Comment by drivebyacct2 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by drivebyacct2 | Hacker News Reader

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I've never once see an Atheist imply that Phelps and Lewis should be judged equally, just as I've never even conceived of someone dismissing someone's accomplishments purely because of their faith. Likewise, I'd like to thank you for reinforcing the notion that Atheists are angry. As one who feels persecuted, I often do feel angry about it. But to assume that I'm not versed in religious, theological, or philosophical texts is irritating. Have you ever actually engaged these people you refer to, to explore if they have this depth of knowledge you seem to require them to have to have an opinion?

Are you equally scathing of the millions that vote to keep me from having rights because their preacher on Sunday that they blindly listen to, tell them I'm a filthy sinner? Ignorance is not unique to any side, and well-versed-ness is not a requirement for having an opinion. And from where I'm sitting, Robertson, Lewis, Falwell, Phelps, the Greeks, the Romans, they all make the same fundamental mistakes in logic as far as I'm concerned. Of course, I'm not going to get riled up about it unless the live half way across town and I have to see them with their signs on my drive to work twice a week.

For what it's worth, I don't even find Dawkins to be that terribly reductive. Much of his talks and writings revolve around very real, palpable, tangible and timely issues. He addresses them at high levels and reduces them and disassembles them. Also, I don't understand your first sentence at all, it seems like just another attempt to lump and dismiss atheists.

It's all anecdotal, no doubt, but the Atheists I know are FAR, FAR better versed in the Bible than the typical Christians that we come across who want to shout at us, insult us, call us names or inform us of the tortures we'll endure after we perish. Similarly, I'm shocked at the droves of people on my campus that haven't been to church in years, haven't read the Bible, are generally not good people, and can't even enumerate reasons why they cling to their faith, but happily rush out to vote for anti-gay Republicans. We can talk about the sad state of theological discussion in our society, but I see a far less intellectual "default" position in place.

From reading a couple of replies now, I'm thinking that I didn't express myself well. I respect atheists, especially ones that have taken the time to think about the world and their place in it and the nature of truth. Most atheists are engaged with the big questions and that's more than I can say for most. I probably have more in common with the average atheist, in terms of our desire to engage big questions and draw conclusions, than most of my Christian friends on that count.

I also realize in my post that I haven't adequately taken into account how persecuted most atheists probably feel. It's a problem of perception on both sides -- both feel attacked and misunderstood. But I can definitely see how an atheist in America might feel marginalized.

I respect the atheist if nothing else for the simple fact that they have the integrity to hold to a conviction, the intellectual curiosity to engage the biggest questions and then the courage to stand with that conviction in a society that doesn't tend to hold with such opinions. With such atheists I can have long discussions and good beer. Beer seems to be a recurring theme with me here...

I guess I'm curious for more clarification on your post then. I guess I don't get the point. I feel like it would be summarized, "Lots of people like to loudly be ignorant about their beliefs". I don't disagree with that, but I don't find it uniquely or even tilted towards atheism.

Further, I still don't understand the reductive criticism on Dawkins. Again, I find much of his positioning to be directly related or relatable to very palpable issues. Even in his books, he uses real life modern and historical examples and addresses their basis in logic and their societal effects before breaking it down and discussing it in what I might call a reductive fashion.

If anything, I feel like you're looking for a philosophical discussion that Dawkins, and I would suspect many Atheists, are flatly uninterested in.

(I find myself a little surprised to see such a discussion surrounding Santa Claus. I won't purport to know how the cited individuals would reply to such a simplistic response, but I've yet to have it sufficiently answered and though it may spark a larger discussion, it's simplistic nature is a way for me to express how little initial\fundamental stock I put in the existence of either.)

In closing, yes, beer and a good theological discussion sounds nice. Most of the people who were willing to sit down with me simply refer me to a higher authority now though (they tell me that they can't answer my questions and to go ask a Preist or a Preacher, I've already been Catholic once though :P).

To me Richard Dawkins is a bit like Carl Von Clausewitz or Nietzsche. In a sense they all see their respective fields with an astonishing clarity and try to lay it all out in the open. But due to the sheer size and complexity of their work, few in their audience posses necessary sophistication to understand it completely.

Thus Dawkins spawned a legion of believers that got everything mixed up and who by applying their teaching literally, become more dogmatic than their target.

I'm glad Dawkins can play that role for you. But for me the chasm between Dawkins and Nietzsche is...vast.

A clarification then (the reply tree seems to halt, so I'm posting this higher up):

I run into a lot of atheists these days who've read Dawkins, Dennett, Sam Harris, maybe even Stephen Pinker, heck maybe even the whole John Brockman crew of "Brights" and so forth. And that's all, and I don't understand that. I'm no exemplar of intellectual integrity, but I'm just too curious to not read contrary points of view. I thought that was the point. When I first started questioning my own faith, I went after the best atheists I could find to read, which at the time were guys like Antony Flew, Quentin Smith Kai Nielson, Peter Singer. Then later some pretty deep reading of Russell and Ayer. On the existential side Sartre, Camus and finally the greatness of Nietzsche.

I don't find that same aggressive curiosity and charitable engagement with this generation of atheists that have latched onto the Four Horsemen, and honestly I don't find the Four Horsemen all that compelling, even at a distance. Dennett of course is the deepest intellectual of the bunch but I don't find much new there. Consciousness Explained just really, really wasn't, sorry. But that's ok -- we can debate that, I would just like to see some curious, adventurous young atheists who can read both Dawkins and someone like, say, Christopher Dawson or T.S. Eliot -- not just for the sake of debate and argument but for the understanding of the soul of a worldview that deserves at least respect and not derision.

Likely the same thing you're asking from me...

A good argument is enough. I'm a mathematician and I have not read any of the original papers of Euler, Gauss, etc. but understand and accept their results fully. To me, philosophical and theological reasoning are not fundamental as they may be to you, because I have accepted they are an outcome of a particular brain architecture with its own tendencies and biases, itself an outcome of a more general process. This argument is convincing to me because it seems a natural progression to our realizations that humanity is not fundamental (which, coming from antiquity, is counterintuitive), and a natural extension of the shift from a geocentric to a heliocentric point of view. Understanding our reasoning capacities as the outcome of a natural physical process leads to my agreement with Dawkins's claim that any philosophical result prior to 1859 can be disregarded.

We have a limited amount of time. I was a faithful, practicing Catholic who scoffed at atheist ideas because I didn't understand them. I remember the precise position I sat while reading the God Delusion when my brain was shocked into realizing "Wait a second, I'm agreeing with this." I took a few more months to verify the ideas were sensible, and what I got was much more; a worldview with more coherence and explanatory power than anything I'd yet seen. So for me, I don't spend my time on reading further theological / atheist philosophy for the same reason I am not proofchecking Deligne's demonstration of the Weil conjectures, even though I accept and use his result.

> A good argument is enough. I'm a mathematician and I have not read any of the original papers of Euler, Gauss, etc. but understand and accept their results fully.

Here what would answer one of my friends. He happen believe atheism is true, but more importantly, he's a literary person. So:

"To understand [such and such author]'s ideas and concepts, you have to impregnate yourself with their original thoughts. That is, you must read their original works. Secondary sources just won't do."

I tried to reply that I didn't need to read Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica to understand Newtonian physics, but he seems to think that philosophy is different. (But then, where to that "Philosophiæ" comes from? Oh yeah, he meant literary philosophy, of the kind that somehow cannot be true nor false.)

I think the root of the problem is something akin to dualism. Many people (including some atheists) postulate that between the laws of physics and the human soul, there is something that is not only unexplained (true), but actually unexplainable. In other words, "Poof Magic", though they won't ever use that ridiculous wording. So, below the "Poof Magic" threshold, we have the lowly matters that you can indeed explain. Above it, the very notion of truth is muddled.

As you may guess, "science" is placed below the threshold, and "philosophy" is placed above. The first is about facts we can check, about theories that can be improved or disproved. The second is more about schools of thought, which are neither right nor wrong, neither true nor false, they just "are" (this way, no one can claim his own school of thought is better than any other).

Another key difference between "science" and "philosophy" is the treatment of secondary sources. They can be wonderful for "science", but they are worthless for "philosophy". To understand a philosopher's ideas, you must "impregnate yourself with his thoughts", that is, read his original works. And of course you are not allowed to judge the veracity of those works.

Now here is the killer argument: theology is to be placed above the "Poof Magic" threshold. Therefore, (i) you have to read them all before you claim anything about them, and (ii) you cannot say they were false anyway, it's just a school of though, that is "by definition" no worse nor better than any other.

I have never defeated the killer argument. I need to get rid of the "Poof Magic" nonsense first, and the burden of proof is always on my shoulders. Even If I manage shake it, the real reason why people make the killer argument is because its comfortable. They can never be wrong with it, and it avoids arguments.

But, you know, if we disagree, at least one of us must be mistaken, right? Wouldn't it be interesting to know who?

Oh, no doubt. I have long ago realized that from a psychological point of view, it is purely axiomatic whether to "have faith" or not, and is primarily a factor of one's upbringing. Unlike formal systems, the brain has no need for internal logical consistency. (And it could be argued that many religious systems are internally consistent given you accept their axioms; in which case there is absolutely no hope of resolving the argument without appealing to Bayesian inference and noting that my choice of axioms is a better fit for the evidence, but this is a very subtle point to grasp. For example, read the story of Luke Muehlhauser, who read mountains of philosophy and theology and in the end was only convinced by the dissonance in historical evidence for Jesus, an implicitly Bayesian argument: http://commonsenseatheism.com/?page_id=3)

Another nice argument is by Occam's razor, that the scientific choice of axioms has less complexity and is devoid of localization, whereas systems like Catholicism have strong focus on arbitrary notions like Jerusalem or sacristy. These arbitrary notions are explained on-the-nose by evolutionary thinking (our ancestors made up stories because of their psychology), whereas they are inexplicable in Catholic thinking. (Why did Jesus choose to come alive when did? He just picked a time and place at random.) Of course, Occam's razor is only an aesthetic choice that agrees with evidence, again a Bayesian argument. It's difficult to base one's life philosophy on an aesthetic choice, so naturally a religious upbringing overwhelms.

EDIT: I should point out that the Bayesian argument is locally uncontrollable. My mother claims to have had a sensory experience--when facing doubts about divorcing my father--complete with vivid sounds and imagery, of Jesus appearing to her and telling her she must stay with him. I admit if I had such sensory evidence, the scientific axioms would be hard to swallow, and the Catholic system would be a strong contender (Bayesionally speaking). Thence stems the problem of faith.

But, you know, if we disagree, at least one of us must be mistaken, right? Wouldn't it be interesting to know who?

Chances are, both of you. Put another way, you are both right in ways you wouldn't suspect, and wrong in the same fashion. The unknown unknowns of epistemology, so to speak.

For nuanced questions, I agree. But many important questions are quite clear cut. For instance, "is there a God?", or "is there an afterlife?" hardly admit any other answer than "yes" or "no" (for any given definition of "God" and "afterlife", that is).

"Understanding our reasoning capacities as the outcome of a natural physical process leads to my agreement with Dawkins's claim that any philosophical result prior to 1859 can be disregarded."

I'm sorry my friend, but...no. I'm open to a lot of ideas and directions that a discussion may take but this is just a non-starter, a laughable example of exactly the sort of benighted, willful ignorance that dooms fruitful discussion. This is the kind of statement you can only make if you haven't read philosophy written before 1859. I mean, of course, _The Origin of Species_ was a watershed to be sure, but there's certain philosophical freight even Darwin can't carry.

I think underneath this is a problem of false analogy. Philosophical insight is not the same species as math, and doesn't "build" the same way, in a scaffold of proofs and deductive confidence towards an inevitable conclusion that, once reached, can be accepted on its own terms without understanding of the prior movements.

I'd suggest reading a bit further and broaden your engagement. As a mathematician, you might appreciate Pierre Duhem's views on religion and history, Whitehead's ideas on the history of science, and in particular I'd say check out Hans Jonas' "Is God a Mathematician?". All of those pass the 1859 smell test as well, so, bonus!

Ok, let me apologize. "Laughable" and "benighted" are the kinds of uncharitable language I'm arguing against using. The charitable read of this statement would have acknowledged its substance -- the idea that after Darwin there was a 'clearing of the decks' so to speak, and to some degree that's true although not to the extent Dawkins claims. From a philosophical standpoint, certainly Teleology was seen to have been dealt a death blow, at least the kind of teleology advocated by folks like Paley, and that was a massive turn. I'm unaware of any serious philosopher or historian of ideas that would suggest it's wise to dismiss all prior developments out of hand, though. If that's not laughable, it's certainly dangerous.

I don't see why. Without mechanical tools and rudimentary physics, progress on flying machines was nil until the Wright brothers. Without better tools to study brains, there is no reason to expect we have produced any valuable answers to the sorts of "big questions" brains ask about themselves.

Thank you for the references. I wasn't trying to debate the point, only offer one perspective on your question. To elaborate a little more, the reason why philosophy prior to 1859 is not relevant is because philosophy is the study of human thought (and the answers it produces to philosophical questions), whereas the origin of the organ which produces human thought was fundamentally misunderstood without the evolutionary framework. A good analogy here is alchemy; Darwin's results implied prior philosophy was the wrong approach as chemistry implied the confused results of alchemy, and all the latter's results were reduced to no more than historical curiosity.

As an addendum, the reason why philosophy has been unsuccessful at producing answers is because it assumes human thought or language or existence as something fundamental. As Eliezer points out, rather than ask "do we have free will?", the productive perspective is to ask "what sort of algorithm does our brain run which makes it believe such a question is meaningful or answerable?" Have you read the Less Wrong series on rationality? It's a good exposition of the thinking process of someone like me.

Certainly the attempts prior to 1859 were brave, but it was quackery. Much like Erdos's comments on the collatz conjecture, we are not yet ready for such questions (although neuroscience will get us close in the next century).

"the origin of the organ which produces human thought was fundamentally misunderstood without the evolutionary framework."

This is a concise version of the fundamental category mistake Dawkins makes. In one sentence, we've dogmatically blown past thousands of years of deep reflection on the mind/body question. It's not as if the idea that mind were reducible to matter had never been broached before, or that the Mendelian breakthrough provided some evidence that was philosophically pertinent. And Certainly Origin of Species does not put a cap on that discussion any more than Dennett's Consciousness Explained does. It's very much a live question to this day, as it was a live question when Cicero and Lucretius engaged on the very same terms.

If the mind/body problem has not been settled now (and it certainly wasn't in 1859, that's more than anyone could possibly claim) then for that reason at least no one should take Dawkins seriously on this count, and fortunately very few serious thinkers do.

"although neuroscience will get us close in the next century"

This is first-rate eschatology, more cashing out of the infinite blank check of the Future of Science (let us pray). This is dogmatism, not science, not philosophy. It's hope.

I see. Let's say we completed the study of a new field, neurophilosophy, where we learn precisely the neural mechanisms for how and why we generate the philosophical questions we do, and why we find them "interesting," and why we reason about them the way we do. I don't think that would convince anyone as to why classical philosophical arguments bear no merit. I never bought into the fundamental category division, but for the first time, I see the issue clearly. Then I am flabbergasted as how to even conceive bridging the gap, my mathematical intuition tells me it is nonsensical, and that we must throw away the non-physical category--but is that like throwing out the baby with the bathwater?

This is very tricky, and my arguments above on religion don't appeal to my last few posts on "philosophy before 1859," but we digress. Thanks for the back-and-forth!

Likewise, this is all good stuff. I think we've exhausted the dialectic limits of the HN comments section. As a parting shot I'll point you one last time to the Jonas essay, "Is God a Mathematician?" It cuts straight to the question you just broached.

> Philosophical insight is not the same species as math, and doesn't "build" the same way […]

Err, I think this one is a non-sequitur. The actual argument would be to say that science and philosophy aren't the same. But, as a believer of reductionistic materialism myself, I fully expect science to confirm or disprove nearly every philosophical insight there ever was (except maybe the moral ones, but even then, moral realism isn't far from my mind).

Of course, it's not like Darwin invalidated all prior philosophy, but it did invalidated some beliefs, like Young Earth Creationism.

So here is what I believe to be the correct phrasing: "Any philosophical result prior to the science that falsified it can be disregarded". Well, you can scrap "philosophical": it applies to any result.

Nice to see this thread keep going. So..

"I fully expect science to confirm or disprove nearly every philosophical insight there ever was"

"Any philosophical result prior to the science that falsified it can be disregarded"

These are the non-sequiturs. Science is a sub-species of philosophy, whether you're willing to acknowledge it or not. Any reasonable survey of the history of science and its foundations must acknowledge this from an historical standpoint, and any objective examination of the ideas should quickly see Science's dependence on philosophical foundations.

I don't want to be unkind, but this is precisely the kind of historical and intellectual illiteracy I'm talking about. What you're stating here is truly dogmatic and emotive, and disconnected from anything resembling a healthy contextualization or understanding of the centuries of thinkers and writings that were poured into building the very worldview you take for granted.

You and I would have to go through some long discussion and/or remedial reading to get to the point where we could progress the argument reasonably, and I suspect you'd run out of patience and just wave your hand, make another high-handed dogmatic statement about The Sovereignty of Science and move on to something that made you less uncomfortable. I hope not, but my experience with discussions like this makes me suspect so.

I think I agree with most of what you just wrote. Now, regarding my "correct" phrasing, I did not reduce the sentence to its essence. If I do, there's not much left: "Any result that has been falsified can be disregarded", which is a near-tautology (sorry about that).

About science being a sub-specie of philosophy, well, it certainly looks like so. I am not well versed in the history of science and philosophy, but I do recall that many scientific fields either spawned from philosophy, or answer what was once philosophical questions. As for philosophical foundations, well, there's Bayes, Occam's Razor, and of course the plain old scientific methodology. We indeed don't have to look very far.

Now about my assumptions:

In a trivial sense, there's only one reality (or world, or universe). Each of us looks at it from a different window, of course, but if it weren't the "same" reality, we wouldn't be interacting at all. Now the trick is to figure out what this reality is.

Relativism is bullshit. More precisely, for any given two contradictory models of reality, at least one of them contains mistakes. Yes/no questions are even easier: the correct answer is bound to be either "yes" or "no". Not neither, not both. For instance, for any definition of "God", there is a God, or there is none.

Bayesianism is most probably the best we'll ever have to understand reality. Note that it rules out the possibility of ever forming absolutely correct answers: for any yes/no question, I am bound to qualify my answer with probabilities, and that will not match reality itself. For instance, if reality says "yes", while I say "yes with probability 90%", I am wrong. Less wrong however than "yes with probability 65%".

Reductionist materialism is very probably correct. That is, there is no such thing as an indivisible mental entity. Minds are composed of parts (like neurons), and so are love potions (if there's such a thing). In principle, anything, whether it thinks or not, can be studied and ultimately understood in non-thinking terms. It may be beyond the grasp of our mere human brains, however.

Determinism is probably correct. Given current knowledge, it means that the universe probably follows some form of the Everett branches (the Copenhagen interpretation is just crazy).

I really appreciate this answer. What you're doing here is some good philosophical reasoning, setting up an epistemological foundation for the practice of science. Popper would have something to say about your use of inductive/Bayesian reasoning as a foundation -- I think you've mixed a little Popper in here with your use of 'falsification'. If you're interested in this stuff, you might look into the problems with induction as an epistemological foundation, and how Popper attempts to solve that problem in his Objective Knowledge.

Good stuff.

As far as reductionism is concerned, my problem with it, in a nutshell, is that at its core it is dogmatic and built on core metaphysical assumptions that a reasonable person doesn't have to accept. I suggest to you that your confidence in materialism/reductionism is inherited and only seems likely and intuitive to you because most moderns are steeped in materialist metaphors and abstract confidence in reductionism and the hope for prediction and control it provides. But that hope is really based on the triumphs of Newton, not the last hundred years, as your citation of Copenhagen and String, etc., demonstrates. At the very least it must be acknowledged that physics has not progressed as it was hoped 150 years ago, and our expectations for what we eventually can and can't know are being truncated or qualified into increasingly abstract and near-poetic models. Does the boson exists? Branes, strings? Will we ever get a GUT? Those are live questions and at the very least should cause the triumphal materialist a measure of humility.

Any number of philosophers in the last 100+ years have pointed out that reductionism is not the only possible model and has never been the only possible scientific model. In the modern era, from Leibniz on we've had basic philosophical systems and metaphors that would fit very nicely into modern physics, but would require a basic inversion of our idea that at the core reality is dead matter, rather than something like rudimentary/primitive mind. Spinoza, Husserl, Whitehead, Bergson are just the biggest names that advocated some version of this.

For some reason it's very difficult for us moderns to give up the basic dogma that reality must be dead matter, or mute energy or some paradoxical balance of the two (paradox?! in science?! that's mysticism!)

Thanks for the heads up. Now about reductionism: I believe it is true because it looks like so. To me, at least. Before Darwin, Newton, and the discovery of neurons, reductionism was an incredibly hard sell. Now however, I'm quite confident about it. But should something unexpected happen, I may well change my mind (it would be hard, but not as hard as forsaking Bayesianism itself). Sure, there are some (huge) loose ends, but it still looks like there's reasonable hope. And of course, Occam's razor strongly favours reductionism, though it could still lose.

Regarding "dead matter", I'm not sure the term is useful. The wave function, which is supposed to be at the bottom of all things (according to current physics), isn't even close to what we intuitively call "dead matter". Its behaviour certainly is (conceptually) simple and deterministic, though.

I hadn't exactly Popper's falsification in mind. But even from a Bayesian perspective, most experiments that don't end up as predicted still deal huge blows to the underlying theories.

"simple and deterministic" -- I do like that better, although "dead" does indeed convey the essence here: it's not alive, it's not thinking.

Occam had prior philosophical assumptions to support the Razor of reknown, namely his metaphysical nominalism, which I reject in favor of something closer to a reformed Aristotelian formalism, which to me is far more intuitive than nominalism or reductionism.

Lastly, reductionism was actually not a hard sell at all, it had its advocates long before Darwin and in fact the advent of Darwin was really highly desired and favored by this camp. The fact that Wallace and Darwin were pursuing very similar agendas at the same time speaks to this. We had the notion of evolution and atomism since the pre-socratics, just no plausible scientific evidence to give it public political traction and philosophical (in the sense of epistemological) credibility.

So I guess I end up agreeing with you -- it was a hard public sell before Darwin, but reductionism's advocates had been around for thousands of years. Also see F.A. Lange's _History of Materialism_. That also may be of interest to you. Lange was a Kantian who had tremendous influence on other atheist thinkers, especially Nietzsche.

Hmm, I'm a bit lost by your paragraph about Occam. (I know next to nothing about the distinctions between nominalism and formalism, maybe I should check this out.) For now, I just trust the formal version of Occam's razor, based on Kolmogorov complexity (or Solomonov induction, the two are equivalent), but I don't fully understand those yet. (I should definitely check this out).

So, for now I must admit, that feels like a leap of faith. I am very confident, but my curiosity isn't satisfied yet.

"Understanding our reasoning capacities as the outcome of a natural physical process leads to my agreement with Dawkins's claim that any philosophical result prior to 1859 can be disregarded"

On a side note: Of _course_ _Dawkins_ would say that, being an evolutionary biologist... :)

I'm sorry, but you say that you're versed in scripture? Well, clearly you're not. You would know that we are ALL sinners and that Jesus Christ died for our sins. You are not versed in scripture, nor do you have knowledge of what sin is.

It is one of the core beliefs of Christianity that we are all sinners and that all sins are equal in God's eyes -- just any any Christian. But in practice, most tend to treat some people as a lot more sinful than others, and to be looked down upon for that. Hitler, for example, or gay people, or the 9/11 terrorists, or swingers.

Scripture does not define typical Christian behavior; let's not conflate the two.

Well, since the concept of sin is well defined in the bible it is silly to equate it to what some silly people say it is.

>Scripture does not define typical Christian behavior; let's not conflate the two.

Exactly, thank you.

Blurring this line is exactly what irks me, if you're going to 'talk shit' about Christianity then use scripture. Otherwise, properly define that you're simply arguing against stupid people.

Don't say you know scripture, and then use anecdotes to show it.

Sin is well defined in the bible, it doesn't matter what people think it is or what it should be.

BTW, I'm aware the author didn't make this claim directly, but this notion is what irks me.

If you ask any Christian, and indeed they know the nature of the equality of sin, then these 'common' Christians that don't follow scripture and bash people can't exist.

If that's the case, are these people you are talking about being Christian, or just being people?

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