Talking Snakes: A Cautionary Tale

Don't you think it's still useful to find contradictions within the religious framework in order to convince theists they are wrong? I know some converts who converted because the bible just "didn't make sense" and contained too many contradictions. Some people even convert to religion because the bible (or whatever holy text) "made so much sense." They think, "Well, I agree with Y, and since X implies Y, I will now believe X."

Parrots can talk; a parrot named Alex even accidentally learned how to spell out a word for emphasis when the listener didn't seem to be paying attention. Pre-curse, this "snake" wasn't crawling around on the ground. Maybe it was just a slightly cleverer species of parrot.

I also thought about something along those lines: explaining the domestication of wolves to dogs, or maybe prehistoric wheat to modern wheat, then extrapolating to chimps. Then I had a dangerous thought, what would happen if we tried to select chimps for humaneness?

While it could have a social function a larger benefit to having an absurdity bias is in limiting the hypothesis space when considering a question to those worth investing cognitive energy in investigating. (Example: when considering the question 'who ate the cake' the hypothesises 'Alice,' 'Bob,' or 'Carol' would likely be worth investigating but 'The president of the united states' wouldn't be, and so shouldn't be investigated.)

The truth is that neither cristians believe in a talking snake nor evolutionists believe in humans coming from monkeys. That's just a straw man falacy. Cristians believe that's a metaphor and evolutionists believe they have common ancestors.

Many (most? all?) Christians believe the snake was really Satan, who took the form of a snake to trick Eve. Treating it as an ordinary snake that happened to be able to talk is probably as gross a misrepresentation as the lady's misrepresentation of evolution.

This suggests an improved absurdity heuristic: if somebody expresses a belief that seems absurd, first check whether they actually believe what you think they do. It might not be as absurd once you know what they actually believe.

They might really believe in a literal talking snake, but have you really lost much by giving the (temporary) benefit of the doubt?

In general, I think taking Yvain's advice is probably better than not.

If the group of (otherwise) intelligent people is a group of anosognosiacs that tell you that they aren't disabled, then their common bias is probably sufficient to dismiss them. In most cases, however, we don't have the line by line code that produces bad answers.

If you can't look under the hood and say "The car doesn't work because part x is doing y instead of z", but rather "I'm not sure exactly how this thing is supposed to work, but something is leaking", then you can't be sure it isn't going to do something right, even if its performance is suboptimal. There could be a hint of rationality buried in the muck, and in that case, they might manage to get it right.

One example of this is the "magical collapse" deal in QM. It may sound absurd (because it is), but the physicists talking about it aren't stupid, and will still manage to give correct predictions. If you dismissed it as "entirely irrational" before looking at the evidence, you'd be stuck with classical physics.

If you then consider the fact that people tend to exaggerate other peoples biases (it's always the other guy that is biased, right?), the case for at least putting some thought into it gets stronger.

(months later...)

Another point is that you won't actually encounter all that many obviously-false beliefs widely held by intelligent people. Taking the effort to check out the ones you do encounter shouldn't be an onerous effort.

I'm wondering if this is the kind of confusion that can be cleared up by tabooing the right words.

I believe it can be taken as obvious that the image in the muslim woman's head upon hearing the phrase "monkey's transformed into humans" isn't at all similar to the image in the mind of someone who understands evolution, as even to my ear it comes across as, at best, misleading.

Thus my response would be more along the lines of:

I don't believe monkeys can change into humans. I believe that both monkeys and humans belong to a larger category of creatures called apes, and it seems very suspicious to me that if a hypothetical omnipotent being created humans in His image, that the image would be just another species of ape rather than anything unique.

With greater time and preparation, I don't think it would be too hard to demonstrate how a human body and a chimp body are almost the same machine, just shaped a little different. In the 'explain in twenty minutes' scenario, I think the critical insight is scope insensitivity. It is legitimately difficult to imagine the number of generations involved. You'd have to describe a family tree, point out how the less distance up you need to go to find a common ancestor, the more similar any two individuals will look, and then... zoom out, massively.

Even if your non-evolutionist then believes that family tree will eventually lead back to Adam and Eve or whoever, rather than connecting to the animal kindgom once you go far enough back, it moves the competing suppositions out of the realm of absurdity and creates an actual disagreement rather than merely a confusion.

It is hard to argue that magic was not involved in the origin of the human species when the other person cannot conceive of the possibility that humans could even exist or function without magic being involved. And that is not a trivial thing. Even many of today's educated people, who pay lip-service to the idea that humans are biology and nothing else, still believe in souls-and-elanvital-by-another-name. There are modern martial arts that still believe in Ki. You can't trip over your own feet without stumbling on "science" fiction that treats sentient thought as something ontologically fundamental. Likewise, "science" fiction where things like age can be disconnected from people and moved around. And just try to ask the Worm fandom what the difference between telepathy and precise telekinesis acting on the brain, is.

I don't see the inconsistency. You obtain the conjunction fallacy only if omnipotent God is less absurd than talking snake. I think that such position is absurd.

Hum, in this analogy, it seems likely that she could answer :
"Your analogy is correct in that these groups are no more similar to mine that a monkey is similar to a human.
Your analogy is incorrect in that my group is fundamentally different in origin to the other groups. The word/ intent [depending on the confession] of God does not change."

Not necessarily. The vast majority of propositions are false. Most of them are obviously false; we don't need to spend much mental energy to reject the hypothesis that "Barack Obama is a wooly mammoth," or "the moon is made of butternut squash." "Absurd" is a useful label for statements that we can reject with minimal mental effort. And it makes sense that we refuse to consider most such statements; our mental time and energy is very limited, and if we want to live productive lives, we have to focus on things that have some decent probability of being true.

The problem is not denominating certain things as absurd, it is rejecting claims that we have reason to take more seriously. Both evolution and Christianity are believed by large enough communities that we should not reject either claim as "absurd." Rather, when many people believe something, we should attend to the best arguments in favor of those beliefs before we decide whether we disagree.

Uh oh.

http://www.overcomingbias.com/2007/08/religions-claim.html and http://yudkowsky.net/rational/technical , but a full argument would probably take forever, be inappropriate for this site, and have me answering religious objections until the cows came home.

Logical was probably not as good a word as "rational" here. If saying "on rational grounds" makes more sense than "on logical grounds", feel free to replace it.

If you're really really really interested, send me your email and I'll try to sketch out some thoughts, but beyond what's in the two links above I doubt anything I say will be that much more exciting than anything you've heard atheists say before.

There is literally no way anyone is going to be able to do this in the limitations of a blog - if you can get through Michael Martin's "Atheism: A Philosophical Justification" you'll know the answer. Dawkin's "The God Belief" is shorter and easier because he uses evidence to shorten the strictly logical disproofs philosophers use. An older and less complete, but more readable, philosophical disproof is George H Smith's "Atheism: The Case Against God". There are others, but of the ones I've read these two are the best and the most accessible, respectively.

I think this just underscores the original post's point.

The lesson here isn't that Christians are probably right or that Christians are probably wrong. The lesson here is that you can go very wrong by relying on the absurdity heuristic. And that that's true even when the claim seems really absurd.

Let's take a hypothetical atheist who really does think that all Christians believe in the literal word of the Bible. This atheist might reject the whole of Christianity because of the absurdity of talking snakes. Having rejected the entire school of thought that all of Christianity represents, he never has the opportunity to find out that he was wrong (about all Christians taking the Bible literally). Therefore be never realises that he had flawed reasons for rejecting religion.

The woman in the story has a similarly inaccurate understanding of what (many) evolutionists believe. The flawed understanding is part of the issue.

This bias applies to people who reject an idea on the grounds that it seems absurd, but their assessment of 'absurdity' is based on their limited, probably inaccurate, understanding of the topic.

to take them literally is certainly absurd.

You have more certainty than I do.

It could have been meant literally at some point, and the claim "it is there only as a metaphor" could have been inserted afterwards. If it traces back to a pre-Christian creation myth that got to be part of the Bible as an accident of history, it probably was meant literally at some point, and not just in a "this weird sect takes it literally" way, but in how it was generally understood.

Furthermore, there are other passages in the Bible that are not taken literally now, but were taken literally recently enough for that to have happened within recorded history. People only began to say they shouldn't be taken literally when taking them literally became embarrassing.

There seems a tacit assumption here that all people who read the bible believe it is to be taken literally. [...] This is NOT a premise believed by all or even most Christians.

This is, roughly, an accusation of a Weak Man fallacy:

One of the cutting-edge advances in fallacy-ology has been the weak man, a terribly-named cousin of the straw man. The straw man is a terrible argument nobody really holds, which was only invented so your side had something easy to defeat. The weak man is a terrible argument that only a few unrepresentative people hold, which was only brought to prominence so your side had something easy to defeat.

Note that this was also written by Yvain, and is the #2 hit on Google for "weak man fallacy". I think it's fair to say he popularized the concept of the Weak Man as a fallacy around here. Furthermore, he's the only person I can think of offhand who frequently gets accused of being too charitable to his opponents. So, as far as the author's original intent (although not necessarily everyone else's reading of the essay, death of the author and all that), I feel like he gets the benefit of the doubt here. I, for one, will happily disclaim that a large fraction of Christians do not accept the Bible as literal.

Meanwhile, although certainly there are many Christians who would say the story of Adam and Eve and the snake and the tree is not literally true, I don't think it's unfair to claim that some significant fraction do believe it's literally true - after all, almost half the country rejects evolution as the origin of human life, which is a referendum on the literal truth of another part of the same story. The fall of Adam and Eve is important to the Christian ideas of salvation and original sin, which makes some Christians understandably reluctant to reject it. From a certain perspective, denying the literal truth of the story is equivalent to rejecting a central tenet of Christian thought.

Edit: Of course, some also believe that the Fall is in some sense literally true, while the snake/tree or other fantastical elements are allegorical; there are more than just two schools of thought here.

I think that my bias towards our being related to monkeys is due to the meanings I invest in "monkey" and "human" as not being greatly dissimilar.

On the other hand, if I had already accepted the existence and human-exclusiveness of a soul, and/or a supernatural account of the world's origin that afforded special primacy to humans as distinct from animals, then clearly I would think relations that crossed these distinct boundaries of type were too absurd to consider.

Also, another limitation on the heuristic might be, as you suggest, weighing the value of the time that it would take to investigate the proposition being examined; I'm more likely to pause and engage in a discussion of my beliefs when I'm relaxing in my leather armchair with a snifter of brandy than while I'm changing trains on the way to work.

I know of an old prime number that happens to end with a 2.

Almost every possible non-absurd claim is also false. I think this is Occam's Razor, not the absurdity heuristic, in effect and working great.

"Almost every possible absurd claim is false."

Ah, I see you have adopted Douglas Adams' argument which demonstrates that the population of the universe is zero.

If a theist makes that remark, then she's really saying "Your argument is not good enough to convince those of my tribe". It is not "Your argument is invalid, logically speaking", because that is simply false.

Why can't a theist say something that is false?

From what I've seen, most theologians don't even believe that they know how to defend what they believe. The most common sentiment among them seems to be that the part of theology that seeks to demonstrate the existence of God is the crudest and least interesting part. Those theologians who do bother to try and support their belief with arguments, like Swinburne and Plantinga, rarely agree with one another.

In any case, comparing theologians to physicists as you do is silly. Physicists are the experts of physics because they know about the most accurate theories and the evidence that supports them. What do theologians know about? The evidence for the existence of God? Most of them admit there isn't any. The most accurate version of Christianity? There's no way to judge accuracy without evidence.

Some people who call themselves theologians may be experts on the history of Christianity, and a precious few might even be experts on what Christians actually believe these days, but none of them are experts about the actual claims of Christianity: That God loves us, that he sent his son to Earth, that he's got a blissful afterlife set up for good people, and so forth. Without evidence to know about, theologians have no more expertise on this subject than average Christians. Therefore, the theologian's version of Christianity is no more valid than the average Christian's version of it, and is no more deserving of our attention. In fact, because theologians represent such a tiny fraction of Christians, it deserves less.

Indeed. Ignorant atheists piss me off. No, you don't have to go along with everything your culture does just because everybody else thinks it's a good idea... but you'd better have a damn good reason for rejecting it.. But there really are a lot of atheists for whom it comes down to something like "talking snake? C'mon!". It's worse than being religious.

What's worse is a lot of these folks love being polemical - they don't have good reasons for being atheists but want to be loud jerks about it, so religious folk get the idea that atheists are just uninformed rude jerks.

I should have responded to this earlier, but I only just noticed it. Next time you're going to say something like this eight months after a post, you might want to PM me to make sure I get it.

This story is not fake, nor are any stories I post here. Occasionally I fiddle with details to make them more readable, but I do not make things up wholesale.

Here is a blog post from my trip to Cairo in which I mention meeting this woman. Upon request I can give you the names of people who frequently read my blog and can confirm this has been in there since 2008 and was not recently edited in to provide backstory.

Here is a picture of me very obviously in Egypt. Several people on this site have met me in person and can confirm that's me in the picture (Alicorn, for example). Although in principle it could be photoshopped, it would be hard to get that exact camel-riding position, or that exact face of grimacing discomfort you get when you are on a smelly and ill-tempered animal in 105 degree heat. I regret I don't have any pictures of me with the Muslim woman in question, but this should at least establish the premise of the story.

Downvoted for baseless and hostile accusation of dishonesty, misreading of the original post, and extremely dubious claims to positive knowledge of Egyptian culture.

(1)  p(DEVOUT | ARGUES) > 1 - epsilon,

(2)  p(DEVOUT) < 1 - epsilon,

(3)  p(DEVOUT | ARGUES) > p(DEVOUT).

p(ARGUES)

= p(ARGUES) * p(DEVOUT | ARGUES) / p(DEVOUT | ARGUES)   [multiplying by 1]

< p(ARGUES) * p(DEVOUT | ARGUES) / p(DEVOUT)  [by (3)]

= p(ARGUES | DEVOUT)  [Bayes's formula],