We atheists are fond of telling theists how much better natural morality is than dogmatic morality, and we’re right. My compilation of Christian Bashing is mostly based on the absurdity and depravity that results when you treat morality as an inscrutable list of mandates as opposed to a system of valuation based on intent and consequence. However, I’m afraid that we sometimes get caught up in a little idealism of our own. We get caught in the trap of thinking of morality in theist terms — or more properly, outdated philosophical terms.
A recent article in New Scientist describes a phenomenon that liberals have known about for a while, but haven’t had much success in selling — that the lower classes are not inferior people, but rather people in inferior circumstances. When we take our emotions out of the equation and look at human behavior the same way we’d look at other social animals, we see something shocking. Impoverished humans behave the same way as other impoverished animals in their mating strategies and social risks.
We like to put teenage mothers in a box and label them as “bad people,” but across the entire human population, we see a powerful correlation between poverty and teen pregnancy. More importantly, we see a negative correlation between wealth and teen pregnancy. In other words, it isn’t the quality of the women that determines mating strategy. It’s the quality of the environment.
To put it plainly, humans do the best they can with the environment they live in. Their strategies (en masse) make sense, evolutionarily. Overwhelmingly, poverty is equivalent to shorter lifespans. Across the entire animal kingdom, we see a strategy in which animals facing a shortened lifespan reproduce more and earlier than those with long life expectancies.
Similarly, poverty is usually a predictor of crime. (Yes, I realize that white collar crime happens. That’s another post.) This also happens in the animal kingdom, and typically in males. When there is no clear path to the top, animals are willing to accept higher risks for higher rewards.
But it’s not just crime. Do you think it’s coincidental that the explosive growth of poker in the U.S. coincided with the collapse of the economy? No. It’s a predictable behavioral adaptation, in which millions of people who can’t see a way out of their situation engage in high risk behaviors in the hopes of hitting the big Chris Moneymaker jackpot at the final table. It’s why lotteries and casinos are all the rage.
I could list lots of strong correlations between “immoral” behavior and environments, but I need to take it as read at this point. I promise I’ll cover this topic in more depth soon, but for now, I have a broader and (I think) more important point to make. We have a real problem with the naturalist fallacy and morality.
Here’s the nasty truth: Our moral instincts are not designed to make us all equally happy, healthy, and self-actualized. They are designed to create a macro-organism which reproduces successfully across as many environments as possible.
So we have a very basic problem: The study of ethics has been primarily a philosophical endeavor, attempting to reason its way to a “formula” for determining how one ought to act in a particular situation. It has also largely treated humans as if they have free will — that they can and should choose certain actions because they are good. But this is a simplistic approach. Humans do not behave uniformly across populations, and frankly, they cannot be expected to behave uniformly.
Humans do behave predictably. We don’t like thinking about how predictable we are, but it’s true. Take the example I gave recently in describing the decoy effect. Like it or not, when the decoy effect is used, there is a predictable swing in what humans will choose. Similarly, when we study moral behaviors in particular environments, we find that people are equally predictable.
So we have a chicken and egg problem. On one side of the fence, we are told that if only people will behave differently, their environment will change for the better. On the other, we are told that if we only change the environment, people’s behavior will improve. Of course, environment and behavior are intertwined, since other people’s behavior creates the environment which influences our behavior, but as far as the science goes, there is a rather depressing truth emerging: In the immediate sense, telling people to change their behavior doesn’t work. Changing the environment does.
This fact calls into question our very concept of morality. Can we really look at a poor, uneducated teen girl and tell her she’s a bad person for having a baby at sixteen? Or to put it more generally, how much can we ask of our fellow humans when it comes to defying their genetics? The quest for better morals has always focused on improving people. I submit that while it’s important to encourage and teach good morality, it is far more productive to go about it from the opposite point of view. If enough people are behaving in a way that we don’t like, we should ask ourselves how we can change their environment such that they will behave the way we’d like.
The recent research on AIDS prevention bears this out. In Malawi, the AIDS infection rate was cut by over 50% by simply giving young girls a little bit of money each month. Talking about morality is great, but when there’s no food in the cupboard, and an old man offers you food or money for sex, morality goes out the window. Food trumps morality.
This also gives us a new perspective on the environment itself. As predicted, I’ve caught a bit of flack for my post on objectification and sexy atheists. How dare I question the obvious harm caused by objectification of women?! I’ve been told to look at all the women starving themselves and getting plastic surgery and putting their daughters in beauty pageants. It’s an obvious line of cause and effect, right?
Or… is it? Which women are we looking at? Is there a particular demographic which is especially susceptible to social pressure to look like supermodels or pop stars? When is the last time you heard of a famous female scientist in a beauty pageant? I can’t think of one. At first glance, it seems that while female scientists certainly come in various degrees of attractiveness, they aren’t flocking to the wet t-shirt contests to gain validation by winning a hundred bucks for taking their tops off.
So are we really being fair when we blame “objectification” for runaway female sexualization? Do we really have a problem with objectification, or do we have a problem with a population that is especially susceptible to pressure from objectification? Does the objectification cause women to harm themselves, or does a lack of education, self-esteem, and self-actualization cause them to react especially negatively when they are objectified?
Let me relate a conversation I had a few days ago with a friend who has been trying to learn “Game.” He approached a group of girls and ran a “routine” straight out of the Mystery Method. He got shot down pretty brutally, too. When he told me about it, he asked me why it failed so badly and I asked him about the girls he was approaching. It turns out, they were at least graduate student age, and hanging out in a bar known for being friendly to the intellectual type. In other words, these girls were very smart, and probably very secure in their academic field. And they saw right through what he was doing. But by the same token, I’ve seen other friends follow the Game program to the letter and have it work like a charm. On younger girls with self esteem issues.
So we can rant and rave about the evils of men who use Game, or we can chide the girls for being too stupid to recognize Game when they see it. Or we can look at Game as a social dynamic that functions in a particular environment. Want to give women a Game Immunity Shot? Find an environment in which they can gain self esteem and education. Want to put a stop to all the social outcasts who learn how to pump and dump by negging? Find an environment in which men learn valuable social and emotional skills at a young age.
Want to stop girls from sticking their fingers down their throats? It’s a great goal, and I support you in it. But stop blaming Victoria’s Secret catalogs and billboards. Do it the same way that scientists do it. Find a group of women who aren’t susceptible to over-sexualization, who have healthy self-esteem and compete effectively for the attention of men. Figure out what they have that the other women don’t. Then find a way to give it to the other women. Just like the scientists who figured out that ten dollars a month cuts AIDS transmission in half.
“The quest for better morals has always focused on improving people. I submit that while it’s important to encourage and teach good morality, it is far more productive to go about it from the opposite point of view. If enough people are behaving in a way that we don’t like, we should ask ourselves how we can change their environment such that they will behave the way we’d like.”
Teaching good morality is a type of environmental change, and may be effective. However, that is a complex empirical question with many variables (including how it is taught and if said teachings contains appeals to imaginary entities) that I have no data to support either way.
Posted by MKandefer | July 26, 2010, 4:58 pmHeh… I was waiting for this comment, actually. With bated breath. (Thanks, Evan!) Here’s the thing about teaching morality: Yes, it is a change in the environment, but is it a relevant change?
Humans are actually pretty self-regulating in moral terms. That’s because… well… we self regulate. If you’re a dick to me, I will punish you for it. If my friends are around, they’ll punish you for it, too. If you’re a dick to too many people, you don’t have any friends left. Most people can and do figure this out on their own. A little encouragement from the parents certainly helps while the cognitive circuits aren’t all fully formed, but for adults, it’s a pretty simple equation to work out.
The question we have to ask ourselves is whether or not people are behaving “immorally” because of ignorance or some other factor. In terms of teen pregnancy, the data seems perfectly clear. We all know that sex causes babies, and most of us know that condoms are a nice place for the semen to live if we don’t want them relocating to the uterus. Or, to put it less cynically, only the most extremely uneducated are unaware that condoms prevent pregnancy. But across the world, across education spectrums, poverty is a much better indicator of teen pregnancy than education.
(Yes, education and wealth do often go hand in hand, but reducing poverty is better at improving education than improving education at reducing poverty.)
So the point is this: We can bring Malawi teen girls into a classroom and tell them that risky sex causes AIDS, and now they know. And they’ll go home to their empty cupboards and realize that the only way they can generate a little cash flow is to have risky sex. So they have risky sex. And the education was virtually worthless.
On the other hand, if we find a way to get twenty bucks a month into their hands, they’ll be able to eat and have a little free time and money, with which they can educate themselves if they’d like to get a job making forty bucks a month.
So yes. Education can be an environmental change. But if it doesn’t make a meaningful change in the available options — and more importantly, immediate need, then it’s not an effective environmental change. (We see this in America with obsolete degrees, or in times of recession. Got a PhD? Great for you, except when you’re priced out of the market and have to accept a low paying job, but you still have your $100k in student loans.)
Oh, hell… I’ll go ahead and give you the punch line to my next blog: Teens having babies is not really a moral or immoral behavior in the way we usually think of it. But I’ll leave it at that and make you wait for the details.
Posted by hambydammit | July 26, 2010, 5:14 pmHmm. I don’t think you’re entirely wrong, but there seem to be some fundamental confusions lurking just under the surface of what you’re arguing here.
Firstly, what you’re saying here is hardly a new insight or a contrast between a modern, scientifically-informed view of human nature and stodgy old philosophical views of human nature. Aristotle was talking about the importance of environment in shaping human moral character twenty-three centuries ago. Every great ethical theorist has asked the question “Why don’t people act ethically much of the time?” with respect to whatever specific ethical theory they develop, and one of the answers (though by no means the only answer) they’ve come up with every time was that people’s environment and circumstances shape their behavior more than abstract considerations of right and wrong.
Secondly, the reason ethics has been a primarily philosophical endeavor is that philosophers (as a profession, with altogether too many individual exceptions) take great care to clarify concepts and definitions – and those who fail to do so get into all sorts of trouble. You have failed to do so here, which brings me to…
Thirdly, the philosophical study of ethics has almost never been primarily about reasoning “its way to a ‘formula’ for determining how one ought to act in a particular situation.” Rather, ethical theory is and always has been about analyzing and arguing for the underlying values that make judgments of right and wrong possible in the first place. Yes, various versions of the principle of utility and Kant’s categorical imperative are formulaic rules for behavior, but those rules are merely the conclusions of lengthy arguments about what is valuable (happiness, autonomy) and why. Nor does every philosophical argument about what is valuable and why produce such a formula for action: Virtue theory, for example, focuses on what character traits we should value and why rather on what specific actions are right or wrong in particular circumstances.
Understanding, analyzing, and arguing for the values which underlie specific judgments about right and wrong actions is a crucial part of ethical theory, and one you cannot avoid by ignoring. You are very evidently committed to a set of underlying values, as anyone else who speaks in moral terms must necessarily be. Why, for example, do you think that getting girls not to stick fingers down their throats is a “great goal,” presumably meaning one that it’s a goal that is worthwhile/valuable/good to pursue? I’m not disagreeing: I’m just pointing out that it is evident from the actions and ideas that you criticize and praise that you are committed to a set of values: You think that goals like happiness and life satisfaction are intrinsically worthwhile and good to pursue, and not just for yourself but for anyone and everyone. Ethical theory is about analyzing and justifying such value claims, and you are only going to speak past people rather than engage them and persuade them if you don’t address your own underlying values, and theirs.
What I’m saying is that your argument here – which is primarily about strategically effective ways of bringing about desired behaviors and consequences – is only secondarily an ethical argument. It relies on a whole suite of prior ethical claims which you’ve glossed over or simply assumed without justifying – specifically, claims about which behaviors and consequences we ought to desire. What behaviors/consequences are genuinely valuable/good, and what makes them so? Should we care primarily about behaviors (deontological ethics, e.g. Kant) or about consequences (consequentialist ethics, e.g. utilitarians)? Or perhaps we should ignore behaviors and consequences as secondary, and focus on the character from which they spring (virtue theory, e.g. Aristotle)? Whatever part of human life we consider to be of primary ethical importance – character, behavior, or consequences – the specific content of what we value and why must be established separately from the question of how to best realize what we value.
Posted by G Felis | July 26, 2010, 6:55 pmHamby — irrelevant pet peeve of mine. It’s “bated breath” from a contraction of “abated breath”. The verb to abate still exists but it’s contracted form is never used outside of this phrase anymore.
Posted by Evan | July 27, 2010, 2:53 pmThanks, Evan! I’ve fixed it in the comment (and given you props) and will henceforth use the proper word. I’m always happier to be corrected than to remain ignorant. Keep up the good proofreading!
Posted by hambydammit | July 27, 2010, 3:16 pmThanks, George. As usual when I talk about ethics, I’ve presented a great idea poorly, and I appreciate your attempt to weasel out the proper way of explaining it.
Taking everything you’ve said about ethics as read, yes. I am interested in affecting a change in the way people think about moral behaviors, not in the way we came to have our moral values in the first place. And grudgingly, yes, it’s true that this isn’t a new idea. However, I think for the majority of Christianized Americans (even the atheists nee theists) it’s new in the “new to you” sense. I know that for myself, even as an staunch skeptic, it’s sometimes been difficult to remember to flip my brain over into a more scientific perspective of morality.
As to glossing over ethical claims, I must beg to differ. I have not glossed over them. I’ve simply omitted them because they’re not relevant to the argument I’m making. Distilled to its essence, I’m arguing that “moral instruction” is over-emphasized to the point of ignoring the fact that people are moral animals, and that with or without moral instruction, the environment is the most powerful predictor of behavior. (No, I’m not encouraging people to stop teaching their children morality. I’m saying that all the moral training in the world can’t compete with a change in the environment for the purpose of increasing “good” behavior.)
Posted by hambydammit | July 27, 2010, 3:33 pmAh, but we aren’t moral animals. Humans are animals that, like all social animals, are a mixed bag at best. On the one hand, we have cooperative/moral impulses, motivations, and behaviors which take the well-being of others into account. On the other hand, we have selfish/amoral impulses, motivations, and behaviors which, to the extent that they acknowledge the well-being of others at all, subordinate them entirely to our own selfish interests.
With that firmly in view, I’m not sure whether it makes sense to “bracket out” value claims when trying to figure out how best to produce people whose mixed bag of impulses, motivations, and behaviors tend more towards the cooperative than the selfish. In fact, you can’t even understand the goal – what it is you’re trying to figure out how to do more effectively – without attending to the underlying values that structure the division of that mixed bag into two sets of impulses/motivations/behaviors in the first place. Why did I pick cooperation and selfishness? How are they defined? Can they be defined without fleshing out that vague phrase “well-being” I used in the prior paragraph?
On further reflection, I’m not sure your whole dismissal of moral education isn’t too quick even aside from the more philosophical objections I’ve raised. I’ve read some excellent reports on the effectiveness of philosophically- and psychologically-informed moral education in reducing bullying, schoolyard squabbling and violence, and judgmental “othering” behaviors. These programs use roleplaying exercises and such to encourage empathy with others and tie it to the inherent sense of fairness that children start with. Come to think of it, they are essentially programs that teach critical thinking about ethical questions – and you and I both know that effective, early education in critical thinking is a panacea for all sorts of social ills. So I don’t think your beef is really with moral education in general, but with *shitty* moral education – moral education in the most common religious model, which consists in no more than the inculcation and enforcement of dogmatic rules which often have nothing to do with anything of genuine moral value.
Posted by thephilosophicalprimate | July 28, 2010, 3:53 amI mean moral in the descriptive, not prescriptive. Without any moral training at all, humans feel moral impulses.
And thus fall under the broad category of morality. (That category encompassing all actions which have moral/ethical implications.)
I suppose I should have used the word “pontification” or “preaching” instead of education. The program you describe qualifies, I think, as a substantial environmental change in the sense that the children are taken out of a milieu in which they could bully without empathy and more or less forced into a situation where their natural empathy responses could come into play. In the sense that I was thinking (and clearly not conveying well) this is primarily an environmental change (though it certainly is a change designed to educate).
To illustrate the point, imagine two classrooms. In the first, the teacher admonishes all of the children not to bully because it’s bad. In the second, they run the program you’re talking about. It’s not hard to imagine that the first classroom will be full of bullies and the second will have substantially less. (I attended school in the first classroom. I can vouch for it.)
In other words, I think your example illustrates precisely the argument I intended to make.
QED
Posted by hambydammit | July 28, 2010, 9:06 amHamby, I think some of this stuff is very age-dependent. I remember reading about an experiment in a book by Cialdini regarding influence:
“All this has important implications for rearing children. It suggests that we should never heavily bribe or threaten our children to do the things we want them truly to believe in. An experiment gives some hints about what to do and what not to do. The experimenter had a set of 5 toys, and wanted the boys to avoid playing with the most interesting toy (a robot). His first approach was to issue a clear threat. “It is wrong to play with the robot. If you play with the robot, I’ll be very angry and will have to do something about it.” 21 of the 22 boys didn’t touch the robot during the first session. On a second group of boys, a second approach was tried. This time all that was told to the boys was ‘It is wrong to play with the robot.’ Again, 21 of the 22 (different) boys didn’t touch the robot. The real difference among these boys came a 6 weeks later, when they had a chance to play with the toys without the initial experimenter around. 33% of the boys who had been spared the strong threat played with the forbidden toy the second time around. However, for the first group, not having the person wielding the threat present, gave them a free hand with the toys. A whopping 77% played with the robot. The lesson? If you want your kids to comply while you’re not around, threats will not internalize the desire for them to adhere. p94″
Posted by Evan | July 28, 2010, 1:32 pmYou mention this in reference to children, but I honestly wouldn’t expect it to be much different in adults. Threats only work when they are perceived as real and applicable. That is, when we are only behaving a certain way to avoid punishment, we aren’t really behaving morally. We’re behaving under coercion.
Posted by hambydammit | July 28, 2010, 3:54 pmYou know Hamby I find it rather ironic that your recent postings actually summerize my objections to you from the past two years.
When it comes to objectification of women look deeper for root causation, don’t fall into the trap of saying “it’s obvious” provide scientific evidence for your claims ….etc etc……
Sound familar? I mean yesh.
So yeah actual research into social issues will make the world a better place.
Posted by cptpineapple | July 29, 2010, 6:20 pmI find it ironic that you still don’t seem to get that all your bitching at me has been pointless because you’ve been on my side the whole time. Of course I recognize the irony. That’s why I chose the words. And if you didn’t get it, my primary point to you was that as strongly as you feel about objectification, that’s how strongly I feel about faith based belief.
So… is over-objectification bad? Is faith based belief bad? Honestly, I think the answer to both is a qualified yes. You’re allowed to live your life based on the assumption(!) that we live in a dangerously over-objectified, over-sexualized environment. And I’m allowed to live as if we live in a dangerously under-rationalized, anti-science environment. And we can both encourage others to try to change these things.
But it doesn’t especially benefit you or me to continually argue over what we both already know. There’s a big difference between scientifically demonstrated and societally “obvious.” We should always treat the two categories differently when building social policy, but societally obvious is not a worthless position. It’s just less supported than scientifically demonstrated.
Posted by hambydammit | July 29, 2010, 6:59 pmI don’t know, I’ve been struggling with this line of though for a few days now especially with my views and even thinking about your stance on moderates. I left theism due to my stance to be scientifically minded and not accept “obvious” as an answer.
I mean, I think a lot of things can go wrong. It may be “socially obvious” to you and me for relatively harmless beliefs. Such as I may skip on wearing skimpy clothes etc… but what about other people who want to use “socially obvious” for things that are a little less trivial.
Such as it’s “socially obvious” that Jews want to take over the world and ergo any and all aggression against Israel is not only morally justified by required. What do we do with somebody like that?
In other words where is the line of what we can say is “obvious” and what we can’t?
I mean I’m sure you think my views of objectification etc.. are doing me harm.
Shouldn’t we try to convince people out of harmful beliefs? But how? I mean to do so we would have to accept the stance that “obvious” isn’t the answer. But in order to do that, we should make sure we don’t seem like hypocrites when we try to argue from “obvious”.
Now I agree about that “obvious” and scientific supported position should be treated differently when it comes to social policy, but this isn’t an ideal world. Our views of “obvious” will slip into our political views and we will be trying to legislate what we think is “obvious”. Like will somebody with the view I wrote above really keep his views out of politics? Will he really NOT vote for a candidate that shares his views just because we should treat “obvious” and “scientifically demostrated” differently?
On the same hand, I don’t like ragging on people for one thing than doing that thing. I mean if I reject “obvious” as a reason for your views, then should I be accepting “obvious” as a reason for mine?
Another thing that’s bugging me is that isn’t science the best and only method of determining what is true?
I mean either my claims of objectification are true or not. I would prefer them to be true, but is that justified? Would I change my mind in view of contrary evidence or would I just say that it’s “obvious” and no need for scientific investigation?
Seeing as “obvious’ is less supported than scientifically demostrated and scientifically demostrated is the only way to know something then where does that leave “obvious”?
Sorry, but I’m just thinking out loud.
Posted by cptpineapple | July 30, 2010, 11:40 amPlease don’t apologize. Thinking aloud is a good way to think, especially when we’re unsure of ourselves. This isn’t (and never has been) about winning or losing. It’s about figuring out truth as best we can.
And who decides what is trivial? It may be trivial to me that you do or don’t wear skimpy clothes, but I’ll show you a radical feminist who thinks it’s the most important thing you can do. (We’d both probably be wrong in our opinions, fwiw.)
Which is why we speak of the gravity of the situation determining the strength of the burden of proof. Ask me to vote for or against a bill banning beauty contests for girls under 18, and I won’t really require a ton of evidence to come to a decision. It “feels” like that’s probably psychologically a good thing, and even if I’m wrong, the worst thing that happens is Mommy’s Little Princess (and Mommy) have to wait a couple of years before Princess gets to parade around in her undies. But if I vote yes on a campaign to exterminate the Jews before they take off their masks and reveal themselves to be aliens… well… that’s a little heavier, so I’d really like to see some concrete evidence. (WMD’s anyone? Trillion dollar war on the word of a few war hawks?)
Scientific rigor gets relaxed as the projected consequences of being wrong diminish.
That’s the $64,000 question, and you’ll probably win a Nobel Prize if you can figure out how to quantify it. Life is all about guesswork, and unfortunately, some of the most important questions need an answer now, even if there isn’t enough scientific evidence to feel certain of our position. I tend to rank my own decisions and my opinion of social policy on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. You don’t fuck with the base of the pyramid until you have extremely strong evidence that you’re doing the right thing. Thus, the need for scientifically rigorous evaluation of drugs, food, pollution, etc.
I’m strongly in favor of legislation banning Sharia law because it demonstrably and scientifically cuts into the bottom two tiers of Maslow’s hierarchy. I’m a staunch advocate of freedom of and from religion in America because at this time, the things I am most opposed to in Christianity are primarily affecting the upper levels — self actualization and esteem. While these are very important, I can’t justify “socially obvious” restrictions on other people’s right to pursuing the upper levels in any way they see fit.
So… yes, I’m quite convinced that faith based religion is one of the worst things man has ever invented. And I spend a good bit of my time trying to convince other people that I’m right. But I will never call for legislative action against it until and unless it can be rigorously scientifically proven to be as bad as I think it is, and at least as harmful as things we’re already comfortable legislating against. Likewise, I think that until sexual objectification can be linked directly to the bottom of Maslow’s hierarchy, the discussion should stay on blogs and out of congress.
It’s not a perfect solution, but it guarantees freedom in principle. If everyone did it this way, I think the world would be substantially better than it is.
I dunno. I think you’re probably missing out on a bit of self-actualization in life because you are too conservative and a little high strung about things like this, but on the whole, I think you’re doing ok. You and the world will probably both be ok if you pass through life as a prude.
Absolutely we should try to convince others out of harmful beliefs. That’s what my blog is all about. There are some things that I am scientifically “certain” of, and I present them with the full weight that it entails. Evolution, humans as biologically non-monogamous, the power of brainwashing/indoctrination, and even the nature of free will. Likewise, I will rail against the doctrine of Christianity with full force. It’s absurd, scientifically retarded, and demonstrably harmful if taken either literally or figuratively. (See my diatribe about finding a good metaphorical meaning in the Christian message.)
Beyond that, I have to use my best judgment for how strong the circumstantial and/or partial scientific evidence is. With the harmfulness of faith based religion, I believe the science that we do have supports my position well enough to advocate it strongly. However, as I said, I would never support any kind of legislation restricting the freedom to practice faith based religion (so long as it abides by existing law). But I believe in my position enough to be a strong advocate.
I think I’ve answered this thoroughly, but just to be sure: Personally, I will not vote for restricting someone else’s freedom unless there’s scientifically rigorous evidence that I should. I will probably suffer for this, but I believe that the freedom to fuck up (and the consequences of mass fuck-ups) are more important than everyone living the scientifically best life possible.
LOL! Could have fooled me! Don’t like ragging on people. My hairy white ass, you don’t like ragging on people.
Sorry… couple of years of pent up frustration there…
Ok… back to fluffy and kind hambydammit. You’re exactly right. The evidence for both claims is still somewhat circumstantial. Either you need to stop ragging people for their positions and accept that some things just aren’t proven one way or another yet, but we need to hold some kind of position on them nonetheless, or continue ragging but apply the same standards to yourself.
Well, that’s the rub, isn’t it? I think all we can do as individuals is make the promise to ourselves to (1) try to be open to disproof of our emotionally attached beliefs, and (2) to stand far enough away from our emotionally attached beliefs that we at least treat them with healthy skepticism.
To that end, I’d like you to think about the exchanges we’ve had concerning religion and terrorism. Recall that back in the RRS days, I was on the religion = suicide bombing bandwagon. It was one of the atrocities I cited as evidence that religion is a bad thing. But no more. I’ve read the same studies you have, and it’s clear that religious adherence just isn’t a primary motivator for suicide bombers. To be sure, it’s a facilitator — it’s easier to carry out a bombing when you believe that you’re a major player in a cosmic battle between eternal forces than when it’s just some petty warlord working his way up the tribal ladder. But, it’s pretty apparent scientifically that the best predictor of suicide bombing is tactical necessity. Not religious adherence.
So… I’ve incorporated that into my worldview. I’d honestly prefer that we could link suicide bombing to religious adherence. What a powerful argument that would be! But we can’t. So I make the less powerful argument. “Religious belief exacerbates existing human nastiness.” Even though I don’t have the definitive study to prove it, I’m doing it as scientifically as possible, adjusting my claim based on what science I do have.
I remember a few years ago, there was a great big study where they spent close to a million dollars to figure out that male breasts are different from female breasts. Duh, right? I never could get my hands on the full study, but I read the abstract, and for the most part, it bore out what everybody already knew about female breasts as a secondary sex organ and male breasts as more or less vestigial. (Well, the nipples, specifically.)
The point is that science backed up what everybody “knew” was obvious. But it needed to be done anyway. The thing is, people have been saying that there’s a quantifiable difference between the way breasts are perceived for as long as they’ve been talking about breasts. And they were right. And more importantly, they weren’t wrong for saying it before there was scientific proof. It was obvious.
As you say, we live in an imperfect world. A lot of questions that need answering simply don’t get the grant. So they don’t get answered. But they need answers, so we do the best we can with the tools we have — reason, circumstantial evidence, and “obvious.” That’s not wrong. It’s the way it has to be. It only becomes wrong when we intentionally avoid backing it up with science, or defy the science and stick dogmatically to what we believe.
Sorry this got so long, but I think these are the best questions you’ve asked in a long time, and I feel like they deserve the best answers I can give you.
Posted by hambydammit | July 31, 2010, 1:28 pmI’ve been thinking of your comments for the past week and am still stuck on something.
So rather than go into another long post, I’ll just ask something simple.
Say there are two Christians. When asked for their justification of their belief in God they respond:
Christian 1: I just have faith that God exist.
Christian 2: It’s obvious that God exists [due to complexity, first cause whatever...]
How would you deal with each? Would you deal with them differently?
Posted by cptpineapple | August 8, 2010, 7:39 pmHow would I deal with them? What do you mean? What am I trying to accomplish in dealing with each of them?
Posted by hambydammit | August 10, 2010, 3:16 pmBy deal with them I mean to get them to reconsider their Christianity. That is you want to plant a seed if you will that will eventually lead them to atheism.
What I was trying to get at is the difference between”it’s obvious” and faith.
When I was a Theist, I used much the same as Christian 2 and you ragged on me pretty hard for it.
So if you wanted to convince Christian 1 and 2 into rationality how would you do it? Would you use different approaches for them?
Posted by cptpineapple | August 11, 2010, 11:18 pmYeah, I would approach them differently. Bear in mind that most theist arguments represent a certain amount of rote repetition, and don’t always reflect the reality of the belief. That is, some people say “I just have faith that God exists,” but in reality, they believe because they perceive lots of evidence and either don’t know how or just don’t put the evidence to the same standard of proof that they do for other things. Or it could be backwards from that, or something else. The point is there are a lot of times we’re really quite confused about our own minds.
Having made that disclaimer, I’ll put it like this. Once I’ve fleshed out that a believer really does operate on faith — that is, he sees the evidence against god, understands it, and believes anyway — I attack faith in one way or another. Perhaps by demonstrating that faith leads to a subjectivity paradox where nothing can be known. (IIRC I used that on you frequently.)
Christian 2 is usually a person who misunderstands basic epistemology and critical thinking, and has made numerous logical fallacies in their internal argumentation. (That is, the logical argument for the existence of god.) For them, I attack each fallacy and hopefully, over the course of time, dismantle the tower of bad critical thinking brick by brick.
BTW, I was primarily Christian #2. Once it became obvious that the evidence was faulty and the logic fallacious, I couldn’t rely on faith. But I’ve always had a very low tolerance for cognitive dissonance. I’ve known plenty of people who damn near thrived on it.
Does that help your thinking process at all?
Posted by hambydammit | August 12, 2010, 12:45 amSince you thanked Evan for the proofreading…
In your next comment (your 7/27 3:33 pm response to George), you said you were interested in “affecting a change.” The word you want there is “effecting.” These are tricky words, often confused. Here’s one explanation:
http://www.wsu.edu/~brians/errors/affect.html.
Posted by Joel Justiss | August 15, 2010, 9:01 pmBleh. Thanks, Joel. Unfortunately, that was just an error in proofreading, not thinking. I do know the difference in this case, so nothing learned today. Thanks for trying, though.
Posted by hambydammit | August 16, 2010, 4:20 pmSorry I’ve been off for a week as my internet went down.
But anyway what I don’t understand is where does the burden of proof fit in?
I mean critical thinking demands that we assume things are false until proven true, and by “proven” I mean scientifically, not circumstancally.
That is the correct answer to, say does religion cause X is “I don’t know” seeing as there isn’t any real scientific evidence for it.
It seems to shift the burden of proof, that is “X is obvious prove me wrong.”
I’m glad you brought up the Christian relying on faulty logic and fallacies, because isn’t that what “obvious”is?
I mean if it as scientifically and logically demostrated, we would just say it was scientifically demostrated, we wouldn’t have to say “obvious” so the obvious route seems to contain non sequiturs at best because if it was founded on logic and evidence it would be scientifically demostrated rather than “obvious”.
Posted by cptpineapple | August 20, 2010, 7:55 pmAlright so many, if not most, atheists claim something needs to be scientifically verified true to be true. If that is true, what scientific evidence is there to verify that claim? Or is it something just accepted as true on faith? Regardless, if the findings in that paper are true then what we do is just determined by some biological, evolutionary process independent of our free will (which, according to this, we do not have); we can, then, not hold people accountable for what they do. How can a person that murders to get money because he is poor be held accountable is all he is doing is following some predetermined, natural biological, evolutionary urge? It would make no sense to punish anyone for anything since they do not do anything out of choice.
Posted by Christian | October 30, 2010, 8:50 am