(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

[nameandnature]

St Jack gave up his childhood Christianity because he wanted autonomy. The implication of the quotation you give above is that he later thought this autonomy was a bad thing, monstrous and lawless. Returning to our favourite topic of Derren Brown, I'm not sure where this leaves the free will defence, which seems to assume that autonomy is a good thing, good enough to allow all the evil of the world, even. If Jack, and hence God, objects to autonomy so much, why not use NLP to ensure we always make the right choices?

My relief at leaving Christianity was probably partly a relief at not being told what to do (although being told what to do is in some ways a relief in itself: too much choice tends to make people unhappy, psychologists say. De-converts often feel quite lost). None of us are pure and disinterested seekers of the truth (robhu has clearly re-converted to get girls, for example), and I don't want to exalt myself too much (just enough will be fine).

What I recall most, however, was a relief as at the resolution of the tension of trying to believe stuff that wasn't true. Evangelicalism (rightly) teaches you that truth is important. The quote from Altemeyer's The Authoritarians, which I've mentioned before, precisely describes my feeling of knowing the truth is important and realising that what I previously believed wasn't it.

Thinking on it some more, I think there's more to the moral contagion stuff than bad company, because, if we're honest, most unbelievers are not that bad and most believers are not that good (this is gjm11's Christian behaviour argument, as it happens). To take separatism to the sort of extremes that, say, the Johanine community seems to have (the church is light, the world is darkness), requires you to think that unbelievers are yucky (and therefore bad and contagiously so), regardless of whether we've actually done anything much other than fail to believe. You'd be forgiven for not wanting to hang out with Dawkins or marry me (although note that I only play the fire-breathing atheist on the Internet), I guess, but the average agnostic on the Clapham omnibus? Really?

We can call Christianity a symbiote instead if you like. Religions behave a bit like organisms (although there's no science to "memetics", so I'm not going to argue about that). The choice of organism for the analogy reflects the writer's prejudices about the religion, to some extent. Would you agree that evangelicalism is like a fluffy bunny?

[ex-robhu.livejournal.com]

My relief at leaving Christianity was probably partly a relief at not being told what to do
What were you told to do that you didn't like?

I almost wrote "What were you told to think that you didn't like?", but you didn't say that...

Was it StAG telling you what to do that you didn't like, that you thought God was (or might be) telling you to do something, or just anyone telling you to do something?

If God (by which I suppose I'm interested in 'god' in the general sense as well as Yahweh) was real and wanted you to do (i.e. act) in a certain way how would you respond?

We can call Christianity a symbiote instead if you like. Religions behave a bit like organisms (although there's no science to "memetics", so I'm not going to argue about that). The choice of organism for the analogy reflects the writer's prejudices about the religion, to some extent.
I think memetics is helpful in the weaker sense. It's obviously pseudoscience if you try to push it to far.

So I'd agree that Christianity is a meme in the same way that atheism, science, Labour party political views, and so on are.

I think arguing that religion is a mind virus is a bit of a cheap shot tbh.

[nameandnature]

I don't really recall any specific thing that StAG wanted me to do that I didn't (erm, except at one stage they wanted me to consider helping with the youth group or something, and I didn't want to because I wasn't sure I'd get on with youth, because I was shy). I think rather that the idea of an absolute authority is worrying unless you absolutely trust that authority, and one of my major doubts was whether the God portrayed by StAG was trustworthy (partly because I took the OT record of God ordering genocide as historically accurate, partly because of concerns about hell).

Yahweh is, as you know, the most unpleasant character in all fiction. In general, my response to a god which wanted me to do something would depend on whether I thought that thing was good. My impression of most gods is that the people who've devoted their lives to them are better than the gods themselves (a point Terry Pratchett makes in Small Gods).

The characterisation of religion as a virus can apply if a religion is mostly about reproducing itself. Some of religions can be like that, to some extent (evangelical Christianity, Scientology, Mormonism, some kinds of Islam). A virus can be harmful to the host, too, which again, I'd say those religions can be.

I wouldn't characterise ideologies which aren't hard-nosed replicators in the same way, so I'd argue that atheism (in itself, not New Atheism, which is evangelistic) and science are not in the same class. Party politics might be, in the sense that people are encouraged to canvas.

[mattghg (from livejournal.com)]

You're conflating two different senses of "autonomy":
(1) The ability to make free choices (as per the FWD)
(2) The fact of those choices being no-one's "business" but the chooser's (what CSL was so keen to have at one point)

If someone e.g. gets married, or joins the army, they sacrifice a large portion of their autonomy (2), without thereby ceasing to be a locus of free will. But actually it's the Christian claim that, in the final analysis, autonomy (2) (auto nomos, "self-law") doesn't exist, because "God will bring every deed into judgement, including every hidden thing, whether it is good or evil".

We can all play the motivation game all day and get nowhere, as you point out in you comment about Rob (I assume that's what you meant). I didn't mean to imply that your reasons for relief were the same as CSL's, or Rob's, or anyone else's. I just wanted to show that there's no necessary connection between the emotion of release and "pressure to keep bailing".

Suppose I alter the saying to "un-Christian company corrupts Christian character". Now we have a statement to do with concern about taking on the values of those surrounding you (or "following their gods", as the OT warnings to Israel went). Again, this has nothing to do with "uncleanness as a thing that can get passed on without an obvious mechanism".

And no, I don't think any belief is like an organism in any useful sense. You already have some idea of how dim a view I take of "memetics".

[nameandnature]

If, in the end, God's going to judge everyone, then what's the point of the ability to make free choices? Given how bad Hell is, it'd be better not to have been able to make those choices. "You have free choice, but I'll fry you if you chose something I don't like" limits my ability to chose, I think.

I just wanted to show that there's no necessary connection between the emotion of release and "pressure to keep bailing".

I agree that there's no necessary connection, but I certainly found that in my own case.

Suppose I alter the saying to "un-Christian company corrupts Christian character". Now we have a statement to do with concern about taking on the values of those surrounding you (or "following their gods", as the OT warnings to Israel went).

Then I'd agree (but you've removed the moral dimension which religions tend to add to that sort of statement).

[ex-robhu.livejournal.com]

"You have free choice, but I'll fry you if you chose something I don't like" limits my ability to chose, I think.
As you know, this isn't what (most) Christians think. It's more like "You deserve this punishment, but if you make this choice you don't have to face the punishment you rightly deserve". A big difference being that in your version it sounds like God is responsible and almost 'fries' people on a whimsy, whereas in the other we rightly deserve judgement but because of God's great love for us he provides an escape (to his own cost). Of course not all Christians (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lutheran#Central_doctrines) believe in decision theology (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decision_theology).

[nameandnature]

Why do we deserve punishment? If it is because of our wrong choices, my argument applies. If it is because of someone else's (Adam's, say, although I thought you had abandoned creationism in Christianity 2.0), this is unjust.

Similarly, if God choses who to save and no-one is saved who God does not chose, by implication he choses who to damn (God's knowledge and power being absolute, so that there's no third position of people God just forgot about). Again, this is unjust.

I think we've discussed this previously. My position hasn't changed since then: evangelical Christianity portrays God as evil.

[ex-robhu.livejournal.com]

I don't know whether original sin is correct or not. In a sense it doesn't matter, because even without original sin we (well, *I*, I don't you whether you have made such choices) make bad choices.

If it is because of our wrong choices, my argument applies.
Your argument is wrong. You said "If, in the end, God's going to judge everyone, then what's the point of the ability to make free choices? Given how bad Hell is, it'd be better not to have been able to make those choices. "You have free choice, but I'll fry you if you chose something I don't like" limits my ability to chose, I think."

Let me break that down in to pieces:
If, in the end, God's going to judge everyone, then what's the point of the ability to make free choices?
There is of course speculation about whether love has to be volitional act, and so if free will is a prerequisite of having beings that can love (one another, and God). I'm quite sure there are lots of valuable things possible because of free will like that. By just focussing on judgement you're being a bit blinkered. One could similarly ask "If, in the end, a child is going to grow up and die, then what is the point of the ability to make a child?" - the question doesn't really state it's assumptions, which are, I think, flawed.

Given how bad Hell is, it'd be better not to have been able to make those choices.
IIRC there is someone in the Bible who says that (I *think* it's someone who is already in hell). It pushes the blame on to God though, whereas the whole point of a free choice is that you could have chosen the path that didn't lead to hell.

"You have free choice, but I'll fry you if you chose something I don't like" limits my ability to chose, I think."
I agree with mattghg - because there are consequences to your actions doesn't limit your ability to choose (in the sense that you are irresistibly compelled). It's obvious consequences don't that (that's pretty obvious just from looking at the world in the general case, and personally at one point I thought hell was real but decided to choose the path that led to hell which refutes the stronger example you made).

If you mean the consequence of hell is so severe that you would choose heaven out of fear of hell, then great - that's a good outcome. Hell is so bad that I hope everyone would know how bad it is, recognise how serious the offense must be to warrant it, repent, and be saved.

[mattghg (from livejournal.com)]

Well, heaven forfend that your choices should have consequences!

[gjm11.livejournal.com]

Do please feel free to show us where Paul said that his choices shouldn't have consequences.

He did say that choices that every human being makes shouldn't have the consequence of eternal torture. You might notice a slight difference between that and "my choices should not have consequences". Or, then again, you might not.

(Well, actually he didn't say "choices that every human being makes". But the Standard Evangelical Position on this, which so far as I can tell is what you're offering here, is that everyone without exception -- or, perhaps, with one or two supernaturally-enabled exceptions over the whole course of history -- makes choices that will land them in hell unless they Turn To Christ. "Nice soul you've got here. Shame if anything happened to it, eh?")

[mattghg (from livejournal.com)]

I understand this isn't obvious from the layout of this thread-thing, but my last comment was actually in response to this remark of Paul's:

"You have free choice, but I'll fry you if you chose something I don't like" limits my ability to chose, I think

To which I retort as above. Or, if you prefer: Your ability to choose is not diminished but the fact that your choices have certain consequences. Let's be rigorous here. (Also, "I'll fry you if you choose something I don't like" is an utter caricature, as I explained to Paul, like, a year ago).

But then Paul said to Rob:

Why do we deserve punishment? If it is because of our wrong choices, my argument applies

What argument is that? Surely not the argument that we don't really have free choices because some choices have horrible consequences - after all, now we're talking about those consequences! You think it's this, I guess:

He did say that choices that every human being makes shouldn't have the consequence of eternal torture

But he didn't say exactly that, either. Not at this point in the discussion. What he said was:

Given how bad Hell is, it'd be better not to have been able to make those choices

which is a stronger claim ((p & ~q is better than p & q) isn't as strong a claim as (~p & ~q is better than p & q)), and is far from obvious, given:
(1) I have no idea what life would be like without free will.
(2) There are choices which lead to catastrophic consequences, but there is another choice which makes everything alright, namely
(3) "Given how bad Hell is" is one thing, but how good Heaven is has so far been left out of this discussion.

Standard Evangelical Position on this, which so far as I can tell is what you're offering here

It is (I hope!). That said, I believe that (so far) this is also the standard Roman Catholic position and the standard Eastern Orthodox position as well - although I am of course open to correction on this point by any RC or EO believers out there.

"Nice soul you've got here. Shame if anything happened to it, eh?"

At the start of this thread, Paul was calling Christianity a parasite. I asked him for a supporting argument, and he declined. Now you're comparing evangelism to unscrupulous insurance sales or something. OK. I'm simply going to ignore this kind of baseless slander as of (three, two, one) now. If you don't think sin is serious, I don't know what I can say that will change your mind. I admit that.

Paul,

Sorry to end up talking about you in the third person on your own blog.

[gjm11.livejournal.com]

Actually, I had correctly identified what comment you were replying to. And, I repeat, "my choices should not have consequences" is not the same as "it is unreasonable for *these* choices to have *those* consequences", especially not when *these* choices are ones everyone makes and *those* consequences include eternal torment. You may repeat the same retort as often as you please, but that won't make it any more reasonable.

I agree that "given how bad hell is, better not to be able to make those choices" is an odd way of putting it; I think Paul has been briefly suckered by the all-too-common Christian move of representing eternal damnation as something God simply has no choice about. Much better than hell-and-no-choices would be choices-and-no-hell, I expect. "How *good* Heaven is" seems to me to strengthen Paul's argument that the choices aren't real choices; the bigger the carrot and stick offered to encourage choice A over choice B, the less meaningful it is to say that you get to choose freely between A and B. (The reality is that the choice between A and B is not clearly offered; those allegedly inseparable consequences are not clearly enough indicated to make those who choose one way or another responsible for those consequences.)

I was comparing (some versions of) Christianity to the mafia, actually, which is somewhat worse than most unscrupulous insurance sales. And it's not a baseless slander; evangelical Christianity really does represent God as offering that sort of choice. It's not *my* fault that your religion has such nasty bits in it :-). I've no idea how you get from there to "you don't think sin is serious"; that really *is* a baseless slander, since I've not suggested in the least that sin isn't serious. We do, perhaps, disagree over just how serious, and over what an omnipotent and perfectly good being might be expected to do about it. As for what you can say that will change my mind: well, you could always try rational argument. But if you prefer to think that because I made an analogy you don't like I'm impervious to reason, go ahead.

[ex-robhu.livejournal.com]

the bigger the carrot and stick offered to encourage choice A over choice B, the less meaningful it is to say that you get to choose freely between A and B
No, I know that isn't right. There was a point in my life where I believed in hell, and a fairly good appreciation of how bad it would be. Yet I decided that I was making a choice to reject God that would (I thought) lead to hell. I had no less free choice then than I have today, or that I have had at any point.

[gjm11.livejournal.com]

I forgot to say something: what I'm comparing to the mafia isn't *evangelism*. The person extorting protection money in my analogy is God, not you.

And, since I claimed my slander isn't baseless, I suppose I'd better justify it. Christianity (in the version that, AFAICT, you espouse) says that sin is soooo serious that it requires those who commit it to burn eternally in hell; not even omnipotence can (without compromising justice) simply set that punishment (or "consequence", as you may prefer to call it, ignoring e.g. Jesus's admonishment to "fear him who can destroy both soul and body in hell") aside; but, on the other hand, that the on-the-face-of-it-irrelevant action of Turning To Christ can entirely, or almost entirely, get rid of that "consequence".

Let's turn that around: sin is so trifling that one can (without compromising justice) entirely escape its consequences provided one sincerely Turns To Christ (despite, e.g., continuing to sin at more or less the same rate as before), and yet God leaves everyone else (insert here the usual, no doubt perfectly sincere, pious platitudes to the effect that of course we don't know the will of God and he may in his infinite grace choose to save more people than we imagine; but heaven forfend that choices not have consequences) to burn.

Which, I submit, is not so very different from your classic protection racket. There's a threat (shame if something happened to that nice soul of yours such as, say, eternal damnation). It's a very big threat. There's nothing remotely resembling a decent justification for it (please feel free to demonstrate that I'm wrong, but I'll take quite some convincing). There's a way out, which curiously has rather little to do with the actual threat (e.g., it doesn't involve, you know, actually not sinning any more). The fact that this way out is available suffices to show that God does, in fact, have a choice in the matter, so you don't get to claim that eternal damnation is just some kind of inevitable "consequence" of sin that God couldn't prevent.

I'm sorry that you don't like the comparison. But, unfortunately, if you hold beliefs that entail that God is a monster then every now and then people are going to be tactless enough to point it out.

[woodpijn.livejournal.com]

What I recall most, however, was a relief as at the resolution of the tension of trying to believe stuff that wasn't true.
That sounds familiar. I remember a huge sense of relief at my deconversion. I felt like I'd been trying to do a jigsaw with pieces that didn't fit together, or trying to hang wallpaper and every time I pressed down a bubble another one came up. Deciding that I simply didn't have to do that any more was an immense relief.

But then I started to find (but maybe you don't find this?) that there were similar jigsaws and wallpaper in atheism. Giving up believing in God didn't mean I was free to not believe anything at all - I had to have some kind of worldview, and that came with holes, tensions and contradictions of its own. I came to the (somewhat irritating) conclusion that intellectual peace, absence of tension, a sense of everything fitting together, were luxuries we're not entitled to have.

A few years ago I read an economics book - Small is Beautiful by E.F. Schumacher. He talks about "convergent" and "divergent" truths. The former are neat and make sense, and the latter are messy and often apparently contradictory, but nonetheless true, and usually apply to the things that really matter in life. (He wasn't talking about religion - just economics and human relationships and stuff.) As a mathmo and a CICCU-ite I had been far more accustomed to dealing with convergent truths, and needed the validity of divergent truths to be explicitly pointed out to me.

(robhu has clearly re-converted to get girls, for example)
Bit of a cheap shot. And I don't think it's true - he says he thinks a relationship at this stage would be unhelpful for him and for the girl, so he's not looking.

[gjm11.livejournal.com]

I think Paul's "cheap shot" was purely a joke.

So far as I can tell (and of course I'm very fallible),
- reality doesn't in fact contradict itself
- outside specially-tamed areas like pure mathematics, our grasp of reality is imperfect and imprecise
- so if we treat it as perfect and precise (e.g., attempting to construct lengthy chains of logical inference, not nailed down anywhere except at one end) then we're going to get wronger and wronger as we extrapolate further and further
- and if we do this in multiple (conceptual) places then where our extrapolations meet they're going to clash (and we may well not be able to figure out how to adjust them to make the extrapolations fit)
- and this is what's going on with "divergent truths"; our best-available approximations to the truth in different domains are all slightly wrong, and when we push them far enough that they meet one another the errors may have grown enough for us to notice
- but none of this means that reality actually contradicts itself, that there are *real* divergent truths (i.e., things that are actually genuinely 100% true but contradict one another).

It seems to me, so far, that atheism (of the hard-nosed materialist variety) requires much less jigsaw-piece-hammering than Christianity (of the moderate evangelical variety; some other varieties work with jigsaw pieces made out of blu-tak, but I think that misses the point a bit), and lets you extend your jigsaw further before getting stuck.

[woodpijn.livejournal.com]

I think I agree with all your bullet-points, but not your last paragraph. I guess "which worldview requires the least jigsaw-hammering" is a very subjective judgement, depending on which apparent contradictions an individual considers most unacceptable.

[gjm11.livejournal.com]

Yes. Also, different people may notice different problems or pseudo-problems, or spot solutions to different ones. Maybe you've spotted an inconsistency in atheism that's never so much as occurred to me. Or maybe we've both spotted it but I've figured out why it isn't really an inconsistency and you haven't. Or, mutatis mutandis, the same for Christianity.

[nameandnature]

If you read the final few paragraphs of this, you'll see that I do say that the only sort of Christianity I could return to would be one which acknowledges that it doesn't have an over-arching Answer. That rules out evangelicalism, as far as I'm concerned, because evangelicals tend to believe they've got the Truth as it was originally given by God. The thread on evangelical tradition over on robhu's journal is an example of the sort of thing I mean (I don't mean to pick on Rob here, that sort of thing is common to all evangelicals).

I don't find the same sort of problems with weak atheism as I do with evangelical Christianity because weak atheism is merely the lack of belief in a god. I'm not required to be a physicalist (which seems to be Rob's problem with atheism in the discussion elsewhere on this posting, although I think he's misunderstood what David Chalmers is saying). What I try to do is base my level of belief in something on the evidence I think there is for it. I'd say I'm a tentative physicalist because of that.

So I don't have a worldview in the same sort of way I did as an evangelical Christian, where it seemed I was required to assign arbitrarily high probabilities (in the Bayesian sense) to some statements of how the world is. What I try to have is a worldview where my confidence in a statement is reflected in how much evidence there is. As far as God goes, the objective evidence that Christians advance seems internally contradictory, and the subjective evidence is no good to me because God hasn't revealed himself to me.

[woodpijn.livejournal.com]

I'm not required to be a physicalist
Ah, OK. For me - and I guess for Rob too - the only plausible alternatives were ever theism and physicalism (I assume that's the same as what I'd call materialism), so for me rejection of one entails acceptance of the other. I wrongly assumed that was the same for you.

[nameandnature]

Really? Chalmers, robhu's philosopher of the moment, thinks panpsychism is at least plausible, for example. AFAICT panpsychism doesn't require theism, but wouldn't be compatible with physicalism (which is apparently a modern term for materialism, preferred as it includes stuff like energy and fields which aren't "material" i.e. made of matter).

So: physicalism seems plausible. Theism could be true in some sense, but, for example, the God robhu is portraying in this entry is presumed to be good, but is actually evil, and so is internally contradictory, so we can dismiss the idea that he exists (We can remove the contradiction if we imagine a God who claims he's good but is actually evil, but the question then is why you guys worship him). Similar objections apply to most gods conceived of by other religions (or at least, those I've looked at).

It's OK to not know stuff. Another thing the doctrine of Hell does is force you into making a decision where there's insufficient evidence (after all, I might get hit by a bus tomorrow, right?). See the Pullman quote, again.

[ex-robhu.livejournal.com]

I don't know what Chalmers is saying now, but back when I studied him at university there was definitely the idea that it was silly to ask if we were conscious because really we aren't, and he was one of the people arguing this position (or at least he seemed to be, philosophers are always a bit vague) may not be unreasonable.

The God I've portrayed is most definitely not evil, and I don't really know why you've stated that as if it's an agreed point when you know full well woodpijn doesn't agree with you. I don't see any internal contradictions. I suppose in response you'll just repost everything that has been said in the thread between myself and gjm11. I think - this whole discussion is going in circles too much to be worth continuing right now (and I've spent far more time on it that I really have at the moment).

While I was a self described weak atheist I don't think you can really get away with 'just' being a weak atheist (or at least I couldn't) given that weak atheism is the position that there is insufficient 'positive evidence' for god but not strong 'negative evidence' that there is no god. Weak atheists AFAICT tend to still adopt a worldview to explain things - in your case (and mine) that is scientific materialism.

It's perfectly reasonable and valid to do what woodpijn is doing which is to say that that world view is just as open to scrutiny as her position as a Christian theist. The New Atheists are fond of criticising theists who at one point make big claims, then when the light of enquiry is shone on them say "well, we don't really believe something like that". Weak atheists AFAICT are guilty of a similar crime.

I don't understand why you think the doctrine of Hell forces you in to making a decision where there is insufficient evidence. Do you mean insufficient evidence for the non Christian or for the Christian? As a Christian I am convinced there is more than ample evidence. For the non Christian it is not required that they know how they are to be punished for their actions to make such a punishment fair. We all know we do wrong, a defence of "but I didn't know I was going to be punished for what I've done wrong!" isn't going to wash.

BTW I'd appreciate it if you didn't say things like "robhu's philosopher of the moment". I know I invoked Chalmers before, but that was me sharing a not well developed thought that is part of a larger system of thoughts and conclusions that I have not had time to crystalise and right down.

[nameandnature]

wrt the "philosopher of the moment" stuff, I was under the impression that reading Chalmers was your main reason for being dissatisfied with physicalism (based on your mention of that dissatisfaction in your conversion most and your comment about Chalmers in this post, which might be a bit tenuous, I admit). So, I was a bit concerned that your conclusions didn't agree with what I've read about Chalmers.

Anyway, I'm not an an expert and it's possible that Chalmers has himself changed his mind at some point. I wonder whether gjm11 knows more about this stuff (as I think he's read far more philosophy than me) and would be able to tell us.

I'm not stating that your God is evil as if it were an agreed point, I'm referring to myself using the majestic plural (or perhaps just using "we" the way it tends to be used in mathematical explanations: "if we do this, we can see that").

There's good reason to think the God you're portraying here is evil. gjm11's chess analogy is a good one: there might be other explanations for the way that God plays, but the moves evangelicals say he makes don't seem to tie up with goodness, quite the reverse in fact. I'm surprised you're finding this difficult to see, because you've made the same points yourself before your re-conversion. From the outside, the decision to believe that God is good no matter how he behaves looks like abdication of your moral faculties, in the way that more than one person has likened to toleration of an abusive partner.

I'm not sure what you mean by "get away with". I can, if I want, say that I haven't got enough evidence to believe in God and then be a humanist, a Buddhist or whatever. A weak atheist who's never really considered God at all (because they've never been taught about God and never seen anything like evidence, a position a lot of younger people in this country might be in today, I suppose) might have all sorts of other superstitions which are incompatible with scientific materialism. I'd say a scientific attitude was actually pretty rare in weak atheists, more's the pity, although you're probably right to say it's more common among those who have considered it seriously.

The New Atheists are fond of criticising theists who at one point make big claims, then when the light of enquiry is shone on them say "well, we don't really believe something like that". Weak atheists AFAICT are guilty of a similar crime.

I don't what sort of thing you're criticising here. Can you give an example?

I don't understand why you think the doctrine of Hell forces you in to making a decision where there is insufficient evidence.

It forces (which is probably too strong a word, let's fall back to the traditional Christian "encourages") the person considering Christianity (which I didn't make clear) into making that decision, because making no decision is equivalent to saying no and risking Hell, so the temptation is to take Pascal's Wager.

The fact that you're convinced there's ample evidence doesn't really help: the main evidence you've shown so far is a personal experience which is not accessible to anyone else, which seems to override any arguments anyone else makes. I think both gjm11 and I have made good arguments that evangelical Christianity is incoherent: most recently, Gareth in the comments here, and me on the evangelical tradition thread in your journal. I don't think your answers hold up, so I don't understand how you can then say that it is reasonable to believe it, as you do on the conversion posting. To me it looks like you've got a feeling God is real and are looking for reasons, whether in the works of Chalmers or elsewhere. But I would say that, of course :-)

[gjm11.livejournal.com]

I'm absolutely not a Chalmers expert -- I think I've read a grand total of about 5 pages of his work. So I have no idea whether he's changed his mind, or how well what Rob's saying matches up with any given opinion of his. (Except that I know Chalmers has said he's an atheist.)

One word of warning for anyone inclined to find out more. Some time back, on the talk page for the Wikipedia article about either Chalmers or one of his pet subjects (I forget which), there was a discussion along the following lines. A: "Y'know, all the stuff about Chalmers's position about P, Q and R is wrong because X, Y and Z." B: "Bollocks it is. I've read his work, and he definitely thinks what the article says." A: "You might like to know that I am in fact David Chalmers." B: "Well, you're wrong anyway." A: "Oh, I give up." (It was verified that A really was Chalmers. There was some further amusement because the way A initially revealed his identity was by quoting that bit in "Annie Hall" about Marshall McLuhan, and B didn't understand. So, anyway, Wikipedia pages about Chalmers may possibly have been edited by people who are confidently wrong about Chalmers.

I'm guessing that what Rob means about weak atheists is: they talk as if there's definitely no god, religion is definitely bunk, etc., but when pushed to justify their position they retreat to "well, of course I don't know for sure" and "atheism is a default position, it doesn't need justifying", and so on. I've not gone trawling for examples, but I'd guess that (1) that happens sometimes and (2) it also happens sometimes that the weak atheist says much more reasonable things and gets misunderstood by the theist, who hasn't fully grasped the difference between "the evidence is strongly against X" and "I have proof that X is wrong", or between "I've never been given any good reason to believe X, which in any case seems unlikely a priori" and "I just randomly choose to act as if X is false without having any evidence".

I don't think what I've said here amounts to an argument that evangelical Christianity is incoherent; I think it's possible to be an evangelical Christian and also an annihilationist (as e.g. John Stott does), and I've almost exclusively been arguing that the traditional idea of hell is monstrous and stupid. It's possible that bits of what I've said could be repurposed to make an argument that some ideas more central to evangelical Christianity (e.g., the way evangelicals are supposed to think about the atonement) are nonsense, but that would be a different argument and one I haven't made here. (Also, one I'm less sure is correct.)

[mattghg (from livejournal.com)]

I take it that atheism is a negative worldview in the sense that it represents a claim or belief about how reality isn't (strong), or at least how it seems not to be for all you can tell (weak). But what's far more interesting are claims about how reality is, and I don't think that anyone can do without one of these in practice. Refusal to offer a positive worldview (like physicalism or whatever) which then in turn has to be defended may be what Rob means by "get away with" - although I'm sure he'll tell us.