scrape_r_rational/data/cache/4bivel.md

Do you need to be an atheist to be a rationalist?

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• u/castleborg:

  Its a side effect, not a prerequisite
  

• u/None:

  No, but it does tend to sort of happen in the process of becoming a rationalist.
  

• u/eaglejarl:

  Why is this listed on a site for rational **fiction**?
  

  • u/gabbalis:

    Probably because we didn't call it /r/rationalfiction.
    
    I mean if we're just literally hypothesizing the causation behind these sorts of posts, that's probably the reason.
    

• u/None:

  Does your "belief in God" constrain your expectations?  If yes, then yes, otherwise no.  But you may find that you care more about "beliefs" that *do* constrain expectations, find them more emotionally weighty.
  

• u/SkeevePlowse:

  I would suggest that if you're a rationalist and still religious, you're either not a very good rationalist, or you know something the rest of us don't.
  

  • u/BadGoyWithAGun:

    I'm a religious rationalist and I agree with this statement. A healthy dose of non-overlapping magisteria helped in the beginning, but it's not even necessary at this point.
    

    • u/protagnostic:

      ...so are you saying you're not a very good rationalist, or you know something the rest of us don't?
      
      If the former, I'm very confused as to how your brain works.
      If the latter, what's the secret?
      

• u/Alphanos:

  Though I don't expect this to be popular here, I think there's a point on this topic oft-ignored by atheism.  Perhaps the rational community will be more open to considering it.  The problem is that of experimental controls.
  
  The linked page discusses "spirit speaking" as a hypothetical event in reality that can be tested like any other.  This brings to mind stories of tests involving MRI scans attempting to determine parts of the brain that indicate spiritual or religious perceptions.  However, there is a great flaw in the methodology here.  The successful application of science requires reducing variables to test one or at least few things at a time.  We try our best to use controls in order to only test what we are seeking to answer at present.  But this requires humans to have the requisite level of power or control over the thing being tested.
  
  When people talk about it being difficult to impossible to test spiritual or religious matters, it is not because we have applied those labels to them.  It is because we are discussing intelligent actors who, hypothetically, have vastly more power and intellect than the tester, and so will only show up reliably on the tests if they desire to.  This is not some inert law of nature which we can test in myriad ways at our leisure.  We aren't able to establish proper experimental controls because we have no control over the thing we're trying to test.
  
  Imagine that a group of ants decides that they want to runs observations and tests in order to understand human behaviour.  While far easier a task than humans trying to test for God, this would still be exceedingly difficult.  The ants may try to set up different scenarios - one ant nearby to the human's door, or three ants.  100 ants watching the human's house, or no ants watching.  The ants may then observe different results in each of these scenarios!  Yet the observed differences in human behaviour truly bore no relation to what the ants were doing.  The human had motivations and interests beyond the comprehension of the ants (going to work, or to get groceries, etc).  Nothing the ants did prompted the human to return home with groceries.  The human likely wasn't even aware of what the ants were doing.
  
  Suppose that the human became aware that the ants were trying to run such tests, and it was a common expected behaviour of ants.  The human might choose to play along with the tests for a while, or ignore them, or purposefully confound them for fun.  But nothing the ants did would control that human's choice in the matter.  It is especially unlikely that the human would, from that point forward, prioritize the ants' goals and motivations above its own and always play along with any tests they wanted to run indefinitely.
  
  Of course, in this example the ants have a far easier time in their testing efforts than we do.  The hypothetical ants can easily perceive the existence of the human, and can clearly identify which acts it is responsible for when in close proximity to them.  Yet despite these massive advantages compared to our attempted tests of God, it seems their efforts will be doomed to failure, no matter how good their science.  The ants will not discover jobs, money, or grocery stores.  The ants could not even guess as to these things, which are far beyond their capability to observe.  The only realistic chance of the ants getting even a vague understanding of such matters would be for the human to somehow use ant language to try to explain concepts in parables and metaphors.  Ant language, of course, would not have the true words or concepts involved, but this way things far beyond the ants' capabilities to observe could be at least partially explained.
  
  I am sure there are flaws in this off-the-cuff analogy, and surely atheists have other arguments on such matters.  But I hope this helps to illustrate the difficulty of performing science given the complete lack of ability to establish proper experimental controls.
  

  • u/Jiro_T:

    Ants don't have a concept of testing hypotheses.  This metaphor only "works" because the audience is supposed to think of the ants as doing things that ants can't do, but still only having the success at them that actual ants have.
    
    Consider why you didn't use rocks instead of ants.  The ability of rocks to comprehend us is the same as the ability of ants to comprehend us, after all.  Except if you use rocks, the trick you're playing becomes obvious.
    
    Also, nobody who uses this argument should ever claim that God is good.
    

    • u/Alphanos:

      You seem to be identifying possible flaws in my analogy rather than the underlying point I was attempting to illustrate.  If you can think of a better analogy, then great!  Please tell me what it is and I'll be happy to use it in the future.  If you disagree with my underlying point for some reason, then you'll need to be more specific about why that is =).
      
      Whether or not God is good is not addressed by my analogy, and really has no bearing on the question of experimental controls.  That's a completely different discussion from the topic at hand.
      

      • u/Krozart:

        One of the underlying flaws in your argument is that if the relationship between god and humans is similar to how you portray it, then we would have evidence of gods existence.
        
        Its not a requirement of science that something has to be constant or even easily observable. Sure its easier to understand, thats one of the reasons gravity was better explored before quantum mechanics. But its certainly not a requirement. 
        
        The problem for the argument of god is that there just isn't any proof, and contrary to a popular saying, the absence of evidence is evidence of absence.
        
        Currently the only arguments that I see nowadays regarding god that is consistent with the absence of evidence all have the look of the story of the invisible dragon. This includes your analogy of the ants. The ant analogy has all the signs of an hypothesis generated to prove a belief is true, instead of being generated to explain reality.
        

  • u/scruiser:

    The solution space of things that could logically exist but can't be empirically tested is very large... I could be a smartass and bring up the flying spaghetti monster, but to restrict my examples to things to more serious things, some of which I could hypothetically actually believe given bizarre enough personal experience.
    
    * The Simulation Hypothesis (reality is a simulation maintained on some underlying substrate of a much vaster, 'realer universe')
    
    * Boltzman brain.  I am just a brief collection of dust that has managed to temporally emulate a mind long enough for it to imagine it is real...
    
    * Magic exists, but can't be tested because of some arbitrary convoluted occult properties it has (i.e. the further it is known and revealed to reality, the more it ceases)
    
    * Some form of extreme post-modernism is actually literally true about 'objective' reality, but science is unable to realize this because its ability to arrive at truth depends on a consensus process in the first place.
    
    * Modal realism is true, as a side effect of this, an even more generalized form of quantum immortality applies.  From one's own perspective, instead of dying, improbable events, or outright previously unknown laws of nature (this is the modal realist version), will seem to continuously conspire to keep you alive.
    
    * Combining modal realism and simulation hypothesis results in an even deeper rabbit hole of seemingly paradoxical implications...
    
    * Alien life and civilizations exists/have existed, but the laws of physics make it such that the infinite computing substrate is obtainable collapsing edge of a blackhole, so the solution to the Fermi is that all intelligent life eventually chooses to migrate to simulations on the edges of blackholes
    
    * Future civilization is likely to simulate us to get a chance to resurrect us, to some small margin of probability 
    
    * Combining several previous points: all of this has already happened before and will happened again...
    
    **Anyway** my point is that the concept of God is just as untestable as most of these other ideas.  Why should it receive any special respect/belief over any of these other possibilities?
    

  • u/None:

    If an entity exists but doesn't leave any verifiable evidence that it exists, then it functionally does not exist.
    
    That's how evidence works.
    
    Edit: No, I will not be responding to any incredibly over-elaborate, pseudointellectual justifications for why you're allowed to believe in your dumb magic shit without evidence. Holy fuck why did I get these responses.
    
    Followup edit: No, I will also not be responding to any weird stalker-y personal attacks aimed at me because I say silly things on this reddit account. You people need to stop.
    

    • u/Alphanos:

      Edit: This post, and the reply to his next comment, were written prior to the addition made by his edit.  I'm disappointed that he chose to abandon discussion of rationality in favour of an emotional appeal to incredulity.
      
      I upvoted you for very succinctly expressing the same error that all other replies have made.
      
      I agree with the principle that you're expressing, but I disagree in regards to its limitations.  You're expressing this as a universal, philosophical truth.  I'm saying that it is an exceptionally useful heuristic which has boundaries we very rarely encounter.
      
      Please understand that I'm not making a positive case for God.  I'm not saying God exists because of experimental controls.  Rather, I'm saying that attempts to use the heuristic you quote to prove that God cannot possibly exist are misguided.  There may be many other arguments or reasons to claim that God does or does not exist.  But this one isn't valid due to the issue of experimental controls.  This is a very narrow and limited claim I'm making.
      
      We are not able to verifiably measure whether any such evidence exists despite our best efforts.  In the case of an unknown powerful intellect we are trying to detect, absence of evidence may not, in fact, be evidence of absence.  I'm not saying such an entity doesn't have any effects upon the world - I'm saying that we cannot successfully formulate an experiment or test that will reliably tell us which effects, if any, such an entity would hypothetically be responsible for.
      

    • u/scruiser:

      I don't think this is quite true for the most general meaning of 'exist'...
      
      * The expansion of the universe could cause a relativistic ship to travel far enough that (assuming the speed of light is the absolute limit) no information from it could ever return.  Does this relativistic ship cease to exist?
      
      * There is also EY's favorite of the many worlds interpretation verse collapse interpretation...  Intuitively, many worlds seems more complicated and less parsimonious, but it is arguably more parsimonious (people with more physics knowledge occasionally disagree with EY, but for the sake of argument lets just compare many worlds against collapse interpretation that are less parsimonious in this case)
      
      * Do you define information entirely by its physical substrate?  This is more a philosophical question in the present, although if mind-uploading or teleportation based an atomic disassembly and reconstruction ever become possible, this could be a major issue.  This also might one day be relevant if we had a completely reductionist understanding of the human mind well enough to rigorously define all the concepts humans thinks of in order to put Anslems/Godel ontological style arguments into a more rigorous form.
      
      I do agree with your statement for the most part, particularly in the case of god, but it worth keeping in mind the edge cases.
      

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