(no subject)

[nameandnature]

Stuff I found on the web, probably on andrewducker's del.icio.us feed or something.

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.

Comments

[andrewducker]

Not me. But I do love that quote.

[ex-robhu.livejournal.com]

When I stopped being a Christian I felt relief because I no longer had to view myself as a very naughty sinner (in fact I've probably swung too far the other way now), and not having to believe that the scientific community was wrong about the age of the earth and how man came about were a bit of a relief.

On the other hand secular / atheistic explanations for things aren't terribly easy to accept either. Atheism is nice in that you can sail which ever course you want to avoid the rocks you see in your path (rather than feeling you really have to sign the DB or something), but I don't want an easy life - I'm more interested in a worldview that makes sense and explains things. I find it terribly hard to believe that me, the self, consciousness, is a property of the material world, for reasons I find hard to explain (perhaps I should write a post about it). People like Chalmers who suggest that maybe we don't have consciousness at all (http://www.overcomingbias.com/2008/04/zombie-movie.html) solve the problem in a way that is totally unsatisfactory to me.

There are many examples of things like that which I find unsatisfactory, like the fine tuning issues with the universe. As with the fine tuning argument many of them seem to boil down to "well we don't know, but hopefully we'll have better answers in the future", which is fine I suppose - science has a habit of coming up with the answers, so I'm reticent to start betting on another horse. That doesn't mean it's satisfying or easy to think about all these things and hold on to that worldview though.

It's a shame toothycat doesn't post about his beliefs more often (or in more detail), not just because toothypocalypses are amusing - but because it is surprising how close his beliefs are to mine (and those of many atheists) but he remains a (Evangelical?) Christian. I suspect that many of the things atheists think are knock down arguments against Christianity (I'm thinking of arguments referring to science and such rather than 'where is the evidence for God type arguments) really only seem like that because Christians at the moment think the opposite position is required for Christian belief. In the future when they change their minds it may not be (just) that they need to evolve to keep their religion alive, but because it was never really required that they held such a position (e.g. the universe doesn't have to be finely tuned, maybe God created a 'multiverse' in the same way and for the same reasons that Christians tend to accept that God created a universe that is hostile to life with one corner that resulted in the evolution of human life - why not extend the idea to universes themselves?)

[brokenhut.livejournal.com]

That Voyou blog post was quite horrific. I've never seen so many people (well, since I last read Fundies Say The Darndest Things) completely fail to grasp the point of comparing one's opinions with observable reality.

Said Voyou:

if the difference between theists and atheists is explained by their stupidity and our cleverness, we’re left without a way of analyzing how our own sets of beliefs might be plausible but ultimately false.

Hey look, if we posit straw men we can knock them down really easily!

[mattghg (from livejournal.com)]

I did find that giving up removed the constant pressure

You, and C.S. Lewis:

"The whole thing [Christianity] became a matter of speculation: I was soon (in the famous words) 'altering "I believe" to "one does feel"'. And oh, the relief of it! [...]

"And so, little by little, with fluctuations which I cannot now trace, I became an apostate, dropping my faith with no sense of loss but with the greatest relief." (Surprised by Joy, chapter 4)

Although, of course, that was not the end of the matter, and he has a different analysis of the experience.

RE: moral contagion, I don't think you have to be a Christian to believe that "bad company corrupts good character". And I simply didn't understand the argument at the end of the "unequally yoked" hyperlink.