Being a Realist (even if you believe in God)

Since I was once where you are now, I would like to (helpfully?) mention that the only real difference between You and Alternate Universe You That Believes the Same Things but Identifies as an Atheist is that the latter doesn't spend so much mental energy rationalizing a label to erself.

Maybe it's because I've never been religious, but I have trouble figuring out what the main message of this post is. Is it, "when you look at the evidence, you'll realize that YEC and biblical morality are false" ? Or is there some deeper meaning ? You promised to buffet the reader with torrential emotions, but I'm only feeling bafflement...

Relevant song.

I guess my only question is:

If you are a realist about nature, if you believe that you should check your epistemology against the natural world, and if you accept that moral values and ethical systems are something you are free to choose based on your actual preferences...

What does a belief in God add?

In other words, if we both believe in a naturalistic view of the world, in testing our beliefs against reality, that proper beliefs are tested against the world, and that moral values and ethical systems are chosen rather than built into reality... it seems like at that point the belief in God isn't pulling any epistemic weight. I might be missing something, however, which is why I ask the question.

I like this post. You're coming from religion, you're seeking truth, you don't want to toss out the religion completely. I think asking what self-identified rationalists have to say about that is entirely appropriate. As mwengler implies, a religious background is as good a place to get values from as anyplace else.

I was raised as an atheist, toyed with Quakerism for a while, but went back to atheism, but with a kinder view of religion. Quakers may not be great at cost-benefit tradeoffs, but they've been at the forefront of progressive values forever. I'm also a Unitarian-Universalist atheist, and enjoy the community a church provides (a mix of atheists and theists). We teach our kids about all major religions, and then let them choose their beliefs (most choose what amounts to atheism, but they have some idea who they share the world with. One parent said he brought his kids to UU Sunday School to "inoculate them against religion").

But if I sing a line like, "Holy, holy, holy, Lord God Almighty... only thou art holy, there is none beside thee, perfect in power, love and purity." it makes me feel kind of teary and good. As does, "The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want." What a great idea, that someone else is watching out for you, someone who knows best! Sometimes it can be helpful, for instance for reducing unproductive anxiety. 90% of me focuses on the fact it isn't true and 10% on its value. For a questioning believer, maybe it's 90-10 the other way.

All I ask of believers is to subscribe to what I've heard described as the liberal bargain. We do not expect to come to agreement on important issues of values and how life should be led. Persuasion is fine, but coercion is not. All you have to do is be a good neighbor, abiding by widely shared ethical beliefs: leave other people alone and treat them with a modicum of respect. Let the public schools teach (secular) science. We do interfere inside families enough to prevent child abuse, but that's about it (and arguably we do too much of that). And I hope/expect that all a believer needs to buy into the liberal bargain is just a little bit of doubt.

So I say go ahead and pray, go to church, whatever works. Churches do a lot of good works. You already know that God helps those who help themselves, which means you're doing pretty much the same thing with or without a God.

I realize some people who were raised with religion and reject it have substantial anger against religion and need to denounce religion in strong terms. Sometimes they seem to want to make believers feel like idiots. I think that is unfortunate.

No need to apologize for emotion. LessWrong is all about rationally pursuing your values. The rationality part isn't helped by emotions, but the values part comes from nowhere else. At the deepest level, a value is just something you like. Rationality is about tethering yourself to the real world as you decide how to maximize your goodness taking your values as an assumption, as a given, as a BELIEF, as a FAITH.

To the extent "Christian" means a belief in some "supernatural" aspect to some man who lived here for 33 years about 2000 years ago, and indeed a belief that this man in some sense is or was an omnipotent omniscient supernatural being who not only created everything, but is also somehow deserving or automatically eligible for our love, our worship, our slavish devotion, well that's a bunch of low entropy statements with extraordinarily small amounts of evidence OTHER THAN MERE ASSERTION by some other humans of its truth. So it is probably hard to be a "rationalist christian" by that definition since that definition of christian sets so much belief on things that follow only from the authority and not from observation of reality.

But if by Christian all you mean is you have a taste for some of his moral/ethical statements, then heck, you can be a Dawknsist, a Yudkovskyist, a Feynmanist, a Ghandiist, and still have a strong role for rationality in realizing your values.

And since Jesus was supposedly talking about being a slave to sin - what is sin but imperfection? And what kind of imperfection can you be freed from just by knowing the truth? Obviously, an imperfect understanding of the world. So realising this, I cheered up immensely. I could still be a Christian (and possibly a better one) by doubting, by seeking the truth and letting myself be freed by it.

Why did you "cheer up immensely"? Have you traced the logical chain behind this emotion? My guess is that you had your cognitive dissonance resolved by rationalizing your faith.

You lost me at

(BTW, I am using the conventional spelling of Him with the capital letter as a gender-irrelevant variable name rather than a male personal pronoun).

First off, I'd like to say, I have met Christians who similarly were very open to rationality and applying it to the premises of their religion, especially the ethics. In practice, one of these was the only person who directly recognized me as an immortalist a few sentences into our first discussion, where no one else around me even knew what that is. I find that admirable, and fascinating.

I also think it likely that human beings as they are now need some sort of comfort, reassurance, that their universe is not that universe of cold mathematics.

So I'm not sure I should point this out, but, in the end, you're still trying to find a God of the gaps. In the end, you're still basing your view of the universe on a very special premise, that is, God.

Eventually, this can only be resolved in a few ways : either God exists, or He doesn't, or using its existence as a premise doesn't make a difference, and a theist would eventually come to the same understanding of the universe as a down-to-earth, reductionist atheistic rationalist.

But I also began to feel depressed, and then sort of hollow inside. I had no attachment to young-earth creationism, but I suppose I was trying to keep a sort of "God of the gaps" with regard to the beginning and development of intelligent life on Earth. Having seen why there were considerably fewer gaps than I had thought, I couldn't un-see it. A little part of me had been booted out of Eden.

I don't think God exists, and I'm still puzzled by how anyone could come to believe it does. Here I mean believe in that sense where you don't just "like to pretend something is real for the comfort it brings", which I do too, but rather in the sense where you think "stop kidding yourself now, you need a real, practical, useable answer now".

Both are different, the first is fine and necessary for many people, but if you use God in the latter I'm worried you're going to be up for a few disappointing experiences for the next few decades.

What do you make of "If I speak in the tongues[a] of men or of angels, but do not have love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal"?

I find at least a partial truth in it-- that communication is at least made much more difficult if there's no good will, though I think an assumption of good will by the listener is at least as important as actual good will from the speaker.

I hope never to have to protect something I love from crazy people with unshakeable beliefs that make no sense.

Amen.

I think I might add this sentiment to my heuristic for determining whether someone is sufficiently similar to me to TDT-cooperate on the Prisoner's Dilemma.

(Uh, if you're not familiar with TDT, just take it as high praise.)

By your lengthy apologetic introduction you're signaling to me that you know this doesn't belong here.

One goal of religious commitment is to become righteous. You may want to be righteous, but in order to be righteous, you first have to be right.

People who think of themselves as righteous are never right.