Christian Overconfidence

[Athanasius]

...because I do think a legal code implies something about morality.

Why should the mere existence of a legal code imply morality? A legal code can be moral or immoral, depending on what it contains. We don't even have to go back to ancient history for that. Nazi Germany had a legal code that legalized genocide. That's why the Nazi leadership had to be tried under the heading of "crimes against humanity". Because what they did was perfectly legal under their country's laws at the time that they did it.

A legal code implies morality in that it attempts to set a standard of behaviour. In the case of Hammurabi's code, the (ahem, class-specific) lex talionis. This would either have to correct some behaviour deemed unacceptable, or it sets the standard that begins the moral discussion. I don't think all moral systems will be moral according to a biblical understanding, but I think I have to accept that the people submitting to those moral values think they are being moral, virtuous, etc. Hammurabi's code isn't a moral code itself, and only rises to the level of implication.

In the case of Nazi Germany, it's like that quote from 1984:

"Look, I hate purity. Hate goodness. I don't want virtue to exist anywhere. I want everyone corrupt."

What was peddled as right and moral was actually evil and immoral. Or, you know, people had a gun to their head while their children were indoctrinated.

[Oscar_Kipling]

Athanasius

I just watched a lil 10 minute video to get refreshed on Plantinga's evolutionary argument against naturalism.


1. That in evolution it shouldn't matter if the belief that the evolved biology generates is true so long as it causes an advantageous behavior.

2.Therefore if evolution were true we should expect it to produce unreliable cognitive faculties, memory, senses and so on.

3. therefore if evolution is true then you can't trust your cognitive faculties, memory, senses and so on and shouldn't have confidence in the truth of any beliefs including evolution.

Is there more to the argument than that or is that the gist of it? if so do you think this is a good argument?

That's the general gist, although the argument is probabilistic. It purports to raise the spectre of epistemic doubt in relation to the first premise: how can one's faculties be trusted if advantageous behaviour rather than truth-seeking is the evolutionary 'target'. It's a good argument whether one finds it compelling, and it's generated quite a few responses. There are two main formulations of it, actually. The first from '93 and the second from '08.

I mention it as it's interesting to think about, and particularly - though this is an aside - when rejections of the EAAN come into conflict with postmodernist conceptions of truth propositions, i.e., that we have no access to the world as it is, but only our perceptions.

Okay in that case here are some things I think about it.

Yeah, I agree with the first premise or I agree that there should be the expectation that just good enough, or as much as we could afford should be expected in anything developed via evolution. Even hyperspecialized traits have their tradeoffs, you can be the fastest land mammal but only in short bursts and you are comparatively fragile. Plantinga seems to entirely ignore these sorts of interactions. He also appears to ignore biology that was selected for the advantage that its correct relationship with the outside world provides, like vision or cognition, that is to say that fidelity with reality in cognition or vision is what provides the advantage. but I think most discouragingly I just dont think his idea about how belief generation works or that it is a single type of non mutually interacting process. Like belief generation as described by Plantinga, I think the closest we get in an actual human is something like a revulsion response being agnostic to any beliefs that may be generated in response to it so long as the response causes avoidance...and that's not even what he is imagining, nor is it the only thing going on in our brains.

I also agree that unreliable or faulty or error prone, or limited, or truncated faculties is exactly what we see in humans or any life. there is no super animal that is maximally great at everything that is technically biologically possible. What we see is constant tradeoff's and compromises and limitations doing just enough to get ahead.

Finally I also agree that we should be extremely skeptical of our beliefs and our ability to generate beliefs that comport with reality. I don't agree that this leaves us hopelessly lost. We are individually very bad at lets say being perfect calculating machines, but we are good enough to build one...but see the real truth is that we aren't actually just good enough to build one because it took essentially all of human history and accumulated knowledge to do it. We were not "built" for that kind of scale, individually we are too mistake prone and live to beefily, but over history the little truths that we fumble our way into feedback and reinforce each other and allow me to reach back across history and use tools created by all that humanity so that I totally can build a calculator or incrementally improve the branch prediction of a cpu or whatever. You don't get to Cpu's or solar panels without the things that you believe about silicon actually comporting with some real aspect or properties of silicon and this only has a slight reality bias that looks dendritic and not like a sprawling landscape. anyway we all stand on the shoulders of approximately human sized people, but man there have been enough of them that a few humans stood on that peak they formed and stepped onto the moon.

[Fenris]

A legal code implies morality in that it attempts to set a standard of behaviour.

In that case, you mean "morality" and not morality.

[Athanasius]

A legal code implies morality in that it attempts to set a standard of behaviour.

In that case, you mean "morality" and not morality.

Yes, but therein I'm allowing that any moral - or "moral" - system is a moral system, whereas I think you're saying that moral systems were only purportedly moral systems until the various revelations of God?

[Athanasius]

Okay in that case here are some things I think about it.

Yeah, I agree with the first premise or I agree that there should be the expectation that just good enough, or as much as we could afford should be expected in anything developed via evolution. Even hyperspecialized traits have their tradeoffs, you can be the fastest land mammal but only in short bursts and you are comparatively fragile. Plantinga seems to entirely ignore these sorts of interactions. He also appears to ignore biology that was selected for the advantage that its correct relationship with the outside world provides, like vision or cognition, that is to say that fidelity with reality in cognition or vision is what provides the advantage. but I think most discouragingly I just dont think his idea about how belief generation works or that it is a single type of non mutually interacting process. Like belief generation as described by Plantinga, I think the closest we get in an actual human is something like a revulsion response being agnostic to any beliefs that may be generated in response to it so long as the response causes avoidance...and that's not even what he is imagining, nor is it the only thing going on in our brains.

Typical refutations take the form of contending with Plantinga's notions of probability, like, how has Plantinga come up with X probably for Y thing? It reads like you're saying something like that?

Finally I also agree that we should be extremely skeptical of our beliefs and our ability to generate beliefs that comport with reality. I don't agree that this leaves us hopelessly lost. We are individually very bad at lets say being perfect calculating machines, but we are good enough to build one...

If we're very bad at being perfect calculating machines then we aren't capable of building the perfect calculating machine. I think one of the points is that we should be sceptical, but where is that scepticism grounded if along a naturalistic view there's no guarantee that we do interact with reality as reality actually is.

but see the real truth is that we aren't actually just good enough to build one because it took essentially all of human history and accumulated knowledge to do it. We were not "built" for that kind of scale, individually we are too mistake prone and live to beefily, but over history the little truths that we fumble our way into feedback and reinforce each other and allow me to reach back across history and use tools created by all that humanity so that I totally can build a calculator or incrementally improve the branch prediction of a cpu or whatever. You don't get to Cpu's or solar panels without the things that you believe about silicon actually comporting with some real aspect or properties of silicon and this only has a slight reality bias that looks dendritic and not like a sprawling landscape. anyway we all stand on the shoulders of approximately human sized people, but man there have been enough of them that a few humans stood on that peak they formed and stepped onto the moon.

I think a simpler refutation is simply that consciousness interacts with the world necessarily, and there need not be a specific selection for 'truth' because that's the base state of affairs. Why would any process result instead in false beliefs about real things? But that's the problem. The EAAN isn't a refutation of naturalism, but an attempt to undermine the confidence of the naturalist in her beliefs. That's probably a bigger problem for externalists than for internalists.

Anyway, a mere curiosity.

[Fenris]

Yes, but therein I'm allowing that any moral - or "moral" - system is a moral system, whereas I think you're saying that moral systems were only purportedly moral systems until the various revelations of God?

I'm understanding you to say that any system that has expectations of behavior is by definition moral. 

[Oscar_Kipling]

Typical refutations take the form of contending with Plantinga's notions of probability, like, how has Plantinga come up with X probably for Y thing? It reads like you're saying something like that?

essentially, The probabilities work fine in the world he describes, but I don't think he's describing our world.

If we're very bad at being perfect calculating machines then we aren't capable of building the perfect calculating machine. I think one of the points is that we should be sceptical, but where is that scepticism grounded if along a naturalistic view there's no guarantee that we do interact with reality as reality actually is.

See I knew I should have been more precise but I didn't feel like going back and rewriting. Like "Perfect Calculating Machine" is what exactly, right? So a calculating machine that can perform the calculations that the best humans could perform unreliably 10 times more reliably. But even that lacks some margins too, Like reliably as in meantime between hardware failure or in the case of humans passing out from exhaustion or is it incorrect result rate or in accuracy or in degrees of precision? I'd argue we can build machines that can do at least all of those simultaneously to a degree and rate that our individual meat can never achieve or even reliably detect that it is in fact doing that. Also I would count a machine that we create that can improve and expand its calculating abilities beyond what humans may even be able to apprehend much less perform reliably or unreliably in the space of what is possible in "calculating" as a thing that we can take credit for making. If you still feel that very bad calculators cannot create calculators that exceed them in some arbitrary number of some arbitrary metrics of performance by some arbitrary order of magnitude as outlined in these clarifications then please explain. Like if you are saying that as much of that stuff as is possible in this universe is where it breaks down then sure I agree, I bet that that universe is probably all calculator an no one around to revel in its awful power anyway. Now if you count calculators that we could accurately conceive and design and would work if we could build it but we cannot manipulate the physical world to the degree that would be required to actually build it, but it is not in principle impossible that it could be manipulated into such a configuration, then the calculator universe is not off the table for me.


Not only is there no guarantee, it is guaranteed that we don't accurately or precisely interact with reality though our meat or in some cases only accurately up to some degree of precision or only under some limited conditions. Like I was trying to put across that being good enough to provide an evolutionary advantage doesn't  mean that there is not a relationship between some aspect or scale of reality and the biology that was selected, and that we cannot then work within these limited ranges to perform investigation and build tools that do not have these limitations. There is a lecture that I Think is called something like "the history of precision" that I'll look for later. But it walks through how we got to tools that can accurately and precisely measure things at scales that we have no natural tools that are reliable in any sense at those scales by working within our meat's limitations and ranges of accuracy and precision (and other meat gifts too)...its really cool.

Anyway in this sense I should be skeptical of my beliefs because my meat was by and large built to provide advantages in a world where it didn't really matter that you can't reliably tell that a stick is 15.3657478576mm longer than this other one. It didn't matter that you could detect a narrow range of chemicals reliably but couldn't detect the chirality of some arbitrary chemical. Or that you could reliably form the true belief that the sun is a heat source, but not that it is fusion powered ... we have no meat for that fanciness because it would be expensive to build, take up a bunch of space, probably be shaped really weird, and provide no appreciable advantage while simultaneously making us much worse at everything else, if its even possible.So, yeah I think there is a ground and there are also very good reasons to be skeptical and careful and conscientious of the margins of what you conclude about what your meat seems to say about the world.

see that seems like both too much and not enough of a response to your post.
 

I think a simpler refutation is simply that consciousness interacts with the world necessarily, and there need not be a specific selection for 'truth' because that's the base state of affairs. Why would any process result instead in false beliefs about real things? But that's the  at problem. The EAAN isn't a refutation of naturalism, but an attempt to undermine the confidence of the naturalist in her beliefs. That's probably a bigger problem for externalists than for internalists.

Anyway, a mere curiosity.

Yeah I thought of consciousness, but the depth of well evidenced things we can say about it and its relationship to evolution is far shallower than what I went with I feel. But yeah, whatever consciousness is, and however it arises from our biology...the advantage it provides is very much based in the fidelity of its relationship to reality...buuuut still its only as good as it needed to be  within our budget. I mean as a thing to think about, yes i'm having a blast, as a thing that does what it says it is going to do, its tragically unmoored.

[Athanasius]

I'm understanding you to say that any system that has expectations of behavior is by definition moral.

I consider it a moral system, not that it's moral necessarily, so I could say things like, "The Nazi moral system of the 1930s was quite immoral indeed".

[Oscar_Kipling]

I mean I've always thought I was unique but i dont think I'd be the first guy whose head explodes if God sent me a vision...Like is there a single recorded case of traumatic vision injury? I get it it maybe I don't like it, I captured fried and ate cicadas last brood I didn't not do it because they might taste like tree sap and dirt ...which they did and a little like shrimp, 3 out of 5 would eat bugs again. Likelihood, Oh I have no idea we'd need to be specific. A guy once told me something about traffic lights changing after he prayed being a sign of Gods glory, that one I could definitely wriggle my way out of pretty easily though I might run some tests to see if its repeatable and if it is then I might end up getting arrested for tearing apart traffic lights. I mean why would God send a vision that is obviously misconfigured for me, fine if free will is important i'm cool with seeing how I deal with just enough wiggle room. Thine is, the faithful get visions so its all kinda moot. No, Its more like I frequently require proof or some compelling rational argument (or I at least have to find it so) to believe things. God doesn't owe me anything as I understand it, But he both loves and wants me...I know how I act under those conditions, take me out for dinner and dancing...but His ways I suppose. It doesn't make sense to me, actually not making sense is something I can deal with, It has internal logic, but it does not seem to comport with reality or reason.

Don't underestimate prayer. As a young Christian I once had to make a hard decision, what to do with the rest of my life, I had two choices and I did not know what to choose. I decided to leave it up to the Lord because He would know best. Now at that time I drove in a very old Opel Ascona (my first car) with as license plate 17-23-UX and I knew there were only 2 newer cars (and one old like mine)  in the Netherlands that had the same 6 characters only in a different order. And I asked the Lord to show me one of those as a sign what to decide. At the time the Netherlands had 5 million cars. It's a bit like winning the lottery if that would happen.

The months passed nothing happened (to my shame I was already a bit forgotten about the prayer) and then on a sunny afternoon I saw one driving right in front of me. Shock! The same week I saw the second one. Shock! Two jackpots in one week.

It's seems I am a bit hard of hearing, God answering in plural to me, maybe He was making fun of my unbelief.

Maybe, or maybe it wasn't as statistically unlikely as you think...but idk It just doesn't do much for me.

Well, I am a number guy, and the only 2 cars in the Netherlands (by accident) driving in my area of the country and I (by accident) seeing them in one week is too much randomness. The odds are 1 to 8.333.333.333.

Far be it from me to impune your aptitude with numbers, yet I have my doubts that however you arrived at that number you captured every relevant factor....but hey maybe you did and it's reasonably accurate.

I can give you a second example of an answered prayer, but the odds are only 1 to 10.077.696 

So here are some of the problems for me outside of my incredulity regarding your calculations. Followers of other religions have made similar claims, down to the similar statistical unlikelihood touted. What am I to make of this? If I accept all of these claims as accurately described and genuinely improbable, then Christianity is at a dead heat with several other religions and things like "the secret" as  things that can supernaturally generate unlikely outcomes. If i'm supposed to accept only the Christian claims and dismiss the others, then why are the Christian claims more credible? What of all the unanswered prayers, those where there was no sign or a contradictory outcome? for every person that miraculously survives some usually fatal medical condition or injury after praying for that outcome how many people pray for intercession and die anyway?  You're a numbers man, what do you think that ratio is? Do you think that Christianity has a different ratio than any other religion that practices intercessory prayer? What of seemingly miraculously unlikely things that happened when no one prayed for them at all...Is that the work of the Christian God? Why isn't it some other god or just the fact that the opportunities for improbable things to occur often greatly outnumbers the actual occurrences? Why is it reasonable to accept your claims as miraculously improbable in light of the laws of combination & truly large numbers and confirmation bias and so on? why doesn't the same hold for muslim claims and so on?

[ProDeo]

I mean I've always thought I was unique but i dont think I'd be the first guy whose head explodes if God sent me a vision...Like is there a single recorded case of traumatic vision injury? I get it it maybe I don't like it, I captured fried and ate cicadas last brood I didn't not do it because they might taste like tree sap and dirt ...which they did and a little like shrimp, 3 out of 5 would eat bugs again. Likelihood, Oh I have no idea we'd need to be specific. A guy once told me something about traffic lights changing after he prayed being a sign of Gods glory, that one I could definitely wriggle my way out of pretty easily though I might run some tests to see if its repeatable and if it is then I might end up getting arrested for tearing apart traffic lights. I mean why would God send a vision that is obviously misconfigured for me, fine if free will is important i'm cool with seeing how I deal with just enough wiggle room. Thine is, the faithful get visions so its all kinda moot. No, Its more like I frequently require proof or some compelling rational argument (or I at least have to find it so) to believe things. God doesn't owe me anything as I understand it, But he both loves and wants me...I know how I act under those conditions, take me out for dinner and dancing...but His ways I suppose. It doesn't make sense to me, actually not making sense is something I can deal with, It has internal logic, but it does not seem to comport with reality or reason.

Don't underestimate prayer. As a young Christian I once had to make a hard decision, what to do with the rest of my life, I had two choices and I did not know what to choose. I decided to leave it up to the Lord because He would know best. Now at that time I drove in a very old Opel Ascona (my first car) with as license plate 17-23-UX and I knew there were only 2 newer cars (and one old like mine)  in the Netherlands that had the same 6 characters only in a different order. And I asked the Lord to show me one of those as a sign what to decide. At the time the Netherlands had 5 million cars. It's a bit like winning the lottery if that would happen.

The months passed nothing happened (to my shame I was already a bit forgotten about the prayer) and then on a sunny afternoon I saw one driving right in front of me. Shock! The same week I saw the second one. Shock! Two jackpots in one week.

It's seems I am a bit hard of hearing, God answering in plural to me, maybe He was making fun of my unbelief.

Maybe, or maybe it wasn't as statistically unlikely as you think...but idk It just doesn't do much for me.

Well, I am a number guy, and the only 2 cars in the Netherlands (by accident) driving in my area of the country and I (by accident) seeing them in one week is too much randomness. The odds are 1 to 8.333.333.333.

Far be it from me to impune your aptitude with numbers, yet I have my doubts that however you arrived at that number you captured every relevant factor....but hey maybe you did and it's reasonably accurate.

I can give you a second example of an answered prayer, but the odds are only 1 to 10.077.696 

So here are some of the problems for me outside of my incredulity regarding your calculations. Followers of other religions have made similar claims, down to the similar statistical unlikelihood touted. What am I to make of this? If I accept all of these claims as accurately described and genuinely improbable, then Christianity is at a dead heat with several other religions and things like "the secret" as  things that can supernaturally generate unlikely outcomes. If i'm supposed to accept only the Christian claims and dismiss the others, then why are the Christian claims more credible? What of all the unanswered prayers, those where there was no sign or a contradictory outcome? for every person that miraculously survives some usually fatal medical condition or injury after praying for that outcome how many people pray for intercession and die anyway?  You're a numbers man, what do you think that ratio is? Do you think that Christianity has a different ratio than any other religion that practices intercessory prayer? What of seemingly miraculously unlikely things that happened when no one prayed for them at all...Is that the work of the Christian God? Why isn't it some other god or just the fact that the opportunities for improbable things to occur often greatly outnumbers the actual occurrences? Why is it reasonable to accept your claims as miraculously improbable in light of the laws of combination & truly large numbers and confirmation bias and so on? why doesn't the same hold for muslim claims and so on?

I don't know the answers your questions, I do of course have opinions, but opinions are not facts and opinions are not very useful in a thread with the name Christian Overconfidence. So what I have done so far is just sharing my experiences, my personal facts.

[Oscar_Kipling]

I mean I've always thought I was unique but i dont think I'd be the first guy whose head explodes if God sent me a vision...Like is there a single recorded case of traumatic vision injury? I get it it maybe I don't like it, I captured fried and ate cicadas last brood I didn't not do it because they might taste like tree sap and dirt ...which they did and a little like shrimp, 3 out of 5 would eat bugs again. Likelihood, Oh I have no idea we'd need to be specific. A guy once told me something about traffic lights changing after he prayed being a sign of Gods glory, that one I could definitely wriggle my way out of pretty easily though I might run some tests to see if its repeatable and if it is then I might end up getting arrested for tearing apart traffic lights. I mean why would God send a vision that is obviously misconfigured for me, fine if free will is important i'm cool with seeing how I deal with just enough wiggle room. Thine is, the faithful get visions so its all kinda moot. No, Its more like I frequently require proof or some compelling rational argument (or I at least have to find it so) to believe things. God doesn't owe me anything as I understand it, But he both loves and wants me...I know how I act under those conditions, take me out for dinner and dancing...but His ways I suppose. It doesn't make sense to me, actually not making sense is something I can deal with, It has internal logic, but it does not seem to comport with reality or reason.

Don't underestimate prayer. As a young Christian I once had to make a hard decision, what to do with the rest of my life, I had two choices and I did not know what to choose. I decided to leave it up to the Lord because He would know best. Now at that time I drove in a very old Opel Ascona (my first car) with as license plate 17-23-UX and I knew there were only 2 newer cars (and one old like mine)  in the Netherlands that had the same 6 characters only in a different order. And I asked the Lord to show me one of those as a sign what to decide. At the time the Netherlands had 5 million cars. It's a bit like winning the lottery if that would happen.

The months passed nothing happened (to my shame I was already a bit forgotten about the prayer) and then on a sunny afternoon I saw one driving right in front of me. Shock! The same week I saw the second one. Shock! Two jackpots in one week.

It's seems I am a bit hard of hearing, God answering in plural to me, maybe He was making fun of my unbelief.

Maybe, or maybe it wasn't as statistically unlikely as you think...but idk It just doesn't do much for me.

Well, I am a number guy, and the only 2 cars in the Netherlands (by accident) driving in my area of the country and I (by accident) seeing them in one week is too much randomness. The odds are 1 to 8.333.333.333.

Far be it from me to impune your aptitude with numbers, yet I have my doubts that however you arrived at that number you captured every relevant factor....but hey maybe you did and it's reasonably accurate.

I can give you a second example of an answered prayer, but the odds are only 1 to 10.077.696 

So here are some of the problems for me outside of my incredulity regarding your calculations. Followers of other religions have made similar claims, down to the similar statistical unlikelihood touted. What am I to make of this? If I accept all of these claims as accurately described and genuinely improbable, then Christianity is at a dead heat with several other religions and things like "the secret" as  things that can supernaturally generate unlikely outcomes. If i'm supposed to accept only the Christian claims and dismiss the others, then why are the Christian claims more credible? What of all the unanswered prayers, those where there was no sign or a contradictory outcome? for every person that miraculously survives some usually fatal medical condition or injury after praying for that outcome how many people pray for intercession and die anyway?  You're a numbers man, what do you think that ratio is? Do you think that Christianity has a different ratio than any other religion that practices intercessory prayer? What of seemingly miraculously unlikely things that happened when no one prayed for them at all...Is that the work of the Christian God? Why isn't it some other god or just the fact that the opportunities for improbable things to occur often greatly outnumbers the actual occurrences? Why is it reasonable to accept your claims as miraculously improbable in light of the laws of combination & truly large numbers and confirmation bias and so on? why doesn't the same hold for muslim claims and so on?

I don't know the answers your questions, I do of course have opinions, but opinions are not facts and opinions are not very useful in a thread with the name Christian Overconfidence. So what I have done so far is just sharing my experiences, my personal facts.

haha yeah I could see how that could be a bit funny with the thread title, But if you don't mind sharing your opinions then I'd love to hear them because i'm actually curious.