nameandnature | (no subject)

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.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

gjm11.livejournal.com

Yes, I agree that the salvation-and-damnation story is less arbitrary and protectionrackety if you switch from the standard evangelical version of the story to one that involves being actually made better. I think the fact (and it does seem to be one, though I'm not sure anyone's really done a proper study) that in this life -- which after all is the only one we can actually observe -- Christians don't seem to be markedly nicer, more generous, more honest, etc., etc., than non-Christians, does make it a lot less plausible.

Christians seem to be awfully willing to postulate necessary truths for which there's no evidence other than "if this were true it would make it easier to believe what Christianity says" :-). I don't find it at all plausible that sentient creatures get limitlessly better or worse over time, which seems like it's what you need to get your proposal to work.

Neither does it appear to be the case that when they die Christians are all heavenly creatures who could and should be admitted straight to heaven while non-Christians are all hellish creatures for whom it's clear that nothing other than eternal torment is appropriate. But if that isn't true, I don't see how your justification for hell is supposed to work. Let's suppose for the sake of argument that Paul is one of those non-Christians who are way better than you (note: I have absolutely no reason to believe either that he is or that he isn't, other than a vague guess that in fact you're probably about as good as one another), and that you both get killed in a freak accident tomorrow. It seems to me that either (1) nothing happens at that point to change your relative merits, in which case your attempt to justify hell fails, or (2) something does happen which dramatically changes those relative merits, so dramatically that you become a Heavenly Creature and Paul becomes a Hellish Creature, in which case I think you're missing an account of why that happens and why it's either fair or inevitable that it does so.

Yes, I agree that the "encounter with God is either blissful or unbearable" approach has more promise. But, again, it really doesn't seem terribly plausible that Christians when they die are all such that encounter with God would be blissful, nor that non-Christians when they die are all the reverse; and the question remains of why God wouldn't do anything for those non-Christians (like, say, actually letting them know he really exists) before zapping them with the consuming fire of his presence.

The key points here: (1) if it's really inevitable that Not Being A Christian leads to hell -- whether directly, or indirectly by e.g. not having that opportunity to be gradually transformed into a heavenly being, as you are and I'm not -- then it seems odd that the god who supposedly loves us all enough to die for us wouldn't take the elementary steps that would enable far more of us to *know* (as opposed to "be told, not very credibly") about the problem and its solution. And (2) the arguments that it might be inevitable all seem to require postulating (what seem to me to be) tremendously improbable and inexplicable and unevidenced necessary truths, such as to constrain even omnipotence (or whatever approximation to omnipotence God has), which makes them difficult to believe.

From:

woodpijn.livejournal.com

if you switch from the standard evangelical version of the story to one that involves being actually made better.
I think that's implying a false dichotomy - I don't think most evangelicals would dispute the account I gave. It's just differing emphases. They don't put it in tracts, but that's because tracts are necessarily brief introductions aimed at people unfamiliar with the message.

Christians seem to be awfully willing to postulate necessary truths for which there's no evidence other than "if this were true it would make it easier to believe what Christianity says" :-).
It was admittedly speculative - I said "it's possible" and "I don't know". Sorry if it was sloppy of me to do it even with those caveats. Is it a general trend? Where else have you noticed it?

or (2) something does happen which dramatically changes those relative merits, so dramatically that you become a Heavenly Creature and Paul becomes a Hellish Creature, in which case I think you're missing an account of why that happens and why it's either fair or inevitable that it does so.
So - this is also speculation - but it could be that when we die we end up outside time, as God is sometimes thought to be - or at least somewhere where "a thousand years is as a day". That would have two consequences: 1) the upward or downward trajectory could be continued to its conclusion instantly, even if it would have taken millennia of our time; and 2) it may be that the direction can no longer be changed, because there's no longer time to change it.
Or, it could be that after death (with or without time-contraction) God perfects people, but can only do so in those who are willing to let him, i.e. those already positively disposed towards him, because he still will not override anyone's will.

it really doesn't seem terribly plausible that Christians when they die are all such that encounter with God would be blissful, nor that non-Christians when they die are all the reverse
I think it's certainly plausible, although I can't argue that it's certain. I think some souls are fundamentally aligned in the right direction, and the mistakes they make don't change that, and others aligned in the wrong direction, and the things they get right by luck or their own strength don't change that. King David is a good example of the former - he did some terrible things, but I'm sure that when he met God he was delighted. (There's some stuff at the end of Screwtape, and also elsewhere in Lewis, about how there is pain even for the saved when they meet God, but it's a welcome kind of pain, like removing a scab or a diseased tooth. I imagine that pain is proportional to sins committed on earth. But perhaps the unsaved are those who don't welcome it, who want to keep their scabs and diseased teeth.)

it seems odd that the god who supposedly loves us all enough to die for us wouldn't take the elementary steps that would enable far more of us to *know* (as opposed to "be told, not very credibly") about the problem and its solution.
*sigh* Yes. I admit I struggle with that. I think if I had one question to ask God it would be something like "Why don't you make yourself more visible to people? Especially my non-Christian friends?"

I don't know the answer. There are proposed answers, and I expect you know them. Ironically, one of them is roughly what you've been saying on the other branch of the thread: that if we knew with absolute certainty we'd be guaranteed to choose right and then it wouldn't be a free choice.

Something which I think is true - although I find it difficult to believe when I'm having doubts, and you may find it difficult to believe too - is that it is fundamentally our disobedience rather than our incomplete knowledge that prevents us coming to God. The evidence for this is various people in the Old Testament, who had much better evidence that God existed and still disobeyed him. Adam and Eve walked with him in the garden; the Israelites in the desert saw the Red Sea part and the pillars of cloud and fire, and then made their golden calf. I kid myself that my doubts and sins are due to incomplete knowledge, and would disappear if God revealed himself; but in reality I'd probably have been helping build that calf.

From:

gjm11.livejournal.com

Yes, I think it's a general trend. You can see it all over this discussion. You can also find it, e.g., in discussions of the problem of evil. (For instance, one of Plantinga's famous papers proposes that maybe it's a necessary truth that every possible created sentient being with free will does evil in all possible worlds. He calls it the "principle of trans-world depravity", I think. I remark that the existence of such a principle would make it *even more* unjust to inflict eternal torment on anyone as a punishment for doing something it was *metaphysically necessary* that they would do, but that's a separate issue and no one is under any obligation to believe Plantiga's silly principle.)

It doesn't seem obvious (or even plausible) to me that every Christian's moral trajectory at the moment of death is upward, or that every non-Christian's is downward.

Thank you for the suggestion that I have a fundamentally evil soul. (It's no worse than the suggestion, implicit in every defence of eternal torment, that all things considered it would probably be best for me to suffer torture for all eternity. Which is, I think, a more abominable thing for anyone to say about anyone else than the worst insults spouted by racist bigots and the like. One of the things I dislike about Christianity is that it encourages basically decent people to say such things and consider themselves to be acting reasonably in doing so.)

It's nice (note: I'm not being sarcastic here) that you "struggle" with the idea that perfect goodness and mercy and justice require that people like me suffer eternal torment and not be given a credible way out even though supposedly there is one. I'm afraid it seems to me that something more than struggling is really called for, though. It's a bit like saying "I struggle with the knowledge that my employer is building torture chambers and encouraging governments to buy them" but not actually making the step from there to "er, that's just *wrong* and I should blow the whistle".

The fact that the Old Testament *says* that various people had really good evidence but still disobeyed is not, in fact, good evidence, at least not for those of us not already committed on other grounds to believing everything in the Old Testament. I also remark that the OT doesn't say that Adam and Eve and those naughty Israelites decided that God didn't exist at all.

From:

woodpijn.livejournal.com

I'm genuinely sorry if I've offended you.

Is it still bigotry if it's said about everyone indiscriminately? I don't think you have an evil soul any more than I have, and I don't think you deserve hell any more than I do. I may have been unclear with the stuff about souls' alignment, but what I meant was something like this:

All souls are partly good and partly evil. But, by default (since the fall), they are aligned the wrong way: inwardly, towards themselves; they look to themselves for ultimate authority and rely on themselves. However, some have made the decision to align towards God: to look to him for authority and to rely on him (however imperfectly they carry this out). God is able to work in this second group of souls, transforming them and bringing about genuine moral improvement, both before and after death (I think), and eventually making them fit for heaven. But he cannot do so in the first group of souls without overriding their wills, which he's committed to not doing.

(I think some Christians, myself included, are guilty of talking too glibly about hell. I don't know if I've said this yet or not, but I find annihilationism quite plausible; so when I say hell I'm thinking of a kind of superposition of states that's about 2/3 annihilation and 1/3 torment. But even then I ought to be much more careful what I say about it.)

I also remark that the OT doesn't say that Adam and Eve and those naughty Israelites decided that God didn't exist at all.
Yes, exactly; that's what I mean. They had such visible demonstrations of his presence that they couldn't possibly doubt his existence - and still they disobeyed. This implies that people are inclined to disobey God even if they have irrefutable evidence of his existence; and therefore, in our case who do not have irrefutable evidence, that lack of evidence is not the only thing preventing us doing God's will; even if we had irrefutable evidence we would continue to disobey.
I'm trying to argue that if someone met God after death and said "It's not my fault; if only you'd given me more evidence of your existence, I'd have followed you" they may be mistaken.

at least not for those of us not already committed on other grounds to believing everything in the Old Testament.
You don't have to believe it very much; I think you just have to believe that the people described in it were convinced of the existence of their God, which I think is a reasonable conclusion for an atheist to draw from the text as a historical document.

From:

gjm11.livejournal.com

No, I'm actually very hard to offend. But I do think it's worth pointing out, at least every now and then, just what it is that's involved in belief in hell (in the Eternal Torment sense). It's very nasty indeed, and one of the things I dislike about Christianity is that it encourages otherwise decent and nice people to think and say things that they would be horrified by if it weren't made to seem normal by being part of Christianity.

I don't think it *is* bigotry. I just think it's the same *kind* of thing as bigots say, only much worse.

I am (grimly) amused by the idea that God cares so much for my autonomy and welfare that he won't override my free will even a little bit, but that he doesn't have any comparable objection to my suffering eternal torment. My own priorities aren't quite the same, and I hereby give notice that if I have to choose between eternal torment and having my free will overridden in a way that brings my beliefs, attitudes and actions closer in line with the truth, then I choose the latter.

I regret that I am not impressed by an attempt to justify burning me in hell by telling me that (1) if God's reality were revealed to me then I would still deny him, which you know because (2) you have an old book that says that some entirely different people once did that. Sorry. :-)

(It's possible that if God's existence, and nothing else, were conclusively demonstrated to me then I might decide that the evidence then favours the belief that God is real but evil or indifferent. So I don't guarantee that I *would* follow him as soon as I was convinced of his reality. It would probably depend on exactly what I was being convinced of.)

What you have to believe for the argument-from-the-OT to work is that the events described there really did take place, and that the people involved really had as much evidence of God's reality and care for them as would be provided by the events described in Exodus. I don't see any reason why anyone not committed to treating the text as scripture should believe those things.

From:

woodpijn.livejournal.com

I hereby give notice that if I have to choose between eternal torment and having my free will overridden in a way that brings my beliefs, attitudes and actions closer in line with the truth, then I choose the latter.

Go on then ;P

From:

gjm11.livejournal.com

I am not, as yet, persuaded that I do have to make any such choice, nor that doing as you suggest would bring my beliefs, attitudes or actions closer to the truth.

But you knew that :-).