Some more thoughts on God and Religion

[catsittingstill]

Some things that occurred to me in the context of my recent discussions with Smallship_One.

First, there are many different Gods.  No, I don't mean Aphrodite and Zeus, rather I mean that "God" covers everything from the vengeful, jealous, wrathful God who sent Katrina to New Orleans because we weren't oppressing women and gays to His satisfaction, to the Thread of Love running throughout the Universe.  In fact, "the God atheists don't believe in, I don't either!" is apparently a common statement from members of some religions.

It just seems to me that calling the Wrathful God and the Thread of Love God by the same name makes about as much sense as storing the eye-drops and the drain cleaner on the same shelf in identical bottles, right down to the label.  I can't understand why anybody would want to do that.

Second, Smallship_One said: "When she talks about "allegiance to the truth" as if factual accuracy were a noble cause and atheism an order of knighthood"

(Blink.)  But, factual accuracy is a noble cause.  How could we build bridges that don't fall down and kill people, create vaccines that work and save lives, fine-tune governments to reduce human misery as much as possible without factual accuracy?  Hopefully factual accuracy about the physical principles of the systems we're working in, but at the very least, factual accuracy about the results of each adjustment we make?

Factual accuracy is the bedrock of every non-art attempt to improve the lives of our fellow humans. 

And it's damned important for the outcome of our art-based attempts, too--how are you going to bake a decent plate of cookies if the supplier of the bag marked "sugar" hasn't been factually accurate about the bag containing sugar, and not salt, or rat poison?  How are you going to get the cookies to come out properly if the oven is 50 degrees hotter than it says on the dial--unless you have the facts about how each batch of cookies came out?

How are you going to discover the truth about anything, including God, if the facts you're trying to work from are not accurate?

Third, I'm not in Smallship_One's head and can't say what is going on. 

However I can mentally model someone who really wants to believe that life has a meaning beyond what we bring to it and the universe is guided by principles beyond the physical ones we can determine though observation and experiment, but can't quite bring himself to believe, given the current absence of evidence, but hopes that convincing evidence, or a convincing argument, will turn up.  When I do this, I come up with someone who lacks God belief, but doesn't accept that God does not exist, doesn't accept that it is not possible to know, cares passionately what the answer is, and tends to perceive people who say things that make religion seem less likely to be true as mean, because they are making him unhappy.

If this is in fact what is going on for any of my readers, all I can say is I'm sorry.  I'm not doing it to make you unhappy, but I realize it makes you unhappy and I do it anyway, so I have to take some responsibility for that.  I think that factual accuracy matters deeply, for the reasons I outlined above and I do my best to pursue it wherever it leads.

But you know what is best for you, and if it is best for you to skip over what I have to say on this subject, I won't be offended.
 

Comments

[lil-shepherd.livejournal.com]

*applause*

[smallship1.livejournal.com]

On your third point, I can agree with almost all of it. Where I disagree is that the things that are said that I perceive as mean (and I differentiate between that and perceiving the people who say them as mean) are not the things that make religion seem less likely to be true. I am not made unhappy by anyone pointing out that there's no physical evidence for God--I know that. I am made unhappy when people talk, for instance, about "the Invisible Man In The Sky," as if that were how *every* Christian sees God (though that's a fairly mild example of what I mean). And I'm made unhappy by that, not because my almost-not-quite-belief is threatened (it isn't), not even because I think anyone else's belief is threatened (it isn't), but in the same way I would be made unhappy by someone inveighing against domestic cats on the basis of what they had seen in a Tom and Jerry cartoon.

But otherwise, thank you. You understand me, and I appreciate that.

[catsittingstill.livejournal.com]

Supposing that this was someone who had other ways to learn about cats besides watching cartoons.

I wish there were a way to transfer "not particularly caring if life has a purpose or not" but I suppose this is as impossible as transferring "not craving pickles." If you crave pickles, you crave pickles, and while it makes me sad for you that you crave something I'm pretty sure doesn't exist, "pulling yourself together and stopping" is not a possible answer. Which is why it's something I'm pretty sure I've never said about religion, to you or anyone else. The only thing I can think of to suggest is to try to distract yourself from your craving--at least until pickles become available--by concentrating on other things you like.

miscellaneous thoughts

[patoadam]

I think that you and smallship1 are looking for different kinds of factual evidence. You are looking for scientific evidence, which may not be useful when we attempt to verify the accuracy of reports of historical events. I don't think we can run a controlled experiment in which we crucify 100 Jesuses and 100 non-Jesuses to see how many in each group resurrect from the dead.

smallship1 seems to be looking for the kind of eyewitness testimony that could be given in a jury trial. A sane, honest person once told me that she had a vision of Jesus. How much weight should I give this account? (She eventually married a Jewish guy and converted.) Is there any reason to believe that some subset of the Bible is historically accurate?

How could we ... fine-tune governments to reduce human misery as much as possible without factual accuracy?

I think that governments, in our country at least, do a poor job of reducing human misery precisely because many politicians do not look carefully at the facts. Public policy is hard. Deregulation of the airline industry was, AFAIK, successful. Deregulation of the lending industry, or of the energy industry in California, wasn't. Why? Probably because of different factual circumstances in the different cases.

Is it possible that one reason we don't look at factual evidence as much as we should is that religion accustoms many of us to not doing so?

My last question may seem combative, but it's not. I am asking not because I expect to disagree with you, but because I expect that either (a) you have thought about it more carefully than I have, or (b) the answer is obvious to you.

In the absence of God, where do ethics come from? If the universe is just "the popular name for milliards and milliards and milliards of atoms playing their infinite game of billiards and billiards and billiards" why does it matter what we do or don't do? After the eventual heat death of the universe, when all life has been extinguished, what we did will no longer matter, so how could it ever have mattered?

I certainly act as if what I do or don't do matters, but I'm not sure I have any reason to justify that belief.

I should note that it seems reasonable to also ask "In the presence of God, where do ethics come from?" Why should we accept the ethical authority of a Being responsible for the Flood and the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah?

Re: miscellaneous thoughts

[catsittingstill.livejournal.com]

I don't think eyewitness testimony is the same as evidence. Note that I was talking about factual accuracy above, which is a different issue. Eyewitness testimony is factually accurate if it matches what actually happened, and not factually accurate if it doesn't and obviously it could go either way. I don't trust "eyewitness testimony" about God because 1) in most cases I can't even evaluate the trustworthiness of the witness for myself and 2) it's wildly inconsistent.

A sane honest person can be mistaken; it happens all the time. And the fact that she converted to Judaism kind of suggests she came to think it happened in her case, or that the distinction between religions didn't matter.

I grant you fine-tuning governments is hard, and yes, I also think that is partly because there is very little encouragement in this country to look at the facts rather than listen to the person who "believes most strongly" i.e. can throw the biggest tantrum. And yes, I think part of the reason people are disinclined to value facts over emotion is the emphasis many religions place on feeling strongly rather than studying the evidence, though I hesitate to say that's the whole story.

I think ethics come from our normal human feelings--which are the result of millions of years of evolution as creatures who had more offspring if our band thrived. Any genetic tendency toward feelings that make us help others in our band, even at some cost to ourselves, and admire members of our band who do the same, would tend to be selected for, and any genetic tendency that toward feelings of tolerating selfish behavior in others would tend to be selected against (which means our fellow band members would tend to select against *us* if we are too selfish.)

So of course we wind up with bone deep, not-reasoned, "gut feelings" about right and wrong ways to behave to members of the band even at cost to ourselves. And, in contrast to what we would reasonably expect if these feelings were instilled by a God who loves everyone equally, people "not of the band" are less likely to provoke those feelings in us, and provoke them to a lesser extent.

Does it matter what we do and don't do? To humans--yes, certainly. To the dust between the stars? It seems profoundly unlikely. I guess I'm one of the lucky people who doesn't need what I do to matter to the Universe. That it matters to the people around me is quite enough for me.

Re: miscellaneous thoughts

[dornbeast.livejournal.com]

"After the eventual heat death of the universe, when all life has been extinguished, what we did will no longer matter, so how could it ever have mattered?"

First, I'm self-centered enough that it matters to me. Fifty years after I die, I fully expect that nobody will remember me. I don't expect to leave any works of art, great discoveries, or anything else, and given certain aspects of my personality, I don't put high probabilities on having children. But for that tiny fragment of time when all that exists of me is a memory, I don't want to be remembered as "that selfish unprintable who stabbed me in the back."

Second, it matters because it affects how people act. Perhaps it's like trying to cross the ocean by throwing pebbles in until I have a bridge, but one ethical act at a time, I believe I can influence the world to being more ethical. (And I'm not alone in throwing pebbles, even if the reason people are throwing pebbles differs from person to person.)

[thnidu.livejournal.com]

1. Very good post. I have nothing to add or comment on substantively.

2. "Particles". "Atoms" doesn't scan right. (Here inter multa loca (http://thnidu.livejournal.com/730019.html).

[catsittingstill.livejournal.com]

Calvin and his snow people.

That boy has a very strange sense of humor but I have to say that when he's inspired, he can work very hard indeed.

[patoadam]

Thanks for the correction. "A good memory does not equal pale ink."

[autopope.livejournal.com]

Ahem: you missed a meta-level: there are many different frameworks by which human beings [imagine they] apprehend the divine.

The classical Greek model of what gods are and how they work, for example, is radically different from the Jewish model, or the Christian model (which is not the same as the Jewish one; Jews have a strong allergic reaction to Jesus because the proposition that God is human enough to have a child is nonsensical within their framework).

(My frame is that the human propensity to apprehend the divine is a cognitive malfunction that has been selected for via evolution, because it's a side-effect of Theory of Mind, without which it's rather hard to have things like language or empathy. your mileage may vary.)

[catsittingstill.livejournal.com]

I'm not quite sure how this relates to my post, but my best guess is you are responding to the first part about different "God"s.

I'm perfectly willing to concede that part of these differences could be due to different frameworks by which humans consider the divine (and actually it's rather interesting to consider the models of what gods are and how they work), but my point stands: toxic (God wants us to oppress women and gays) and non-toxic (Something Out There Loves Us) ideas are being presented under exactly the same label. I don't think it's good for us as a society because I think it makes it very difficult to discuss the concept God at all without stepping on each others toes. I also think it convinces theists that they're part of a large majority when in fact people who worship the same "God" they do may not be all that thick on the ground.

the proposition that God is human enough to have a child is nonsensical within their framework

I have to admit it seems pretty strange to me too. "He runs around making babies with human women" is something that seems to make more sense when said about Zeus than when said about God. (And "he runs around making himself with human women" doesn't parse at all.) But maybe that's because a lot of the (male) Greek Gods got up to such shenanigans.

I think I use the same frame as you, for what it's worth. I think belief in God arises from 1) a tendency to observe non-existent patterns in random "noise" and then to remember further observations that confirm those patterns and forget further observations that disconfirm them 2) a theory of mind that makes many good things possible but trips us up if no mind is present and 3) a tendency to postulate intent based on past perceived patterns, whether real or not, 4) a tendency, when young, to believe uncritically what we are told by adults who care for us that mean these mistakes will be summed up and passed on.

[tourist-city.livejournal.com]

As one Jewish human out of lots of others, I want to pipe up to say his word "nonsensical" sounds absurd to me. I hang with right wing and left wing Jews both and I've never heard anybody analyze the sense and sensibility of Jesus' divinity, ever. Instead I'd say that if I do have any strong allergic reaction to Jesus' divinity it isn't based on his blessed birth but rather two thousand years of roasting and toasting my ancestors.

[catsittingstill.livejournal.com]

Okay, fair enough.

Come to think of it, the pogroms against the Jews are another thing that should pop immediately to mind when someone promotes religion as a source of morality. I will try to remember that.

[randwolf.livejournal.com]

The observation that people believe in multiple versions of the Christian god and call them all by the same name is a result of a study by sociologists Froese and Bader of Baylor University. See: http://www.usatoday.com/news/religion/2006-09-11-religion-survey_x.htm for some of their conclusions. There's lots more: they've published scholarly papers and even written a book on the matter.

[catsittingstill.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the link.

It's an interesting survey

[randwolf.livejournal.com]

Perhaps when the god of love was talking to people who believed in the god of wrath he found it best not to argue the point.

[catsittingstill.livejournal.com]

:-7