Trust? No, Verify!

I have not been much in the mood to write recently, but I came across a few things tonight that I thought I might mention.

The Box Turtle Bulletin is a blog I follow that deals primarily with social and political issues related to homosexuality. There have been some noteworthy developments recently, including increasing support for the end of the DADT (Don't Ask, Don't Tell) policy in the military. Also noteworthy are a pair of conferences in Southern California, one held by Exodus International, a Christian organization dedicated to helping people overcome their homosexuality, and another by BeyondExGay.com, an organization dedicated to helping people recover from the "help" they got from organizations like Exodus International. Three former Exodus leaders issued apologies this week for the harm they felt their efforts had caused.

My purpose is not discuss any of that in any detail. Rather, the path that lead to this post began with a short post on Box Turtle Bulletin titled Focus on the Family Predicts the Future that pointed out a brief article on Citizen Link (by Focus on the Family Action) describing the conferences. The Citizen Link article states that about 100 people attended the BeyondExGay.com conference, even though that conference did not start until tonight and no pre-registration numbers are available. It also characterized the BeyondExGay.com conference as a protest, which is contrary to the stated purpose of the conference. Finally, the Citizen Link article concludes with a quote from Randy Thomas, the executive vice president of Exodus, who says, "We are always in ongoing communication with people who disagree with us, people with similar testimonies... We definitely will be in communication with them." Yet it was the BeyondExGay.com founders that extended an invitation to dinner to the leaders of Exodus, an invitation that apparently went unanswered. (And, I note also that the article provides no link or other identifiable information about BeyondExGay.com that would allow readers to find out more about that organization or its conference.)

Now, it is certainly possible that the attendence figures were an honest mistake, and it is certainly possible that there is, has been, and will continue to be dialogue initiated by Exodus International, even if this one particular dinner invitation is not accepted. There is reason to be concerned about the accuracy of the Citizen Link article, the intentions of its author(s) and the claims of Exodus International, but nothing necessarily beyond honest mistakes, incomplete information and heavy spin. This was just the first step on my path.

After I read the brief article on Citizen Link, I glanced at the sidebar to see what other kind of content they have on their website. In the section "Focus on Social Issues", they have a sub-category called "Origins". I had never really thought of Focus on the Family as being much involved in the whole evolution vs creationism thing, though I have heard some minor rumblings recently. So I decided to check out what they had to say.

The first article in the "Features" section is titled Evolutionist Admits False Assertions Against Critic of Darwin's Theories. This article was from Agape Press, "Reliable News from a Christian Source". Since I had just been looking into a case where a Christian source had been making questionable claims, what would I find here? I had not heard anything about this.

Well, it turns out that the article was nearly two years old, and it describes an article written by Eugenie Scott, director of the National Center for Science Education. She had written the article for California Wild, a magazine published by the California Academy of Sciences, describing efforts by a certain Larry Caldwell to introduce anti-evolution, pro-creation materials into a California school district. Larry Caldwell, an attorney and activist in that area, said that many of her claims about him were false and quickly filed a libel lawsuit.

Several of Scott's statements did turn out to be incorrect. That is, while Caldwell was involved in the efforts to introduce the materials into the school district and while he had done some of things that Scott had reported, there were other people involved as well and some of what Scott had attributed to Caldwell was in fact done by others. She issued corrections in the next issue of the magazine. While Scott should have been more careful, there is little reason to believe that she was being purposefully misleading. (The charge of libel would have been very difficult to support.) It is unfortunate that the original article is no longer available on the California Academy of Sciences website, because several writers commenting on the case reported that a number of claims Caldwell made against Scott were factually incorrect; that is, that he made false claims about the content of her article. If true, the irony would be substantial.

The article on Agape Press describing these events is pretty heavily spun. But it includes several statements that are quite humorous to those who have paid attention to the efforts of creationists to promote their ideas: "He [Caldwell] feels even pro-evolution scientists must realize that the integrity of their position is at stake when false allegations and misinformation take the place of fair, rational, and well-informed debate." And, "What Caldwell is hoping, he adds, is that the proponents of Darwin's theories will realize the need to stick to the truth." These statements are humorous because they apply so accurately to creationists. Some of the clearest examples of this can be found in the practice of "quote mining", a technique whereby quotes from scientists are taken out of context (often with critical information elided) so that they appear to cast substantial doubt on evolution. This practice is so common that whole collections of them have been cataloged: the Quote Mine Project contains many examples and references to other similar lists.

Quote mining is not restricted to the anti-evolutionists. Another debate in which this tactic has seen substantial use is the debate over whether the United States was founded on Christian principles (or is a Christian nation, or other similar variations). Just tonight, Hemant Mehta at Friendly Atheist discusses an article written in his local newspaper by a Baptist minister, Vernon Lyons. Lyons' article argues that the United States was and is a Christian nation in some important respects. Hemant is planning to write a rebuttal and asked for suggestions.

Lyons closed his article with a quote from a Supreme Court decision (Church of the Holy Trinity vs. the United States) in 1892:

Our laws and our institutions must necessarily be based upon and embody the teachings of the Redeemer of mankind. It is impossible that it should be otherwise; and in this sense and to this extent our civilization and our institutions are emphatically Christian. This is a religious people. This is historically true. From the discovery of this continent to the present hour, there is a single voice making this affirmation...we find everywhere a clear recognition of the same truth. These, and many other matters which might be noticed, add a volume of unofficial declarations to the mass of organic utterances that this is a Christian nation.

I had not heard of that one before. It does sound fairly compelling, doesn't it? But is it accurate? There are a number of so-called quotes on this subject that are floating around that appear to have been simply made up. And there are those ellipses in the middle of a quote — always a danger sign. A quick visit to Google searching for that last phrase, "mass of organic utterances that this is a Christian nation", gives as the first two hits two articles explaining the background of this quote. While you can get the details there, the most important word in the second part of the quote that is a clue to the original context and intent of the sentence is "unofficial".

Searching for "embody the teachings of the Redeemer of mankind" yields an article about a number of fake and questionable quotes that were published by David Barton, quotes that he has since admitted were fake or at best questionable. The first half of the quote included in Lyons' article is one of the fake quotes. (Barton is associated with WallBuilders, a Christian organization "dedicated to presenting America's forgotten history..." It's pretty easy to forget something that never happened.) While the inaccuracy of the quotes has now been acknowledged, the damage has been done. They have been repeated far and wide, and continue to be repeated long after they should have been discarded.

Now, many people who repeat these quotes believe they are giving accurate information; they are misinformed and sometimes ignorant of important facts, a condition which is an almost inevitable consequence of being human. No doubt I have written something here that, while I believe it to be true, is not. Even in the normal course of honest discourse, people will make mistakes and for this reason alone it is valuable to double-check important claims. But as you will see if you read through the quote mining examples and the fake quotes, these are cases where the only reasonable explanation is deliberate misrepresentation by somebody.

I am in no way claiming that these kinds of examples invalidate everything that is ever said by Christians. That would be absolutely preposterous. Neither am I claiming that atheists never commit these sorts of unintentional errors or deliberate deceptions. What I do want my Christian readers to understand, and to see through some of the examples listed here and in the referenced articles, is that there is an awful lot of Christian writing, especially on the Internet and most especially that which comes from more fundamentalist sources, that either originates or uncritically repeats blatant falsehoods in support of the beliefs of the authors. (The same might be said about various political writers.) Practice skepticism! Check their sources. Google is your friend.

We Are Children

During the past few days, there has been a confluence of events and of thoughts that have provided me some amount of focus for writing. In my last post, nearly two weeks ago, I described some of the questions that I am trying to answer about where to go with my writing here, and some of the thoughts that contributed to this present smidge of inspiration relate to those questions. But in many ways, the subject is much broader, and the route that I will take to describe it is a bit circuitous.

To start, I should back up to, say, junior high or so. I read a fair amount, and it would have been about that time that I started to pick up science fiction by Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein, two of the classic authors of the genre. Naturally I have read far more since then, but I never did get around to reading any novels by Ray Bradbury or Arthur C. Clarke, two of the other most well-known science fiction authors of its early years. (Asimov, Bradbury and Clarke have been called the ABC's of science fiction.) In some ways it was almost embarassing not to have read anything of Bradbury and Clarke other than a few short stories, and that embarassment was most pronounced when, toward the end of April, the local libraries put on a "Big Read", a week focusing on a single book, in this case "Fahrenheit 451" by Ray Bradbury. The final event of the week was a talk by Bradbury's friend and biographer, whose name now escapes me. I went with a friend of mine, but still had not read that book or any other of Bradbury's novels, and according to a show of hands, I think I was one of only two people there in that apparently despicable condition.

So, I picked up a copy of "Fahrenheit 451" and read that a few weeks ago. More recently, I checked out "The Martian Chronicles" from the library, which I finally started to read earlier this week. The library had several copies, but I picked the one that looked the oldest. It was printed in 1958; the book was first published in 1946. In this particular edition, there is a Prefatory Note by a Clifton Fadiman (I have no idea who he is) who describes Bradbury as a moralist, and says of the book that Bradbury "is telling us ... that human beings are still mental and moral children who cannot be trusted with the terrifying toys they have by some tragic accident invented."

I think I read that on Tuesday. On Wednesday, a woman I with whom I work, whose stepson is deployed in Iraq, found out that four men from his unit were killed last week. The total number of US servicemen killed broke 3500, a number dwarfed by the number of Iraqi civilians killed by us or, sometimes after having been tortured, by other Iraqis. Regardless of your views about how this situation came to be or how it might now be addressed, it must be acknowledged that the situation is tragic, and that the tragedy is the result of human action (not natural disaster). Nor should we forget Darfur, or honor killings, or secret prisons. We are not yet a century past the Nazi Holocaust, the rape of Nanking, and genocide in Rwanda, to name just a few of the most obvious horrors.

This week also brought the G8 summit in Europe, where President Bush, on behalf of the United States, again refused to participate in any meaningful commitments to reduce carbon emissions. Representatives of the US automotive industry met with senators, urging them not to raise fuel efficiency standards which are already the worst in the developed world. Even China has higher standards than we do. Michael Griffin, the head of NASA, made waves last week for statements made in an interview with NPR where he expressed doubt about whether we should bother to do anything about global warming, despite the dire projections of his own researchers. But, he later clarified, understanding Earth's climate is not part of NASA's mission. True — they removed the study of Earth itself from NASA's mission just last year. Meanwhile, Greenland's ice continues to melt, apparently faster even than predicted by the climate models so maligned by climate change skeptics. Somebody forgot to tell the coal industry, which is pushing for government subsidies for coal liquefaction plants, a process that might ease the demand for oil, but only by doubling CO₂ emissions.^*

I could go on, of course. In fact, I had originally planned to address just one of the many factors that contributes to problems such as these (and to religious questions), but perhaps later. Instead, let me agree with Jeffrey Spender, a character from "The Martian Chronicles":

We Earth Men have a talent for ruining big, beautiful things.

We are mental and moral children.

^* There is, apparently, more than one way to turn coal to liquid fuel, and not all produce double the carbon emissions. However, the cost of the less damaging processes is prohibitive.

New Directions

As my online dialog with Ernie slowly winds down, I have been taking some time to think about what I want to do with this blog, if anything. When I started twenty months ago, my intended purpose was to explain my decision to leave Christianity. After only a short time, most of my effort was diverted into my discussion with Ernie, and though parts of my original explanatory intent peeked through, for the most part I think my original purpose in blogging was unfulfilled. Somewhat ironically, that was the source of some frustration for Ernie, who stated at various times throughout the discussion that he did not really understand the essence of my objections to Christianity.

So perhaps the time has come to return to my original purpose, now with the benefit of additional time of thought and study. As I look back at my earliest posts, I think perhaps I started too quickly with details, without establishing a framework into which the details could be placed, and without a good plan for how to build from a beginning to an end. Should I be writing down a personal history, a sort of spiritual travelogue that includes some of the personal events that led me to ask questions and search for answers? Or should I seek to present what I feel are the best reasons for disbelief, regardless of the path that brought me here? What forms of Christianity should I address? What goals am I reaching toward, what good would such an explanation (hopefully) produce? Is it even worth my time, given my glacially slow writing pace? Can I sustain the effort long enough to produce a quality result, or will I end up leaving things hanging? (That happened too much with Ernie, for instance.)

I am still trying to work out an approach that I think might work, and I do not know yet what that will look like, or when I might be ready.

Drawing to a Close

This post is part of an ongoing dialog between my friend Ernie and me about the validity of Christian belief.

As we draw our diablogue to a close, it is time for some reflection on where we have been. Coming so closely on the heels of similar reflections that led to a change in format a few weeks ago, some parts of this may be repetitive.

First, some statistics. This dialog started in toward the end of 2005, triggered by a comment Ernie left after my post on Solomon's Temple, followed by what I would consider the first posts that were explicitly intended as part of an ongoing conversation, Testable Propositions and A Post-Modern Faith in Jesus. Since then, I have written 68 posts (plus this one) and Ernie has written 66 (if I counted right). That works out to almost 3/4 MB of text, maybe 100,000 words.

As I look back on some of the earliest posts, I wonder if we really got very far, because some of the same issues we have discussed recently were introduced then. Of course, along the way, we have travelled here and there, discussing hell, epistemology, morality and touches of historical and modern Christianity. Obviously we have not come to any major agreement, but perhaps that is not so surprising.

For my part, despite the lack of resolution, this dialog has been helpful in several ways. It has forced me to consider more carefully my reasoning on various issues, especially regarding those issues that are treated in very different ways by different branches of Christian thought. It has driven me to study philosophical subjects more deeply and particularly develop a deeper understanding of ethics and morality. And I hope (perhaps unreasonably) that I have improved my ability to express myself and to engage in a thoughtful yet perhaps somewhat adversarial discussion.

But do I really understand Ernie any better? I suppose I do, yet what I understand does not move me, intellectually speaking. The primary evidence that seems to be important to Ernie apparently relates to changed lives on both small and large scales. That is, that Christianity has (in his view) produced and continues to produce positive changes that indicate that Christianity must be on to something. My response has been, over and over, that this type of evidence is problematic in several ways: that false beliefs can have (some) benefits, that other belief systems also produce positive changes, that attribution of the large-scale changes to Christianity specifically is difficult, that any weighing of the evidence must also include the evil that can be attributed to Christianity, and that the moral contributions can exist apart from the metaphysical beliefs so that other kinds of evidence must be adduced to support those other claims.

If there have been other lines of evidence offered, I do not recall them now. I think Ernie has made some other types of claims, but (perhaps due to the conversational trajectory) has not defended them. Similarly, I have not addressed or supported all of the issues that lead me to disbelief.

I might summarize my major themes as: the disproportionality of the evidence for Christianity to the consequences for disbelief and sufficiency of non-theistic explanations for the evidence that Ernie claims support Christianity. While I have advanced other lines of evidence external to our dialog, I think most of my half of this conversation has fallen into those two grand themes.

I respect Ernie for his recognition of some of the flaws of modern Christianity and his intention to improve it. There is a great deal of room for improvement in this world, and while may disagree with Ernie on a number of points, I appreciate his willingness to engage for so long in an attempt improve our small part of it.

Thanks, Ernie.

Penultimate Thoughts

This post is part of an ongoing dialog between my friend Ernie and me about the validity of Christian belief, a dialog that is drawing to a close.

I promised to Ernie that I would write up some reflections on how our dialog has proceeded over the past eighteen months. This is not it.

I have wanted to hear from Ernie more details about his views of the Bible. In our last chat, when I asked about this, Ernie compared the Bible to lab notebooks, written by people "performing real experiments on 'moral reality'" who got "the right answer" even if the standards of evidence are below today's standards. He further compared the process by which scripture was copied and transmitted to the peer review and citation processes of modern science. His claim appears to be that we therefore have comparable reasons to trust scripture as we have for trusting the results of modern science.

I do not agree.

First, when Ernie admits that the standards of evidence were below today's standards but yet claims that they got the right answer, on what basis can he say that they got the right answer? Have there been modern experiments performed according to our modern standards of evidence that verify the Bible's answers about questions of moral reality? If these experiments have not been performed, how can Ernie claim that the Bible contains the right answers? As far as I can tell, Ernie seems to be basing this claim on the success of Western civilization, despite the various problems that exist in tracing this success to the moral claims of the Bible. I am not aware of any modern experiments that would allow Ernie to claim that (according to modern standards of evidence) that the Bible contains the correct answers to questions of morality. In fact, the Bible contains moral instructions that have been discarded by modern believers. This is most clear when examining the moral laws of the Old Testament, but I believe is also true of parts of the New Testament (to varying degrees among different groups).

Second, the Bible contains more than just moral instruction. It also makes claims about the existence and nature of God, of Jesus, of heaven and hell, and so on. Does Ernie claim that these were experimentally verified? How could these experiments be reproduced today? If they cannot, the modern standards of evidence cannot be met.

Third, the process by which scripture was transmitted and eventually canonized has only a vague similarity to the peer review process in science today. Ernie says that "People made claims, others wrote them down, still others decided they were worth copying and transmitting, etc." Without knowing the standards by which such decisions were made, this becomes little more than a popularity contest. An important part of the peer review process today is evaluation of a paper against the very standards of evidence that are important to modern science. Without those standards, standards that Ernie admits were lacking for the Bible, the peer review process loses much of its force.

Now, there were some standards that were supposedly used for the eventual canonization of the New Testament: apostolic authorship, correct doctrine and widespread use. As I have written recently, modern scholarship places considerable doubt on the correct assignment of authorship to a large number of New Testament books. The standard of correct doctrine assumes that there is an independent source of correct doctrine to which the books and letters could be compared. What was that source? Is it still available today? Without knowing what this source was, and without having good reasons to trust in its accuracy, the criteria of doctrinal correctness is in great danger of reducing to question begging. Widespread usage is also problematic. Perhaps if we had good reason to believe that widespread usage was indicative of widespread truth-testing, this might hold some weight. But since some popular books were not included on the basis of doctrinal incorrectness, we have good reasons to believe that popularity was not considered to be equivalent to wide-spread truth testing. (Note too that the doctrinal issues involved often revolved around Jesus' divinity and related concepts that are not open to experimental verification.)

The similarity between the development of the Bible and modern scientific progress is terribly shallow. No matter how many smiley-faces Ernie uses while comparing them, the differences that remain are substantial and important.

As our chat progressed, I claimed that Christianity has had trouble converging. Ernie claims that Christianity is converging, but slowly. He gave as an example of "numerous hard-won convergence points that have enormously broad appeal" the 1974 International Congress on World Evangelization that resulted in the Lausanne Covenant. I found this example interesting for several reasons. First, this was a meeting of evangelical Christians, so it already illustrates one of the fracture lines that divides Christians in the world today. Now, Ernie did not claim that this was an example of universal convergence, just "broad appeal", but still this is an important point. The second point of interest is that the Lausanne Covenant affirms "the divine inspiration, truthfulness and authority of both Old and New Testament Scriptures in their entirety as the only written word of God, without error in all that it affirms, and the only infallible rule of faith and practice." As far as I can tell, while this statement may have broad appeal, it contradicts Ernie's own stated views about the nature of the Bible. The Lausanne statement does not describe a lab notebook written by fallible humans; it describes authoritive, inerrant revelation.

Ernie and I also discussed Christianity, atheism and secular humanism and their roles in societies. Here there are a few things that I need to clear up. Ernie said, "So, I get the feeling that you're attacking me from both sides. Either you say it doesn't matter that Christianity works, because its false; or else you say it must not work, since its false." This accusation has some merit and I need to answer. I think Ernie's description is misleading because it is not a question of purely working or purely not working. I have tried to acknowledge that there may be some useful contributions of Christianity (so it "works" to some degree). I have also stated multiple times that false beliefs can have some beneficial effects (so again, it "works" to some degree). But I have further claimed that, because it is false (or contains false elements), it will not work as well as belief systems that exclude the false elements. It is possible that this last statement is actually incorrect. Some people have argued that such false beliefs play important roles in social cohesion. While I have to acknowledge that possibility, I also believe that we have good reasons to search for alternatives that do not involve such false beliefs.

Ernie was correct to point out that, to date, there have been no examples of persistently successful societies that lacked some sort of shared religious tradition. Recent trends in this direction, such as in Europe and Japan, are neither pure examples nor have they demonstrated long-term success. It may also be true that secular humanism by itself will prove insufficient to bind a society together. As I just stated in the last paragraph, it may even be true that certain kinds of false belief are inevitable and/or necessary. That possibility raises some interesting questions about how those who recognize the beliefs as false should proceed. But it does not make the beliefs true. Absent other considerations, I would accept societal success as evidence that the beliefs reflect some sort of truth, if perhaps only indirectly. But when we have other reasons to believe that the beliefs are false, and when we also have reasons to expect the false beliefs to have beneficial effects, societal success simply does not carry sufficient evidentiary weight. I will also point out again that societal success (that is, persistence) does not necessarily imply individual well-being.

I had hoped to draw some parallels between this particular interaction and our larger dialog in order to illustrate what I think were some of our larger issues. At this point, I need to wrap this up, so I will simply take care of that in my coming reflections on our dialog.

Chatalogue: End Game

Ernie and I held our third chat last night, a day earlier than planned due to some scheduling conflicts. I will be preparing some commentary this weekend; for now, here is the transcript:

E: G'day.

A: Howdy

E: Thanks for being flexible.

A: No problem

E: Sounds like Wednesday was better for both of us.

E: So, any thoughts about how you'd like the conversation to go this time?

E: [since you seem less than thrilled by last week's trajectory :-]

E: http://little-endian.blogspot.com/2007/04/remonstration-of-conversational.html

A: Well, I wonder if you understand my concerns about what kind of conclusions we'd be able to reach.

A: And I am also curious about what flaws you feel exist in Alonzo's descriptions of how DU solves various problems of morality

E: I can see it; I'm not sure I "understand" it.

E: That did raise an intriguing possibility.

E: I wonder if this might actually be more "constructive" if we focused on less on trying to construct a common understanding, but actually defend opposing viewpoints.

E: That is, get adversarial (in content and structure, though hopefully not tone!)

A: Interesting. It seems like we just decided to "restart" with less adversiality (is that a word?)

E: Yeah, but every time I try to build something, you seem underwhelmed by the result.

A: That's true.

E: Plus, it seems like you're more interested in the "adversarial" results (or lack thereof) than in anything mutual we've come up with.

E: So, rather than backing into being adversarial, maybe it would actually be more fun for both of us to tackle it (and each other) head on!

A: Well, I thought our first week's chat was helpful, but last week we kind of settled back into the same groove we had already tried to cover earlier.

E: I concede that I easily get stuck in lecture mode.

E: Perhaps debate mode would be more mutual.

A: Maybe.

E: Unless you have a lecture prepared, for the sake of equal time? :-P

A: :-)

E: Do you have any claims you'd like to articulate and/or defend?

A: Grrr... trying again.

E: or even an inquisition you'd like to put me through...

A: Let me back up, and say first, that I am not sure that further discussion on morality seems likely to be that helpful.

A: The reasons I believe (or don't believe) what I do (or don't) are not grounded on what provides a basis for morality, so even if you could show that there were no foundation for morality without a benevelent moral purpose,

A: I am not sure it would matter that much to me. (Not that I believe that is true.)

E: Or, put another way, your commitment to "truth" is actually foundational, not merely instrumental to morality.

E: http://little-endian.blogspot.com/2006/10/reason-morality-and-evolution.html

A: Hmm, I am not sure I would have put it that way. Just stop at "commitment to truth is foundational".

E: Okay, fair enough.

A: Does that make sense?

E: It does, though it somewhat conflicts with an operational/consequential definition of "truth."

A: Why?

E: What is the basis of your commitment to truth? In terms of what do you define truth?

E: My metric has been 'The truth is what works' (even if "what works is not the truth").

A: When you say, "the truth is what works", I would take that to mean that the truth is what lets us make accurate predictions about the world.

E: sure

A: There need be no moral judgement attached to those predictions.

E: Sure.

A: So I still don't see where the conflict is.

E: But, it gets back to what you mean by "truth is foundational".

E: Not a strong conflict, just a request for clarification.

E: Since truth about human beings is difficult to evaluate apart from moral considerations (though not impossible).

A: Why?

E: Well, in my worldview, all human action has a moral dimension.

E: It is related to purpose and happiness, at the very least.

A: So, you assume a moral dimension, so it then becomes difficult to interpret people without it.

E: Right.

E: To me, it would be like trying to interpret subatomic particles while ignoring charge.

A: That kind of seems like question begging.

E: Again, my point was that it is *hard* for me to understand how you define truth.

E: So, how about you show me?

A: The reason that we attribute charge to subatomic particles is that we observe particular kinds of behaviors of those particles.

E: RIght, we interpret their behavior as being due to charges we label as "positive" and "negative."

A: I do think that it is sensible to talk about morality because we can observe various things about how people behave.

E: As I interpret human behavior in terms of positive and negative attributes I label "love" and "hate."

A: Sure. I hope I have communicated that I do actually think that there is a basis for making moral statements.

E: Right.

E: But, getting back to the epistemic question.

E: Our original definition started with assertion that 'truth is good'.

E: http://homepage.mac.com/drernie/iblog/B48962342/C1521058277/E20060225081557/index.html

E: If we don't assume that, we need a slightly different starting point.

A: I still agree with that, but I don't see us making any real progress from that starting point.

E: Fair enough.

E: So, can you propose an alternate starting point?

E: [new link, same article; http://2transform.us/2006/02/26/diablogue-epistemology-of-empirical-essentialism-take-deux/]

A: Well, I am still curious, in a non-adversarial way, in hearing you further explain you views on scripture and why it's "good"

E: I think of Scripture much like I think of Newton's Laws.

E: More precisely, like Millikan's Notebook.

E: http://www1.umn.edu/ships/ethics/millikan.htm

E: The standards of evidence are far below what we'd accept today.

E: But, they got the right answer. :-)

E: Which implies to me that they were in fact performing real experiments on "moral reality", and obtaining useful data.

E: And thus, by incorporating their data into my models I achieve better predictive power than if I ignore or discount that data.

E: Did you drop off?

A: Nope, just listening.

E: [i got a weird message saying you signed on, which is why I asked].

A: Weird.

E: anyway, that's the essence of my argument

A: So, scripture could be reproduced by anyone able to perform the same experiments?

A: (Not in exact detail of course)

E: Sure, to the limits of historical correspondence?

E: .

E: That's what most of the charismatic movement is about, after all. :-)

E: Back to the second goalpost: most of it is due to a small group of old guys from a particular ethnic background wandering in the desert, coming back with paradigm-shattering reports that are difficult to reproduce, but validated by their peers, and prove to have extraordinary explanatory power.

E: Because of that, I tend to believe that their experiences were genuine, and their reports trustworthy -- despite the fact that many counterfeits have presented with similar claims.

E: http://little-endian.blogspot.com/2006/09/found-two-goalposts.html

A: In what ways were the reports validated by their peers?

E: The process of scripture formation was originally organic, and only later hierarchical.

E: People made claims, others wrote them down, still others decided they were worth copying and transmitting, etc.

E: Not entirely unlike our Citation Rank process for scientific papers.

A: Do you have reason to believe those other people actually selected papers for their actual truth value rather than some other characteristic?

E: Do we ever? :-)

E: Peer-review is only as good as the quality of the peers.

A: Yes, but today we know something about the quality of the peers.

E: And the metrics for selection are more complicated than one might think.

E: Only for fields where we're already expects, unfortunately.

A: Then, we have some information, but it is not necessarily that positive.

E: Otherwise, we're simply trusting in the institutions.

E: :-)

E: That's why my espitemic model makes explicit claims about the nature of communities, and relational trust.

A: I think the scientific process is very much one in which arguments from authority are not supposed to be powerful.

E: (which makes it hard to separate from morality :-P )

E: Since when? :-)

E: What that really means is that scientists don't accept arguments from authorities *outside their paradigm*

E: Within a paradigm, we are continually citing authorities.

E: The Particle Data Book, Newton's Laws, the Standard Model, etc.

A: They accept (not always immediately, but eventually) arguments that are consistent with the data.

A: And they are judged by that standard.

E: http://pdg.lbl.gov/2006/html/what_is_pdg.html

E: Again, within a given paradigm.

A: I don't think a similar standard was used for scripture.

E: How can it not be?

E: It was a different paradigm, but obviously people had one.

A: Why should we trust that paradigm?

E: Again, why do we trust any paradigm?

E: More importantly, in which -ways- do we trust the results of those paradigms?

A: We trust science because it works. It has produced results. These results have substantial agreement.

A: There is not a comparable level agreement amongst Christians about doctrine.

E: Can you quantify that statement?

E: Or does it depend entirely on how you define various terms?

A: I think in the entire history of Christianity, there have been and continue to be major disagreements about what it means.

E: As opposed to the history of science? :-)

A: Science converges.

A: Christianity hasn't.

E: Last I checked, the vast majority of Christians still hold to the Nicene Creed.

E: Science tends to discard ideas far faster :-)

E: Believe it or not, Christianity also converges.

E: One fascinating example for me is the charismatic movement.

A: Different pockets converge to different places.

E: Again, how is that different than science?

E: Before the 1960's, the charismatic movement was a fringe Pentecostal set of denominations.

E: In the 1980's, it was enormously controversial.

E: Now, it is more-or-less accepted as normal and healthy by virtually every denomination.

E: There's numerous hard-won convergence points that have enormously broad appeal, e.g. http://www.lausanne.org/Brix?pageID=12891

A: I am not so sure about that, actually. Maybe by some people within every denomination, but not by everybody. It's just another way to split.

E: You miss the point.

E: In the 1980's, there were a huge number of ideologues talking about how charismatic gifts were of the devil, and how anyone who practiced them should be cast out of the church.

E: Now, it is only a handful of relics who would make such claims, and most of those do so quietly -- for they know they'd alienate a bunch of their supporters and colleagues.

E: It is like believing in a Steady State universe -- only those with a huge ego investment in that belief persist in it.

E: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steady_state_theory

E: To be sure, we don't converge on *everything* -- but then again, neither does science.

E: But, the church has in fact converged on a great many things, at least to the "majority extent" -- which is all we get out of science, either. :-)

E: We just have an annoying tendency to amplify our controversies.

E: Still there?

A: Yes and no...

E: I get the impression that you feel any of the "common beliefs" of Christianity (and western culture) are "obvious", so Christians shouldn't get any of the credit for having discovered and converged upon them.

A: Some were also discovered by non-Christians. Some were not discovered by all Christians. Some were wrong. The signal is not strong enough to overcome the disconfirming evidence.

A: (Or, sometimes, significant lack of evidence.)

E: Which brings us back to whether you think the success of Western culture and morality is a notable discovery, on par with Newton's Laws.

A: I don't think it was that concentrated and unique.

E: I've never claimed that Christians had all truth, or were always correct; just that it is the most successful paradigm, among other less succesful ones.

E: Further, need I point out that while Christian societies have had mixed results, atheistic ones have been uniformly disastrous?

A: They have had other problems.

E: Other than moral ones?

A: It may be true that Christianity and other religions play a beneficial role while being false. That's something I'm still chewing on.

E: So, I get the feeling that you're attacking me from both sides.

E: Either you say it doesn't matter that Christianity works, because its false; or else you say it must not work, since its false.

A: It's not just Christianity that works in that sense though.

E: (wait, that came out wrong)

E: What sense must it work? Can you come up with a consistent standard, that you'd be willing to judge atheism against?

A: Atheism entails too little.

A: People with vastly different views can still be atheists.

E: Well, do you have a foundational alternative to Christianity you'd propose building society around instead?

A: Secular humanism

E: Or are you just tearing it down because you think it deserves to die, and you really don't care about the consequences?

E: Secular humanism is almost as vague as atheism.

A: Stalin and Pol Pot, while atheists, were not secular humanists.

E: Okay, sure.

E: But they at least managed to run a country.

E: There is zero evidence that secular humanists can actually manage to maintain social cohesion while being true to their values.

E: At least that I've seen -- I'd be willing to be confronted by facts I've overlooked.

A: How would you describe Japan and Scandinavia? They are among the most "atheistic" countries in existence right now.

E: Huh?

E: Sure, if you consider Confucianism atheism, but that grossly mistates the case.

E: Japan is bound together by far more than secular humanism, as you well know.

E: And Norway is hardly secular in the strict sense, even if people are skeptical or organized religion.

E: http://www.norway.org.uk/facts/religion/general/gereral.htm

E: "Norwegian religious expression is largely private; whereas most individuals state that religion is important to them, this is not generally expressed through active religious participation in organized communities."

E: Besides, you do realize that all secularized societies are slowly committed genetic suicide, right?

A: And the religious societies are doing so much better?

E: Well, yeah.

E: At least by that crude metric, the world population is still increasing.

A: But, is increasing population a good thing at this point?

E: Compared to the alternative?

A: yes

E: Look, any society that fails to have children is eliminating itself from history.

E: I would consider that counter-productive.

E: And, it is in fact creating a huge age crisis in Japan, as I'm sure you've heard.

E: I'm not saying that the excessive breeding of African Muslims is a good thing, but at least you gotta give em credit for trying to stay alive.

E: Well, I do; I'm not sure where your morality fits into this.

E: So, we should wrap up.

A: yep

E: Do you want to take a stab at defining secular humanism for next time, and how it obviates the need for a consensus around my Deistic Hypothesis?

A: I'm not really sure I'm interested in continuing, actually.

E: Sorry to hear that.

E: I apologize if my more adversarial tone today didn't help things.

E: But, perhaps that is wisdom on your part, to recognize the futility of dead-horse beatings.

E: still there?

A: yes

A: I don't think we're going to get anywhere.

E: So, maybe we should simply try to end well.

E: Perhaps we could each write up our reflections on how we thought things went, just to wrap things up.

A: Sure. It might be a couple days, though.

E: No hurry; I'm gone all weekend anyway.

E: Perhaps if we can get our respective Conclusions posted, we can chat about them one last time next Thursday.

A: We can discuss that (privately) after they are posted, I suppose.

E: To be honest, it would be something of a relief to have this over; though, I'll miss being connected to you this tightly.

E: fair enough

A: Thanks, Ernie. I'll be in touch.

E: 'later

A: bye

Remonstration of Conversational Trajectory

This post is part of an ongoing dialog between my friend Ernie and me about the validity of Christian belief.

Ernie,

Regarding:

1. That G/NOD is a singular, well-defined entity covering all of humanity.
2. That the moral rules governing G/NOD are *discovered* more than they are *invented*.
3. That those rules are in principle discoverable by human beings in the right circumstances
4. That there is such a thing as virtuous character, which is always better than vicious character.
5. That it is always rational to do that which is virtuous.

Is it your position that these are true statements that must either be derived or assumed? If not, why are they important?

I disagree that DU must assume all of them. (1) through (3) may be assumptions but they are hardly earth-shattering; only (1) is at all difficult. (4) is derivable. (5) may be false, but I may be misunderstanding. Rationality has to do with using reason. This seems to be saying that, using reason, all people will always find that virtuous actions will best satisfy (the most and strongest of) their own desires. DU does not assume this, entail this, or require this. But maybe I am misunderstanding, since this interpretation requires importing some assumptions that may not be correct.

My larger complaint about this whole approach is that there are multiple tenuous connections chained together in series: the importance of Christianity to Western civilization, the role of ontological and ethical claims in that contribution, the admitted possibility that contra-factual beliefs play an important role in such contributions, the mere consistency of those claims with a barely characterized "benevolent purpose" when the claims do not otherwise require such an additional entity, ...

I spent a couple of hours last night trying to write a response to our chat. During the chat, I wanted to let you continue to see where things were going and we may not have gotten far enough to really see that, but so far, my perspective on this is not really any different from your previous attempts in our diablogue. After a lot of work, we'll have only a very weak, tenuous conclusion.

I'm not sure that's helpful.

I introduced UU and DU as ethical theories that require no external "benevolent purpose" or "deity", no mysterious metaphysical claims, in constrast to your claim that such additional elements were essential. DU particularly relies on only a small number of ontologically basic elements: desires, beliefs, intentions and intentional actions. Their existence does not seem controversial. DU does appear to solve a number of issues that plague other ethical theories. Alonzo recently summarized them in Evaluating Moral Theories. While I agree that there may be practical difficulties at this point that could benefit from further exploration, this is enough to satisfy me (at least for now, knowing what I know) that no additional entities are necessary. Demonstrating that the above statements are consistent with (and even derivable from) the existence of a benevolent purpose is unconvincing when the statements are also consistent with its non-existence (or when the statements are not demonstrably true, as (5)).

Can you offer some reason to expect that the direction we are taking will be more fruitful than what it appears to me?

Alan

Chatalogue: Think Globally, Act Locally?

Ernie and I chatted again tonight. I'll have some more to say later, I hope, but for now I'll just add the transcription:

E: Hello!

A: Hi

A: So, where to start this week?

E: I see you've been doing some homework as well.

A: A bit. The Toynbee book I got was not exactly what I expected.

E: Anyway, i do think you captured the essence of his argument.

E: http://little-endian.blogspot.com/2007/04/civilized-inference.html

A: Was there anything you wanted to say about that, or are we jumping back into the G/NOD thing?

E: I think the key distinction might be what I'm calling "pseudo-factual" statements.

A: Explain?

E: Does that mean that the religious beliefs of the Balinese were true? No, it just means they had evolved successful rules and encoded those rules in religious stories and rituals. The beliefs were false, but they were helpful. On the other hand, while the rules may have been well-adapted to Balinese climate, they may not have worked well elsewhere or during periods of abnormal rainfall or other sus

E: In your example of the Balinese, their beliefs were not entirely "true", but they were "contextually accurate within a given domain."

A: But attempting to extrapolate further from those beliefs would have been difficult, yes?

E: Isn't it always?

E: In my epistemology, *all* knowledge is merely "contextually accurate within a given domain."

E: (some just span bigger domains than others)

A: But you have to be careful of the domain.

E: Sure -- but that is always true, yes?

A: I guess what I see you doing is saying that (for instance) Jesus/the Bible teaches certain things about love. Love seems to be a good thing. So, since Jesus/the Bible was accurate in that one instance, we can trust him/it about other things.

E: No, not at all.

A: So, how do you support the supernatural/theistic aspects of your beliefs?

E: That's too many steps to jump in one leap.

E: Let me start with a simpler set of statements, to see if we can identify where we part company.

E: 1. Successful moral systems must embody some number of valid truths about human nature.

E: 2. The ontological claims of those moral systems may or may not be counterfactual.

E: 3. Medieval Western Christianity (MWC) -- while far from perfect -- has proven to be the most fertile ground for succesful moral innovation of any system yet attempted.

A: How are you determining that?

E: Well, can we go back to the metric of "greatest good for the greatest number?"

E: If you buy Toynbee's characterization of "Western Christendom" as a civilization, it has produced more net happiness than any other civilization to date.

A: See, I don't see how you can make that determination so easily, nor can you easily tie that production to Christianity.

A: It's not that I don't think there is some truth there, but I think there is too much contingency and dynamicism and complexity to make simple attributions like that.

E: Well, here's a simple test.

E: (I have this weird feeling of deja vu -- have we discussed this before?).

E: Compare the "quality of life" of someone in Western Christendom, and its ability to respond to external threats, with that of any other civilization.

A: At what point in time?

E: Pick a time.

A: And how do we know that Christianity itself was responsible for that?

E: The only exception I can think of is the Moorish empire.

E: I didn't say that "Christianity per se" was necessarily responsible.

E: I am saying that a culture which (at least initially) was based on MWC has proved to be extremely succesful.

E: It is a data point, not a proof.

A: OK

E: So, moving on...

E: 4. Many of the ontological and ethical presuppositions of MWC (though far from all) are still a vital part of Contemporary Western Civilization (CWC).

E: go ahead

A: Wasn't sure if you were going on to (5) or not...

E: trying to

E: hard to phrase properly...

E: 5. Any system that presumes to improve on MWC needs to adequately account for those axioms that are in use by CWC, and ideally provide better explanatory and predictive power.

E: there

A: Let me think about that a second...

A: I guess the reason I have trouble with this line of argument is that whatever Christianity (or MWC) got right about ethics, many of its claims about reality go well beyond what are supported by those parts it got right.

E: Maybe, maybe not.

E: The question is, do you concede that your "improvement to Christianity" needs to get right at least as many things that Christianity did?

A: Yes and no.

A: I think the "improvement to Christianity" is wider than ethics. I also think that many of the improvements that MWC has made in the area of ethics have come about in contrast to the established views of Christians.

A: Not sure if that was very clear.

E: Sure, cast the net as wide as you wish.

E: But do you concede that, on the whole, your improvement to Christianity (as we know it) actually needs to be an overall improvement on areas that matter, not just superior in one tiny facet?

A: Yes.

E: Ok, good.

E: We can go back to G/NOD, unless you'd like to tackle something else.

A: That's fine.

E: Okay, well from this perspective I would claim that MWC implicitly made several very powerful assumptions about what we can interpret as G/NOD.

A: Which are?

E: I. That G/NOD is a singular, well-defined entity covering all of humanity.

E: II. That the moral rules governing G/NOD are *discovered* more than they are *invented*.

E: III. That those rules are in principle discoverable by human beings in the right circumstances

E: IV. That there is such a thing as virtuous character, which is always better than vicious character.

E: V. That it is always rational to do that which is virtuous.

E: Of course many of these were also inherited from the Greeks.

E: But MWC managed to develop an ontological scheme that accounted for everything they liked about the Greeks, and quite a bit more.

E: over to you...

A: And does this relate to Christianity specifically in any way?

A: Or theism generally?

E: At this level, not necessarily (except implicitly in III).

E: However, it does relate to my claims regarding the Deistic Hypothesis, and our first goalpost.

A: What part of the ontological scheme requires a deity?

A: Or transcendent morality?

E: Those terms aren't necessarily well-defined.

A: How does this relate to you deistic hypothesis then? Doesn't that imply a deity somewhere?

A: I just don't see where you make the leap.

E: From the MSSB, I define DH as "the various systems encompassing humanity are the result of a benevolent Purpose -- one sympathetic to human Reason, Virtue, and Happiness"

E: I am simply asserting that one can derive all five of those Principles from the DH.

A: I guess it doesn't appear to me that such a Purpose is necessary. Those principles (or similar) can be derived from a G/NOD without reference to external purpose.

E: And that Desire Utilitarianism requires those same assumptions (but ad hoc) "in order to support meaningful “social inquiry.”

E: "

E: No, they can be *asserted* for G/NOD.

E: But not derived in any meaningful sense.

E: still there?

A: Scrolling back up to look at the statements...

A: DU says that desires are real. Individuals have them. They can be aggregated.

A: There are relationships between desires, mediated by actions.

E: Sure.

E: But is there a global solution that maximizes then? Do we have sufficient information to make that determination?

A: There is at least one such solution, right? How can there not be at least one maximum? Unless it goes to positive infinity somewhere...

E: There can be multiple local maxima.

E: It could be flat (zero-sum) with multiple minima.

A: Yes. But at least one and possible multiple global maxima.

A: It's even possible that the maximum is "negative", I suppose, but it's still a maximum.

E: Well, okay. But is it reachable?

A: How is that relevant here?

E: More importantly, is virtuous behavior due to virtuous desire the optimal means to get closer to that maxima?

E: In order for DU to be actionable, it seems necessary to answer questions like that.

A: Virtuous behavior is behavior that promotes desires, so by definition, virtuous behavior move close to at least a local maxima.

A: "closer", not "close"

E: Right, but what if that local maxima takes one away from the global maxima?

A: Again, how is this relevant here? Yes, it seems possible.

E: My point is that if "morally good" is defined relative to G/NOD -- and that's what we care about -- then mere local statements and decisions about what is "functionally good" don't tell us anything about genuine morality.

E: We need some additional assumptions about how maximizing the local Network of Desires (L/NOD) impacts the G/NOD.

E: I'm trying to decide whether DU (as you understand it) implicitly makes those assumptions, or denies their relevance.

A: Ooh, I think we are talking about different sense of the word "global".

A: I am imagining a multi-dimensional landscape where the "altitude" at any point is the total amount of desire fulfillment.

E: okay...

A: A local maxima does not refer to maximizing desires locally (socially speaking) but maximizing desires in the neighborhood of the current position on the landscape.

A: So, the dimensions correspond to the strenghts of various desires.

E: I'm not sure I see the difference.

A: Well, what do you mean by the L/NOD?

E: At any rate, if we don't have a unimodal landscape, it seems you have the same issues.

E: L/NOD = the local set of entities and their desires

A: Local geographically (as in social connections)?

E: hold on

E: okay, I'm back.

A: Let's say there are only two desires that people have, A and B. So there is a two dimensional landscape (with hills).

E: Let us assume that -- at least in principle -- I can observe the entities that I have personal awareness of, and make a plausible assessment of their desires.

E: (which itself is a big assumption, but I can live with it).

A: The hills are the total amount of desire fulfillment in the entire population when that population has desires a in domain and b in domain

E: [feel free to continue your example while I work on mine]

A: Ooops. that was domain ( A ) and domain ( B ) that cleverly got converted to pictures...

E: I was wondering... Beer and angels made a nice contrast

A: So, there may be a local maximum of total desire fullfillment at a=a1 and b=b1 but a global maximum at a=a2 and b=b2. But in both cases, the desire fulfillment of the entire population is being measured.

E: If P is the people whose desires I can observe or infer, then L/NOD is simply D , the aggregate of all their desires.

A: he he

E: D[P]

E: Anyway, I'm concerned with the epistemic problem.

A: How can we find the solution? How do we know when we've found it?

E: Exactly.

E: How indeed?

E: I am asserting that there needs to be some sort of paradigm.

E: And more, that there needs to be a widespread moral consensus about the validity of that paradigm.

A: I don't think I follow.

A: For instance, consider this alternative: each individual promotes in others desires that will tend to satisfy his own desires.

E: Sure.

E: I call that manipulation.

A: At the same time, of course, he is acted on by others in the same way.

A: Do we want to get side-tracked on manipulation?

A: It doesn't have to be dishonest or "tricky".

E: I'm just labeling your definition.

E: Feel free to keep going...

A: Grrr... trying agin.

A: again

A: My point is just that progress can be made by individuals acting as individuals without the widespread consensus you mentioned.

A: It might go faster with consensus, but not necessary.

E: I disagree, at least under the terms you defined above.

E: I would assert that influencing other people's desires requires either a) power, or b) moral authority to succeed.

A: What is moral authority? If not power?

E: And that if influencing you to act according to my desires is not perceived by you as in your best interest, it will interpreted as unhealthy and illegitimate manipulation.

E: If you like you can define moral authority as a form of "soft power" to distinguish it from "hard power."

A: Praising somebody for something they did is a way to manipulate them and others to do similar things again. If the praise is sincere, is it unhealthy?

E: Define "sincere" and "unhealthy".

A: Sincere simply means here that I gave praise because I actually approved of what I am praising.

E: I would define "sincere praise" as "valuing something as truly good", not merely as "beneficial to me."

A: Are you asserting the existence of intrinsic goodness apart from anybody's desires?

E: At least part from the "local" desire, yes.

E: For example...

A: It does not have to be beneficial to me to be praiseworthy.

A: I can praise somebody for helping somebody else, knowing that similar actions could be helpful to me in the future.

E: If a kid in high school who wanted my approval stole the answers to the physics exam, I could easily praise her for her ingenuity and courage.

E: And I would be fully sincere.

E: But it would be manipulative and immoral in the larger scheme, no?

E: Sure, *some* praise is healthy; but that doesn't mean it all is.

A: Oh, definitely.

E: Okay, so let us define 'healthy praise' as this which encourages behavior that tends to maximize the G/NOD, whether or not it maximizes the L/NOD.

A: I'm sorry if I implied that sincerity was the *only* criteria by which the praise should be judged.

E: Or do you have a criteria for "healthy" that doesn't reference the G/NOD?

A: No.

E: So, we're running out of time.

A: I was just going to say...

E: I'm not in a hurry, but we should probably try to wrap up..

A: Yep.

A: I guess we'll leave it there... maybe I'll blog about it before next week.

E: My position is that it is possible to make meaningful statements about how to maximize L/NOD with fairly weak assumptions about reality, but that to make meaningful statements about the G/NOD requires fairly *strong* assumptions about reality (comparable to I-V) above.

E: Is that much at least clear?

A: Clear as lemonade, at least.

E: I'll settle for translucent. Hopefully we can start with that next week, unless we manage to resolve it before then.

A: OK, "talk" to you then.

E: Bye!

A: bye

Civilized Inference

I wanted to write down a few thoughts I had as a bit of follow-up to my first chat with Ernie and as preparation for our next one.

Ernie brought up Arnold Toynbee and his 22 identified civilizations. I have only the most passing familiarity with Toynbee's work. I picked up one of his books about the history of Christianity at the library today, and I've read through a only couple of articles on Wikipedia about him and his work. So I cannot speak in any detail about his ideas, but I would like to address Ernie's reference to his work.

Basically, Ernie's claim was that the success of Christianity in contributing to so-called Western civilization, one of only twenty-two identified successful civilizations (according to Toynbee) is evidence that Christianity is "onto something" and further, that a "truer belief" must be better than the "false belief" it replaces.

There appear to me to be several difficulties with drawing any strong conclusions from these statements. First, most of the other civilizations Toynbee identified were not based on Christianity or even monotheistic belief systems. Some of these other civilizations continue today. Second, that the lists of "aborted" and "arrested" civilizations includes several based on Christianity suggests that Christianity was not sufficient to guarantee success. Both of these difficulties reflect a more generic problem: we are talking about complex systems of complex elements in dynamic environments, and teasing out causes and effects is going to be difficult. As I understand it, Toynbee advocated explanations based on "creative minorities" and challenges that were neither to difficult to overcome nor too simple to allow stagnation. Whether or not that is true (or partly true), the diversity of beliefs represented in these civilizations suggests that the truth content of the beliefs may not be a critical factor.

Can false beliefs be helpful? Yes, I think they can. Beliefs are important contributors to intentions (and therefore to intentional actions). False beliefs can lead to beneficial actions. They have important limitations and potential for other problems, but they can still be helpful.

For example, in Bali there are water temples whose priests control the distribution of water to farmers through a system of offerings to various deities. In the late 1970's or early '80's, this system was disrupted when the government attempted to modernize agriculture with new fertilizers, new pesticides and new types of rice. After a brief increase in productivity, things fell apart. Later computer simulations showed that the water temple system was far more effective than the newer technology in the Bali climate.

Does that mean that the religious beliefs of the Balinese were true? No, it just means they had evolved successful rules and encoded those rules in religious stories and rituals. The beliefs were false, but they were helpful. On the other hand, while the rules may have been well-adapted to Balinese climate, they may not have worked well elsewhere or during periods of abnormal rainfall or other sustained environmental changes. While the technology that was introduced turned out to be a step backwards for them (based on other presumably "scientific" but false beliefs), science still provides a more reliable platform for learning and eventually predicting and controlling the behavior of the ecological system, especially in the face of changing climate.

I came across a similar example a couple of months ago regarding the ecology of Central or South American rain forests, but I cannot find a reference to it now. The basic idea was that the religion of the native people contained beliefs about the kinds of spirits that inhabited different kinds of trees and/or animals with corresponding rules about the circumstances in which the trees could be cut down or the animals killed. Those rules, again encoded in the guise of religious beliefs and rituals, were found to promote the health of the forest ecology.

Because of these and other considerations, I think we have to be pretty cautious about inferring too much about the truth of Christian doctrines based on the continued existence of Western (Christian?) civilization. Even according to Toynbee, that success is partly dependent on historical contingencies in the form of challenges faced (not too strong, not too weak, but just right).

Chatalogue: True Good

Ernie and I have exchanged a few emails in addition to our recent posts, trying to figure out a better way to proceed that is less prone to the difficulties that we seem to have been experiencing. We decided we needed to shorten the feedback loop so that we can clarify things more quickly when something is not making sense to either one of us. On pretty short notice (about three hours) we decided to have weekly IM chats and we just finished the first one. Ernie whipped up a little program to convert the transcripts of these sessions for inclusion on his blog, so you can read our first conversation in Chatalogue: True Good. I think we did pretty well for an hour of typing, even if the transcript is occasionally hard to follow when we were typing simultaneously. Just ignore my typos.

---

Update: I can hardly let Ernie be the only one with a cool translation program to make posting chats easy, so I wrote one too. Here is our first chat, with some typos corrected:

A: I'm here!

E: G'day

E: Did you see my transcribed version?

A: Yes, I did. Nice work.

E: Are you okay with me blogging the transcript like that?

A: We'll see. I guess a chat has a bit different flavor than normal written stuff. It just seems a bit weird to know that everything I am saying is being transcribed for posterity.

A: But, onward!

E: So, shall we start with a bit of meta-discussion, to see if we can get onto the same page?

A: Sure

E: My hope is that, rather than trying to prove each other wrong, we can focus more on trying to build a common understanding.

A: My difficulty is, while I agree in principle, I am not sure what it means to build a common understanding about something that we (may) have fairly fundamental disagreements.

E: Well, ideally we could at least figure out *where* we disagree!

A: I mean, we can agree about things at some meta-level, but I am not sure that will be very satisfying.

E: The funny thing is, we actually seem to agree on the vast majority of facts.

A: Vast majority? Not sure how to count that. Some, many?

E: We both believe in the scientific method, a generally Western set of ethics, a historical critique of the Bible. etc.

E: I have a hard time finding a "point of fact" where we've had serious disagreement.

A: That's still a pretty big tent.

E: From where I sit, it is mostly a matter of "interpretation" and conclusion where our communication breaks down.

E: I also think that, at least in theory, we respect the same rules of logic (even if we sometimes fall short in practice).

A: Sure

E: For example, I presume you agreed with the bulk of logical tools employed by Alonzo in "A Better Place"

A: Yes. Although I had intended to re-read it before we discussed it, and I haven't yet. (Thanks for reminding me.)

E: Of course, that begs the question: if we have so much in common, why do we seem to miss each other's meaning so often?

E: Is it intellectual, emotional, semantic, or purely a communication gap?

A: I am not sure how to classify it. Sometimes it just seems like things that you think are important to critical issues (trilemma, anger, etc.) just don't seem that "helpful" to me.

E: Yeah, I realize that.

E: It is entirely possible that our differences are (at least in part) a matter of priority.

E: I see theism as solving a host of formal and practical problems that you may not consider important and relevant.

A: Hold on a second.

E: ok

A: I get that impression from what you right, but usually it seems to me more like a "if theism were true, it would solve this problem this way", but it doesn't really provide reasons to believe that theism is true.

A: what you *write*, not right

E: Right, which brings us back to the epistemic issues.

A: How is what you are saying not an argument from consequences?

E: It is more an operational definition.

E: I'm still not even sure what you mean by 'true' in this context.

A: I'm speaking a bit loosely, of course. Because we're chatting.

E: Or if you're still thinking of "truth" as a boolean yes/no.

A: vs. a probabalistic sense of truth?

E: Um, not exactly.

E: More like a fuzzy logic sense of truth values.

A: okay

E: The way we can say "Newtonian mechanics is true, but less true than Quantum Mechanics"

A: right

E: From my point of view, Christian theism is a succesful "theory" which explains certain facts very well, but also has many facts which (as currently formulated) it doesn't explain.

A: But from what I have seen, some of the "facts" that you say it explains are not really "facts" at all.

E: Okay, then we get to definition of "facts" :-)

A: For instance, the statement about Christianity being responsible the success of Western civilization.

E: That was a terminology problem, I later realized (after reading another post of yours).

E: I was using Toynbee's classification, and referring to Western Christendom as founded by Charlemagne.

E: My bad -- I should've been more precise.

A: So, Christianity was responsible for Western Christendom? How is that helpful?

E: It is really hard to build a civilization. There's only 22 or so that Toynbee was able to catalogue.

E: There's great diversity, of course, but the "creative minority" who developed those civilization had to find beliefs powerful enough to grow and maintain society.

E: Christianity is hardly unique in this fashion, but it implies they were onto "something."

A: Some people have referred to that sort of thing as "belief in belief".

E: Sure -- but not every belief in belief works.

A: Sure. But the beliefs do not have to be true to work either.

E: Not absolutely true, but at least relatively true.

E: And a "truer belief" must work better than the "false belief" it replaces, no?

A: I've been reading a book by the anthropologist Scott Atran. He goes so far as to say that no society has survived without certain kinds of shared beliefs and rituals, but that they all contain counter-factual, quasi-propositional elements.

E: Sure.

E: So does science.

A: In fact, the "cost" of believing falsehoods is part of what makes them work.

E: Newtonian physics was dead-wrong about action at a distance.

E: Quantum physics has random infinities we just ignore.

E: We know it can't explain gravity.

E: I'm not sure I understand or buy the "cost" part, though...

A: I am not sure I can describe it well enough, quickly enough, but the basic idea is that people tend to trust people who have demonstrated a willingness to participate in expensive behaviors on behalf of their society.

E: Sure.

A: But he develops it much better than that.

A: I have been meaning to blog about it. He has a number of very interesting quotes that relate to various parts of our conversation.

E: Well, then that raises another question: do believe that virtue is rational, and that truth *always* ultimately supports virtue?

E: Like Alonzo tries to prove.

A: I guess I wouldn't word it like that, but yes, more or less.

E: So, I'm confused. Are you saying:

E: a) It is always better to believe the truth.

E: or

E: b) Ethical behavior is contingent on believing a shared group falsehood

A: That's a very interesting question, isn't it?

E: Which is true, or which you're saying? :-)

A: I lean toward ( a ), but I have to admit the possibility that successful societies have been based on ( b ).

A: Note that "successful" is not the same as "ethical"!

E: Isn't it?

E: I thought that this was how Alonzo defined "ethics", and fulfilling societally contructed desires.

E: as fulfilling.

A: A successful society is one that continues. That does not imply that all members of that society have their desires met.

E: Sure, but most definitions of society assume that the individuals see their survival as tied to that of their society.

A: Again, survival is not their only desire.

E: Sure, but in the absence of survival, what other desires can be met?

E: Isn't it at least a prerequisite?

A: It may be the strongest desire, but not the only one. So, yes, it is a prerequisite, but not sufficient.

E: Sure.

E: Let me try to summarize.

E: At least, as best i understand Alonzo.

E: 1) "Good behavior" is that which maximizes desire fulfillment within a society

E: 2) One of the baseline desires of a society is for its own survival

E: 3) Therefore, a set of behaviors "X" that improves a societies chance of survival is, by definition, better than a comparable set "Y" that decreases those chances.

E: Are those all true statements?

A: Sorry... first try didn't work.

A: I think we need to be careful not to conflate the desires of individuals with desires of a "society"

E: Is not a "society" merely the aggregate of its individual desires?

A: If we define it that way, but I think we have to be careful of equivocation.

E: I would love to see a formal definition, as I don't recall one from "A Better Place" (ABP)

A: For instance, when we talk about the survival of a society, are we talking about just the survival of the aggregate of the individuals' desires?

A: When I hear "survival of a society" I think of survival of the various structural elements. Take the example of a country ruled by a despotic line of rulers.

A: The individuals in that country may not be having their desires met, but perhaps the structure persists.

E: That's an excellent point. What exactly does "ethical behavior" mean when the lawgivers are corrupt?

A: That is "surviving" but not ethical.

E: Is murdering the kings tax collectors an ethical behavior?

E: I thought ABP defined ethics relative to the society's institutions and cultural norms.

A: I would say that the society's institutions and cultural norms affect people's desires, so they are reflected in ethics in that sense.

E: I think this is one of those areas where my understanding of Alonzo is murky.

E: Morality is defined relative to a "network of desires", right?

A: Yes.

E: Okay, *which* network? My local community? My society? My progeny?

A: I agree that he is not entirely clear about that.

A: But, I think it is partly the extent to which are actions affect others' desires.

A: What is the "reach" in the network?

E: But, can't one pretty much get almost answer you want simply by choosing the appropriate network?

E: almost any answer

A: As an individual, I am not a member of any possible network.

A: I am a member of a particular network.

A: (with fuzzy boundaries, perhaps)

E: Multiple fuzzy boundaries, with unbounded scope, no?

E: The Carbon you emit could change whether a Chinese power plant gets built, no?

A: Sure. So in that case, the appropriate network is a global one.

E: So, in the general case, is morality defined relative to the global network of all humans who are currently living?

A: Yes.

E: (even if the coupling of certain actions is quite weak)

E: And might live in the future?

E: Or only to the extent some of us alive today happen to care about our progeny?

A: We get into difficulties here because there are practical problems in "evaluating the metric".

E: Um, yeah.

E: That's the problem I have with Alonzo's whole approach.

E: It seems to work fine as a *descriptive* model of what we mean, but it seems to fall apart into uncountable sums as soon as you try to use *prescriptively*.

A: I think there are some difficult cases, and some cases that are not so difficult.

E: But the "easy" cases all seem to rely on ad hoc assumptions.

E: I agree it "might" be true -- in fact, at some level I think DU is true -- but without knowing its boundary conditions, it seems impossible to make any sort of valid claims.

A: I understand where you are coming from there.

E: Thank you.

A: I can imagine setting up a network of desires and "solving" it.

A: But the complete problem appears intractable.

E: Well, not necessarily.

E: Let us define "NOD" as a the global network of desires.

E: The goal is optimize the "most and strongest" of the desires in NOD, right?

A: Right.

A: But remember, that we are dealing with *mutable* desires.

E: The question is, is there some structure in NOD which allows us to reduce the N! weightings to a calculable heuristic.

A: (That is, some of the desires are mutable.)

E: Right. I believe one of the assumptions we need to make is that desires exist with some well-defined distribution.

E: That is, the *important* desires are not fully mutable, but need to fall within some well-defined range.

E: (at least in principle, even if we don't know what that range is)

A: Right. We can take a "statistical mechanics" like approach to the problem without pretending to solve for every individual variable.

E: Exactly.

E: But, that requires us to assume that:

E: a) there are meaningful aggregate metrics that we can discern

E: b) it is possible, in principle, to maximize them

E: c) it is worth the effort to attempt to discover them

E: If the problem is underconstrained, then we get a nice relative world where we can pretty much construct our own morality.

E: If it is overconstrained, then we (or some group) is screwed. :-(

E: Make sense?

A: Yep.

E: So, here's the funny thing.

E: DU only seems to be well-defined and useful if all these other assumptions are true.

E: Otherwise, it is just a post hoc rationalization of what we (or society) have already decided is true based on other considerations.

E: (at least if we're talking about "good" in the moral sense, not merely "good for a particular purpose)

A: I'm not sure that's true.

E: Can you give a counter-example?

A: Let me think a second... still trying to decide.

E: Actually, it is almost 6 pm.

E: Do you want to take that as homework? :-)

A: We can pick up there next week.

E: Okay.

E: So, shall I post this?

A: That's fine. I'll probably post a link to it after you've done that.

E: Fair enough.

E: If I have time, I'll try to clean up the argument.

E: At any rate, I think this was *way* better than our previous exchanges. :-)

A: Yes, definitely.

E: Thanks for suggesting direct conversation.

E: Have a good week.

A: Same time next week? Or coordinate later?

E: Same time, same place.

A: OK. Thanks, Ernie.

E: Thank you!

E: Bye.

A: bye