quote:Originally posted by King of Men: Apparently.
Unlike KoM, I believe that all religious people have the potential to see the error of their ways and convert to the One True Non-Faith.
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Katie, thanks for the defense but really I prefer to speak for myself.
My earlier post was intended as a possible explanation for why atheists seem to come off so much more intolerant than religious people in many discussions like this. I'm sorry if I hit some hot buttons.
As for my bona fides as a former atheist, I assure you they're impeccable. =) I was a rationalist with a scientific worldview, like my heroes Richard Feynman, Isaac Asimov, Richard Dawkins, Freeman Dyson, Douglas Hofstadter, Carl Sagan, etc. etc. They're all still my heroes, in fact, and I'm still a materialist rationalist with a scientific worldview, even. I've just expanded my view to encompass that overwhelming majority of observations that don't happen to be repeatable, shared, and objective. There's just a huge amount of experience in life that's personal, subjective, and not repeatable. When you begin to notice and learn from these observations, as well as the other sort, then your worldview can become expanded in new and fruitful directions.
I made an analogy of this to engineering, and how we go about linearizing nonlinear systems, to simplify things. The power of science is just this, by narrowing our focus to what is repeatable, shared, and objective, we simplify things a great deal so that we can make much more sense out of them. Science is incredibly powerful as a way of looking at the world. It's transformed human life hugely for the better. But it does so at the cost of negating, or rather overlooking, or dismissing, 99+% of all observations, nearly all our experience of being alive.
Nobody engaged me on any of this, which I thought of as the most interesting and substantive part of my post. It's too bad. The one thing I would want to go back and ask my former atheist self, had I the chance, is how could I possibly have believed such a large number of extremely intelligent people were deluded, brainwashed, ignorant, or simply believed what their parents taught them unquestioningly? Look into history at who was religious and who was not. There's no preponderance of intelligence on one side or the other. No matter who you are or what you believe, lots and lots of people way smarter than you have believed the opposite way. So that tells me that we should have a lot more respect for each other's worldviews than we usually seem to have.
So to close, let me state categorically that I have many friends of all different religions as well as no religion at all, and I have an overwhelming amount of respect for all their worldviews which I see have arisen from their unique experiences. We're all at different points of our journeys, which are all different sorts of journeys to begin with, and I feel greatly humbled in the face of all that I can never understand about other people's lives. So that was my point, that nobody should be dismissed or ridiculed for their unique viewpoint. Unfortunately, it seems some people thought I was ridiculing them for theirs, or trying to say that my former views were just like theirs are now. Quite the contrary!
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I thought of another analogy which may (or may not) be fruitful. It's as though we're arguing over which is really true, Euclidean or non-Euclidean geometry, with the one side ridiculing the other, and both casting aspersions on each other's sanity.
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quote:The power of science is just this, by narrowing our focus to what is repeatable, shared, and objective, we simplify things a great deal so that we can make much more sense out of them.
In my opinion, religion not science is a way of "simplifying things a great deal so that we can make much more sense out of them". Religion gives people an easy answer to things (e.g. "God did it/made it/told us to") rather than letting people discover (again - this is just my opinion) the real reasons as to why, what, when, where, how things came about etc.
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Tatiana: I don't think science ignores or dismisses 99%+ of all our observations, it just cautions us that our first impression may not be accurate, and we should double check to confirm.
I don't think that's a negative. My observation is that my car is working perfectly now, but if I never check my oil, my observation will quickly become 100% wrong. My current observation isn't valueless, but it doesn't have a very high level of confidence.
I think that makes a valuable analogy to science. Religion is a series of first impressions, which we insist on keeping, because we cannot accurately verify them. We may feel very strongly about them, but we cannot have a high degree of confidence, because we have no way of repeating many of the experiences upon which we must rely to build our beliefs.
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Ah, Mighty Cow and stacey, that's where we disagree.
Do you agree, though, that science is only concerned with observations that are repeatable, shared, and objective?
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quote:Originally posted by MightyCow: [QB] Tatiana: I don't think science ignores or dismisses 99%+ of all our observations, it just cautions us that our first impression may not be accurate, and we should double check to confirm.
I don't think that's a negative. My observation is that my car is working perfectly now, but if I never check my oil, my observation will quickly become 100% wrong. My current observation isn't valueless, but it doesn't have a very high level of confidence.
I think you're kinda missing Tatiana's point (assuming I'm getting it correctly. Tat, let me know if I'm misconstruing you again). Whether your car is working is a science question. "Should I marry this woman I love even though my family will resent me for it" is not.
I think the 99% figure is exaggerated quite a bit. I'd put it closer to 50/50, although I'm sure it varies from person to person depending on how they approach life. I also think the two sides are not necessarily divided: in the marriage question above, even though the experience isn't repeatable for you, you still can see how other people have dealt with the same situation. And in the age of the internet, you could concievably have access to hundreds of "trial results."
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quote:Religion is a series of first impressions, which we insist on keeping, because we cannot accurately verify them.
This is not true. This is one of those myths people tell themselves so they don't have to explain other people's actions.
My religious adherence is supported by a continual series of experiences that have occurred over years and continue to occur. Everything else fades, but this has not.
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"My religious adherence is supported by a continual series of experiences that have occurred over years and continue to occur."
The portion of this that falls under Mighty Cow's statement is "Accurately verify."
Analogy: For hundreds if not thousands of years, people thought the natural state of an object was to be at rest. This belief was continuously supported by experiential evidence of millions of people, as in our every day lives, objects tend to come to rest. It took a rigorous approach to understanding why objects move to realize that the natural state of an object is whatever its already doing. Even 400 years after this knowledge has been gained, most kids come into their introductory physics class believing that objects tend to come to rest on their own. And, if they don't have a good physics teacher, within a year or two, most go back to believing that... because it is supported by daily evidence. The problem is, that evidence isn't rigorously examined.
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As charming as your patronizing condescension and skepticism concerning my intelligence and own experiences is, I am in a better position to judge which of my experiences are real and which are not.
If your position is that nothing can be verified as real, that there is nothing that can be truly known, and there is no experience that is reliable, then you have expanded your argument from just religion.
If you limit your skepticism to religious experiences, then you are wrong.
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"As charming as your patronizing condescension and skepticism concerning my intelligence and own experiences is, I am in a better position to judge which of my experiences are real and which are not."
Umm... I'm not sure that what I posted was "patronizing," or "condescending." But if you'd like to take it as a personal attack, thats fine. It doesn't make me wrong, though.
Because the thing is, I didn't say that what you experienced isn't real. I'm certain you've had real experiences that you interpret as being evidence of god. The point is, though, that experiential evidence isn't evidence for any particular conclusion, until we try to rigorously examine the evidence, and falsify any conclusions we draw from that experiential evidence.
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quote:Analogy: For hundreds if not thousands of years, people thought the natural state of an object was to be at rest. This belief was continuously supported by experiential evidence of millions of people, as in our every day lives, objects tend to come to rest. It took a rigorous approach to understanding why objects move to realize that the natural state of an object is whatever its already doing. Even 400 years after this knowledge has been gained, most kids come into their introductory physics class believing that objects tend to come to rest on their own. And, if they don't have a good physics teacher, within a year or two, most go back to believing that... because it is supported by daily evidence. The problem is, that evidence isn't rigorously examined.
I don't think you are drawing the right conclusion for this example. It is safe to say that over thousands of years, at least somebody must've rigorously examined the evidence regarding the natural state of objects. In fact, many many people did. So, the problem was not a lack of rigorous examination of the evidence. The real problem is that no matter how rigorously you examine evidence, there is always the possibility that the evidence will still lead you to the wrong conclusion - particularly if you hold some false assumptions that shape the way you rigorously examine the evidence. In the case of the kids, they could rigorously examine the evidence all day long and they'd still come to the conclusion that objects come to rest - in order to come to a different conclusion, they'd need to be taught to hold different assumptions about the universe.
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Yes, we can expand. Testing assumptions is at least as important as testing evidence. Which only strengthens the argument I was making.
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quote:Because the thing is, I didn't say that what you experienced isn't real. I'm certain you've had real experiences that you interpret as being evidence of god. The point is, though, that experiential evidence isn't evidence for any particular conclusion, until we try to rigorously examine the evidence, and falsify any conclusions we draw from that experiential evidence.
My point was that religious devotion is not dependent on childhood experiences or just on first impressions and then people refuse to be talked out of them. They are often the result of continued experiences and do not rely on shaky memories.
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quote:Originally posted by Tatiana: My earlier post was intended as a possible explanation for why atheists seem to come off so much more intolerant than religious people in many discussions like this. I'm sorry if I hit some hot buttons.
Do you believe that atheists are more intolerant than religious folk (which is what your previous post said), or only that they "come off" as more intolerant? One could be a personal observation & then personal explanation, the other is impossible for you to know, and rude of you to hypothesize without some data to back you up.
quote:I've just expanded my view to encompass that overwhelming majority of observations that don't happen to be repeatable, shared, and objective. There's just a huge amount of experience in life that's personal, subjective, and not repeatable. When you begin to notice and learn from these observations, as well as the other sort, then your worldview can become expanded in new and fruitful directions.
If you believe that scientists or rationalists don't know of or think about things that are not open to understanding via the scientific method, then you don't know many (decent) scientists or rationalists.
quote:Science is incredibly powerful as a way of looking at the world. It's transformed human life hugely for the better. But it does so at the cost of negating, or rather overlooking, or dismissing, 99+% of all observations, nearly all our experience of being alive.
Again, any scientist who would claim that anything that can't be studied by the scientific method should be negated, overlooked, or dismissed, is a bad scientist. It would, for instance, be very difficult to be a good scientist who didn't use mathematics. Math isn't part of the scientific method, but it is used by science, and celebrated there.
quote:The one thing I would want to go back and ask my former atheist self, had I the chance, is how could I possibly have believed such a large number of extremely intelligent people were deluded, brainwashed, ignorant, or simply believed what their parents taught them unquestioningly? Look into history at who was religious and who was not. There's no preponderance of intelligence on one side or the other. No matter who you are or what you believe, lots and lots of people way smarter than you have believed the opposite way. So that tells me that we should have a lot more respect for each other's worldviews than we usually seem to have.
The Greek philosophers have my utmost respect as extremely intelligent people who thought deeply on a wide variety of subjects. That doesn't mean I'm going to trust their opinion on medicine. Someone can be intelligent and extremely wrong on any number of things. Asking why intelligent people of days of yore don't think the same way you do is silly and unproductive. The only problem arises when you have intelligent people who have been given the same evidence and arguments disagree. I have run into very, very few intelligent people (maybe two?) who, faced with the same arguments and evidence as I have at my disposal, still argue that the Judeo-Christian God exists.
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quote:Originally posted by katharina: I am in a better position to judge which of my experiences are real and which are not.
While this is likely true of you and [insert other forum poster], it may not be true in the general case. It's entirely possible that our own internal context is to a large extent a fiction constructed by our brains to fill the gaps in our perception. IIRC, an example is colour detection in peripheral vision. Your eyes don't actually see colour in your peripheral vision -- your brain makes it up.
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"My point was that religious devotion is not dependent on childhood experiences or just on first impressions and then people refuse to be talked out of them. They are often the result of continued experiences and do not rely on shaky memories. "
I agree. My mother is a rabbi who grew up in an atheist home, nominally christian. Each of her brothers are involved in radically different christian churches.
My point is that experiential evidence isn't a good indicator of reality.
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Paul: Then we are having separate conversations. I was objecting to the contention that religious devotion is dependent on first impressions and childhood experiences.
quote:While this is likely true of you and [insert other forum poster], it may not be true in the general case.
The cases where it is not true is minuscule compared to the cases where it is true. What are the characteristics you identify of people who are more poorly equipped than an outside person to judge their own experiences? Who is it that you have so little regard for that you don't believe them when they tell what they have experienced in their lives? Who are these masses of people that don't realize that what they think they are feeling is actually something else, and a complete separate person knows better than them about it?
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quote:Originally posted by Raymond Arnold: ... I think the 99% figure is exaggerated quite a bit. I'd put it closer to 50/50, although I'm sure it varies from person to person depending on how they approach life.
The figure is flawed for more reasons than just that. It completely ignores those of us who don't have to "negat[e], or rather overlooking, or dismissing" the majority of our observations, regardless of being an atheist or not.
In other words, I don't have to ignore *any* experiences to avoid being religious. In fact, it is my experiences as a whole that lead me to be an atheist in the first place.
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quote:Originally posted by katharina: ... Who is it that you have so little regard for that you don't believe them when they tell what they have experienced in their lives? Who are these masses of people that don't realize that what they think they are feeling is actually something else, and a complete separate person knows better than them about it?
Maybe he's a cop
But seriously, its actually a fairly commonly known fact that eye-witnesses can be notoriously unreliable, contradictory, and fill-in the gaps with what they think the questioner wants to hear.
Thats why we have legal procedures like line-ups and why forensic evidence is often more reliable than eye-witnesses. The separate person that knows better may not even be a person, it might just be a thing with a record of some sort.
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"Paul: Then we are having separate conversations. I was objecting to the contention that religious devotion is dependent on first impressions and childhood experiences"
To me, you seem to be saying that your religious adherence is based upon your personal experiences that have occured over a long period of time.
My contention is that personal experiences aren't good (or even decent) indicators of what is real. Furthermore, that conclusions drawn from personal experience go untested (or the assumptions that connect the experience to the conclusion). As such, they constitute "first impressions."
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Sure, in the sense that ALL of life consists of "first impressions." But then you're not just questioning religious experiences, you're questioning all experiences, everything we encounter in life. That's fine, but it's kind of a separate discussion.
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"Sure, in the sense that ALL of life consists of "first impressions.""
Mostly, yeah. But not all. When we test assumptions and observations with the possibility falsifying those assumptions and observations, then we're no longer dealing with first impressions. Its the untested stuff that is a first impression... most of us don't test most of what we believe, so most "stuff" is first impression.
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You're saying that every experience we undergo and draw knowledge from, save religious ones, are then tested and verified with outside sources? This does not accurately describe human behavior, including your own.
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It also assumes a great deal that is mistaken about how adults relate to their religion and their religious devotion. This isn't to say that all adults have a mature set of expectations and relationships, but I notice that there is an assumption that religious adults are all stuck in the same level of maturity religious-wise as the people speaking were when they left their own. That's understandable, but it isn't comprehensive and displays a lack of understanding of how people really do pursue a religious existence.
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"You're saying that every experience we undergo and draw knowledge from, save religious ones, are then tested and verified with outside sources? This does not accurately describe human behavior, including your own. "
quote:The one thing I would want to go back and ask my former atheist self, had I the chance, is how could I possibly have believed such a large number of extremely intelligent people were deluded, brainwashed, ignorant, or simply believed what their parents taught them unquestioningly? Look into history at who was religious and who was not.
Remarkably brilliant people are just as susceptable to being wrong in areas where they have no expertise as anyone else. My father is a talented lawyer but he hasn't got a clue about how transistors work, nevermind logic gates, integrated circuits, photolithography...
If Einstein had said something remarkably stupid about weather patterns, we wouldn't say "Hmm, maybe there's something to that.". We'd say "Well that's not really his area of expertise." If there was any doubt about the stupidity about his comment, we could consult experts on climatology who could articulate why what he said was or was not correct.
Regardless, theists and atheists alike continue to try to claim Einstein for their side as if his brilliance in physics somehow bleeds over into a field for which he claimed no expertise and for which there is no objective measure of expertise.
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So, what test have you performed that would falsify your religious adherence? And have you attempted to falsify any assumptions you make during your falsification test?
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quote:Originally posted by Tatiana: I made an analogy of this to engineering, and how we go about linearizing nonlinear systems, to simplify things. The power of science is just this, by narrowing our focus to what is repeatable, shared, and objective, we simplify things a great deal so that we can make much more sense out of them. Science is incredibly powerful as a way of looking at the world. It's transformed human life hugely for the better. But it does so at the cost of negating, or rather overlooking, or dismissing, 99+% of all observations, nearly all our experience of being alive.
It sounds to me like you're suggesting that most of what we experience or observe is irrational.
I find that I'm somewhat amused by the random statistics being thrown around...50%, 99.4%, 21.435%...
Setting random numbers aside for a moment: What kinds of things are scientists ignoring?
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What did you write it in? I wish there was a "auto save draft" function in notepad. Or in IE or Firefox.
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I wrote it in the reply window, but then I copied it so I could paste it into Word. I closed by browser and did some other stuff (not copying or pasting) between the copy and paste, and when I went to paste my text was gone.
Oh well. Long story short: rivka, I don't see how the Matrix lies that way. The Matrix is essentially Descartes' arch-deceiver; the internal zombie doesn't need an external deceiver.
I don't currently believe in the internal zombie, but I do think it's an open question that will probably be answered in my lifetime.
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quote:Originally posted by katharina: The cases where it is not true is minuscule compared to the cases where it is true. What are the characteristics you identify of people who are more poorly equipped than an outside person to judge their own experiences? Who is it that you have so little regard for that you don't believe them when they tell what they have experienced in their lives? Who are these masses of people that don't realize that what they think they are feeling is actually something else, and a complete separate person knows better than them about it?
It is really amazing how many people have deep, intense personal experiences which just happen to validate the religion their parents taught them. When you take five people who all have, so far as we can tell, the same experience, yet they take it as support for five different and contradictory theories, and those theories are clearly extremely culturally contingent, then you're going to have to throw out their own explanations.
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King of Men, I am not going to dignify such a trashy and deliberately obtuse post with a thoughtful response.
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quote:Who are these masses of people that don't realize that what they think they are feeling is actually something else, and a complete separate person knows better than them about it?
The answer, from a religious point of view, is "religious people who believe things that contradict my own religious beliefs." AFAICT, this conclusion is inescapable. They can't all be right, therefore there have to be masses who are wrong.
Why an atheist or agnostic should be any less ready to conclude that there are masses of people who are wrong about the implications of their personal experiences, I can't imagine.
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quote:Originally posted by Tresopax: The real problem is that no matter how rigorously you examine evidence, there is always the possibility that the evidence will still lead you to the wrong conclusion - particularly if you hold some false assumptions that shape the way you rigorously examine the evidence.
That's why part of the definition of being rigorous is to test your hypothesis in such a way that it can be falsified. Confirmatory evidence alone is not a very good proof. If the ancients were't doing the kind of tests that would have falsified their hypothesis, then they weren't being rigorous.
It's not like Galileo or Newton had access to high-technology methods that primative people didn't. If they'd done the same tests, they'd have found the same thing.
quote:In the case of the kids, they could rigorously examine the evidence all day long and they'd still come to the conclusion that objects come to rest - in order to come to a different conclusion, they'd need to be taught to hold different assumptions about the universe.
All you need to do is see that balls moving across a surface will slow down more or less depending on the friction betwen them, and then you realize that their stopping isn't because of their fundamental nature, but because of the friction. It's not that an icy surface is retarding the ball from reaching its rest state, it's that the surface doesn't impede the natural motion of the moving ball as much as other surfaces. I'm sure that there were plenty of people who knew that once something big gets moving on a slippery surface, it doesn't want to stop, it takes a lot of effort to stop it! But those weren't the people pondering Aristotle.
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KoM: That you have fooled yourself into believing that only those who think as you do think is a grand and tragic failure of yours of your own making.
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Just going where the evidence leads me. My 'you' was rather specific; if English had retained its full set of pronouns, it would have been a 'thee'.
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quote:Originally posted by katharina: The cases where it is not true is minuscule compared to the cases where it is true. What are the characteristics you identify of people who are more poorly equipped than an outside person to judge their own experiences? Who is it that you have so little regard for that you don't believe them when they tell what they have experienced in their lives? Who are these masses of people that don't realize that what they think they are feeling is actually something else, and a complete separate person knows better than them about it?
It is really amazing how many people have deep, intense personal experiences which just happen to validate the religion their parents taught them. When you take five people who all have, so far as we can tell, the same experience, yet they take it as support for five different and contradictory theories, and those theories are clearly extremely culturally contingent, then you're going to have to throw out their own explanations.
I'm not sure why this has warranted such hostility. It's a fair observation.
One woman loses her husband to a long fight with cancer and realizes that God only gave her what she could handle and surrounded her with friends and family to bless her and so she has come through the experience stronger and more devoted to Him.
Another women loses her husband to a long fight with cancer and realizes that there is no God for if God existed he would not put such a flaw in his design. She decides the outpouring of support is fake and insincere and secludes herself, popping up only on internet forums where she declares her true faith -- atheism.
I've heard both of these before. Powerful personal experiences that support their belief in X.
I'm not saying that they're wrong. Actually, in my personal religious philosophy, they can both be right at the exact same time. But I acknowledge that I'm weird and a the moment, I'm just enjoying this back and forth between the idea that there is a God or that there is no God. And this seems to be a fair point.
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You missed two points of my observation: First, in your second case, the woman is not validating the faith she already happened to have. Second, I was actually referring more to spiritual experiences, "feeling the nearness of God", such as many people report as a cause of their conversion or an effect of prayer or meditation.
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quote:Originally posted by Christine: Actually, in my personal religious philosophy, they can both be right at the exact same time. But I acknowledge that I'm weird and a the moment, I'm just enjoying this back and forth between the idea that there is a God or that there is no God.
I've always thought it would be kind of funny if what happens to you when you die is what you believe will happen. Christians go to Heaven or Hell, Buddhists get reincarnated, atheists get oblivion, etc.
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I have a friend who, while his sick daughter received a LDS priesthood blessing, felt a powerful confirmation by the Spirit that she would be healed. She died shortly after.
I have had LDS friends describe the quasi-physical experiences which, for them, confirm the veracity of their religion. I've heard non-LDS friends describe the same sort of feeling not only as confirmation of their own beliefs, but as a confirmation that their belief of the falseness of the LDS church was correct.
I've felt things very similar to what others describe as spiritual experiences, but I can see no reason to believes these feelings were somehow supernatural in origin.
I think these are more of the type of scenarios that KoM is talking about.
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quote:Originally posted by twinky: I've always thought it would be kind of funny if what happens to you when you die is what you believe will happen. Christians go to Heaven or Hell, Buddhists get reincarnated, atheists get oblivion, etc.
There was a funny Lucasarts game called Afterlife which was a Sim-type game based on this principle. It was rather amusing at the time.
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Precisely. And to spin a bit further on your example of the Spirit telling someone that their daughter would be healed, if your friend went on to reason that "Well, clearly she is not sick in Heaven, so she was healed", that is the sort of rationalisation I'm referring to.
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