Let me clarify. I think there are several non sequiturs in a couple of your paragraphs
...if survival is all that counts, then the beliefs that promote survival ought to be truer.
Well we are dealing with a lot of legacy architecture from when we were monkeys or amphibians or earthworms, so there may be some behaviors that conferred survival in our predecessors. Humans werent built from scratch. But you are somewhat correct although I would not say truer, but more important.
Fire is hot. Ice is cold. If I try to murder my rival, he will try to murder me! Men have penises, and girls have vaginas.
What? I dont see how this follows. Fire is not hot in an absolute sense. It is much colder than the sun. It is hot relative to us. Ice is up to 273 degrees above absolute zero. Lots of stuff colder than an ice cube. But if I grant you all this, I still dont know the point you are making.
We tend to believe things which are true. We think that these things would be true in any possible world like our own, that is, that fire would burn us (or any sufficiently hot thing would burn us).
Fire will burn us != Fire is hot
It becomes senseless to call this a relative truth,
I agree it is a highly inefficient way to deal with fire if you are a human, nevertheless “fire is hot” is not an absolute truth
If the fact that fire burns us isn't true, then you've at least established one truth - that relativism is true.
Wut
Yet if relativism is true, you've also established that belief in it would hurt survival - therefore a true belief would hurt us. This is a contradiction. It makes no sense
Wut
Consider these statements
mugs are useful
fucking little kids is bad
These are both statements many people would agree are true
Is the truth value the same for these statements? I could drink my coffee out of a paper cup or even a shoe and no one is going to lynch me.
How do I process the idea of mugs being useful. What algorithms are running in my brain.
What about the second statement. Is the same circuitry being used when I think about the badness of fucking kids?
If you asked people which of those statements was more true, I bet they would say the second. Its not really more true. But its more important to most people.
I'm still working on a theory about the evolution of true belief in God. I actually think it is coming together. It has become something of a personal project for me because I've been so prone to the kind of thinking in the paper from the OP. I desire an intellectual basis for understanding belief in God in an evolutionary context that doesn't automatically lead us to false belief. So I've actually taken this paper personally haha. It's coming!
I'm frustrating myself! I keep defeating my own argument, so naturally I can't come at you with it. The second that I think I've got it, I find a way to kill it. It's something I'm going to have to continue to think about. You can take the W for now, Helena. Just don't get too comfy with it, k? It might be the case that this just isn't ever going to be an angle of attack, even if I want it to be.
Im not really here for the win, although maybe my competitive mode kicks in when people hint that Im wrong. :(
We’ve talked ourselves in circles a bit. The question was did the concept of god evolve as a survival strategy, or something like that, which is what I believe. To re-cap, I believe that god and religion and other supernatural notions like good and evil evolved with an underlying neurological architecture because they are useful ways to process reality. Processing reality as an accurate reproduction is perhaps inefficient and unneccessary at least in some situations, e.g. human interactions. Perhaps there is a creator that has designed us this way to understand another aspect of reality that is not otherwise detectable to us? That is possible. But there is no evidence of that IMO. And then of course you have to deal with another question, i.e. where does the creator come from?
The problem with most atheists however is that they mistakenly believe that they are oh so clever because they’ve consciously abandoned the notion of god and the supernatural but they cant change their neurology. America/Europe worked well in many ways because people feared judgement and hell. Its not the same if we just all casually agree to be “ good.” Furthermore they begin to create their own irrational godless relgions with equally supernatural beliefs like “it’s not a person if its still inside the uterus.” etc.
I'm mostly kidding.
although maybe my competitive mode kicks in when people hint that Im wrong
No, no, no. This is a very good thing. I think that each of us has a competitive nature, albeit that we give it away in our own subtle expressions. Sometimes, they aren't so subtle :). I have thought a time or two back to spring of last year, which is when myself, @PS, and ARM really started to engage each other. At first, I was highly antagonistic toward Peace. I disagreed with him in almost every conceivable way. I suppose you could say that, overall, Peace earned a big W insofar as the substance of what we disagree on today is miniscule compared to its depth when we began.
I remember certain threads specifically where ARM would pile on Peace, about probability or something, and he'd always ping me on this or that point, saying something like, "I can't parse this @chirogonemd." Then I'd come in and pile on with whatever I could.
One thing that stands out was how consistent Peace was. He probably repeated his positions from different angles dozens and dozens of times over the course of the summer. Eventually I think ARM, despite not agreeing, realized that Peace's positions were so coherent that he was never going to 'win' by picking at this or that so-called crack in the armor.
Toward the end I think we began to reach a point where we were stagnating, but overall, the sum of the antagonism was profoundly beneficial. My own views today are far stronger and more informed for it.
As far as the impasse I reached trying to respond to you, it may be the particular way I was trying to attack it, that is, by way of what I'm trying to prove. It's a hunch, really, but as I said yesterday, it may prove to be a bad idea. I'm wanting to show that an impersonal, purely physical and deterministic/mechanistic process for evolving mental states (beliefs) cannot, with sufficient time, lead to stable and fixated false beliefs.
Again, maybe I will be able to, and maybe I won't. Sometimes you simply realize you've barked up the wrong tree.
But no, I'm fully appreciative you've sat your atheistic ass down at the table. It's really not too common to find someone willing to invest the time to read these longer posts on top of applying the mental effort to make arguments. Most people simply don't care enough, or (and without actually being condescending) they just don't really have the intellect/acumen/logical faculties for the conversation to be worthwhile. I know that sounds insulting, though I don't mean it to. It's just a fact not everyone is equipped in terms of the desire or the ability to go back and forth on these topics.
Damn if this didn't feel like an ARM response. Well done. I'm hoping my reply will be able to deal with these objections more aptly than my last one. Like you said, it was 1 a.m. There was nothing in that comment that was very well-formed, particularly the examples of atomic statements I used. I'm going to try to package it a little better.
I will say here that I'm not too concerned yet with getting to beliefs/propositions as complex as morals. I hope to get my point across without getting nearly that deep. Morality is tremendously hard. Statements of value, generally, like the mug one are also hard. I want to try to deal with propositions that we take to be atomic facts, even where the language we use to state them might seem less than precise. The point will be that true facts underlie the utterances.
(post is archived)