Human beings are equipped with superb pattern recognition software, so good that it can even find patterns that are not there. That makes sense from an evolutionary point of view. Seeing a hidden tiger that is not actually there is a much less costly mistake than failing to see one that is, so biasing the software in the direction of more of the first kind of error and fewer of the second is good design
"With enough effort and help from those around me, I might be able to convince myself not to."
Maybe so, but giving this sort of a thing up and becoming rational about life after death could lead to other serious problems, like depression or anxiety. We are seeing so much of this now in the Western world, despite so much wealth.
As far as which is the true religion goes, I like the answer given by the Ted Danson character in “The Good Place”
“Hindus are a little bit right, Muslims, a little bit right, Jews, Christians, Buddhists...every religion guessed about five percent of it. Only a Canadian stoner named Doug Forcett got it 92 percent right while high on mushrooms, before promptly forgetting what he’d learned.”
As far as whether any of them get it right goes, I would say none of them, that we are on our own in this thing and death is the end.
But John Von Neumann told his mother that it was more likely than not that there was a God. He converted to Catholicism near the end of his life and spent his final days in existential dread.
Erwin Schrödinger riffed on the ‘stories told us in our youth’ - about Christianity in the commentary at the end of “What is Life” before springing the Hindu idea that we are all God Almighty. ATMAN = BRAHMAN.
It’s an interesting question.
Seems like it’s more interesting at 70 than it was at 17.
Franz Kafka: “Man cannot live without a continuous confidence in something indestructible within himself.”
From: Observations on Sin, Suffering, Hope, and the True Way, Number 50.
“Der Mensch kann nicht leben ohne ein dauerndes Vertrauen zu etwas Unzerstörbarem in sich, wobei sowohl das Unzerstörbare als auch das Vertrauen ihm dauernd verborgen bleiben können. Eine der Ausdrucksmöglichkeiten dieses Verborgenbleibens ist der Glaube an einen persönlichen Gott.”
Aside from explanations of God, I think explanations of the *belief* in God can be an argument against the truth of religious belief. To me it makes a lot of sense why, for evolutionary and memetic reasons, religion evolved, helping keep communities stable. By contrast, it appears much harder to explain why a large number of our ancestors would have happened to hit upon a piece of truth, on which we don't seem to agree nowadays. Following this line of reasoning, we would be more likely to find worlds/universes in which religious belief evolved while it being wrong, than worlds/universes in which it evolved while it being right. But this might not be a prove as it already makes assumptions about how the world works, so it risks being circular.
-"The second is that there is no good reason, at least none I can see, to think that Occam's razor applies to the nature of the universe. It is true that simpler hypotheses are, ceteris paribus, easier to work with, but the question here is not which picture is easier to understand but which is true. It seems plausible that simple things are more likely to come into existence than more complicated things, again ceteris paribus. But it is hard to see how that applies to the universe, with or without a God."
I think you are getting mixed up here. Occam's Razor isn't the claim that simpler hypotheses are easier to work with/understand, it's the claim that they are more likely to be true. You ask why we should think that Occam's razor applies to the nature of the universe, but the fact is that Occam's razor has been applied successfully to many things in the universe, so the idea that it doesn't apply to the universe as a whole seems like special pleading. Furthermore, it is not clear why simple things should be more likely to come into existence than more complicated things, except if they are arising from simple things themselves. In other words, the universe as a whole needs to be simple before you can expect that the things in it are simple (and even then, the things in the universe will generally be more complicated than the rules that describe the universe as a whole).
Well to me being spiritual/ believer is more about a " useful belief". Something which helps to have healthier psychological and emotional state
Also it helps that in the world there is plenty of facts which logically can be interpreted as existence of some sort of of supra universe force. Namely quantum effects, general relativity . You can choose to interpret it with statistics or can choose simulation hypothesis.
Its all in the eye of the beholder . Main question is which view is healthier. Atheism naturally leads to nihilism ..where universe is just particles moving in chaos. And your entire life and existence. Hell entire history and existence of planet earth are meaningless
Thanks for linking, enjoying the legal systems article. I'll have to reread it several times.
I would argue that unlike religion, a sense of spirituality is highly genetic, by which I mean heritable, by which I mean somehow influenced by DNA, in the classic sense of inheritance. Adopted children likely have similar intensity -of- attachment to religion as their birth families, and similar religious beliefs to their adoptive families
If belief in an afterlife is a function of object permanence, why have similar beliefs not become prevalent regarding other objects like houses or animals? It seems that other explanations - like a reluctance to accept death - are likelier.
As far as why religions developed beliefs in Hell, it could be that adherents of religion are satisfied imagining themselves having the last laugh, while their enemies are ultimately punished. Most don’t imagine themselves being punished. Everyone is the protagonist in his own life story.
The issue with possibilities 1-3 is that they are mostly unknowable inasmuch as they are trivial. Inasmuch as religions are meaningful – that is, they make specific claims about the world, they become knowable. Questions about the theoretical advantage for the existence or nonexistence of gods aren’t necessary (or even really meaningful. We can speak of "a universe with a god" but what is a god. We need to start making specific claims for the statement to even be meaningful). The particular claims of the religion can be examined.
>If everyone got his religious beliefs from his parents it is hard to see how multiple sects could come into existence.
Obviously, religious beliefs are neither 100% inherited, nor 100% deduced. But it seems clear that for the most part they are inherited – there is a very strong correlation between a person’s religious belief and that of their parents’ religious beliefs.
This is why people who don’t share those beliefs should not be overly “puzzled by all the reasonable and intelligent people who do.”
Given that religious beliefs are so highly a function of adopting beliefs, the intelligence involved would be primarily rationalizing, rather than independently deducing.
>It is tempting to blame religion for past violence but there are other explanations. There was violence between Christians and Muslims but also between English Christians and French Christians
It is trivially true that not all violence is caused by religion. A more reasonable question would be whether religion has a net effect of increasing violence or decreasing violence.
Quite a lot of violence has been caused by religion, e.g. the Crusades. It’s possible, however, that religions also prevent violence, so perhaps the net effect is positive. E.g. perhaps the religious are less likely to commit violence against coreligionists, even if they are more likely to commit violence against others.
But the examples of intra-Christian warfare do nothing to suggest that.
The adage goes that it doesn’t take religion for bad people to do bad things, or for good people to do good things, but religion can succeed at making good people do bad things, which seems to often be true.
>And the USSR, whose official doctrine on religion was atheism, was also one of the most murderous states in history.
If the options are Stalinism or “generic religion,” than sure, choose generic religion. But if we are discussing the costs and benefits of religion, why mention Stalinism? Most atheists aren’t Stalinists. Religion kills lots of people and Stalinism also kills lots of people. Both can be bad.
But it is also misleading to lump all religions together, just as it would be odd to lump all non religious ideologies together. Quakerism and secular humanism probably pose much less threat than Wahabism or Stalinism.
Additionally, it seems weird to jump from whether religions are true, to whether they are destructive. If they are true, then the people they kill ought to be killed – that would be a feature not a bug. So why hold it against them?
>Similarly, it might be that religious truth is too difficult for us to fully understand
Then what makes it religion? This again seems to be taking such an abstract look at religion as to render it trivial and meaningless.
What is the difference between saying “I believe there are scientific elements to the universe that are unknown” and “I believe there are religious elements to the universe that are unknown?”
E.g. if the current model of universe is incomplete, and there exists some other force needed to account for everything, is that necessarily religious?
>Part of my skepticism with regard to the efforts of my fellow atheists to demonstrate the absurdity of the opposing position comes from knowing a fair number of intelligent, reasonable, thoughtful people who believe in God
How about examining the arguments of these smart people. If they have compelling arguments, then the fact that they are smart shouldn’t add much. And if their arguments are not compelling, then it makes more sense to update ones priors against intelligence being a predictor of being correct on religion, rather than updating one's priors in favor of religion being correct.
Does spirituality exist or is it an illusion? I am an ultra Orthodox Jewish theist, but I don't care whether people believe in G-d, or which one they believe. Most people have zero idea what they themselves actually think of anything. They go on patterns, like you said.
I am more interested in spirituality. I view someone as a true atheist if they tell me they do not believe that a spiritual aspect exists in the world, even just in terms of right and wrong. I never get this response from anyone except Chinese people who went to school in China.
"With enough effort and help from those around me, I might be able to convince myself not to."
Maybe so, but giving this sort of a thing up and becoming rational about life after death could lead to other serious problems, like depression or anxiety. We are seeing so much of this now in the Western world, despite so much wealth.
As far as which is the true religion goes, I like the answer given by the Ted Danson character in “The Good Place”
“Hindus are a little bit right, Muslims, a little bit right, Jews, Christians, Buddhists...every religion guessed about five percent of it. Only a Canadian stoner named Doug Forcett got it 92 percent right while high on mushrooms, before promptly forgetting what he’d learned.”
As far as whether any of them get it right goes, I would say none of them, that we are on our own in this thing and death is the end.
But John Von Neumann told his mother that it was more likely than not that there was a God. He converted to Catholicism near the end of his life and spent his final days in existential dread.
Erwin Schrödinger riffed on the ‘stories told us in our youth’ - about Christianity in the commentary at the end of “What is Life” before springing the Hindu idea that we are all God Almighty. ATMAN = BRAHMAN.
It’s an interesting question.
Seems like it’s more interesting at 70 than it was at 17.
On the one hand, your father is dead, but on the other hand, he still speaks to me through his books and his recorded speeches.
Franz Kafka: “Man cannot live without a continuous confidence in something indestructible within himself.”
From: Observations on Sin, Suffering, Hope, and the True Way, Number 50.
“Der Mensch kann nicht leben ohne ein dauerndes Vertrauen zu etwas Unzerstörbarem in sich, wobei sowohl das Unzerstörbare als auch das Vertrauen ihm dauernd verborgen bleiben können. Eine der Ausdrucksmöglichkeiten dieses Verborgenbleibens ist der Glaube an einen persönlichen Gott.”
Aside from explanations of God, I think explanations of the *belief* in God can be an argument against the truth of religious belief. To me it makes a lot of sense why, for evolutionary and memetic reasons, religion evolved, helping keep communities stable. By contrast, it appears much harder to explain why a large number of our ancestors would have happened to hit upon a piece of truth, on which we don't seem to agree nowadays. Following this line of reasoning, we would be more likely to find worlds/universes in which religious belief evolved while it being wrong, than worlds/universes in which it evolved while it being right. But this might not be a prove as it already makes assumptions about how the world works, so it risks being circular.
-"The second is that there is no good reason, at least none I can see, to think that Occam's razor applies to the nature of the universe. It is true that simpler hypotheses are, ceteris paribus, easier to work with, but the question here is not which picture is easier to understand but which is true. It seems plausible that simple things are more likely to come into existence than more complicated things, again ceteris paribus. But it is hard to see how that applies to the universe, with or without a God."
I think you are getting mixed up here. Occam's Razor isn't the claim that simpler hypotheses are easier to work with/understand, it's the claim that they are more likely to be true. You ask why we should think that Occam's razor applies to the nature of the universe, but the fact is that Occam's razor has been applied successfully to many things in the universe, so the idea that it doesn't apply to the universe as a whole seems like special pleading. Furthermore, it is not clear why simple things should be more likely to come into existence than more complicated things, except if they are arising from simple things themselves. In other words, the universe as a whole needs to be simple before you can expect that the things in it are simple (and even then, the things in the universe will generally be more complicated than the rules that describe the universe as a whole).
Well to me being spiritual/ believer is more about a " useful belief". Something which helps to have healthier psychological and emotional state
Also it helps that in the world there is plenty of facts which logically can be interpreted as existence of some sort of of supra universe force. Namely quantum effects, general relativity . You can choose to interpret it with statistics or can choose simulation hypothesis.
Its all in the eye of the beholder . Main question is which view is healthier. Atheism naturally leads to nihilism ..where universe is just particles moving in chaos. And your entire life and existence. Hell entire history and existence of planet earth are meaningless
"this again seems to be taking such an abstract look at religion as to render it trivial and meaningless"
One could say the same about mathematics, which is purely rationalist.
Thanks for linking, enjoying the legal systems article. I'll have to reread it several times.
I would argue that unlike religion, a sense of spirituality is highly genetic, by which I mean heritable, by which I mean somehow influenced by DNA, in the classic sense of inheritance. Adopted children likely have similar intensity -of- attachment to religion as their birth families, and similar religious beliefs to their adoptive families
If belief in an afterlife is a function of object permanence, why have similar beliefs not become prevalent regarding other objects like houses or animals? It seems that other explanations - like a reluctance to accept death - are likelier.
This seemingly overly favorable interpretation of the reason why people believe in an afterlife, reminded me of Scott Alexander's perception of your description of a hypothetical culture that sacrifices people to a volcano god: https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/11/13/book-review-legal-systems-very-different-from-ours/.
As far as why religions developed beliefs in Hell, it could be that adherents of religion are satisfied imagining themselves having the last laugh, while their enemies are ultimately punished. Most don’t imagine themselves being punished. Everyone is the protagonist in his own life story.
The issue with possibilities 1-3 is that they are mostly unknowable inasmuch as they are trivial. Inasmuch as religions are meaningful – that is, they make specific claims about the world, they become knowable. Questions about the theoretical advantage for the existence or nonexistence of gods aren’t necessary (or even really meaningful. We can speak of "a universe with a god" but what is a god. We need to start making specific claims for the statement to even be meaningful). The particular claims of the religion can be examined.
>If everyone got his religious beliefs from his parents it is hard to see how multiple sects could come into existence.
Obviously, religious beliefs are neither 100% inherited, nor 100% deduced. But it seems clear that for the most part they are inherited – there is a very strong correlation between a person’s religious belief and that of their parents’ religious beliefs.
This is why people who don’t share those beliefs should not be overly “puzzled by all the reasonable and intelligent people who do.”
Given that religious beliefs are so highly a function of adopting beliefs, the intelligence involved would be primarily rationalizing, rather than independently deducing.
>It is tempting to blame religion for past violence but there are other explanations. There was violence between Christians and Muslims but also between English Christians and French Christians
It is trivially true that not all violence is caused by religion. A more reasonable question would be whether religion has a net effect of increasing violence or decreasing violence.
Quite a lot of violence has been caused by religion, e.g. the Crusades. It’s possible, however, that religions also prevent violence, so perhaps the net effect is positive. E.g. perhaps the religious are less likely to commit violence against coreligionists, even if they are more likely to commit violence against others.
But the examples of intra-Christian warfare do nothing to suggest that.
The adage goes that it doesn’t take religion for bad people to do bad things, or for good people to do good things, but religion can succeed at making good people do bad things, which seems to often be true.
>And the USSR, whose official doctrine on religion was atheism, was also one of the most murderous states in history.
If the options are Stalinism or “generic religion,” than sure, choose generic religion. But if we are discussing the costs and benefits of religion, why mention Stalinism? Most atheists aren’t Stalinists. Religion kills lots of people and Stalinism also kills lots of people. Both can be bad.
But it is also misleading to lump all religions together, just as it would be odd to lump all non religious ideologies together. Quakerism and secular humanism probably pose much less threat than Wahabism or Stalinism.
Additionally, it seems weird to jump from whether religions are true, to whether they are destructive. If they are true, then the people they kill ought to be killed – that would be a feature not a bug. So why hold it against them?
>Similarly, it might be that religious truth is too difficult for us to fully understand
Then what makes it religion? This again seems to be taking such an abstract look at religion as to render it trivial and meaningless.
What is the difference between saying “I believe there are scientific elements to the universe that are unknown” and “I believe there are religious elements to the universe that are unknown?”
E.g. if the current model of universe is incomplete, and there exists some other force needed to account for everything, is that necessarily religious?
>Part of my skepticism with regard to the efforts of my fellow atheists to demonstrate the absurdity of the opposing position comes from knowing a fair number of intelligent, reasonable, thoughtful people who believe in God
How about examining the arguments of these smart people. If they have compelling arguments, then the fact that they are smart shouldn’t add much. And if their arguments are not compelling, then it makes more sense to update ones priors against intelligence being a predictor of being correct on religion, rather than updating one's priors in favor of religion being correct.
Does spirituality exist or is it an illusion? I am an ultra Orthodox Jewish theist, but I don't care whether people believe in G-d, or which one they believe. Most people have zero idea what they themselves actually think of anything. They go on patterns, like you said.
I am more interested in spirituality. I view someone as a true atheist if they tell me they do not believe that a spiritual aspect exists in the world, even just in terms of right and wrong. I never get this response from anyone except Chinese people who went to school in China.
Great stuff, thank you
You mention three interesting possibilities; I think there’s another one worth considering:
4. There is a true religious belief, but none of our present or past human religions resemble it in the slightest.