Interesting Links for 31-1-2011

[andrewducker]

• God Is In The TV interview the ever fabulous Hannah Werdmuller
  (tags: HannahWerdmuller music interview)
• 750,000 more people 'to pay higher rate of tax' (and 500,000 to stop paying income tax at all)
  (tags: tax uk)
• MAXO signals - a solution to the Fermi Paradox by Charlie Stross
  (tags: charlesstross writing scifi)
• Battlestar Choclactica. This is why the Cylons were chasing it. They were desperate for chocolate.
  (tags: battlestar bsg chocolate)
• Note: If you are impressed by a female science blogger do not convey this by telling her her tits are gorgeous...
  (tags: gender science sexism blogging feminism)
• This Is Your Artistic Brain on Drugs
  (tags: art drugs)
• Why one wife now chooses to shop alone
  (tags: shopping funny)
• Tiny Adorable Animals That Will Make You Squee
  (tags: cute animals)
• Myths RETOLD: A VERITABLE SMORGASBORD OF MYTHOLOGY!!!!!!!!!!!!!! AND AWESOME!
  (tags: mythology funny)
• Juden raus (Jews Out!) a boardgame from 1930s Germany.
  (tags: germany boardgames Jews)
• Ignosticism. I keep encountering this, and then forgetting about it. Which is a shame, as it's a very useful position.
  (tags: ignosticism religion knowledge)
• Ayn Rand Received Social Security, Medicare
  (tags: aynrand objectivism politics funny)

Comments

[jack]

But that's what I said (?) Analogy: Do telepathy, unicorns or free will exist? I think most people would agree on what constituted telepathy (not in all the details, but in a few essential ones), most people would be completely unable to give a coherent account of what constitutes free will, and people would disagree about what constitutes a unicorn (does it have to be magical? equine? natural?).

So we can say telepathy almost certainly doesn't exist (or at any rate, we've looked for it and not found it), it's meaningless to ask whether free will exists, because the question is essentially solely decided by how people choose to interpret it, and it may be meaningful to ask whether unicorns exist but only if you clarify what you mean.

Which of these is the concept of "God" most like?

I agree many people might want to do things like keep a belief that "God wants me to be nice to people" while de-emphasising questions like "does God literally exist as an all-powerful extra-planar being who created the universe", which I whole-heartedly support and I assume Rabbi Wine was embracing a more sophisticated version of (?) This seems like the "free will" end of the continuum "we agree these questions are important, but we think 'does God exist' is not a meaningful question".

But adopting ignosticism as a position seems to very very very strongly imply not just that if concepts of God are inherently ill-defined, then there is no sensible answer to whether God exists, but that most people's concepts of God are typically undefinable.

That was probably very true for Rabbi Wine, and for many of my friends who are Jewish or ex-CoE-deist or ex-CoE-atheist-but-don't-want-to-be or similar, who believe in something but aren't sure what or think that what they believed in their religion was right, but more metaphorical than literal.

But also, I think many, many people believe in a literal all-powerful being who sustains the universe, answers prayer, presides over heaven, etc, etc. and even if we can't agree on all the details of what constitutes their notion of God, we can agree that it involves most of a small set of big ones and while there are some beings that might fit the definition sort of, there are many which do fit the definition, and if existed, would plainly be God. And that it is in fact important whether those people are right or not!

I guess you might well say, it's better to shift from a theist position to an ignosticist one than an atheist one (for many people I believe that to be true), but I think this is something which requires a stronger justification than assuming that definitions of God (a) are incoherent but (b) contain vital stuff you can't just throw out.

Does that make any sense?

[andrewducker]

It's a question of whether those positions that people hold that they believe are coherent actually are. Personally, I've found that a lot of Christian beliefs (and I'm picking them because they're the religion I'm most familiar with, not because they're less coherent than anyone else) pretty incoherent. But that may be because the idea of infinite anything is pretty odd, let alone trying to reconcile free will, omnipotence, omniscience and sin into one package seems utterly impossible to me. Especially when I consider free will to be an incoherent idea in the first place.

[jack]

Ah, I see, that's an interesting perspective. I'm happy to consider Christianity. I know what you mean; I've friends who are very intellectually religious, but I'm very familiar with people having a grab-bag approach[1]. Although the contents of the belief are very different, I'd compare it to someone who believes in new-age medicine or in conspiracy theories: they've a grab bag of different associated beliefs, some good, some bad, and have the impression they all join up, but haven't critically examined many of them, and aren't sure which ones they're firm on. (And I'm sure I hold similar messes of belief about stuff I don't know much about, although I hope I don't hold to them dogmatically)

But even then, some sets of belief are truly empty, and some have something in even if it isn't clear. If you talk to someone who believes in new age medicine and say "the standard interpretation of homeopathy doesn't work because xxxx, yyyy and zzzz[2]" they may say "oh, huh, um, obviously that's nonsense, but um, maybe MOST new age medicine works for, um, some other reason"

Which is incredibly frustrating, and why James Randi goes to such incredible lengths to pin down people who claim to do something supernatural to something very specific (and even then most people try to wriggle out of it afterwards).

But also, I think that many people in that situation don't believe nothing: they've got a grab-bag of random assumptions that they think this treatment works, or this conventional treatment doesn't, that aren't very firmly held and are prone to shift around. But I think they have some underlying beliefs that are not VERY precise, but are somewhat clear, like "medicine is complicated and doctors don't know as much as they think they do" and "there's a lot of stuff out there we dont' know abnout waiting to be found" and so on, even if they don't articulate them, and they may if they're willing to sincerely think about it, eventually reject those beliefs.

And I think the same applies to many people with vague religious belief: some of them maybe do believe in God only as a metaphor (or as something else I'm not competent to explain) but others clearly believe _something_ specific exists, even if they're not capable of explaining what...

[1] When I was a young undergraduate, and hadn't heard of the Euthyphro Dilemma, I used to ask people who wanted to offer me religion "did God create morality, or is subject to morality", and I'd be happy with answers like "created" or "subject" or "we don't know, but following God seems to work out ok for us so far" (although I might follow up on the answers), it wasn't that I thought the question was unanswerable, it was that the answer I always got was "uh.... I don't know" which hardly filled me with glee that the person I was talking to was a good representative of a coherent position...

[andrewducker]

There was a friend of mine (and I'm buggered if I can remember who) who went home during University having abandoned religion. And their mother arranged for the local religious representative to talk to them (I think CofE, but don't quote me). And the representative sat down with some tea and biscuits to discuss it in a paternalistic "Don't you _really_ want to do what God wants?" manner. At which point my friend asked something really obvious (like "How do you reconcile omnipotence and evil?" or "How do omniscience and free will go together?" at which point the representative said "Um, er." and fled like a startled rabbit.

Which always stuns me. Because I find it baffling that people who spend their entire lives centred around an idea haven't at least thought about it somewhat.
===

Also, yes, I totally agree that there's a continuum. There are people who have no coherent beliefs at all, just a grab bag of whatever sounded nice when they were in the idea shop. And there are people who have solid beliefs that they think tie together into a coherent whole. And while I also find the ideas of the latter group incoherent, it's not nearly so incoherent as the first lot.

[jack]

Yeah, the description of your friend is really evocative. Perhaps once-a-year CoE Christians (even members of the church) are a good example of believing something, but the core of that something not _necessarily_ involving a literal God.

Which I don't want to push too loudly because it's somewhat prejudicial to people who don't want CoE to become associated with "non-serious" belief. But also, it is a place (like many religious have) where people often get involved with church events, and socialise with the congregation, and look to them for spiritual support, yet maybe get less actually religious.

And many people either stay and don't mention it, or drift away, possibly coming to identify as atheist or agnostic. (I'm sure there are hits for "atheist bishop", though I haven't tried it :))

But from that perspective, an approach of not picking at the definition of God may actually be a very useful one.

[andrewducker]

Yup, I'm sure there are plenty of people out there who get something out of the social elements and don't want to mention that they don't believe in case they have to stop spending time with their friends.