Discussion on the religious instinct

This is part of a discussion I had a while back with someone about why humanity seems to have a deeply set religious instinct…

If you take your own conscious experiences and compare it to inanimate matter, or the actions of a person and compare it to how inanimate objects behave, then it seems like there's not just one kind of thing out there - inanimate matter - there's possibly two fundamentally different kinds of things, because the former stuff seems so different to inanimate matter.

Because it seems like there are two fundamentally different things in existence, it becomes in some sense rational to suppose that inanimate matter comes from the other thing rather than the other thing comes from inanimate matter - possibly because they're so different and there's two options. Although I'm not exactly sure how this intuition about it being 'the other way around' happens.

Yeah, that's the rub, your intuition that it is the other way around. Why would you assume that to be the case when we can observe that matter exists regardless of whether or not it has the property of consciousness, but you do not observe the existence of consciousness without matter. Not to say that it is not a possibility, an immaterial self dependent consciousness but why assume it, since it leaves the question unanswered as to how does matter emerge from the immaterial?

Ah, so we observe that this 'other kind of stuff' - consciousness - seems to be dependent on matter, but matter doesn't seem to be dependent on consciousness, and matter seems to have come first, so you'd assume that matter comes first.

But there's still the issue of how consciousness/the subjective seems to be a fundamentally different kind of thing to matter, regardless of those two considerations. So, I guess, it's an easy thing to think of at least, for anyone, I mean, you just switch it around, matter=>mind becomes mind=>matter; it's very easy to do. So that helps it always be an option on the table, I believe, and maybe there being only two options gives it some additional reasonableness; I'm not sure how that works.

Two important issues are: as far as our observations go, matter seems to have come first, and, two, how can matter possibly emerge from an independent mind?

But they're not too powerful as objections, I believe. Our observations wouldn't include seeing mind come first if it did come first. And it's not like we ought to know how mind originates from matter because we're so smart, I mean, it also makes a lot of sense we wouldn't know how it does, or have any idea how, even if it was true.

Some thoughts on the argument from apparent design

I thought I would mention an argument for believing in God which I find quite convincing, an argument for the design of the laws of physics. General arguments for God are important because if God exists, then it's not a big step to Christianity out of other religions, especially with arguments like the one that uses historical evidence to support Jesus' resurrection.

I'll quote part of an article which is quite good on this subject, available here.

...The world is conditioned principally by the values of the fundamental constants A (the fine structure constant, or electromagnetic interaction), mn/me (proton to electron mass ratio), aG (gravitation), aW (the weak force), and aS (the strong force)...

For example, if aS were increased as much as 1%, nuclear resonance levels would be so altered that almost all carbon would be burned into oxygen; an increase of 2% would preclude formation of protons out of quarks, preventing the existence of atoms. Furthermore, weakening aS by as much as 5% would unbind deuteron, which is essential to stellar nucleosynthesis, leading to a universe composed only of hydrogen. It has been estimated that aS must be within 0.8 and 1.2 its actual strength or all elements of atomic weight greater than four would not have formed. Or again, if aW had been appreciably stronger, then the Big Bang's nuclear burning would have proceeded past helium to iron, making fusion-powered stars impossible. But if it had been much weaker, then we should have had a universe entirely of helium. Or again, if aG had been a little greater, all stars would have been red dwarfs, which are too cold to support life-bearing planets. If it had been a little smaller, the universe would have been composed exclusively of blue giants which burn too briefly for life to develop. According to Davies, changes in either aG or electromagnetism by only one part in 10^40 would have spelled disaster for stars like the sun.

etc...

But what about the idea that there are an infinite number of universes? If there are an infinite number of universes, then our laws of physics are nothing special, because they must happen somewhere.

I think there's a really good article, from Discover Magazine, on the idea of the multiverse from the point of view of modern physics, here.

Here's some key quotes about the issue:

...Call it a fluke, a mystery, a miracle. Or call it the biggest problem in physics. Short of invoking a benevolent creator, many physicists see only one possible explanation: Our universe may be but one of perhaps infinitely many universes in an inconceivably vast multiverse. Most of those universes are barren, but some, like ours, have conditions suitable for life...

...Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg, a physicist at the University of Texas, agrees. “This is the one fine-tuning that seems to be extreme, far beyond what you could imagine just having to accept as a mere accident,” he says.

Dark energy makes it impossible to ignore the multiverse theory. Another branch of physics—string theory—lends support as well. Although experimental evidence for string theory is still lacking, many physicists believe it to be their best candidate for a theory of everything, a comprehensive description of the universe, from quarks to quasars...

...Linde’s ideas may make the notion of a multiverse more plausible, but they do not prove that other universes are really out there. The staggering challenge is to think of a way to confirm the existence of other universes when every conceivable experiment or observation must be confined to our own. Does it make sense to talk about other universes if they can never be detected?...

...Rees, an early supporter of Linde’s ideas, agrees that it may never be possible to observe other universes directly, but he argues that scientists may still be able to make a convincing case for their existence. To do that, he says, physicists will need a theory of the multiverse that makes new but testable predictions about properties of our own universe. If experiments confirmed such a theory’s predictions about the universe we can see, Rees believes, they would also make a strong case for the reality of those we cannot...

So basically the multiverse makes sense as a theoretical idea but it has no real evidence for it in an empirical sense.

So where does one go from there?

I guess to some extent it could be a matter of personal taste, God or multiverse. But I have one more thought on the issue.

One of the traditional problems with asserting the existence of God is that it can easily fall afoul of Occam's razor. Occam's razor is the famous scientific principle that says you should not multiply entities unnecessarily.

A practical example of Occam's razor is the belief, 'My friend keeps ordering hamburgers because they like hamburgers', is more parsimonious than, 'My friend keeps ordering hamburgers because they made a bet with someone to eat 500 hamburgers before the end of the year', because the second one has more (and more complicated) entities in it as an explanation.

If you can explain everything with only one universe, then God has problems with Occam's razor. But if the only alternative to God is literally an infinity of other universes, then it's not clear God will be badly affected by Occam's razor. Because 'infinitely many universes' is a pretty big entity to assert, as big as an infinite God perhaps.

So, I would imagine, if you believe that there's a multiverse, then atheism no longer gets to use Occam's razor.

Normally atheism gets an inherent advantage over theism as the default position from Occam's razor. But with the multiverse that inherent advantage is lost, and neither position gets any inherent advantage over the other.

So the atheism-theism debate is then like thinking it will come up heads on a coin toss rather than tails, in terms of overall plausibility.

Is belief in God natural?

Suppose I created a robot to pick up rocks and for some reason gave it consciousness. In that circumstance, it would be OK for that robot to feel an obligation to pick up rocks and have beliefs reflecting that desire, because that's what it's been programmed to do and think. In the same way, if God has programmed humans to believe in a 'divine reality', then it would be intellectually acceptable for humans to believe in a divine reality under that circumstance. We'd just be fulfilling our 'programming', which would make religious belief perfectly fine regardless of other considerations.

But what if such a God doesn't exist? If there's only a 1% chance of such a God existing, then this viewpoint should sound silly.

Yet, it's not silly to affirm this point of view if there's a 90% chance of such a God existing.

So then what are the chances that there is a God who wires religious belief in this way? If it's 90%, then we can easily affirm the point-of-view described above. If it's 50% or a bit less, then maybe we can believe that it applies to us but in a way that leaves room for a fair amount of doubt.

If there's no evidence for or against God, then the principle of parsimony (if you can cut something out of an explanation without losing anything, cut it out) reduces the chance of God existing. But the chance that God exists does not thereby become nothing, because the debate about God is also part of a broader debate: is the realm of subjective experiences (mind) one of reality's accidents? Or something that has a place at the very foundation of reality? The latter idea will always be somewhat appealing to people in some form or other, even if it has no other evidence for it.

Also, a lot of believers would say that looking at the beauty of the natural world and the physical laws of the universe (the 'fine-tuning' argument), arguments from the big bang, other apologetics, etc., gives some evidence for a God. If so, then there would be a higher chance of a 'hard wiring' God existing.

What's the lowest chance that a 'hard wiring' God exists for believers to take the scenario above as seriously applying to humanity? In one study people found a 'reasonable doubt' that someone is guilty of a crime to exist at about a 25+% chance of innocence, given the evidence. I suppose that indicates you can get reasonable people believing in something with a 25+% likelihood that it's true. So if you bring this idea into the discussion, then there needs to be a 25+% chance of such a God existing for believers to take the scenario above seriously on purely rational grounds.

Looking at creation and Romans 1:18

"There are these two young fish swimming along, and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, "Morning, boys, how's the water?" And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, "What the hell is water?"

...The immediate point of the fish story is that the most obvious, ubiquitous, important realities are often the ones that are the hardest to see and talk about."

-David Foster Wallace

I thought of this joke when I was trying to understand what Paul was talking about in Romans 1:18.

Rom 1:18: "For ever since the world was created, people have seen the earth and sky. Through everything God made, they can clearly see his invisible qualities--his eternal power and divine nature. So they have no excuse for not knowing God."

The joke seems relevant because looking at the beauty of a garden, a forest, a galaxy, animals, the clouds, a sunset, and so on, is stuff that we deal with everyday (and in today's science we see elegant mathematical laws governing the universe). So it's not really that amazing to us. We get used to it. But actually, when you think about it, it's pretty amazing that the world is so beautiful and seems like e.g. a painting with no visible painter.

I think the point in Romans loses a lot of force because we're very used to the world we live in so it's not really that amazing it's as beautiful etc. as it is.