A Question For People Who Believe In God

I was raised agnostic. To be more specific my father - who was a psychiatrist - always answered all my why question chains to the best of his ability, but was pretty adamant that nobody knows for certain what happens when we die: religious people believe in an afterlife, atheists believe there is probably just nothing after death, etc. He was also clear that science favored only the atheist position, religious belief in the afterlife was more about hope over evidence, etc.

I was later interested in religions, but interested in the analytic sense of finding them fascinating, wanting to understand why people believed what they did, how they evolved, etc.

But I still remember when I first heard the simulation argument, and I immediately said "that is the first and only convincing argument for god".

There is pretty obvious alignment between the generalized abstract hope of Christianity and a positive singularity. Something very like the anticipated Christian god could be a very real entity in the future - an aligned superintelligence which expends some fraction of its immense compute on historical simulations for the explicit benevolent purpose of resurrecting the dead. If that is our future, then we already (probably) are in such a simulation now, and the afterlife is very real.

That type of god does exist both inside our physical universe in the future, and also outside of our (current simulated) universe in the present - both are true.

Of course that is no explanation for prayer - all that matters is participation in steering the world towards that positive trajectory (which the now and future 'god' could retroactively reward). It's also not an argument for blind faith: one can hope for the bright future where we are already immortal in a sense, death is defeated, etc, but it is still very much something we have to fight for in the present.

If I can find reasons for having beliefs that makes life more interesting than a purely scientific and materialistic worldview, I usually let them deceive me as much as possible as such beliefs are beneficial to my enjoyment of life.

The idea that a god exist is not all that illogical in itself (since every other theory of origin is just as crazy), but if you asked if I believed in, say, Christianity, then no.

Praying works, for the same reason that visualization works. It's a placebo effect which cases self-fulfilling prophecies by priming the brain towards a specific target and giving us the belief that it's possible to reach said target. The belief that something is possible makes it much more likely that we find a solution when a solution exists (There's many articles on this idea on both LW and Gwern's site, but I can't remember any titles right now). This idea is often called "the law of attraction" and considered paranormal by people who don't know how it works.

I don't personally believe in god, but I try to believe in something, and this something lacks a word, so "god" usually suffices. What it means is merely is something human is mixed together with the mechanical and indifferent. A purpose, an intention, a reason, or a bias. Anything beyond an indifferent and senseless chain of cause and effects which appeared for no reason whatsoever.

I can't speak for other people, but I expect that there's many diverse takes on your question. There's not one specific group, but a lot of scattered viewpoints. There might be clusters in god-related-beliefs-space, but I expect those to be clusters of regular religious people

I don't think I believe in God anymore--certainly not in the way I used to--but I think if you'd asked me 3 years ago, I would have said that I take it as axiomatic that God exists. If you have any kind of consistent epistemology, you need some base beliefs from which to draw the conclusions and one of mine was the existence of an entity that cared about me (and everyone on earth) on a personal level and was sufficiently more wise/intelligent/powerful/knowledgeable than me that I may as well think of it as infinitely so.

I think the religious people I know who've thought deeply about their epistemology take either the existence of God or the reliability of a sort of spiritual sensory modality as an axiom.

While I no longer believe in God, I don't think I had a perspective any less epistemically rational then than I do now. I don't think there's a way to use rationality to pick axioms, the process is inherently arational (for the first few, anyway).

The answer is threefold.

a) First, religious and spiritual perspectives are a primarily a perceptual experience, not a set of beliefs. For those who have this perception, the object of which is technically named "the numinous", it is self-evident. The numinous stuff clearly "is there", for anyone to see/feel/notice/perceive/experience/etc., and they cannot quite grasp the concept of someone saying they notice nothing.

Here are two analogies of how this works.

For people with numinal perception, hearing "it's pretty, but that's all" is somewhat similar to someone with perfect vision hearing from a born blind person they don't see anything. The person with vision can only imagine "not seeing" as "seeing a black background", similar to what they perceive when they close their eyes or are in a perfectly dark room. Not seeing isn't seeing black, it's not seeing.

Consider, for another analogy, that a dove with normally functioning magnetic field sensing were able to talk, and it asked you: "So, if you don't feel North, which direction do you feel?" You'd reply "none", and the dove would at most be able to imagine you feel something like up or down, because they cannot grasp what it is like not to physically feel cardinal directions.

The opposite also applies. People with no numinous perception at all are baffled by those with it describing they perceive something that quite evidently isn't there. Their immediate take is that the person is self-deluded, or maybe suffering from some perceptual issue, maybe even schizophrenic, if not outright lying. At their most charitable, they'll attribute this perceptual error to a form of synesthesia.

Unsurprisingly, it's much more likely to be a Theist or similar if one has numinous perception, and much easier to be an Atheist if one doesn't have it, though there are exceptions. I don't remember if it was Carl Sagan or Isaac Asimov, but I recall one of them explaining in an interview they did have this perception of a "something" there (I don't think they referred to it by its name), and were thus constantly tempted towards becoming religious, but kept fighting against that impulse due to knowing it as a mental trick.

b) Thus, if we establish numinal perception is a thing, it becomes easy to understand what religions and spiritual beliefs are. Supernatural belief system are attempts, some tentative and in broad strokes, others quite systematic, to account for these perceptions, starting from the premise they're perceptions of objective phenomena, not of merely subjective, mental constructs.

Interestingly, in my experience talking with people with this perception, what's perceived as numinal varies from one to the other, which likely account for religious preferences when one has a choice.

For example, for some the navy of a Catholic cathedral is shock full of the numinal, while a crystal clear waterfall in a forest is just pretty but not numinal at all. Those with this kind of numinal perception are more likely to be Christian.

For others, it's the reverse. Those are more likely to go for some religion more focused on nature things, some form of native religiosity, unstructured spirituality, animism or the like.

For others yet, they feel the numinal in both contexts. These will be all in with syncretisms, complex ontological takes, and the like.

c) Finally, on whether perceived numinous thingies are objectively real or not depends on one's philosophical assumptions.

If one's on the side of reductionism, then they're clearly some kind of mental epiphenomena either advantageous or at least not-disadvantegeous for survival, so it keeps being expressed.

If one's an antireductionist, they can say numinous thingies are quite real, but made of pure qualia, without any measurable counterpart to make it numerically apprehensible, so either one has the sensory apparatus to perceive them, or they don't, external devices won't help.

And the main issue here is the choice for either reductionism or antireductionism is axiomatic. One either prefers one, and goes with it, or prefers the other, and goes with it. There's no extrinsic way to decide, only opposite arguments that tend to cancel out.

In conclusion:

To more directly answer the question then, when someone says they believe in God, what they mean is they perceive a certain numinal thing-y, and that the most accurate way to describe that numinal thing-y is with the word "God", plus the entire set of concepts that come with it in the belief system they're attuned with.

If they abandoned this specific explanatory system, that wouldn't affect their numinal perception qua perception, so they'd likely either go with another explanation they felt covered their perception even better, or more rarely actively force themselves to resist accepting the reality of that perception. The perception itself would remain there, calling for their attention.

I have a very religious background but currently I'm not sure whether you would consider me religious. (Also to be clear I watched most of the video but I don't know much about him otherwise)

I think when hearing people share about personal things in the category of religion, it's important to try to be careful when pattern matching or when making assumptions about what beliefs people hold. People can use very similar words to refer to vastly different metaphysical beliefs. Two people could also have very similar metaphysical priors, and one might use more religious coded language due to their cultural background, whereas the other might not.

When he says that prayer works, I don't think you should necessarily take him to mean that he is communicating with an omni*** being who is making changes to our reality based on that communication.

For all intents and purposes he would probably concede to reducing prayer to a form of psychologically theraputic meditation. However, I think part of adopting a religious attitude is a hesitancy towards being reductive in that way.

Anyway, it got me thinking, when someone says they "believe in God" does this mean something like "I assign a ≥ 50% probability to there being an omnipotent omnipresent and omniscient intelligence?"

This is a good question, but how someone responds will vary a lot person to person, and it will be very difficult to converge on a common enough understanding of the meaning of words sufficient to get a clear answer.

For many people, it's more about adopting a kind of mental attitude, rather than something that can easily be understood by trying to clarify a probability.

Then, many people would just unequivocally answer that they assign a greater than 50% probability. Many of those people would go further to say that they'd assign a 100% probability. There's certain kinds of experiences that have a sort of self evident transcendent seeming quality to them, I've had these experiences, so it's easy for me to understand why some religious people would interpret that as a kind of ontological evidence for their own specific views. I just think they're making an error.

Another tangentially related question: how do you update on the non-religious-related views of someone (like Huberman) after they say they believe in God? Do they become less trustworthy on other topics?