"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.
In Hindu philosophy, we are told the individual "atma" (which means self, roughly, not soul) is the same TYPE of thing as universal consciousness called "Brahman". The end goal for the atma is to evolve sufficiently to merge with Brahman (a state called "moksha" or "nirvana"). The atma is a dispassionate observer of what the body goes through. Once it leaves, it could live many many more lives.
So we say "Om shanti" instead of "RIP". A peaceful onward journey towards moksha.
Hindus believe there are many paths to connecting with the universal consciousness. Practice of yoga, devotional music, religious rituals (chanting etc) are a few. They're like trapdoors that help you experience a sort of loss of the boundaries of self. Every thing, living and non-living is a part of this "Brahman". Including this blog page :). To be continuously aware of this, is the ultimate goal.
Understanding this deeply is believed to be the greatest knowledge.
Lemme see… my Gita is by Eknath Eawaran… I’m digging through my shelves…
Same name. Eknath Easwaran
“ The Self, small as the thumb, dwelling in the heart, Is like the sun shining in the sky. But when identified with the ego, The Self appears other than what it is.”
“ That thumb-sized being enshrined in the heart, Ruler of time, past and future, To see whom is to go beyond all fear, Is the Self indeed. For this Self is supreme!”
“ All search for essences and for the ultimate relationship ends with Atman, the Self.”
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.
I recall reading Allan Watts saying something like if he were to explain it to an 8 year old he would say God plays a trick on himself when he is born in each of us and forgets that he is God.
Things seems ms to shake out along the lines of we individuals are all part of the same thing. I am you. You are me. It’s an appealing cosmology. My favorite of all the ones I have examined.
Schrödinger himself had a great interest in Eastern religion.
Yes, I find it appealing too. A friend pointed out to me belief is reincarnation is necessary to believe in Karma. I grew up in a society were proverbs and such are built around that assumption. For example, "Oh I hope I achieve that atleast in my next life." Or, "Were you a monkey in your previous life?" "Pay him back what you owe or you'll pay with compounded interest in your next life. "
So I assumed reincarnation was real, but I was Westernized enough to find it a bit bizarre, even as a child. It is helpful psychologically I think, in some ways.
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
I'm not sure you are correct about atheism naturally leading to nihilism. My impression is that most atheists, myself included, manage to find sources of value.
If there is no basis for moral judgement outside God how do you figure out that God is good, hence that you should accept what he wants as the basis for your moral judgements? If there is some perception of right/wrong, good/bad, independent of God, why wouldn't atheists have access to it?
I don't think "some sort of supra universe force" is equivalent to God, and I don't see how the belief that what we see is a simulation would answer religious questions. While it might be true that believing in a religion results in a happier and more productive life, presumably what you mean by "healthier," that's a reason to want to believe, not a reason to believe.
Suppose you discover that you have cancer, will be dead in a year. You might be happier if you didn't know that, better able to live your final year. But knowing that you would be happier not knowing that doesn't actually let you stop knowing it. Similarly with religion.
There's actually a Jewish religious argument along these lines. If G-d didn't command people who are not Jewish to keep the seven Noahide laws, why can they be punished for violating them?
The answer given is that there is an implicit morality in the world, and people know on some level when they have violated it.
I used to be scientific minded atheist. Thinking it was the right mindset. Worshipping probabilities and such - lesswrong style rationalist before lesswrong .
However if you adopt this mindset fully it leads to the fact that human life is very short and in the big picture completely meaningless. There are only two paths - hedonism , that if you are able to do that. Or suicide if you don't.
Universe being a product of simulation leads to logical support of a possibility of existence of a higher force. One then can accept vedic and buddhist worldview without struggling with 7 days creation, 5000 old human history nonsense .
Now religious question are naturally answered if universe is a simulation. If you accept soul is basically computer code copied to new physical bodies ( karmic cycle). And supposedly if there is a purpose it is set by someone running the simulation.
There was an excellent short story about exactly that.
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
While I'm not the original poster, it happens to be that the claim is not new, nor it it unfounded. Almost 200 years ago, Samuel Coleridge wrote "Every man is born an Aristotelian or a Platonist." The former would seem to correspond to a non-spiritual view, and the latter to the opposite.
>In a 2005 study by Laura Koenig, then at the University of Minnesota, and her colleagues, for example, the researchers analyzed reports on the religiosity of twins in adolescence compared with adulthood. The intent was to calculate the relative importance of genetic factors versus environmental influence at those two stages of life. The scientists used a statistical model to determine which factor is most important in adolescence versus adulthood. For adolescents, they learned that genetics—in other words, dispositions for certain personality traits—accounted for only 12 percent of their religious identity, and a shared upbringing contributed 56 percent to the outcome. (If you include a third category, which captures all the unique events that shape a twin’s life, these three numbers add up to 100.) Conversely, 44 percent of adults’ religiosity could be attributed to genetics, and 18 percent had to do with their environment.
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.
"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?"
Not necessarily. But existing religions don't feel much like existing scientific theories, and it might turn out that what we are missing looks much more like a religion.
Along a related line you might enjoy my novel _Salamander_. It's a fantasy with magic, but magic that feels much more like a science than the usual fantasy magic. The setting is about fifty years after the equivalent of Newton has taken the first large steps towards converting magic from a craft to a science.
Thank you for the reading suggestion! I assume it is no coincidence that you refer to such a figure as Newton-like, given Newton's extensive interest the occult and supernatural, with such writings of his constituting the bulk of his output. As Keynes said, Newton was not the first of the scientists but the last of the magicians.
And I appreciate your distinction between conceptual religion and conceptual science, and how the latter may end up resembling the former. I'll think about it more.
Thanks again for your posts and for responding to comments!
Actually I was thinking of Newton's role in creating foundations for modern science, not his supernatural interests. In my fictional world magic doesn't feel supernatural. Everyone knows it exists, it's just that before Olver people knew how to use it but didn't have a decent theoretical structure. The magic in that world feels like a science not very well understood by most people, not a religion. I mention religion in the novel in terms of some background beliefs but it doesn't play any actual role in the plot.
Part of what I tried to do in the book was create the top layer of a theoretical structure, mostly inspired by the math of Quantum mechanics, so it would look to the reader as if there was an actual science there. Judging by Amazon reviews it seems to have worked for at least some readers. I also show a couple of experiments — one of my two lead characters is an academic theorist.
"How about examining the arguments of these smart people."
I don't think there are adequate arguments to prove either religion or atheism. We are building a model of the world with insufficient data, so what we have is consistent with multiple models.
At a considerable tangent my younger son, who is a history enthusiast, claims that the best evidence he knows for religion is the history of Joan of Arc. Unlike the usual case of history that early we have multiple primary source documents coming out of her two trials, and it is apparently difficult to explain them without some sort of supernatural element. His conclusion is agnosticism — he thinks religion might well be true, might not be.
First of all, thanks for writing your posts and also responding to comments! Like I said in my first comment, positions of religion in the abstract (e.g. existence of "god") may indeed be quite difficult to demonstrate. But that doesn't matter much, since at that point of abstraction there is little meaningful ramification.
But if a specific religious claim is made, e.g. Christianity is true will all that entails, then we have specific claims that can be examined. Textual claims about the bible, historical claims related to Jesus, etc.
We can see what smart people have said about these specific religious claims, rather than the less significant question of religion in the abstract.
"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."
Also true of scientific beliefs, which is what religious beliefs were being contrasted to.
Ok. So if we are placing so much weight on what smart people think, as though it is a particularly useful heuristic, a meaningful question would be: among those who change their views in light of evidence, rather than just going with the flow, do a disproportionate number move away from religion or to religion. I suspect the former.
I don't know the answer. We are currently in societies which have shifted away from religion quite a lot. But there have been periods with the opposite pattern — the Great Awakening in 19th c. America, the various Islamic religious revivals such as the Almohads.
I would want to distinguish between people who seriously believed in their religion and people who identified with it but didn't seriously believe. I was actually thinking of making my next post on how one could distinguish but got distracted by some interesting questions about how Koranic taxes get interpreted by modern Muslims and wanted to work that out before posting. The Zakat is a tax that a Muslim is supposed to pay, but he doesn't have to pay it to the government — he can hand out the money himself to the eight groups of recipients, or give it to a middle man who is entitled to pocket an eighth of the sum in exchange for properly distributing the rest.
It turns out that there are lots of web pages of groups that ask people to pay them the Zakat so they can distribute it — at least one of which specifically says that their overhead is not more than 12.5%. I was trying to use how they interpret the rules, which were designed for a very different society so don't fit ours very well, as evidence of to what degree people actually believe in the religion. I didn't find answers to all my questions yet, so am going to be posting another climate relevant post instead, I think.
Getting back to our topic, I would be mostly interested in people who were serious believers becoming atheists vs atheists becoming serious believers, might even be willing to count nominal believers, people for whom the religion is a cultural identifier that has no significant effect on how they view the world, as atheists.
P.S. As you can now see, I changed my mind about which post to make today.
> We are currently in societies which have shifted away from religion quite a lot.
There is good evidence against this idea, at least as long as one does not restrict 'religion' to belief systems that include supernatural beings - one is, of course, free to make such a restriction, but it excludes from consideration highly similar and plausibly closely related phenomena which are, moreover, of the greatest practical interest. People like Dawkins can be atheist in the sense of not believing in a God, but they nevertheless believe in things like the ineffable beauty of the Universe, a Zeitgeist which in some mysterious way pushes our world to grow more progressive and enlightened, and so on. MM wrote 15 years ago,
> In the first chapter of The God Delusion, Professor Dawkins describes himself as "a deeply religious non-believer." He calls his belief system "Einsteinian religion," and waxes poetical as follows:
>> Let me sum up Einsteinian religion in one more quotation from Einstein himself: "To sense that behind anything that can be experienced there is a something that our mind cannot grasp and whose beauty and sublimity reaches us only indirectly and as a feeble reflection, this is religiousness. In this sense I am religious."
> My observation is that Einsteinism exhibits many synapomorphies with Christianity. For example, it appears that Professor Dawkins believes in the fair distribution of goods, the futility of violence, the universal brotherhood of man, and the reification of community. [...] My belief is that Professor Dawkins is not just a Christian atheist. He is a Protestant atheist. And he is not just a Protestant atheist. He is a Calvinist atheist. And he is not just a Calvinist atheist. He is an Anglo-Calvinist atheist. In other words, he can be also be described as a Puritan atheist, a Dissenter atheist, a Nonconformist atheist, an Evangelical [as understood in 1900] atheist, etc, etc. [...] [F]or a primary-source view of this tradition at the last point in history at which it had the humility to classify itself as mere religion, rather than absolute righteousness and truth, see one of my favorite examples, this Time Magazine article from 1942 [https://content.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,801396,00.html] - written in the lifetime, as they used to say, of those now living. Professor Dawkins would certainly qualify as a "super-protestant" by its definition.
Religion and violence - I would rather blame all human males for violence. Pretty unambiguous correlation. Get rid of male humans and there would be no violence, religious or otherwise
I'm starting to feel like that guy Wittgenstein, who according to my friends husband said something about all philosophy boils down to definitions. We're heading into that territory.
What does it mean to exist? This brings me back to third grade and trying to decide whether I existed or not. I decided that I would never know. See, humility is always the answer. ;-)
Since I do not understand everything about the soul, or life itself, or how the world began, I see no reason to think that continuity of consciousness (which you seem to conflate with existence) is in any way a complication.
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.
Define Spirituality? Is a moral realist, someone who believes that right and wrong, good and evil, are facts rather than tastes or illusions, spiritual in your sense?
If I do not respond, it is only because I am unable to, but I should be able to starting next week, at which point I'll catch up on everything you wrote. Which is not to say that I will understand or memorize all of it. חג כשר ושמח
A legitimate possibility. One could perhaps write an interesting sf or fantasy story where someone, perhaps a believer, discovers that.
The closest I can think of is crossover fanfic, where someone from one work of literature finds himself in the world of a different work where the rules are different. How different would it be from the situation of an atheist, living in a social bubble where everyone else whose views on religion he knows is also an atheist, getting converted to one of the existing religions. It was out there before, but not in his private Overton window.
C S Lewis, Aldus Huxley and John Kennedy died on the same day. There is an interesting little book "Between Heaven and Hell" where the 3 discuss what awaits them in a sort of Limbo. Lewis or course, gives the Christian take, Huxley makes the case for pan-theism and Kennedy covers secular humanism.
The book author seems to have his thumb on the scale for the C S Lewis version but it is kind of interesting.
I've read an SF story like that, "Calculating God," by Robert Sawyer. It had a very interesting beginning, but unfortunately, things went wild and weird halfway through before our characters find out the aliens' religion is absolutely correct and human religion isn't. I unfortunately can't recommend it.
"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.
My condolences to you on your loss.
In Hindu philosophy, we are told the individual "atma" (which means self, roughly, not soul) is the same TYPE of thing as universal consciousness called "Brahman". The end goal for the atma is to evolve sufficiently to merge with Brahman (a state called "moksha" or "nirvana"). The atma is a dispassionate observer of what the body goes through. Once it leaves, it could live many many more lives.
So we say "Om shanti" instead of "RIP". A peaceful onward journey towards moksha.
Hindus believe there are many paths to connecting with the universal consciousness. Practice of yoga, devotional music, religious rituals (chanting etc) are a few. They're like trapdoors that help you experience a sort of loss of the boundaries of self. Every thing, living and non-living is a part of this "Brahman". Including this blog page :). To be continuously aware of this, is the ultimate goal.
Understanding this deeply is believed to be the greatest knowledge.
This is Hinduism 101 as I understand it.
Our Atman, It’s behind our heart, no bigger than our thumb, right?
citing from my copy of The Upanishads.
What translation is that?!
Lemme see… my Gita is by Eknath Eawaran… I’m digging through my shelves…
Same name. Eknath Easwaran
“ The Self, small as the thumb, dwelling in the heart, Is like the sun shining in the sky. But when identified with the ego, The Self appears other than what it is.”
“ That thumb-sized being enshrined in the heart, Ruler of time, past and future, To see whom is to go beyond all fear, Is the Self indeed. For this Self is supreme!”
“ All search for essences and for the ultimate relationship ends with Atman, the Self.”
Now back to reading the rest of the essay!
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.
The type of thing the individual self (atman) is, is the same type of thing the universal self (brahman) is.
Alan Watts explains this well to Western audiences.
https://youtu.be/9tIQBBaTynk
What Hindus mean when they say Brahman or God, is very different from the Judeo-Christian meaning of God.
I recall reading Allan Watts saying something like if he were to explain it to an 8 year old he would say God plays a trick on himself when he is born in each of us and forgets that he is God.
Things seems ms to shake out along the lines of we individuals are all part of the same thing. I am you. You are me. It’s an appealing cosmology. My favorite of all the ones I have examined.
Schrödinger himself had a great interest in Eastern religion.
Yes, I find it appealing too. A friend pointed out to me belief is reincarnation is necessary to believe in Karma. I grew up in a society were proverbs and such are built around that assumption. For example, "Oh I hope I achieve that atleast in my next life." Or, "Were you a monkey in your previous life?" "Pay him back what you owe or you'll pay with compounded interest in your next life. "
So I assumed reincarnation was real, but I was Westernized enough to find it a bit bizarre, even as a child. It is helpful psychologically I think, in some ways.
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
I'm not sure you are correct about atheism naturally leading to nihilism. My impression is that most atheists, myself included, manage to find sources of value.
If there is no basis for moral judgement outside God how do you figure out that God is good, hence that you should accept what he wants as the basis for your moral judgements? If there is some perception of right/wrong, good/bad, independent of God, why wouldn't atheists have access to it?
I don't think "some sort of supra universe force" is equivalent to God, and I don't see how the belief that what we see is a simulation would answer religious questions. While it might be true that believing in a religion results in a happier and more productive life, presumably what you mean by "healthier," that's a reason to want to believe, not a reason to believe.
Suppose you discover that you have cancer, will be dead in a year. You might be happier if you didn't know that, better able to live your final year. But knowing that you would be happier not knowing that doesn't actually let you stop knowing it. Similarly with religion.
There's actually a Jewish religious argument along these lines. If G-d didn't command people who are not Jewish to keep the seven Noahide laws, why can they be punished for violating them?
The answer given is that there is an implicit morality in the world, and people know on some level when they have violated it.
I used to be scientific minded atheist. Thinking it was the right mindset. Worshipping probabilities and such - lesswrong style rationalist before lesswrong .
However if you adopt this mindset fully it leads to the fact that human life is very short and in the big picture completely meaningless. There are only two paths - hedonism , that if you are able to do that. Or suicide if you don't.
Universe being a product of simulation leads to logical support of a possibility of existence of a higher force. One then can accept vedic and buddhist worldview without struggling with 7 days creation, 5000 old human history nonsense .
Now religious question are naturally answered if universe is a simulation. If you accept soul is basically computer code copied to new physical bodies ( karmic cycle). And supposedly if there is a purpose it is set by someone running the simulation.
There was an excellent short story about exactly that.
"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
What is your evidence that a sense of spirituality, by which you seem to mean a tendency to believe in some religion, is heritable?
While I'm not the original poster, it happens to be that the claim is not new, nor it it unfounded. Almost 200 years ago, Samuel Coleridge wrote "Every man is born an Aristotelian or a Platonist." The former would seem to correspond to a non-spiritual view, and the latter to the opposite.
As far as evidence, I see that this pop-sci article: scientificamerican.com/article/are-we-born-to-be-religious/ that states:
>In a 2005 study by Laura Koenig, then at the University of Minnesota, and her colleagues, for example, the researchers analyzed reports on the religiosity of twins in adolescence compared with adulthood. The intent was to calculate the relative importance of genetic factors versus environmental influence at those two stages of life. The scientists used a statistical model to determine which factor is most important in adolescence versus adulthood. For adolescents, they learned that genetics—in other words, dispositions for certain personality traits—accounted for only 12 percent of their religious identity, and a shared upbringing contributed 56 percent to the outcome. (If you include a third category, which captures all the unique events that shape a twin’s life, these three numbers add up to 100.) Conversely, 44 percent of adults’ religiosity could be attributed to genetics, and 18 percent had to do with their environment.
This is a paper by the referenced author on the topic: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/5521384_Stability_and_Change_in_Religiousness_During_Emerging_Adulthood which is paywalled.
Here: https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1166&context=politicalsciencepub is a more recent article about it that mentions it and that is not paywalled.
Thanks. Interesting.
I’m an alum of U of Minnesota. It always tickled me to go into Eliot Hall and see the sign for The Minnesota Twins Study. ⚾️
Catching up now. Thanks Mallard. Nice to see you, Gunflint.
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.
"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?"
Not necessarily. But existing religions don't feel much like existing scientific theories, and it might turn out that what we are missing looks much more like a religion.
Along a related line you might enjoy my novel _Salamander_. It's a fantasy with magic, but magic that feels much more like a science than the usual fantasy magic. The setting is about fifty years after the equivalent of Newton has taken the first large steps towards converting magic from a craft to a science.
Thank you for the reading suggestion! I assume it is no coincidence that you refer to such a figure as Newton-like, given Newton's extensive interest the occult and supernatural, with such writings of his constituting the bulk of his output. As Keynes said, Newton was not the first of the scientists but the last of the magicians.
And I appreciate your distinction between conceptual religion and conceptual science, and how the latter may end up resembling the former. I'll think about it more.
Thanks again for your posts and for responding to comments!
Actually I was thinking of Newton's role in creating foundations for modern science, not his supernatural interests. In my fictional world magic doesn't feel supernatural. Everyone knows it exists, it's just that before Olver people knew how to use it but didn't have a decent theoretical structure. The magic in that world feels like a science not very well understood by most people, not a religion. I mention religion in the novel in terms of some background beliefs but it doesn't play any actual role in the plot.
Part of what I tried to do in the book was create the top layer of a theoretical structure, mostly inspired by the math of Quantum mechanics, so it would look to the reader as if there was an actual science there. Judging by Amazon reviews it seems to have worked for at least some readers. I also show a couple of experiments — one of my two lead characters is an academic theorist.
"How about examining the arguments of these smart people."
I don't think there are adequate arguments to prove either religion or atheism. We are building a model of the world with insufficient data, so what we have is consistent with multiple models.
At a considerable tangent my younger son, who is a history enthusiast, claims that the best evidence he knows for religion is the history of Joan of Arc. Unlike the usual case of history that early we have multiple primary source documents coming out of her two trials, and it is apparently difficult to explain them without some sort of supernatural element. His conclusion is agnosticism — he thinks religion might well be true, might not be.
First of all, thanks for writing your posts and also responding to comments! Like I said in my first comment, positions of religion in the abstract (e.g. existence of "god") may indeed be quite difficult to demonstrate. But that doesn't matter much, since at that point of abstraction there is little meaningful ramification.
But if a specific religious claim is made, e.g. Christianity is true will all that entails, then we have specific claims that can be examined. Textual claims about the bible, historical claims related to Jesus, etc.
We can see what smart people have said about these specific religious claims, rather than the less significant question of religion in the abstract.
"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."
Also true of scientific beliefs, which is what religious beliefs were being contrasted to.
Ok. So if we are placing so much weight on what smart people think, as though it is a particularly useful heuristic, a meaningful question would be: among those who change their views in light of evidence, rather than just going with the flow, do a disproportionate number move away from religion or to religion. I suspect the former.
I don't know the answer. We are currently in societies which have shifted away from religion quite a lot. But there have been periods with the opposite pattern — the Great Awakening in 19th c. America, the various Islamic religious revivals such as the Almohads.
I would want to distinguish between people who seriously believed in their religion and people who identified with it but didn't seriously believe. I was actually thinking of making my next post on how one could distinguish but got distracted by some interesting questions about how Koranic taxes get interpreted by modern Muslims and wanted to work that out before posting. The Zakat is a tax that a Muslim is supposed to pay, but he doesn't have to pay it to the government — he can hand out the money himself to the eight groups of recipients, or give it to a middle man who is entitled to pocket an eighth of the sum in exchange for properly distributing the rest.
It turns out that there are lots of web pages of groups that ask people to pay them the Zakat so they can distribute it — at least one of which specifically says that their overhead is not more than 12.5%. I was trying to use how they interpret the rules, which were designed for a very different society so don't fit ours very well, as evidence of to what degree people actually believe in the religion. I didn't find answers to all my questions yet, so am going to be posting another climate relevant post instead, I think.
Getting back to our topic, I would be mostly interested in people who were serious believers becoming atheists vs atheists becoming serious believers, might even be willing to count nominal believers, people for whom the religion is a cultural identifier that has no significant effect on how they view the world, as atheists.
P.S. As you can now see, I changed my mind about which post to make today.
> We are currently in societies which have shifted away from religion quite a lot.
There is good evidence against this idea, at least as long as one does not restrict 'religion' to belief systems that include supernatural beings - one is, of course, free to make such a restriction, but it excludes from consideration highly similar and plausibly closely related phenomena which are, moreover, of the greatest practical interest. People like Dawkins can be atheist in the sense of not believing in a God, but they nevertheless believe in things like the ineffable beauty of the Universe, a Zeitgeist which in some mysterious way pushes our world to grow more progressive and enlightened, and so on. MM wrote 15 years ago,
> In the first chapter of The God Delusion, Professor Dawkins describes himself as "a deeply religious non-believer." He calls his belief system "Einsteinian religion," and waxes poetical as follows:
>> Let me sum up Einsteinian religion in one more quotation from Einstein himself: "To sense that behind anything that can be experienced there is a something that our mind cannot grasp and whose beauty and sublimity reaches us only indirectly and as a feeble reflection, this is religiousness. In this sense I am religious."
> My observation is that Einsteinism exhibits many synapomorphies with Christianity. For example, it appears that Professor Dawkins believes in the fair distribution of goods, the futility of violence, the universal brotherhood of man, and the reification of community. [...] My belief is that Professor Dawkins is not just a Christian atheist. He is a Protestant atheist. And he is not just a Protestant atheist. He is a Calvinist atheist. And he is not just a Calvinist atheist. He is an Anglo-Calvinist atheist. In other words, he can be also be described as a Puritan atheist, a Dissenter atheist, a Nonconformist atheist, an Evangelical [as understood in 1900] atheist, etc, etc. [...] [F]or a primary-source view of this tradition at the last point in history at which it had the humility to classify itself as mere religion, rather than absolute righteousness and truth, see one of my favorite examples, this Time Magazine article from 1942 [https://content.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,801396,00.html] - written in the lifetime, as they used to say, of those now living. Professor Dawkins would certainly qualify as a "super-protestant" by its definition.
I like this. Some of the stuff I am trying to figure out touches on it.
I always find it amusing when I question people and it seems they are Not X religion. Like ex Christians who are pretty unconsciously christian
Religion and violence - I would rather blame all human males for violence. Pretty unambiguous correlation. Get rid of male humans and there would be no violence, religious or otherwise
Afterlife - does this mean resurrection or permanent consciousness?
For the purposes of my argument, it could be either. Someone dead and in Heaven still exists, like someone alive who has moved to another continent.
Not really. One can believe that there will be required, but death until that point.
Resurrection*
That would be inconsistent with the intuition of continuity, that people don't stop existing.
I'm starting to feel like that guy Wittgenstein, who according to my friends husband said something about all philosophy boils down to definitions. We're heading into that territory.
What does it mean to exist? This brings me back to third grade and trying to decide whether I existed or not. I decided that I would never know. See, humility is always the answer. ;-)
Since I do not understand everything about the soul, or life itself, or how the world began, I see no reason to think that continuity of consciousness (which you seem to conflate with existence) is in any way a complication.
Counterpoint to heritability of religion: Adopted children
wut?
You said, "it seems clear they are largely inherited"
Beliefs can be inherited via osmosis, not just via genes. The mechanism was not relevant to my point.
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.
Define Spirituality? Is a moral realist, someone who believes that right and wrong, good and evil, are facts rather than tastes or illusions, spiritual in your sense?
Yes, because it's a non-physical dimension.
If I do not respond, it is only because I am unable to, but I should be able to starting next week, at which point I'll catch up on everything you wrote. Which is not to say that I will understand or memorize all of it. חג כשר ושמח
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.
A legitimate possibility. One could perhaps write an interesting sf or fantasy story where someone, perhaps a believer, discovers that.
The closest I can think of is crossover fanfic, where someone from one work of literature finds himself in the world of a different work where the rules are different. How different would it be from the situation of an atheist, living in a social bubble where everyone else whose views on religion he knows is also an atheist, getting converted to one of the existing religions. It was out there before, but not in his private Overton window.
C S Lewis, Aldus Huxley and John Kennedy died on the same day. There is an interesting little book "Between Heaven and Hell" where the 3 discuss what awaits them in a sort of Limbo. Lewis or course, gives the Christian take, Huxley makes the case for pan-theism and Kennedy covers secular humanism.
The book author seems to have his thumb on the scale for the C S Lewis version but it is kind of interesting.
The sequel to Enders game is exactly this
I've read an SF story like that, "Calculating God," by Robert Sawyer. It had a very interesting beginning, but unfortunately, things went wild and weird halfway through before our characters find out the aliens' religion is absolutely correct and human religion isn't. I unfortunately can't recommend it.