This is another installment of the series of interviews that I had linked to in a previous thread:

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com...e-us-believers

I don't really like the title of the article itself, which is why I didn't use it. I think the discussion of the role of Pascal's wager towards the end is a different perspective that I've not seen presented around here, but the whole article is worth reading.

As a general comment, I've found many of the interviews in the series to be insightful and interesting.

"“Naïve falsification” is the idea that a theory should be rejected as soon as one of its implications is shown to be false. In fact scientists rightly allow revising a theory to avoid falsifications, but only if the revised theory eventually makes new predictions that might be falsified. What science doesn’t allow is continual revision to avoid any and every refutation. But isn’t that just what religious believers do, resulting in what the 20th-century English philosopher Anthony Flew called religion’s “death by a thousand qualifications”? Is there any evidence that believers would accept as refuting their position?"
My gag reflex was immediately activated after reading this.

Scientists don't revise theories to avoid some falsifications, but then (intentionally) ensure that new forms of falsification are still present. It is inherent to the reality we live in that with every question answered, another hundred questions emerge. It is also inherent that with every theory, there are in-built assumptions - assumptions which provide room for falsifiability. Hell, empiricism itself is built on many assumptions, so if you're using empiricism to reach conclusions about reality, you're already operating under a method that is falsifiable in itself.

Hence why the goal is 'utility/description' rather than 'universal truth' - a distinction religious thinkers often fail to acknowledge. When science says that "light can't travel faster than X" they're not saying that this how reality is but simply that this is the best description we have of the things we've observed so far. For all we know, we may be describing an illusion of macroscopic cause-and-effect phenomena that is in fact not reality itself. It could be that at the quantum level we never discover any cause-and-effect and that this macroscopic view of things is simply an evolved tool in the brains of life on earth: a tool to create meaning out of a system without any.

The above extract to me sounds like philosophers who do philosophy, instead of science, pretending to know about science. The theory of God is not falsifiable because it is outside of our range of observation. This doesn't mean that God doesn't exist, but it also doesn't mean that we should unnecessarily postulate God's existence.

Just so you're clear (because I can't tell), that was the interviewer (who happens to be a philosopher) asking a question, not the philosopher being interviewed answering the question.

The interviewee is not a religious person. I don't know whether the interviewer is religious or not.

Daniel Garber (DG): That objection doesn’t really move me. Pascal’s wager is certainly a cost-benefit argument. But, as I noted earlier, the important thing is what happens afterward. If behaving like a believer transforms you and causes the scales to fall from your eyes, and allows you to appreciate the existence of God in a way that you couldn’t before, when you resisted belief, then why should God complain? In any case, we are not in a very good position to figure out what God might judge on such an issue — if, indeed, there is a God. But what worries me more than what God might think is the possibility that I may corrupt my soul by deceiving myself into believing something, just because I want it to be true. For a philosopher, that’s a kind of damnation in this life.

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Interesting that he uses the word "soul" here. I guess in the religious context he is presenting that is the appropriate word/imagery? But DG is an atheist. And therefore for the last sentence the use of soul seems wrong (he also uses "damnation"). The self-deception he speaks of is something that many do not reflect on enough, in my opinion. It is a powerful influence on our thinking processes.

Not that interesting. He is probably being coy. At worst, he is being poetic and inattentively borrowing from the common lexicon but I don't even think that is the case.

I'm actually sympathetic to Sean Carroll's (a theoretical physicist) suggestion that there is too much focus on the role of falsification in marking out scientific from non-scientific theories. Here is a selection from his short and interesting essay on why we should retire the idea of falsifiability:

The only possible way to live life is by making the most rational decision possible every chance you get. Most people cannot handle the idea that they are going to die, so they try to solve that problem by creating an afterlife. No human mind can really get around the first cause question. If there was a big bang, what was there before the big bang? The human mind demands that there has to be something. But the human mind cannot get there, because you reach an infinite regression, so you have to opt for an eternal universe, or a God, or even a multi-verse. You are still back at square one every time.

Early in human civilization, nobody really knew what the hell was going on. Gods were created to deal with floods, disease, and other unpleasantries. Religion then became a way to control people. Once you hit critical mass, being a caveman hurts the group, and so you need some sort of law enforcement to control behavior. If you can control behavior by telling people they will go to hell if they act outside the norms of the group, then that works, too.

As to the question as to if there is a God. It really doesn't matter, as we would be faced with the same decisions on how best to navigate through this world whether there is a divine being or not. Of course, if there is a God, he is either NOT all powerful, or he is evil, as there is untold suffering that is allowed to go on.

In the long run, we're all dead. However, as Blaise Pascal said:

"After the universe is done crushing him, man is still nobler that which kills him, because he knows that he is dying, and with its victory, the universe knows nothing".

Probably the only question that matters is: "What is true, and what am I going to do about it?". Stray too far away from that and you won't get respect from intelligent people. Of course, it won't matter in the end, so if you want to be irrational, then go for it, but don't teach it to helpless children or try to push it on those who are unlucky in life or less intelligent.

The one thing we can be certain of is the current life we have. It is extremely likely that this is the only life we have, so hundreds of billions of hours have been wasted on something that probably doesn't exist. It could be a trillion hours of human thought on a question that really doesn't matter.

I don't see how this is a rational position to hold given that there exist people who do not make the most rational decision every chance that they get.

The goal has to always be to make the best decision. Now, what constitutes "best", and how you determine that is a different question, but at the end of the day making the best decision is the only game in town. That is why hardcore religious people mainly defer to biology, science, and Doctors when their child gets sick, and those who don't use reasonable care and leave it up to God are punished by most societies, as they should be.

The goal would be to not smoke cigarettes, but lots of people do. There are lots of self-destructive things that each of us do, but that doesn't render making the most rational decision any less desirable.

One of the problems is that early on in human history, certain actions that were considered virtues, are now considered vices in civilized society where the group is better of if there is cooperation. Early on, if you were a strong violent person, you had a better chance of feeding your family than if you were not. Lots of character traits that used to help will now do more damage than help, and that blood runs in all of us.

So, it is basically a collision between caveman like behavior and a more passive behavior. Advance and retreat. Now we channel those impulses to sporting events. A touchdown in the NFL is a huge thing, and there is violence on both sides, one side trying to score, and the other fighting to keep them from scoring.

We are just highly advanced animals. You see it when a child doesn't want to dive head first into a pool when they are very young. In the early days, if you do that you might get a broken neck by diving into a pond or stream filled with rocks. The natural way for a young person to handle a golf club is not the best way. Same type of thing.

It is all a big mystery that nobody will ever have answer for. The answer is basically: "There has never been an answer, there will never be an answer. That's the answer".

Coy is good.

I note you were also coy. And waltzed over the self-deception issue from my post. Coy self-deception?

I was talking recently with a close friend, an atheist, and almost certainly the most rational person I know, and he said that one of the most common unjustified beliefs of atheists is that there is no afterlife, that our life here on earth is all there is. He wasn't claiming that there was an afterlife, but rather that we should adopt an attitude of agnosticism towards this claim, especially since the advent of simulation arguments in physics and philosophy, and that it was perfectly justified to go towards death with a hopeful attitude.

There are over 10k reported Near Death Experiences with many people clinically dying and claiming to retain conscious awareness, an afterlife, meeting with dead relatives/friends, etc. This is a real phenomena that happens to people who are nearing death, clinically dead, in a coma, etc. Most stories have many of the same features and parallel each other in some or many ways. It can't really be ignored or said that all these people are making it up...and these are just the people that are coming forward willing to talk about the experience. The deeper you dig into this phenomena the more you realize there is much much more to reality than any of us actually perceive.

One can hope for whatever one wants, but there is little reason to think this hopeful thing is actually true (ignoring the above post for now). If you wish to refrain from calling the view unfalsifiable, we can certain claim it is not empirical in the sense that Carrol described.

Would your friend say it is unjustified to believe we are not plugged into the matrix or whatever your preferred such thought experiment is?

Refuting religion is fairly impossible. That would be like refuting politics.

However, a lot of direct religious claims have been refuted post-enlightenment. We don't "need" God for what the direct causal chains we observe every day. So there is less and less need for religious explanations of observable phenomena and parallel to this get less religious refutation of empirical observation. For example early biological research on "races" where often questioned by peers because it challenged the idea of some European civilizations being "chosen by God". Things like these are unheard of on an intellectual level today (even though it lives on quite happily elsewhere).

These days intellectual debate on on God is mostly about grander claims of "first causes" and similar definitions that resemble terminology more than entity.

This was not what you said the first time around. Are you abandoning that position?

In other words, "I cannot possibly be wrong." Good job!

It amuses me that you treat your speculations as if they were actually answers by stating them in a confident affirmative, and then you conclude that there aren't answers. Seems rational to me.

Actually, physicists at the University of Washington recently published a paper exploring some empirical results of the simulation hypothesis, so while this is clearly at the very farthest reaches of theoretical physics, I am not sure that it doesn't have empirical implications. Anyway, at the most basic level, we'll be able to test it when we die.

I'm also not really sure what I think of Bostrom's argument, but I don't dismiss it as readily as you do here. That being said, I think the overall point is the more Socratic one: people that confidently assert that there is no afterlife are not justified in doing so. They certainly could be right as there is little evidence for an afterlife, but there is also little evidence against it either.

I think the idea is that our anxiety about death can be placated, at least to a degree, not only by happy fairy tales about heaven, but also by more depressing claims about its finality. So when people think that they are being solid, practical men because they realize that death is the end, they are also telling themselves a story about the end of their life in order to combat our basic state of uncertainty.

Edit: Realized I didn't answer your question: I think the answer is yes.

The "soul" was a philosophical idea before it was adopted by Christianity, and philosophers often still use it in its original philosophical sense of referring to the rational and emotional part of the self. For instance, the ancient Epicureans and Stoics wrote at length about the care of the soul, but yet most of them believed that the soul was material (made up of atoms, or of a physical pneuma, or vital fire).

For instance, in Book Five of Marcus Aurelius' Meditations, he says:

Near Death Experiences (NDE) have long been known to have rather prosaic explanations. An example article from Scientific American is linked below. I recall reading about other hypothesis on NDE back in the 1990's, about oxygen depletion and chemical reactions in the brain producing many of the causes of NDE that are then interpreted by the subjects based on preconceived notions of the afterlife.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/ar...nd-near-death/

Thanks Original Position for the excellent reminder (I'm a little embarrassed having read both Epicurus and Marcus Aurelius more than once). A good thread for RGT would be to trace the origin(s) and various interpretations and evolution of the soul concept through human history. It could prove to be very enlightening.

Here is another good read: On the Nature of Things by Titus Lucretius Carus

http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/785

Sorry, Buddy, but whatever you wrote in your original post was not read by me, I was just trying to help you out with an answer to the big questions in life. I have put in tons of time into all of the big questions, and I have studied the greatest ideas and thoughts in mankind's history in great detail.

So, I figured I would save you the trouble of asking strangers on a message board if there is a God. For the most part when something is not falsifiable, it creates a lot bad ideas.

If my neighbor believes that there is an afterlife for those who are racist and treat minorities poorly, then that is the same type of reasoning that most believers use, because it is based on no evidence at all. Whatever evidence one could claim to have is nonsense, and nobody in world history has offered up any evidence of it being true. That is why when people pray for things, they pray for things that happen anyways. Nobody prays that some soldier grows back limbs that were blown off at war. Biology always wins.

You could say that my neighbor should believe that being racist is correct, and that if he is right, and an afterlife life is granted to racist people, then he wins, and if he is wrong, then he has lost nothing. Of course, that is the loser argument about being a believer that most people make. I assume that you can see its flaws. If your life now is a real thing, then every moment you spend on something that is almost certainly not true is a waste of time. And if there is a God, what are the odds that you happened to pick the right one?

What if there is a God that punishes those who believe things without good evidence, and rewards only those who use reason? In that case I would be the winner, and your will be shipped off to Hell, and that would be a just result, and a perfectly fair one at that.

The next time you see a mentally handicapped person and you get that feeling that it is too bad he/she isn't able to think like the rest of us, I hope you feel guilty about wasting your life. Being born in the most prosperous time in human history, and being protected by the most powerful human system in world history if you were born in the United States, and yet you want to waste that opportunity and think like a loser? Shame on you.

I sure hope you don't want me to explain every big issue that the world has. I can do it for you, but that would require an upfront fee. Take a hike, and take some books with you.

εἴπωμεν πάλιν ὅτι ἡ ψυχὴ τὰ ὄντα πώς ἐστι πάντα -- Aristotle

Let us all bow before the greatest thinker of all of RGT.

Hoc autem est anima, quae quodammodo est Omnia - Aristotle [This, however, is the soul that, in a way, is all things]

To be is other than that which is. - Boethius

Original position: Please excuse my lack of quoting and use of paraphrasing due to my obnoxious ipad.

You once made a thread "weak atheists attack" where you defended strong atheism by listing the problem of evil, lack of evidence, inconsistency with scientific theory, wishful thinking coupled with lack of positive evidence (which I'm not sure why you thought s different from the previous entry on the list). Can we be aafterlifeists on similar grounds? We'll certainly the PoE doesn't apply, both the evidence and wishful thinking does more or less identically, and if we accept the naturalistic theory for how the mind works (where we see, say, cognitive function X impaired when experience brain injury Y) that theory doesn't predict any afterlife and so perhaps your inconsistency with scientific theory point applies here too. Note I'm not trying to imply certain knowledge here in the case that being epistemologically overzealous is the only problem your friend is meaning to identify.

I don't know if I've really used the property of unfalsifiability of a theory to reject it on that alone and tend to agree with Carroll. However, I do think it is a useful property to help us identify a particular category of theories that requires treatment of a different nature.

Consider first the category of constructively silly unfalsifiable theories: Martian teapots, pink unicorns, spaghetti deities. While we can reject these on the fact that they are constructed to be silly, presumably this is not your only objection to these things existing. If not, where is the distinction between these and the not silly unfalsifiable theories like afterlife and simulation and so forth?

For the record I wasn't easily rejecting his theory, I wasn't consciously considering it in any way. The paper does seem to be pushing the empirical property back a layer. It isn't saying the theory is empirical, it is saying we can't know that it is not empirical and that in the future we may develop computers that can detect this thing in the future. This is substantially different from the many worlds example of Carroll which is used to explain empirical data that we have now regarding vacuum energies. Likewise with an afterlife being empirical after we die, which I think is meaningfully different from saying the predictions of string theory are just by pragmatic considerations not possible to us so while we will likely all die before we can test it, it seems substantively different than testing the afterlife where theoretically - not pragmatically - we can't test it until we die.