(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

[gjm11.livejournal.com]

Yes, I'm wary of obvious things too. But if something you believe is contradicted by Very Obvious Things, then I think that's evidence against it; and if your defence is to say "well, the understandings that lead you to think that's obvious aren't reliable" but you don't have some specific account of why *that* evaluation of obviousness is more unreliable than other similar ones, then you've landed yourself with (in this case) a very far-reaching skepticism about our ability to tell what's right and what's wrong; and I've explained my reasons for thinking that such skepticism badly undermines Christianity, or any other revealed religion for that matter.

Of course I don't think you're a utilitarian. But, as I said, one of the things that makes me trust this particular bit of "common sense" is that a variety of different ethical systems seem to me to lead to the same conclusion. Also, it's widely (not universally) agreed by non-utilitarians that utilitarianism is at least often a good approximation to the truth.

Perhaps what you "reasonably expect" doesn't include "not being tortured for eternity". Expectations differ. But tell me, what would you think of someone who claimed to be obeying Jesus's instruction to "turn the other cheek" if when someone slapped him in the face he smiled sweetly, offered the other cheek ... and then, a few days later, burned his assailant's house down?

I am not, of course, removing your responsibility. (Go on, check it's still there. See?) I have said at least twice now, I think, that I am *not* claiming that "everyone else did it too so it's not my fault". In fact, I see that I made that clear in the very comment you're replying to. If you must argue with straw men, could you at least make them ones I haven't already explicitly said aren't my position?

If there were a town where everyone without exception stole, then actually I *wouldn't* conclude that everyone in the town should be punished. I would conclude that probably there's something in the water or the culture that somehow stops the people understanding what's wrong with stealing, or makes them unable to resist the temptation; I would regard punishing them as an exercise in futility; but I would try to figure out what was broken so as to make the town stop being a place where everyone steals.

And of course that's different from our actual situation, since in your hypothetical example I'd know (since it's not true that everyone everywhere steals) that the problem, whatever it was, wasn't so deeply ingrained as to be Part Of Human Nature; but here in the real world, we aren't in a position to draw any such conclusion.