Are atheists rebelling against God? Greg Koukl says “No Duh!”

Alright, so where is God´s email adress? If he doesn´t have one – what´s your point supposed to be?

Irrelevant: I didn’t have Peter Thiel’s email address. I still don’t.

And if those alleged recordings of Thiel´s alleged interactions were your only evidence that Thiel exists at all, and you had plenty of completely different alleged recordings – what exactly would you do then since you can neither invite Thiel for a meeting, or visit him, or organize a meeting with him that you will not attend but some of your friends and colleagues can, or drop him an email, or give him a phonecall or write him a letter?

I can help craft the thinking that goes into an email to him to convince him to give a less-than-optimal event another try. Which is what I did. All without ever interacting with Thiel. I still have never interacted with Thiel, although now I have seem him live in a discussion. Nevertheless, the communication was still exclusively one-way, except for that tiny little bit of second-hand information that Thiel really enjoyed the event this time around.

The correct question would be “when you have never met a person, and know nothing about this person, do you have zero background knowledge you employ to understand that person?”

And then my answer would be “yes, of course”, except maybe for the background knowledge that this person is in fact a person (or so I have been told – it´s not as if I could have verified this for myself).

Indeed, that the person is in fact a person is very important, and the notion of “a person” is a remarkably complex one, not a simple one. So it involves, in fact, a ton of background knowledge—or can, if you have learned to have deep insight into human beings.

And when it comes to God, I do not even have this single piece of background knowledge because there is afaict no God at all, and even if I assume that there is a God – I wouldn´t know whether it is a personal one (and if so, in what sense “personal” exactly) or a non-personal God.

One can reason from effect to cause. But yes, Christians have long maintained that God had to reveal himself to us for us to know much about him. Karl Barth apparently took this reasoning to the extreme, almost equating “revelation” with “self-revelation”.

There are countless minor variations of these general concepts of course – but all variations of #3 are afaict impossible given the available evidence.

Yep, and you know I disagree with this.

But, again, I do not actually subscribe to any particular variation of any of those general concepts – so how could I possibly have any preconception of what God is like (as you suggested people commonly have in your response to Edward).

I think it’s time you articulate what you do and do not agree with w.r.t. Grossberg 1999 The Link between Brain Learning, Attention, and Consciousness (partial tutorial), because it’s crucial to my rebuttal.

Your anecdote is completely disanalogous in one crucial aspect:1. You have never personally interacted with Peter Thiel.2. You have done research on Peter Thiel to figure out what kind of guy he is, and then had a friend of yours contact him personally and get a response.The only thing that is analogous to interactions with God is #1, #2 is 100% disanalogous and given that, I do not see how your anecdote shows anything relevant here.

The point is that I was able to successfully simulate part of Peter Thiel’s desire-structure, without ever getting feedback which I could then employ to improve my simulation. The only feedback I got was in the end; before that feedback, I had ceased updating my simulation. The relevance is that you said the following:

AS: Imagine that there is a guy who would really just love to know you and be your friend. However, you´ve never met this guy or interacted with him in any way whatsoever, so you consequently know literally nothing whatsoever about him.

Your “consequently” does not follow; I was able to gain considerable knowledge of Peter Thiel without having ever (i) “met this guy”; (ii) “interacted with him in any way whatsoever”. I only had one-way communication, from Thiel to me. This is directly analogous to one paradigm of interpreting scriptures: that God communicated to mankind and records were kept. The fact that the records include back-and-forth is precisely analogous to the back-and-forth I saw in videos of Peter Thiel interacting with other humans—but never with me.

So you say that God is “in fact”(!) a person. How do you know that?

I don’t know it, in the sense that I know I am typing on a computer right now. Instead it is one possible lens with which to understand reality. You could say that I ‘know’ that God is a person, in the same sense that you ‘know’ QFT and GR can be unified.

How do you know that God is not some thoroughly impersonal ground of all being or something like that?

When I attempt to construct an understanding of reality, this generates a less satisfactory explanation.

And, more importantly, can you think of any reason at all why God would not personally interact with everyone if it is indeed true that there is a personal and benevolent God who wants to have a relationship with humans?

In another blog post, Randal Rauser opens up the possibility that God’s interaction with some, if not many people, is happening but not something of which they are conscious. So I will take your question to include conscious knowledge of said “personally interact”. The start of an answer is that God has reasons to let humans drift away from him, such that their desires and values become so different from God’s that they find it extremely hard to even comprehend God for who he is. Anthropologists frequently encounter situations where it is very hard to understand what alien cultures are doing and why.

If you allow the above beginning of an answer, then we can ask (i) why would God let people so-drift? (ii) why does communication have to break down the more drifting happens, between an infinite being and finite beings? Or at least, that’s how I would see the conversation proceeding. At this point I will let you comment.

Neither the abstract nor your summary gives any indication of this paper claiming that people have preconceptions about things they do not believe in the first place – so I have no idea why you think this paper has any relevance here. What exactly is it about this paper that is relevant here and where it matters whether I agree or disagree?

If your non-perceptual neurons do not have sufficient building blocks for generating phenomenon X (or something like it), you will never become conscious of phenomenon X. You might become conscious of some of the pieces of phenomenon X, but “missing the forest for the trees” is a statement which captures the failure to assemble the pieces into “I’m looking at phenomenon X”. More colloquially, failure to be able to imagine a thing may prevent one from becoming conscious of the thing.

What this means is that if you have no building blocks for what God might be like, then you are guaranteed to never become conscious of him. If your building blocks are inadequate, you are also guaranteed to never become conscious of him. The idea that you can simply plant phenomenon X in front of a person, force his/her eyelids open, and eventually that person will be able to consciously recognize phenomenon X for what it is—such an idea is false. This is the import of Charles Taylor’s influential 1971 article Interpretation and the Sciences of Man:

    In other words, in a hermeneutical science, a certain measure of insight is indispensable, and this insight cannot be communicated by the gathering of brute data, or initiation in modes of formal reasoning or some combination of these. It is unformalizable. But this is a scandalous result according to the authoritative conception of science in our tradition, which is shared even by many of those who are highly critical of the approach of mainstream psychology, or sociology, or political science. For it means that this is not a study in which anyone can engage, regardless of their level of insight; that some claims of the form: “if you don’t understand, then your intuitions are at fault, are blind or inadequate,” some claims of this form will be justified; that some differences will be nonarbitrable by further evidence, but that each side can only make appeal to deeper insight on the part of the other. The superiority of one position over another will thus consist in this, that from the more adequate position one can understand one’s own stand and that of one’s opponent, but not the other way around. It goes without saying that this argument can only have weight for those in the superior position. (46–47)

And so, I claim it is fully legitimate to investigate a persons intuitions about any god which may exist, in a manner completely orthogonal to whether that god does indeed exist. If a person has no intuitions, then that person is probably guaranteed to never consciously be aware of that god existing. However, I have found that pretty much everyone does in fact have such intuitions—although maybe not enough to imagine YHWH, or Jesus’ God (I’ll allow Marcionism for the sake of the discussion).

First, I would like you to indicate whether I have convinced you that your “you consequently know literally nothing whatsoever about him” does not follow from your premises.

And God´s supposed reason for not personally revealing himself to everyone to at least tell them “Hey, just wanted to let you know that [insert alleged communications with God here] are the correct scriptures, I´m letting you figure them out for yourself for some reason, have fun doing that – we won´t see each other again until you die. God out.” is…. what exactly?That is quite literally the least that God could do, but God, if he exists, doesn´t even do that.

Yes; this conversation seems to belong at Randal’s Meaningful relationship and propositional knowledge: A response to Justin Schieber (Part 1) and (Part 2). I would be happy to explore what would have to be true for God to let knowledge of him become so inaccessible that your scenario can obtain. We can look at presumptions in your argument about how human psychology works, as well as what other goals God might have which conflict with what you seem to desire, or at least expect.

In what sense?

The lack of ontology/​metaphysics of personal agent-causation seems very problematic to me. Scientists could not have chosen otherwise to pick the experiments they did or theorize as they did. The laws of nature cause some people to be irrational and some rational, with no law of nature which distinguishes between the two. And yet, with there being no such law of nature, allegedly there is still an ontological distinction. I think this itself is deeply problematic.

This boils down to:1. There is a personal and benevolent God who cares about humans and wants humans to know him and be in a relationship with them.2. This God is also hidden and no matter how much people try to personally communicate with him – he simply doesn´t answer, not even to confirm the most basic things about him like:- he actually is real- he actually is a personal God- he actually does care about humans- the Bible actually is the correct “scripture”

Ummm, even the demons believe God exists, and that doesn’t help. Plenty of people know the right thing to do, but fail to do it (this is formally explored in John Hare’s The Moral Gap; you can also see a look at whether professional ethicists are more ethical). What you establish as prerequisites, I just don’t see as necessary prerequisites. There is a moral dimension which seems to be at least a co-equal prerequisite, such that if it isn’t there, other other prerequisites utterly fail.

LB: What this means is that if you have no building blocks for what God might be like, then you are guaranteed to never become conscious of him. If your building blocks are inadequate, you are also guaranteed to never become conscious of him.

AS: And this is relevant why exactly? I didn´t have any preconceptions about you before I knew you existed and I couldn´t even have any preconceptions about you before I knew you existed, if you say that is different with God, why is it supposed to be different?

You don’t think any of your preconceptions were involved in you first talking to me, when you made your first reply to one of my comments? Seriously? I suggest paying attention to this exchange:

LB: Have you read Alasdair MacIntyre’s 1977 Epistemological Crises, Dramatic Narrative and the Philosophy Of Science? Among other things, he criticizes Descartes for thinking that he has doubted everything when in fact there is a tradition he is not doubting, but instead using as his foundation for doubt.

KP: In any event, it’s widely agreed that Descartes was mistaken in his starting point; you just can’t reject everything and start over from scratch like that.

Kenny Pearce got his PhD in philosophy from USC, a well-respected program. Just like Descartes relied on a rich source of concepts and knowledge for his program of radical doubt, you rely on a rich source on concepts and knowledge in order to possibly communicate with me. I don’t care if you didn’t have preconceptions precisely about Luke Breuer; you had plenty of preconceptions about humans in general, which you use every time you interact with someone new. You don’t start out tabula rasa like Descartes thought he did.

See again my point about anthropologists: when the tribe they visit has a significantly different concept structure and culture, it can take a long time for anything other than the most basic communication to be possible. Why? Because of a huge mismatch in conceptual structure and everything else required to successfully communicate.

Yup, I left out the premise that I have no way to figure out whether any of the several and contradictory alleged recordings of God´s earlier conversations are in any way legit – thanks for pointing that out.

I came across several and contradictory alleged accountings of Peter Thiel’s views. Furthermore, there were multiple ways to interpret the things I saw him say on video and write in print, due to the polysemous nature of natural language. So while a good case can be made that I had to deal with less ambiguity than with the Bible, the difference is one of degree, not of kind.

I won´t address your thoughts re rationality (but I do think they are completely nonsensical for the record), I will simply point out that an impersonal “ground of all being” could potentially create everything that a personal deity could create.

Properties of reality which only a mind could recognize seem extremely unlikely to arise if a mind had nothing to do with creating reality. Moral order would be a chief example, but not the only one. A sense of beauty that helps us do science is another example. Here, “potentially create” is irrelevant/​insufficient, as possibility ? probability.

First of all: you don´t know. You don´t know that demons exist, and if they do exist you don´t know anything about what they are like and what they believe.

I know that people can know the right thing to do and utterly fail to do it, in a way that seems utterly irrational (instead of them having a more motivating end which conflicts and causes only apparently irrational behavior). That fallen angels would also do such a thing seems reasonable.

Second, and more importantly, even if that were true – so fucking what? This is like saying “my firstborn son never listened to me, so I´ll abandon all my other children because what´s the point of having any relationship with them or trying to teach them anything if my firstborn son had a relationship with me and still turned out to be a dick?”

Randal’s Meaningful relationship and propositional knowledge: A response to Justin Schieber (Part 1) and (Part 2) reject the ‘abandon’ thesis in the conscious form.

Disanalogous. When I read one of your comments for the first time, I became aware of your existence. And before I became aware of your existence – I had no conception (pre-conception or otherwise) of you what-so-ever. I don´t even see how I principle could have had one before i knew that you existed.Please give a specific example of any conceptions of you specifically that I could possibly have had before I even knew you.

This implies that you had zero idea of what I was saying, and that you just took the wildest of wild chances in engaging in the English language in a way you understand, that for all you know, I use the English language in a completely different way. Furthermore, it implies that you had zero idea of how my reason and emotions probably function. It implies that I could be an alien who is using English Chinese room-style. No, this is nonsense. When you first responded to a comment of mine, you had a huge model, or set of models, you employed in order to (i) sufficiently well-understand what I said; (ii) craft a response which I would likely find sufficiently intelligible.

So how often does this cause *anyone* to meet someone else (on the street, or in a club, or in a lecture hall, or in a chatroom or what have you), talking to said someone, yet still concluding that this someone doesn´t exist at all because they had the wrong preconceptions of him? If your answer is “never” – then what the fuck does this have to do with anything?

As far as I can tell, this is word salad. One possibly relevant response is that sometimes, someone else gets such a wrong impression of me that all future conversation is blocked, until that wrong impression is corrected. And if it is never corrected, memory of me will fade, perhaps even become permanently inaccessible to the person’s consciousness. Indeed, if the concepts used to understand me sufficiently mismatch, then recollection won’t even properly reconstruct:

SciAm: Why Science Tells Us Not to Rely on Eyewitness Accounts: Many people believe that human memory works like a video recorder: the mind records events and then, on cue, plays back an exact replica of them. On the contrary, psychologists have found that memories are reconstructed rather than played back each time we recall them.

So if the person used extremely mismatched concepts to understand me (Grossberg 1999), then never talks to me again, the ‘reconstruction’ will be so different from me that it might be unrecognizably different.

Unless there would be various people who all claim to be the same Peter Thiel, with different alleged “recordings” of them, it is a difference of degree and of kind.

I’m sure there are multiple people with the name “Peter Thiel” out there. But perhaps we add a Bertrand Russell-type “descriptor”, and say that I mean the “Peter Thiel” who started PayPal. Well, I never actually verified the the two Thiels are the same. There’s much circumstantial evidence, and the Thiel I read about may have claimed to have started PayPal, but I didn’t verify that he did.

1. An omnipotent ground of all being could simply actualize a multiverse that contains every possible universe – including our one.

Something which can explain any possible state of affairs is not an explanation.

2. “Properties of reality which only a mind could recognize” is nonsensical – every property is a “property that only a mind can recognize” because the very act of recognizing something is mind-dependent.

I cannot write a computer program, for a robot, to recognize certain properties of reality?

3. You don´t actually provide any argument that demonstrates that a universe like ours is more likely given a personal deity than it would be given an impersonal ground of all being – and I doubt that you can do that.

First, I need is the principle that an explanation which renders all logical possibilities equally probable fails as an explanation. I’m not sure you will grant that, given 1. Second, I would need to establish the difference between ‘personal’ and ‘impersonal’. Whether I can do that with you, I have no idea.

Because being abandoned, but only consciously so, makes so much sense.

If you just want to make assertions then have at it, but if you want to discuss the matter, let’s go do it on one of those threads.

About people in general, not about you specifically.

No, I think you only actually know about people in particular, and can kinda-sorta generalize off of those particulars. Likewise, we have prototypes of various different conceptions of God and gods.

A possibly relevant response would be rather “sometimes people have such false preconceptions about me that I chat with them and they genuinely believe that I do not exist after our chat” – and how often has that happened to you exactly?

No, what I actually said is that after my chat, their memories are insufficient to represent me with anything resembling accuracy. Add too much error and their memory is no longer of “me”, it’s of a terrible distortion.

Cool. So how often would the “false reconstruction of you” look like “no reconstruction of anything” / “nothing whatsoever”?

More word salad.

There is nothing that an impersonal ground of all being can explain that a personal God couldn´t also explain and vice versa. So what you say here applies to a personal God just as well.

An explanation needs to render certain possibilities less likely than other possibilities in order for it to qualify as an explanation. Or so I claim, as does Gregory W. Dawes in Theism and Explanation. Can we agree on this being a necessary property of ‘explanation’?

Not in the same sense of “recognize” as you would “recognize” this property.

What is the relevant difference?

1. What is the probability of tuberculosis existing in a world created by “God” as you conceive “God”? If you cannot come up with formal calculations of probability or at the very least informal assessments of likelihood, then this is a red herring.

This isn’t the only possible way to “render certain possibilities less likely than other possibilities”, so I reject your claim of “red herring”. Before I continue, this conversation would be much easier if you have any acquaintance with Dawes’ book, or are willing to. Here’s an excerpt:

    Chapter 5 takes us into the heart of my discussion. It addresses the issue of what would constitute a potential theistic explanation. A key requirement it that the theistic hypothesis ought to have independently specifiable consequences. If we attribute to God a particular intention, we need to be able to specify how he is likely to act in order to achieve his goals. And we need to be able to do this without drawing on our knowledge of what is actually the case. If we cannot do this, then any proposed theistic explanation will be without content. Once again, the rationality principle offers the theist a way ahead. But it has a flip side. When applied to an agent who is omnipotent, omniscient, and morally perfect, the rationality principle entails what I shall call an “optimality condition.” We will be warranted in regarding a proposed theistic explanation as a potential explanation of any fact only if we cannot conceive of any better way in which that divine intention could have been realised. And whatever else “better” may mean in this context, it surely means “entailing less suffering.” (Theism and Explanation, 31)

So for example, instead of talking about the possibility of tuberculosis existing, we would instead talk about what else would also need to exist if tuberculosis exists, in order for something like this ‘optimality condition’ to be satisfied. (N.B. I’m pretty sure Matthew Robert Adams’ Must God Create the Best? can coexist with an adapted form of Dawes’ ‘optimality condition’.)

2. A personal God is a “person” in a sense analogous to or at least very close to how you and me are “persons”, while an impersonal God is a “person” in the same sense as a rock, the sun or the weak nuclear force is a “person”.

This is a start, but more is needed. For what are persons better explanations, and for what are nonpersons better explanations? Dawes’ ‘rationality principle’ is a contender and may be the answer, but I haven’t explored the space enough to be confident of that.

You don´t say. This is precisely what I said right at the beginning:“I´m aware of plenty of different conceptions of what “God” is supposed to be like, how am I supposed to “pick” any one of those conceptions while simultaneously believing that all of them are imaginary?”

But you were in precisely the same position when you first started talking to me. All these various conceptions of what or who I might be like were all imaginary until interactions with me started rendering some more probable and others less probable. Had the set of conceptions you started out with been terrible enough, no appreciable communication would have been possible.

Since God doesn´t chat with people and since Atheists are not people that had a chat with God but remember only a “terrible distortion” of him because of “false preconceptions” or whatever – what does that have to do with anything?

It helps illustrate the idea that if your building-block conceptions are a terrible enough match to someone, you can never appreciably interact with that person. At the very least, per Grossberg 1999, you might never consciously know you are interacting with that person.

Yeah, that or more obtuseness.

True.

I talked about two ways, either a formal calculation of probability, or an informal assessment of probability – if you can provide neither, then this is indeed a complete red herring.

When an expert decides, within his/her domain, that A is more likely than B or that course of action Q is better than course of action R, [s]he does not always have “an informal assessment of probability”. And yet, we acknowledge that the expert really is doing something rational, because [s]he can product results. I would like to give you a better answer, but I’m not quite there yet. I’m still grappling with pp46–47 of Charles Taylor’s 1971 Interpretation and the Sciences of Man, where he talks about the mode of understanding which is “unformalizable”, resting on “intuitions”, such that at points “each side can only make an appeal to deeper insight on the part of the other.” Dawes also talks about unformalizability, in “suggest[ing] that intentional explanations are not nomological” (Theism and Explanation, 51).

It is on my list to examine the interface between fuzzy/​intuitive thinking and analytical/​formal thinking, but even if I pursue that, I’m not sure that all explanations (which “render certain possibilities less likely than other possibilities”) can necessarily be picked apart like you imply they must in order for my line of argumentation to be “a complete red herring”.

Either come up with an formal calculation of probability or an informal assessment of probability or let it be – but if it is the latter, don´t pretend that a personal God is in any way a better explanation for anything than an impersonal God.

If I, as an expert software developer, say that taking course of action Q is better than course of action R, I might not be able to give you even “an informal assessment of probability”. And yet, it is likely that I will be speaking rationally. Your requirement of “an informal assessment of probability” simply is not required. All that is necessary is that A is likely better than B, that Q is likely better than R.

No, that isn´t “needed” at all – because your God being both real and also 100% hidden is not a necessity – your God could easily reveal himself to at the very least assure people that:

But you seem to be implying that if God (as generally described by nonliberal Christians) exists in causal contact with reality, then he would, as a bare minimum, do what you describe. I don’t see any good reason why this is in fact the bare minimum. And so, I am attempting what is indeed required as a bare minimum, for a personal explanation of reality to be better than an impersonal explanation of reality.

And since no one is interacting with God, this is thoroughly irrelevant.

I don’t think you know this. In order for you to know that “no one is interacting with God”, you need to establish that there is no way God could possibly be interacting with people, or that the only possibilities are too remote. You haven’t come even close to doing this. What you can say is that no theist has, to-date, given you a possibility you think is remotely plausible.

What seems to be the case is that you have a set of “If God existed, then this would be different.” claims. We could examine them; I suspect that I could find erroneous theology and/or psychology if we went through with this. For example, the idea of God merely asserting that “the Bible contains accurate information about me”, such that people truly, deeply believed this—doesn’t seem like it would work, given that huge groups of humans in the past have in fact believed this thing, and the result was not as awesome as you seem to think it would be.

Tell me how to rationally pick a conception without interacting with God in any way whatsoever and why I should pick one in the first place despite believing that there is no God – everything else misses the point.

You could weed out bad theology, bad psychology, and bad sociology via trying to reconcile the Bible with the world as it is and its history. This would surely rule out some conceptions. It would not rule out all, just as there are many plausible models of a person whose inventions/​art/​other creations you’ve investigated, when you’ve never been able to asking a question of that person.

I imagine that God simply doesn’t have a whole lot to say to us which isn’t in the Bible or flagrantly obvious, until we get enough false beliefs out of our heads and enough true beliefs into them. Likewise, Peter Thiel wouldn’t want anything to do with me if I weren’t interested in what he wants, and willing to become knowledgeable about entrepreneurship of the kind that makes the world a better place instead of merely making money. Indeed, he would likely dismiss me if I hadn’t done a good deal of research on what he wants and about his kind of entrepreneurship.

Wrt God, we are not talking about “no appreciable communication”, we are rather talking about “no communication whatsoever no matter how much people try” – so this is again 100% beside the point.

“never appreciably interact” != “never interact at all in any way, shape or form”You are trying the same equivocation fallacy over and over and over again.

I’m not going to let you dismiss Randal’s Meaningful relationship and propositional knowledge: A response to Justin Schieber (Part 1) and (Part 2) without an actual argument. Oh, and this isn’t an actual argument:

This is bullshit.

???? An argument for saying that A is more likely than B or something like that is an informal assessment of probability. And since you don´t have such an argument – this is all a red herring.

My bad; I wrongly guessed that you wanted at least something more than “A seems, intuitively, more likely than B”. And then you go onto say that the only kind of argument you will accept is something that, far from arguing by intuition, is explicit; I’m not sure what you would accept short of something that could be formalized without too much trouble and made into an algorithm.

Yup, God allegedly wanting to have a relationship with and be known by humans is not at all a “good reason” for said God to reveal itself – it is rather perfectly compatible with God being 100% hidden because why not? Just like you leaving your family for good and faking your death is in fact perfectly compatible with you being a loving and responsible family person because why not?

Once again, I will not let Randal’s Meaningful relationship and propositional knowledge: A response to Justin Schieber (Part 1) and (Part 2) be dismissed out-of-hand.

LB: I don’t think you know this. In order for you to know that “no one is interacting with God”, you need to establish that there is no way God could possibly be interacting with people, or that the only possibilities are too remote.

AS: Of course! […]Makes total sense!

It is quite amusing that you elided the underlined text. IIRC you’ve ripped into me for ignoring important text like that in the past, including failing to include it in a reply blockquote.

Maybe, lets find out – which of the alleged interactions with God from this century do you want to talk about first? How about one of those guys who killed their spouse and told the judge that God commanded them to do it? Or do you have a better alleged interaction with God in mind?

Actually, I think God has largely been absent this century and last century, in the style of Hab 3:3–5 and 2 Thess 2:1–12. We appear to be in the phase of needing to learn the same lessons over and over again. An excellent example is Rwandan Genocide § United States. Why did we let that happen? Only because one Westerner life is worth more than 100 Rwandan lives, or Battle of Mogadishu-type political fallout is more costly than hundreds of thousands of Rwandan lives. As long as we are this fucked up in the mind and heart, what would God possibly have to say to us?

Which is why you should never teach your kids to not touch the hot stove. Some kids didn´t listen to that teaching – which means that it is totally reasonable to just stop teaching kids that stuff and while we´re at it, why not abandon them completely because why not?

God is not insane: he does not try the same thing over and over, expecting a different result. I also don’t think he wants to enable a permanently mediocre situation, where he is always coddling us like infants who cannot possibly learn and pass that knowledge and wisdom on to later generations without an insane decay rate. Seriously, Enlightenment man gloried in how awesome he could be; he prided himself in switching from mimesis ? poiesis. There was a World Fair where those who fancied themselves the smartest and best humans all gathered to glory in how awesome they were. Then came WWI. We ostensibly learned from our hubris. Then came WWII. So much for learning. At some point, you stop trying to teach an unwilling, rebellious student, and let him/her discover the error of his/her ways, deeply enough to re-develop the categories of ‘humility’ and ‘teachability’.

You are again presuming that the holy book that you were indoctrinated with as a kid is obviously the correct one, because why not?

False; in doing said “weed out”, I could conclude that in fact, the psychology in the Bible is terrible, that the humans in the Bible are ridiculous caricatures of how humans would actually operate. So far, this hasn’t happened. In fact, I would say that taking the Bible seriously would result in much better predictions than one finds at Milgram experiment § Results.

LB: I imagine that God simply doesn’t have a whole lot to say to us which isn’t in the Bible or flagrantly obvious, until we get enough false beliefs out of our heads and enough true beliefs into them.

AS: In that case, your God would literally be the most boring person I could imagine.

Another hideous elision.

If God would start to hang out with Bible freaks after they are done learning biblical hebrew and greek and spending a few decades trying to understand just what the gazillion of more bizzare Bible verses were intended to convey – then, and only then, would you have something like a point here. But God is exactly as hidden to Bible freaks as he is to Quran freaks as he is to Bhagavad Gita freaks as he is to Bible who don´t give a damn about religion.

LOL, you think God cares only about knowledge instead of also wisdom? My sister is likely to upset ancient Hebrew scholarship by transforming how the ancient Hebrew verb functions (specifically: the ancient Hebrew verb is not tensed like many Western languages are tensed (future, past, present)), and yet she happily acknowledges that God could give some random African deeper knowledge into himself than she has. No, God cares about mind, heart, soul, and strength. Ancient Hebrews did not differentiate between ‘mind’ and ‘heart’ as the Greeks did. Our problems as sinful beings are not lack of knowledge; probably our primary problem is lack of willingness to do the right thing, even when it costs; also our lack of willingness to admit when we’re wrong, including the hard bit called ‘repentance’. A relatively secular investigation into this matter can be found in Karl Menninger’s Whatever Became of Sin?.

Go read Isaiah 58 and tell me how much “pointing of the finger” is going on in our modern world. And then see how God is not interested in doing much until that behavior stops. Feel free to also consult Mt 7:1–5, Mt 23:1–4, Gal 6:1–5.

And I´m not going to let you pretend that God does interact with people before you present any evidence that God in fact does that.

Are you defaulting to ‘false’ or ‘unknown’?

Oh good grief:

AS: I talked about two ways, either a formal calculation of probability, or an informal assessment of probability – if you can provide neither, then this is indeed a complete red herring.

LB: When an expert decides, within his/her domain, that A is more likely than B or that course of action Q is better than course of action R, [s]he does not always have “an informal assessment of probability”.

AS: ???? An argument for saying that A is more likely than B or something like that is an informal assessment of probability. And since you don´t have such an argument – this is all a red herring.

LB: My bad; I wrongly guessed that you wanted at least something more than “A seems, intuitively, more likely than B”.

AS: I actually do want more than that. Namely an actual argument for why A is more likely than B.

So you wanted an argument for “an informal assessment of probability”, instead of a statement, and criticize me for failing to note the difference when you also failed in your original request? I tire of the ethos you have established, whereby when there is a misunderstanding, it is necessarily my fault; at best you forgot to state something which should have been implicitly obvious.

Ping me back later for “an argument of informal assessment of probability”; I hope to be studying where the intuitive/​fuzzy interfaces with the analytical/​formal, and will hopefully have something sufficiently concrete for you, then.

Did you get bored of the “QFT-GR” thingy? You seem to have a new favorite non-response.

If I don’t think you take seriously points I think are important, I will repeat them.

Which is why you should abandon your family for good and fake your own death. Humans are dicks sometimes – so fuck all of ’em forever because why not?

Feel free to suggest something that God should do, for which you have good reason to think would improve the situation. In so-suggesting you will be relying on imagination; demonstrate that this imagination is possibly trustworthy.

Which is why it is totally pointless to try to teach your kids anything whatsoever.

Yeah, God never tried this…

Congratulations Captain Hindsight! If only you or some other Christian”predicted” that, you know, before you actually saw the result.

I do intend to look at whether Western intellectuals were culpably incompetent for those low predictions. I think the mere willingness to unquestioningly obey authority in WWII Germany would be enough evidence, but apparently not!

I didn´t omit anything relevant.

We frequently disagree on what is ‘relevant’. If you refuse to seriously consider what I consider ‘relevant’ as relevant—if you will not demonstrate this to my satisfaction—then we are limited in what we can productively talk about, and should act according to those limitations instead of pretending they do not exist.

Wrong. You say that “God cares about mind, heart soul and strength” – and your evidence for that is:{}And the people that have enough “mind, heart, sould and strength” for God to have a chat with them are:{}

Yep, because we were talking about possible conceptions of God, and thinking about matching them to reality. One hideously false assumption I see bandied about by atheists is that mere knowledge is enough to improve things; well, falsifying evidence is in, and I’m sure there’s plenty more in disparate domains.

Cool story bro, needs more dragons and shit.

Ahh, so you don’t think that people who love to point the finger but not help are in any way part of the problem? Fascinating.

Wrong. I actually did criticize you for reading “argument” and parsing it as “intuition” instead.

What? The first comment in the exchange I excerpted does not contain the word “argument”. In the third comment, you write as if you actually had used the word “argument”. I have no problems with the fact there was a misunderstanding; I do have a problem with you making it out to be my fault, via “????”. Take responsibility for your own contributions to misunderstanding.

So I´ll stick to the single most important and most obvious item that a “God” would do assuming that “God” is a) real, b) benevolent and c) wants to be known by and have a relationship with humans:- never abandoning his children for good but rather always be accessible for those that need help or advice, because that is what loving parents do.

So if I think that one Western life is more important than 100 Rwandan lives, you still want God to be accessible to me for advice?

I´ve said this before and I´ve dealt with every single objection you came up for this. Virtually all objections you could think of failed because they could just as well be used to argue that God should have never been as accessible as Jesus allegedly was for the people around him – but God was exactly that accessible if Christianity is true.

God also ‘abandoned’ Israel to captivity for a time. So the idea that God ought to always be perfectly accessible is falsified by the OT. It is also falsified by the NT; read 2 Thess 2:1–12. God’s patience for evil is not infinite (it would be evil to have infinite patience for evil). What would you have him do, were humans to sink deeper and deeper into evil, unwilling to see the error of their ways and repent? Just act like a loving parent, who keeps loving his murderer–rapist son and enabling further murdering and raping?

And you also tried the objection that this would constitute God “coddling” humans, which is ridiculous IMO because either “coddling” or “complete abandonment” is an incredibly obvious false dichotomy. What good parents do with their children is something in between “coddling” and “complete abandonment”, they let them become more and more independent – but they are always there for them when their children need their help or advice.

The disanalogy is that we tend not to think of children as being incredibly evil. Let’s take an example that doesn’t bring in the whole “children-are-innocent” paradigm of thought. How would you have God interact with Hitler, Stalin, Mao, and/or Pol Pot? Suppose these people are absolutely unapologetic about having intentionally ended the lives if millions of people. How do you imagine God “[being] always there for them when [they] need [his] help or advice”? Or we could talk about the Bill Clinton administration as described by Rwandan Genocide § United States.

1. You certainly don´t have any evidence that he ever did.

Well, I probably have no evidence that you wouldn’t say is better explained differently—and I don’t wish to pursue this line of thought further right now. Nevertheless, the Bible does make truth-claims about how humans would interact with God. It was those truth-claims to which I am referring. They most definitely do match up to a certain conception of God and a certain psychology of humans. If you want you can discard this conception and that psychology, but then I would ask for a reason why.

2. Even if he did, his hiddenness still makes exactly as much sense (read: none) as you refusing to teach your own kids anything because there are plenty of people from earlier generations that didn´t learn all the lessons that they should have learned.

I see, so my own failings to teach my children should have—virtually zero impact? I mean, I fail to teach my kids to pay the cost to fight for what is right, and God just swoops in and saves the day? One nice thing about this paradigm is that unlike the current situation, where children molested have a much higher likelihood of becoming child molesters themselves, God would swoop in and save the day there, too. No more sins of the fathers being visited on the sons down to the fourth generation (which can easily be interpreted naturalistically). God just keeps swooping in to save the day. We have no responsibility for learning from history; we oughtn’t suffer because we willfully ignore history. No, that would be mean, and a good Got just isn’t mean.

1. You do know that there were plenty of theologians among those “western intellectuals” and that the fraction of intellectuals coming from fields other than theology but who were still well-versed in the Bible was, if anything, higher than today?

The Bible is very cognizant of failed religious leaders, both in the OT and NT.

2. Actually, you do not know how many Germans unquestioningly obeyed authority. And without research like Milgram´s, you also would have precious little basis to make an informed guess as to how relatively important those two competing explanations:

I’m more confident that one can back out of extant historical records, which one is more likely. I also think that the huge disparity between prediction and actuality indicates prior suppression of truth; my impression is that very infrequently does such a study turn up results so much at odds with folk psychology. Clearly I am operating somewhat on intuition here, but I don’t think there is no reason whatsoever for my suspicions. Indeed, it seems like one needs some sort of a priori belief that “We’re doing the best we can!” in order to fight strongly against this intuition. Christians have zero need to believe that “We’re doing the best we can!”; others may feel more of a need to believe something like this.

And that has anything to do with God being either non-existent or hidden because…..?

It affects the idea that God merely forcing us to be aware of his bare existence would accomplish anything.

No idea what you are talking about.

I was responding to an apparent presupposition of this:

AS: If God would start to hang out with Bible freaks after they are done learning biblical hebrew and greek and spending a few decades trying to understand just what the gazillion of more bizzare Bible verses were intended to convey – then, and only then, would you have something like a point here. But God is exactly as hidden to Bible freaks as he is to Quran freaks as he is to Bhagavad Gita freaks as he is to Bible who don´t give a damn about religion.

You seem to believe that mere knowledge does much of anything to accomplish God’s goals (e.g. unity amidst diversity, as indicated by Mt 5:43–48, Jn 13:34–35, Jn 17:20–23). The futility of mere knowledge is well-illustrated by how useless finger-pointers are.

I´ll note that all of this was evidently a red herring that now devolves into meta-discussion about a red herring.

Oh I get it, so you blame me for not understanding what was never in an original comment; you silently changed the goalposts and then blamed me for not anticipating this change. Way to interact in an intellectually honest fashion. (Cue a tu quoque.)

God is 100% hidden for everyone for the last two thousand years […]

Many people report interactions with God. Curiously enough, the reports increase in areas not as influenced by the West, areas with more need, with less affluence. I don’t how that pattern could possibly interact with your general argument here. Oh wait, you have said before that if I can’t give you God’s email address, or some equivalent, I don’t interact with God. Right.

2. Pretty much all Christian objections to Arguments from hiddenness could just as well / in the exact same way be used to argue that God should never have been accessible for anyone – not for Jesus’ contemporaries, not for the ancient hebrews not for anyone ever.

Ah yes, because I totally excluded God interacting with humans while they are teachable, and then being more absent the more arrogant people are, for a time until they find out that arrogance leads to pain, suffering, and death. Then they learn to repent, and start wanting truth instead of comforting illusions which allow them to avoid admitting how evil they are. Then they are actually ready to interact with God instead of a Sky Daddy who pats them on the back no matter how many Rwandan lives they think are worth one Western life.

I´ll just point out the irony of saying “knowledge doesn´t help, also – read this”.

Knowledge alone doesn’t necessarily help. That is the function of ‘mere’ in “mere knowledge”. Unlike you (“rapidly”), I try not to insert superfluous words.

“it´s like me saying that you need to learn how to parallel park if you
want to get a driving license and you replying that you don´t need to
learn that at all because merely knowing how to parallel park is not sufficient in order to get a driving license.”

Well played, good sir.

So, out of curiosity, have you ever felt that God was communicating with you? If so, how did He do it (or rather, how did you *feel* that He did it)?

Thanks for the in-depth answer, Luke. TBH, I find your examples to be of a more convincing variety than “the voice of Yahweh told me, directly, to do X. He had a British accent”. 😛

That said, have you considered that the human tendency to draw order from otherwise noisy situations/scenes etc. could be the prime culprit here? I’m not attempting to discredit what you said, merely sketching an alternative.

It sounds like Andy has set you up with a rather daunting task.
I’ve also had quite a task recently, but it couldn’t be more different from yours (although they both seem to be at about the same altitude).

Now to go off topic. I’ve recently been studying the pleasure principle, and it’s more recent iterations in psychology. As you may know, it posits that humans, however “superior” we’ve regularly asserted our existence to be, are driven by the same fundamental needs that all other life forms are. Like many of the life forms in question (those possessing relatively complex brains, that is; mammals and reptiles, mostly), humans are driven by reward. Whether it be cuddling with a mate, seeking out beauty in nature, or strengthening social bonds, we are pleasure seekers, through and through http://www.theguardian.com/science/2004/dec/16/research.science

But it doesn’t just stop there, IMO. I believe that humans pursue happiness (and there is a BIG difference between pleasure and happiness, as I’m sure you know) just as much if not MORE than immediate gratification. I believe that many of the decisions we make daily come down to a simple question (often posed subconsciously): will the end of my current efforts bring about positive mental states? Will said PMS stand the test of time?

Now, to my inevitable question: if you grant that at least much of what I’ve said is true, how would this inherent pleasure/happiness driven mentality square with your current understanding of God/the bible? If you don’t have a complete answer right off the bat, no worries. 🙂

As Hume taught us, we do not derive our metaphysics of causation from empirical observation. We presuppose it. And we can presuppose incorrectly. Whether thinking that divine action does happen is ‘incorrect’ or thinking that divine action doesn’t happen is ‘incorrect’, seems to be a philosophical choice and not a scientific one. It is not clear that Andy recognizes this….

Two questions that I would really like to see you answer:
1. When Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead – why didn´t the narrative continue with a huge debate about the metaphysics of causation?
2. You seem to think that presuppositions about the metaphysics of causation are what matters here – so which presupposition about the metaphysics of causation do I have to make in order to see Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead and say “meh, just a guy raising another guy from the dead – nothing to see, move along folks”?

1. “Because they presumed a metaphysics of causation which is not the same as the metaphysics of causation” – what is the difference and how is that difference in any way whatsoever relevant for Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead?

2a. You didn´t answer my question at all. Let me rephrase it: which presupposition about about the metaphysics of causation would I have to make in order to conclude that Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead was not an instance of a personal God (or a person with God-like powers) acting in the world? And if you cannot answer that – how exactly is the “metaphysics of causation” topic then relevant at all here?

2b. Mt 24:23-25 is quite frankly one of the most ludicrous claims I have ever seen any religion make (even if we include Scientology). It boils down to “This guy was not just a man, he was the human incarnation of God allmighty! And he proved it by doing x – it says so right here in this book, so it must be true. Oh btw, should you ever actually see for yourself how anyone does x – don´t fall for it.” And again, I find it hard to believe that you yourself actually take Mt 24:23-25 seriousy. I already asked you before why Jesus performed all those miracles then in the first place – and whatever your answer to that is, how the hell that answer applies to Jesus, but not to someone else doing exactly what Jesus did according to the Gospels. You didn´t answer.

No offense to Andy, but he seems all too certain that his preconceived notions of what constitutes causation are valid. I’m far from certain that we humans have any clear understanding of causation, much less the sort he seems to think that we have, such that he believes it discredits LFW.

To be fair: (i) this is most people; (ii) LFW still seems awfully contradictory. The thing is, as I’ve said multiple times before, it seems that ¬(CFW ? DW) ? LFW. I’m actually more interested in examining the category ¬(CFW ? DW), which I probably badly called ‘LFWish’ for a while. It seems required for common intuitions of responsibility, both for doing evil and for performing meritorious good. At some point, I will find someone who wants to work through Bruce Waller’s Against Moral Responsibility with me. 🙂

I would like to think that I fit neatly into the latter group, but this year I kinda dabbled in the worst drug known to mankind…and that, my friend, was incredibly selfish.

Doh! One thing I’ve observed is that it’s easier to be other-centered around folks who are other-centered. Otherwise, you can get your energy drained right out of you by selfish bastards, with no ‘safe’ zone. Such draining can lead to all sorts of nasty attempts to escape.

Let me ask another question, then (aren’t I the inquisitive little kitten today): do you believe that alleged instances of altruism might well be selfishly motivated?

Sure. My general principle is: “Everything can be perverted.” The Pharisees as portrayed by the NT were the proverbial masters at this. I was helping kids at Sunday School the other weak, and the lesson was Saul’s conversion to Paul. The teacher made clear that Saul was very good at following the rules, even though he was a horrible specimen. I asked the kids if they knew kids who were really good at following the rules, but were still mean. They pretty quickly said “yes”. (I think they understood what they were agreeing to.) We agreed that following the rules aren’t enough for you to actually be good to other people.

If you hearken back to my comments about “gaming the system”, and how humans seem to be able to subvert any system of rules with which they are presented, you can perhaps how this necessarily leads to my “Sure.” 🙂

The root problem is Kant’s Ding an sich: the true reality, the true ontology, is unknowable by us finite beings. We can make really good guesses, but we can still be fooled by appearances. What we can do is continually dig more and more deeply, heading toward Kant’s Ding an sich, or as I sometimes say it, dredging up more and more basic beliefs from our unarticulated background. But at every stage, it could be that the layer beneath the one we’ve identified is completely different (e.g., evil, or self-centered) from what we thought it was—qualitatively different.

I’ve missed you!

(i) Very true. It can be easy to forget just how often we behave like this (I’ve blindly marched forward into many discussions in the past assuming that I was somehow an exception to this, laughably!). (ii) It really, really does. I wish it wasn’t so. I don’t believe that one needs LFW in order to have done otherwise, though.

(i) One can turn this tendency into an opportunity for fun. All it requires is humility and willingness to look at things from others’ points of view. Sadly, this is very lacking in my experience. (ii) I suggest being a bit careful here; you might only need to have something that is ¬(CFW ? DW). You might be interested to know that Galileo did his proto-inertia experiments by finding a loophole in Aristotle’s “fire goes up, earth goes down” metaphysics: what about tangential motion? The Scholastics also liked to look for such logical loopholes, as is documented by Amos Funkenstein in Theology and the Scientific Imagination from the Middle Ages to the Seventeenth Century.

But then, I’ve never really had a concrete, “Normal center” to begin with, and have been exposed to far too many disparate conceptions of it to grant that it even exists.

Tell me about it. I’ve always been the outsider, and continue to be, everywhere I go. One consequence of this is an incredible amount of self-doubt, something that most people get to avoid by being part of a social group which accepts them implicitly. When pretty much everyone else is saying, “You’re wrong! You’re messed up!”, it’s tempting to believe it. But sometimes the many are wrong and the few are right. Sometimes. I find you have to work ridiculously hard to (a) figure out which are the ‘sometimes’; (b) demonstrate that you are right and all of them are wrong. Fortunately, such tremendous work can also have great rewards. 😀

Yep. It’s strange, but since that example (gaming any system), I’ve found that I’m much more capable of actively changing myself (largely for the better). My rejection of Hard Determinism (which I owe to you, mostly) has began to cultivate more confidence that I can achieve MUCH more than I’d ever envisioned for myself. It’s funny, too, because I always found gaming the system to be a fantastic contention to determinism of the will, but would never have admitted as much to you.

I am honored, and highly amused that an intensely philosophical discussion had such an impact on how you experience life. I cannot think of anyone else who has been so heavily impacted by a pretty narrow philosophical issue! In this vein, you might like Chimamanda Ngozi’s TED talk The danger of a single story. I think a powerful way to game the system is via story. It is as if you can tell two different stories, each equally plausible, and that it is this which allows one to pick between them, perhaps via the ‘dual rationality’ of Robert Kane, as reported by Richard Double:

    Finally, consider the libertarian notion of dual rationality, a requirement whose importance to the libertarian I did not appreciate until I read Robert Kane’s Free Will and Values. As with dual control, the libertarian needs to claim that when agents make free choices, it would have been rational (reasonable, sensible) for them to have made a contradictory choice (e.g. chosen not A rather than A) under precisely the conditions that actually obtain. Otherwise, categorical freedom simply gives us the freedom to choose irrationally had we chosen otherwise, a less-than-entirely desirable state. Kane (1985) spends a great deal of effort in trying to show how libertarian choices can be dually rational, and I examine his efforts in Chapter 8. (The Non-Reality of Free Will, 16)

Story is absolutely critical for understanding how people navigate life; to see a poignant statement of this, read the 3-page preface of Donald E. Polkinghorne’s Narrative Knowing and the Human Sciences. Academic psychologists thought you could understand people solely “by the numbers” (perhaps after the pattern of BF Skinner’s behaviorism); Polkinghorne found this was ridiculous in his clinical work. Being a dual academician–clinician, he saw the disconnect, the stupidity that is thinking that stories are somehow ‘irrelevant’. No, I think they are critical to “gaming the system”.

P.S. While you aren’t a Christian, you might like George Herbert’s A Dialogue–Anthem, or at least see how it slots into this conversation. 🙂

I kinda like that…the idea that there’s so much to existence we can’t even begin to grasp.

Note that we can always grasp more, and more, and more of it. Indeed, such grasping can be enormously enjoyable. One might even say that doing so is to know God, via his handiwork. But perhaps that is a bridge too far for you, hehe. BTW, Robert Nozick explores this general idea more formally and thoroughly, in his Invariances.

(i) Oh yeah, couldn’t agree more. Sometimes I wonder why it’s so fucking hard for so many people to, in earnest, to put themselves in someone elses mind and at least attempt to glean how they feel, or how they tick.

My guess is that they haven’t had the opportunity to practice in a safe way, and/or that they’ve never suffered enough due to others failing to do this to them, and seeing how much that sucks. Or maybe this has happened, and they don’t know there is another way. There are lots of reasons why which don’t demonize the other person—not saying you are doing this—but it is easy to demonize when one cannot figure them out. I lived a lot of life with nobody empathizing with me, so I did figure out some of the mechanics. To a great extent, those who are ‘outsiders’ to the majority, for whatever reason, tend to get screwed over in the empathy department. And then you have idiots like John Loftus posting The Basis for Morality is Empathy, which wouldn’t be so hilarious and ironic if he didn’t suck at showing empathy to people sufficiently dissimilar to him. Tellingly, nobody responded to this comment of mine, there.

On the other hand, those who cannot empathize this way are kind of like little kids, who when they skin their knees, cry and scream for minutes on end. You expect this behavior out of little kids, but not full-grown adults. So on the other hand I allow that some folks just haven’t had the opportunity to develop non-babby empathy; on the one hand, I had a hard life in my way and they really should stop bitching and moaning when they finally have to develop a part of them which was allowed to stay gimpy for a long time. You see similar annoyance with “refusal to grow up” in Heb 5:11–6:3.

(ii) It is very, VERY unsure ground to be sure. I’. honestly getting tired of attempting to strike up a dialogue with a determinist, only to be shot down (often over definitions), called an idiot, and intellectually spat upon simply because I’m not thinking about the issues at hand the way they’d like me too (the way THEY do….).

You might like this: Whenever someone judges your character—whether moral or intellectual—someone’s character is being judged. Put that in your pipe and smoke it. 🙂 I’ve pissed Andy off by applying this reasoning…

The mindset (which, btw, I’m not arguing is *exclusively* religious; found many atheists who treat me like dirt, too!) was basically, if you aren’t *this* kind of Mormon, you’re a failed experiment that needs to be ended.

Ain’t it lovely, being treated this way? It just gets the warm & fuzzies going on full blast.

It most certainly did. One day I started putting it to the test. I was on my way back from work, and had planned on getting a pint of vodka at a nearby gas station. Like EVERY night. Same exact urge that I’d given into countless times overcame me. I parked outside of the station, reached to turn my car off, then paused. “Why do I have to keep giving in?” I thought for a moment, then recalled what you had said about gaming the system, as well as my own inquiries into it, and said “No.”. I drove off, feeling a tad…relieved, and went back home.

That’s fucking awesome. It reminds me of David Foster Wallace’s “This is Water” commencement speech.[1] I highly suggest the audio version over the transcript.

Have you any interesting insights to share? That is, have you realized something that blew your mind, and wished that you could bring it up without being Andy’d?

Actually, I just did that, with language: part 1, part 2, with the [good] response (first paragraph is my asking the other person to reciprocate):

Sample1: I think that’s quite possibly the most interesting question I’ve had put to me for months. […]

And thanks for your post overall. Lots to think about. I hope I can offer something in return but for now I’m content on being a parasite. Lovely image, no?

I’ve been absolutely fascinated by language recently, and Sample1 created an environment where I could talk about it without having everything so formally correct and rock-solid that it could go in a Nature article and get a Faculty of 1000 recommendation out of it. This might be hyperbole, but Andy seems to require that kind of development of an idea for it to pass his muster. BTW, my wife did get an F1000 nomination for the central paper which came out of her PhD work. 😀

Oh, and for something crazy. Sometimes I try interpreting Andy’s words as a kind of pissy angel who was given license to teach me things, but to majorly fuck with me in the process. It’s a way to take what he says seriously, and try to learn from it, but to also be annoyed that it’s so circuitous and barbed when surely there are better ways to dialogue and learn. But hey, I know I do things that piss off Andy to no end. Such is life, I guess.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8CrOL-ydFMI

You didn´t piss me off, you amused me by trying to make this point in a way that was incredibly pretentious and also flat out wrong (on more than one level).

Ok. It certainly seemed like you were pissed off—in the same way that Ravi Zacharias seemed to be making a certain claim with “visiting scholar at Cambridge University”—but I’ll take your word for your alternative interpretation.

An idea doesn´t have to be either a) “rock-solid” or b) “maximally vague, 100% ad hoc, thoroughly useless as an explanation for anything and having zero predictive power”. There are actually many, many, many shades of grey in between those extreme.

Yes, and it is my experience that you’re quite terrible at dealing with many of those shades of grey. One piece of evidence is that I’m able to talk about grey things with a tenured Caltech faculty member which you would barf at. Now you can dismiss that evidence as mutual sophistry, but I’m going to trust his point of view and judgment of what is “remarkably terrible”, over you.

Why do you even respond to stuff I say if you think it is “remarkably terrible”? You’ve already characterized me this way:

AS: I don´t give a fuck what your diseased mind makes of this. It is evidently impossible to reason with you anyway.

According to the picture you have drawn, you’re basically going into an insane asylum and trying to strike up conversations with inmates.

You do know that you don´t have to communicate literally every thought that enters your conscious mind, no matter how random and off-topic it is, do you?

It is my experience that some people on the internet insist that words must mean what they intended, when that intention is at great variance with how a significant number of people would interpret those words. I expected this behavior from you, in particular. And so, I used the Ravi Zacharias example to preemptively counter it.

No examples given of course.

Would it help if I provided them? I don’t even see why it is worth either of our time, given:

LB: Why do you even respond to stuff I say if you think it is “remarkably terrible”? You’ve already characterized me this way:

AS: I don´t give a fuck what your diseased mind makes of this. It is evidently impossible to reason with you anyway.

How about you actually answer my question? I recall asking it multiple times before. Why do you continually respond to me if you think I am so unreasonable, if not outright mad? Do you actually mean to say that only in certain restricted domains, do I have a “diseased mind”? That’s really not clear; a great deal of your responses to me can be characterized as “It is evidently impossible to reason with you anyway.” Is this estimate of “a great deal” incorrect? I do not mean to exaggerate with it.

You told a Caltech faculty member your omni-hidden-demon-quantum-wizards idea and his response was along the line of “How fascinating! Tell me more.”?

No, but I’m pretty sure I’ve talked about other things with him which fall under your “ideas that are extremely terrible” rubric.

You wanted to “preemptively counter” something you expected me to say about the “intended meaning” of… something… and Ravi Zacharias also got something to do with it. Are you high?

Sigh. See:

LB: You might like this: Whenever someone judges your character—whether moral or intellectual—someone’s character is being judged. Put that in your pipe and smoke it. 🙂 I’ve pissed Andy off by applying this reasoning…

AS: You didn´t piss me off, you amused me by trying to make this point in a way that was incredibly pretentious and also flat out wrong (on more than one level).

Ok. It certainly seemed like you were pissed off—in the same way that Ravi Zacharias seemed to be making a certain claim with “visiting scholar at Cambridge University”—but I’ll take your word for your alternative interpretation.

My point was to legitimate my impression that “I’ve pissed Andy off”, because you seem to have a habit of belittling my interpretations of what you say. And so, I meant to say that given established social protocols, it was reasonable for me to infer “I’ve pissed Andy off”. Now, there is the problem that there is probably a pretty big social divide between us. For example, this might still be true, although it is from 1965:

[…] if we ask around the world a question such as this: “Do you think on the whole it is wise to trust people?” one finds that people in the educated strata of America will answer the question, “Yes” in the overwhelming number of cases. Yet, in a country otherwise so similar to our own such as West Germany, people will answer, “No,” and they will answer “No,” in most of the peasant societies in the world. (David Riesman’s Unpublished Writings and Continuing Legacy)

I recall you mentioning that you’d much prefer trusting the State to take care of you than society in a previous discussion; this helps explicate why we might differ. I also recall getting the impression that you thought I was dumb to take the position I took, while the above provides reason for why we were perhaps both thinking reasonably, given our respective cultural milieus.

I belabor this point, because I’m tired of you portraying me as an idiot. It is tiring because it means you will expend less effort to try to make sense of what I’ve said—to interpret charitably—and if you’re not going to expend some minimum amount of effort, I’ll stop conversing with you.

If those “other things” are indeed as terrible as your omni-hidden-demon-quantum-wizards idea, then yes. I´ll also note that you have no actual examples then.

Not that I’m going to present to you; you’ve given me no reason to trust you. I honestly don’t care what you believe on this matter; I will prefer the judgment of a tenured Caltech faculty member who is a legend in his field and increasingly known in others, over a random person on the internet.

If I would have to make a guess, then I´d say that me saying something along the line of “It is evidently impossible to reason with you anyway” occurs in about one out of 25 of the comments I addressed to you – so if 4% counts as a “great deal”, then I´d say that your estimate is correct.

Interesting; I will have to keep this estimate in mind, going forward. Are you interested in stating why you interact with me at all, given how frequently you only have negative things to say about my comments?

It is still a complete mystery to me what any of this has to do with a seemingly completely random anecdote about Ravi Zacharias.

He violated a standard linguistic-cultural protocol, and then attempted to say that actually, he meant some very nonstandard interpretation that, while allowed by the rules of the English language, was nevertheless not what most folks would think. The trick is, he didn’t get to pick the linguistic-cultural protocol. That was chosen for him. He chose to use it deceptively.

When it comes to what makes it seem like you’ve pissed me off, again that is communicated via a standard linguistic-cultural protocol, which neither of us gets to choose. There is the added complication that we come from somewhat different cultures, and thus will have somewhat different protocols. What annoys me is when you act as if your protocol is clearly right, and mine is clearly wrong. It’s just grating and obnoxious.

I very much doubt that it was ever true – this doesn´t sound plausible and unless you can produce the actual polls that show such results, I´m not buying it.

Whelp, all I have is that quotation right now. Given that it’s not a huge point in the discussion, I will abandon it.

3. I explained to you that poor people are very likely to have poor friends and poor family members because social classes don´t mix easily and class mobility is extremely low in most countries.

I don’t remember #3. Without it, your point wouldn’t make any sense [to me]; with it, it makes total sense. Indeed, I live in a country where class mobility was pretty decent for a while (it is getting iffier: Robert D. Putnam’s Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis), and is generally still believed to be good. And yet, because you have stamped me with your culture, you can say things like this:

I didn´t say or imply that you are dumb, I said that you are privileged and blissfully unaware of the life realities of poor people […]

It is frustrating when you don’t notice how your context and mine are different, and how that matters to our discussions. It is downright tedious for you to constantly see your position as clearly being the right one, and mine clearly being the wrong one. But perhaps this is just the way folks interact in your culture? I know it does in pockets in the US; academic physics would be an example.

Oh, fuck that noise – if you want to accuse me of being deceptive, try dealing with what I said instead of linking to some utterly random story that has nothing to do with me.

I neither accused you of being deceptive nor implied that you were deceptive.

And that shows that having rich friends and family that could easily support you when you are temporarily unable to provide for yourself, is something you take for granted […]

False.

Yeah, I´m the one being obnoxious here, right – keep telling yourself that.

I know you see me as obnoxious. It just seems to me that you think about 95% of the obnoxious is on my side. That is, well obnoxious. 🙂

So… your link to Ravi Zacharias has nothing to do with me directly, and it also doesn´t have anything to do with me indirectly because you are not accusing me of the behaviour that Zacharias engaged in, and it also wasn´t just a brainfart. Why don´t you write yet another essay about what your link was not supposed to mean?

Because my sense was this—

LB: You might like this: Whenever someone judges your character—whether moral or intellectual—someone‘s character is being judged. Put that in your pipe and smoke it. 🙂 I’ve pissed Andy off by applying this reasoning…

AS: You didn´t piss me off, you amused me by trying to make this point in a way that was incredibly pretentious and also flat out wrong (on more than one level).

—implied that I’m a fucking retard for seeing ‘pissed… off’ instead of ‘amused’. Why would I infer such a thing? Well, because you so frequently write as if you think I’m a fucking retard. Indeed, I would estimate that 95% of what you’ve written to me can be well-modeled as you thinking I’m just terribly wrong in just about everything I’ve said.

Then you would not have been baffled that someone would need to beg random strangers for money in a time of crisis […]

Your logic does not follow.

I´d be curious if there is anyone on this planet except for you who doesn´t see this:”It is downright tedious for you to constantly see your position as clearly being the right one, and mine clearly being the wrong one. But perhaps this is just the way folks interact in your culture?”- as incredibly obnoxious.

Oh, I’m sure there are plenty of single little instances you can pick out, which portray me as “incredibly obnoxious”. What you do, though, is act as if those well-characterize me. You’ve never really given me any reason to think that you think of me differently. Indeed, I don’t think I’ve ever gotten a straight, comprehensive answer from you to the question: “Andy, why do you reply to my comments?” And so, I’m left guessing. One guess, given some of the other Christians I’ve seen you respond to, is that you think I’m an idiot just like them, and enjoy pushing back wrong on the internet. You’ve never, ever given me reason to consider an alternative as a better model of your behavior.

Why do I care? Because interpreting what someone says through an “idiot filter”, if not an “evil filter”, makes life very tedious for the person so-interpreted.

That´s a pretty obvious non sequitur […]

You see what I said that way. I see what you said that way as well:

That can´t be what you mean (I certainly hope it isn´t what you mean) – but that´s the only way I can parse this sentence.

Funny thing is, when I do the bad thing, it’s “a pretty obvious non sequitur”, while when you do the bad thing, it’s simply “the only way [you] can parse this sentence”. The asymmetry is glorious.

[…] that wouldn´t magically turn everything I say to you into something that implies that you are a fucking retard.

That’s meta-strawmanning: I never characterized you as doing this thing. Here’s what I did say:

LB: Well, because you so frequently write as if you think I’m a fucking retard.

Ahh. “so frequently” ? “everything“. Exaggerating again? Perhaps to make me look stupid? Oh the irony.

Feel free to point out how exactly this is illogical instead of merely asserting it.

Ahh, here’s the actual error:

AS: Then you would not have been baffled that someone would need to beg random strangers for money in a time of crisis […]

I was never “baffled”. Your further logic helped me identify the error earlier on, so thank you for that.

So you think all the other Christians I´ve talked to are idiots […]

More meta-strawmanning. Here’s what I actually said:

LB: One guess, given some of the other Christians I’ve seen you respond to, is that you think I’m an idiot just like them […]

“some” ? “all”

That can´t be what you mean (I certainly hope it isn´t what you mean) – but that´s the only way I can parse this sentence.

I suggest you stop exaggerating what I say. To summarize the two exaggerations in just one comment:

     1. “so frequently” ? “everything”
     2. “some” ? “all”

More and more, I am seeing why you think that as much of what I write is stupid, as you think (whether 4%, or more). It is not actually what I write, it is your exaggerated interpretation of what I write. Mt 7:1–5 FTW!

I actually think I’ve been perfectly clear about what I mean. But that’s what I think; I can see that there could be some confusion. But when you use extreme language such as:

AS: I still have absolutely no idea what you mean.

, I groan inside because it means I would have to do a lot of work to figure out what you don’t understand. After all, you used the most extreme phrasing possible: “absolutely no idea”. It’s not that you kinda-sorta understand, that there are three possible interpretations that you’re working on and you can’t pick, or anything like that. No, according to you, zero effective communication happened. Well, if I failed so miserably to communicate (Unknowable and Incommunicable, anyone?), I think I will just give up.

Really, it’s just the majority of the instances I have observed, which is surely a subset of the interactions Andy has with other Christians. He keeps his Disqus message history private, so it’s hard to extrapolate from my happenstance observations of his interactions with other Christians.

What I’m more curious about is why Andy interacts with me. I don’t ever recall him giving a straight answer to that question.

Really, it’s just the majority of the instances I have observed…

You obviously don´t give any examples, probably because it´s not true.

I tend to agree, even though I’ve known a few people who oppose the above in the most fundamental (and impressive) ways, yet continued on their course as if such lucidity wasn’t life changing. Go figure.

There are ways of reducing the amount such people can negatively influence you. 🙂

I do like that, actually. We humans tend to forget that, when we’re cruel and judgemental towards another, we’re essentially being cruel to *ourselves*, in a manner of speaking. Does that make sense, or should I begin unpacking it? Would you like a mint on your pillow, as well?

Heh. I talked to a seemingly crazy multi-religion guru at the local coffee shop, and he talked about how everyone is just a projection of ‘me’, so that helping others is helping ‘me’, and hurting others is hurting ‘me’. I rejected the ontological version of this, but as a model it seems quite good in some domains. Recall Newton’s third law: every action has an equal and opposite reaction. To fire a gun, you experience the recoil. To be a dick to another person means you have to shape yourself into a[n inverse] dick, first. It’s just basic physics.

Oh, yes. The sad part is that I’ve gotten so used to it that my skin is thick. Perhaps more so than it should be. You sort of strike me as being similar, in some regards. If we didn’t manage a lofty defense, we’d have been claimed by now.

Yep. Gotta find ways to tactically and strategically dial it down, but then raise shields again when the asshats arrive. Some of those shields might involve cloaking technology.

Your fascination with language (wait for it…..) fascinates me. Or rather, I too share in said fascination, albeit for different reasons. I’m particularly interested in how immeasurably flexible and varied that it is, and how, precisely, it evolved.

You need to get David Braine’s Language and Human Understanding: The Roots of Creativity in Speech and Thought. And then we can read it together and talk about it—I’ve made it a bit in but not too far. Some excerpts:

    This book has been over twenty-one years in the writing, the fruit of fifty years’ preoccupation with language. For the final result, I have to thank first the chief teachers and authors who led me to realize the necessity of achieving an integration of linguistics, psychology, and philosophy if any amount of the meaning and structure of language was to carry conviction. Secondly, I have to thank those without whose encouragement or practical help the project would have been stillborn. (xiii)

    Elizabeth Anscombe advised me, when I met a good argument in St Thomas, never to acknowledge it, but let the argument be seen to stand on its own feet without authority. Yet it is salutary to see how, although Aquinas’s arguments need to be expanded and refurbished, nonetheless his views—that understanding cannot be the operation of a material organ, that no material system can reflect upon itself, and that, where the most general terms are concerned, intrinsic analogies cannot be captured by definitions, but are not a kind of metaphor—each stands the test of time. As to the foundations of grammar, key seeds are to be found in Plato, Aristotle, and, in the East, Panini. Much new develops in human thought, but, when we have refreshed the old, we find it is surprising how far our forebears have anticipated us. (xv)

    A right account of language is, I believe, the key to a right account of the nature of human understanding and thought, and thereby the key to a right understanding of human nature as a whole. Yet the whole theory of language is in considerable disorder, and my aim must therefore be first to seek to remedy this. This will take me into the heart of current debates in linguistics, philosophy, and psychology, and lead me to undertake an extended study of grammar. The effect will be to show how language exhibits the ultimate freedom of the human intellect and will from conformity with mechanically applicable rules and from limitations set by neurology. The brain plays a key role in the normal functioning of the human mind, but does not determine or shape linguistic understanding and thinking in the medium of words, as this develops through adaptation to and learning within a social external environment of other speakers and hearers, all within a setting of natural things. Such understanding and thinking have to be considered the activities not of brains or minds, but of human beings as such. In effect, the animal becomes intellectual in nature as soon as the brain reaches such malleability in its modes of functioning as to set no restrictions on the animal or person’s intellectual operation, allowing autonomy to the mind’s operation. (1)

Forgive a couple typos, if you will. I wasn’t careful enough in my proof-readage, and I’m too lazy to edit!

“No, I do not rely on any specific notion of how causality works when I
argue that LFW is self-refuting – and the demonstration that LFW is
self-refuting would be valid for every conceivable model of how
causation works.”

Ah, my apologies. I was a tad presumptuous.

As for what you said of LFW, I tend to agree. I’ve never found it particularly coherent/necessary to begin with (necessary for one to have done otherwise in a given situation, at least).

Cheers.

No worries. It is nice to hear from you even if your responses have to be short. 🙂