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Stuff I found on the web, probably on

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Psychology Today on ex-Christian ex-ministers and on magical thinking

Psychology Today has a couple of interesting articles, one on ministers who lose their faith, and another on magical thinking. Quoteable quote:

"We tend to ignore how much cognitive effort is required to maintain extreme religious beliefs, which have no supporting evidence whatsoever," says the evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson. He likens the process to a cell trying to maintain its osmotic pressure. "You're trying to pump out the mainstream influences all the time. You're trying to maintain this wall, and keep your beliefs inside, and all these other beliefs outside. That's hard work." In some ways, then, at least for fundamentalists, "growing out of it is the easiest thing in the world."

That sounds sort of familiar. I'm not sure I'd consider myself an ex-fundamentalist, but I did find that giving up removed the constant pressure to keep baling.

The stuff about moral contagion in the magical thinking article reminded me of Haggai 2:10-14, where it's clear that cleanness (in the Bible's sense of moral and ceremonial acceptability, rather then lack of dirt) is less contagious than uncleanness. There's possibly a link here to the tendency of some religions to sharply divide the world into non-believers and believers, and to be careful about how much you expose yourself to the non-believing world (q.v. the unequally yoked teaching you get in the more extreme variants of a lot of religions).

Old interview with Philip Pullman

Third Way interviewed Pullman years ago. It's the origin of one of his statements on whether he's an agnostic or an atheist, which I rather like:

Can I elucidate my own position as far as atheism is concerned? I don’t know whether I’m an atheist or an agnostic. I’m both, depending on where the standpoint is.

The totality of what I know is no more than the tiniest pinprick of light in an enormous encircling darkness of all the things I don’t know – which includes the number of atoms in the Atlantic Ocean, the thoughts going through the mind of my next-door neighbour at this moment and what is happening two miles above the surface of the planet Mars. In this illimitable darkness there may be God and I don’t know, because I don’t know.

But if we look at this pinprick of light and come closer to it, like a camera zooming in, so that it gradually expands until here we are, sitting in this room, surrounded by all the things we do know – such as what the time is and how to drive to London and all the other things that we know, what we’ve read about history and what we can find out about science – nowhere in this knowledge that’s available to me do I see the slightest evidence for God.

So, within this tiny circle of light I’m a convinced atheist; but when I step back I can see that the totality of what I know is very small compared to the totality of what I don’t know. So, that’s my position.

This isn't really a surprising statement, but, like Ruth Gledhill's discovery that Richard Dawkins is a liberal Anglican, some people seem surprised that atheists aren't ruling out things which some people would regard as gods. The point is that there's no decent evidence that anyone has met one. Deism is a respectable position, I think (although I'm not sure why you'd bother with it), but religions which claim God has spoken to them are implausible because of God's inability to keep his story straight.

The walls have Google

The thing about blogging is that you never know who's reading. Someone called Voyou makes a post ending with an aside which is critical of A.C. Grayling's response to Terry Eagleton's review of The God Delusion. Grayling turns up in the comments to argue with them.

(I keep turning up more conversations about the Eagleton review: see my bookmarks for the best of them).

"Compact of hypocrisy and secret vice"

Yellow wonders whether or not he should sign the UCCF doctrinal basis in this post and the followup. Signs point to "not". Si Hollett reminds me of myself in my foolish youth.

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No, I don't quite think that choices are least free when they have most consequences. I think they are least free when the pressure on the person choosing to choose one way or the other is greatest. Actually, even that isn't quite right. Let me make a mathematical analogy, since you're a mathmo :-). Suppose you flip a biased coin. The entropy of the result -- the average amount of information in it -- is - p log p - (1-p) log (1-p), which is biggest when p = 1/2 and tiny when p is very close to 0 or 1. But if the coin actually comes up the unexpected way, the amount of information in *that* result is very large. Similarly: a choice made under strong pressure is, on average, not very free; if you actually manage to make the "unexpected" choice then it's a more-than-averagely free choice, but usually you don't and on balance it ends up being less free. I actually think the analogy with entropy is quite close, but I'm prepared to be persuaded that there's a major problem with it :-).

Large consequences aren't quite the same thing as high pressure. Firstly, because we care more about some consequences than others. In those compelling fictional moments of choice, the usual setup is that the hero has a lot of pressure on him (it's usually him rather than her) to choose the "wrong" way. So he ends up choosing the right way despite the pressure, which is why it feels like a particularly big and genuinely-chosen choice. Secondly, because there are other forms of pressure; for instance, force of habit (can our hero resist the urge for another cigarette when the smoke may be seen by the enemy?), social norms (can our hero work together with a member of the tribe he's been brought up to hate?), moral constraints (can our hero kill an innocent child in cold blood when it's the only way to save the galaxy?), bodily demands (can our hero keep going despite the tiredness and hunger? can he resist the seductions of the voluptuous enemy agent?), and so on.

Your entropy analogy is good - it helps disambiguate between choosing in accordance with strong pressure (what you're saying is wrong with the Christian message) and choosing against strong pressure (our fictional hero fighting against the odds). I think my post may have conflated these slightly.

Can I clarify what you're saying: are you saying that, for a given unbalanced choice (i.e. one with strong pressure in one direction), we can't know a priori how free it is until the decision has been made, and then if the person chose the "difficult" option they did so freely, but if they chose the "easy" option they did so much less freely? Or are you saying that, if the choice is known to be unbalanced, we can say a priori that it's not very free, because most people will choose the easy option and that will average out with the few who choose the difficult option?

(The answer may be obvious if I were more familiar with the maths in the entropy analogy, but I hadn't actually met that formula before.)

I think there are logical difficulties with the former. Suppose you have a smoker trying to quit. Clearly it's more difficult for him to resist a cigarette than it is for a lifelong non-smoker. But if he successfully resists and you congratulate him on his free choice against the odds, you can't also say, if he gives in, "It was inevitable, he wasn't free, he couldn't have chosen any differently." Surely both possible outcomes have to be as free or unfree as each other? (I don't think free/unfree is the same thing as easy/difficult.)

If it's the latter, that makes sense, but I think it's a statistical statement which relies on there being multiple instances of the choice. (You can encode 1000 flips of your biased coin in fewer than 1000 bits, but you still need 1 bit to encode 1 flip, regardless of whether it came up the expected way or the other way.) So it depends whether you think every choice that every person has to make is unique. I think the case is arguable either way, but if they do turn out to be unique then I don't think the statistical principles can be applied, in the same way that you can't use gas-diffusion laws to predict the motion of a single particle.

What I think I'd say (though I'm not entirely sure it's right) is: (1) as you say, we can't know in advance how freely the person will choose, (2) more people will make the much-easier choice (that's almost what "much easier" means), (3) in some sense the right way to think about how much freedom that choice itself introduces to the world is to look at the average -- it might help to imagine millions of people making similar choices, so that most of them make the easier decision, etc. -- and (4) the average works out so that a more-pressured decision introduces less freedom to the world.

I'd say about the smoker either "coo, well done, that was a really difficult choice" or "ah well, it was almost inevitable; try again". (It wouldn't be "it was inevitable, he wasn't free" unless there was really no possibility of choosing to resist.)

On reflection, I think I dislike some terminology I've used here. The quantity that's different in the two cases isn't exactly "freedom", it's something more like "decision". Freedom is (at least according to my analogy) expected quantity of decision.

I don't think the free-ness of a decision can really be affected by whether or not there happen to be lots of other people making very similar decisions, so I'm happy saying "this is how it is in the many-instances case, so that's also how it is in the single-instance case". And since I'm strongly inclined towards the "many worlds" view of QM, maybe there are in effect *always* many instances, with many of them going each possible way...

On reflection, I think I dislike some terminology I've used here. The quantity that's different in the two cases isn't exactly "freedom", it's something more like "decision". Freedom is (at least according to my analogy) expected quantity of decision.

So what are we actually discussing: freedom/unfreedom, in the sense of how much an individual is able to exercise their free will at the point of decision; or ease/difficulty; or some kind of information-theoretic metric?

Freedom/unfreedom seems to be the only one with any bearing on the wider discussion.

The information-theoretic quantity is intellectually interesting, but unless it corresponds to how much the individual gets to exercise their free will it's not relevant to the discussion about whether Christianity is true and whether it's reasonable for God to expect people to choose him. (Phrases like "how much freedom that choice itself introduces to the world" make me think you're conceptualising it as an abstract informational quantity very similar to entropy, rather than something the individual making the decision experiences.)

And if it's ease/difficulty, then your complaint would boil down to "God makes it too easy for people to choose him", which is the opposite of what you're saying in the last paragraph of this post.

I'm suggesting that the three notions are closely related, or perhaps even identical. Free will is notoriously difficult to give a satisfactory definition of, but freedom seems to be (at least) closely related to lack of constraint, and I think it's clear that constraint comes in degrees, and I think following those ideas through leads fairly inevitably to something like what I'm suggesting. (I expect the logarithms are optional.)

I'm open to being shown other ways to deal with the question, though. How would you go about evaluating how much freedom someone has in a given situation?

The choice is experienced and made by the individual. I could equally have written "how much freedom the agent gains by having that choice to make in those circumstances" or something.

As for ease versus difficulty of choosing God: yes, there are two separate issues that pull opposite ways. If we pretend that God has actually told us about our situation (our situation, that is, as described by believers in eternal torment) then we don't get much of a choice because it's like being threatened at gunpoint only much worse. (Of course sometimes people *do* manage to make a clearly-genuine choice despite such threats, as Rob says he did with hell.) But if we drop that pretence, there's a different problem, which is the one I'm whingeing about in the paragraph you cite.

One might hope that these problems cancel out somehow, but it doesn't seem to me that they do. It's a bit like the old ethical puzzle: A, B and C are travelling through the desert; A (who hates C) puts poison in his water bottle, and then B (who also hates C, but doesn't know what A has done) puts a hole in his water bottle so that it all runs out before he ever gets to drink it; so who killed A? I'm not sure that question has an answer, but C isn't any better off for being killed in two "opposite" ways. And we aren't any better off for being mistreated by God in two "opposite" ways, namely (1) being required to do certain things on pain of eternal torment and (2) not being told about #1.

but freedom seems to be (at least) closely related to lack of constraint
Do you mean constraint as in determinism, or as in coercion, or as in pressure from a conflicting value/drive/appetite in an individual's make-up? They have to be distinguished, otherwise "But I really really wanted to" would be a valid defence in law.

How would you go about evaluating how much freedom someone has in a given situation?
I think - tentatively - I would say all decisions not actually forced by determinism are equally free, but not equally easy. Someone coerced by a gun to their head is still totally free to make either decision (if not, there would be no martyrs); it's just that we don't blame them (legally or morally) if they make the self-preserving decision, because we recognise that the alternative would have been extremely difficult and perhaps pointless.

As for ease versus difficulty of choosing God: yes, there are two separate issues that pull opposite ways. ...One might hope that these problems cancel out somehow, but it doesn't seem to me that they do.... we aren't any better off for being mistreated by God in two "opposite" ways, namely (1) being required to do certain things on pain of eternal torment and (2) not being told about #1.
OK, I see what you mean. Fair point.
About "being required to do certain things on pain of eternal torment", I'd like to repeat some comments I made to someone else on this thread:
"It's not punishment for not believing, it's punishment for our sins. Your comment sounds as though the default is heaven and then God goes round finding all the non-believers and chucking them out, whereas the default is hell and then God goes round finding the believers and rescuing them because they've accepted his gift of salvation. It's like saying medical science kills people who refuse to take their medication, when actually medical science saves people who do take their medication (not 100% of the time, but it's only an analogy)."

I'll try to address the "not being told" bit on the other branch of the thread.

I think your view and mine are pretty much opposites. I don't think determinism, as such, need imply lack of free will (if determinism is right then "free" needs a definition like "causally dependent on one's preferences"; the details are notoriously difficult, but it's not like "free" is actually any easier to define if you don't assume determinism), but I think it comes in degrees.

I don't understand why a decision at gunpoint has to be "*totally* free" for there to be martyrs. Not unless you take it as axiomatic that "totally free" and "not at all free" are the only options, which seems to me a very implausible position.

Yes, I do understand that hell isn't generally conceived as a punishment for not believing. I've tried to avoid saying anything that makes it look like I think otherwise, but obviously I didn't quite succeed in this case. (Unfortunately, it turns out that a profusion of bite-sized comments isn't a great medium for serious theological discussion. Now there's a surprise :-).) So, anyway: no, I don't imagine that (either in reality, or in Christians' opinions, or in any compromise between the two) God goes around finding unbelievers and throwing them into hell for not believing. But if the situation is "if you don't do X then you go to hell", and if God knows this and could have set things up differently, then I think it's reasonable to say that God is requiring you to do X on pain of hell even if it's something else that provides the justification (such as it is) for burning your soul. It might be a different matter if God had no choice (as some Christians claim, more or less), but that option is one of those that involves postulating peculiar necessary truths for which there's no other evidence besides "if this were true then it would be easier to believe in my preferred version of Christianity".

Complete tangent:
who killed [C]? I'm not sure that question has an answer

It seems to me that B did (assuming the cause of C's death was thirst), although A is guilty of attempted murder. I think the situation is equivalent to A and B each trying to shoot C, and A missing and B succeeding. (Which seems more straightforward.) A's poisoning attempt was thwarted by forces outside his control, but the victim was killed by someone else.

I think the objection "but if B hadn't acted, C would still have died" is a red herring. In the shooting example, maybe A wouldn't have missed if B hadn't appeared and startled C, causing him to leap out of the way; but I don't think that changes the charges of attempted murder and murder respectively.

That's certainly quite a plausible answer. I remain unconvinced that there's much point in distinguishing between A's action and B's, since for both of them (1) the agent intended to kill C, and (2) C did in fact die, and (3) C would still have died without the other person's action. But if for legal purposes it were necessary to set down one of them as the killer, I expect your answer is as good as any.

(What if B, instead of putting a hole in C's water bottle, put in a substance that is poisonous on its own, and that reacts with A's poison to make yet a third poison? If you still think the answer is that B was the real killer, is your intuition disturbed at all by considering a scenario where instead B puts something into C's water bottle that's unpleasant but not deadly on its own, but that reacts with A's poison to make a different deadly poison?)

Actually, my intuition finds your second example more straightforward than your first. I think in your second example A is the killer; and similarly if they each put in a substance that was unpleasant but not deadly and the two substances reacted to make a deadly poison, neither would be the killer and both ought to be legally guilty of manslaughter - just as if a single enemy put in an unpleasant substance which reacted fatally with a medicine he didn't know the victim was taking, he ought to be guilty of manslaughter.

Your first example is less clear, IMO. I think I'd have to say they both killed him. It's not quite the same as the original story - in the original story B's action actually thwarted A's murder attempt, whereas here it doesn't. This example has a symmetry that the original story lacks; there is nothing to distinguish A and B except chronological order, which seems an arbitrary criterion, and even one which it might not be possible to establish afterwards (A and B, with remorseful goodwill and/or lie detectors, might not be able to figure out which of them acted first). I think this one is equivalent to the case where they each put in a poison and the poisons don't react, so the bottle contains two poisons each of which is sufficient to kill C.

The second example was conditional on your thinking "definitely B" about the first example. Since that wasn't your reaction to it, I'm not particularly surprised that you didn't find the second example difficult :-). Of course it's not the same as the original story; what would be the point of offering something that was? I suppose my higher-level point is that by tweaking stories of this sort one can generally find situations in which any given person can't give a confident verdict of the form "A rather than B killed him".

The whole thing's a digression anyway...

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