Religion
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random acts of methodical rationality
Archived Posts from this Category
Posted by steven on 26 Jul 2007 | Tagged as: Religion, Singularity, Science Fiction
The idea of a technological singularity is sometimes derided as the Rapture of the Nerds, a phrase invented by SF writer Ken MacLeod [update: this isn’t true, see his comment] and popularized by SF writers Charlie Stross and Cory Doctorow. I can take a joke, even a boring old joke that implies I’m a robot cultist, but it irks me when jokes become a substitute for thinking. There’s always someone in discussions on the topic who uses the comparison to fringe Christian beliefs about the End Days as if it’s some sort of argument, a reason why all the developments postulated by those who do take the singularity seriously will fail to materialize.
Although the parallel — like any appeal to authority, positive or negative — might work as a heuristic, a hint to look harder for more direct and technical criticisms, it of course fails as such a criticism itself. When computing atom trajectories in a supercomputer, or in nanotechnological devices, Mother Nature doesn’t check the consequences against a List of Ridiculous Beliefs, rejecting any outcomes too similar to those expected by the uncool and stupid.
Now, it could be that if there’s a close similarity between the singularity and the rapture, this points at some sort of psychological flaw shared by believers in both, a seductive but irrational attractor of the human mind that sucks people in, with those raised religiously dressing it up in terms of God, and us technologically-oriented atheists imagining a human-made God-substitute. But that image of a shared psychological flaw is itself so seductive that it has distorted people’s view of what the singularity is about into a kind of geek-bible-wielding strawman — singularitarian ideas are assumed to parallel fundamentalist Christian ideas even where they don’t, just because the comparison is apparently so much fun. “Oh, look at those silly nerds, aping the awful fundies without even knowing it!” In this post, I will list some (but not all) ways in which the singularity and rapture resemble each other less than some people think.
First, though, it’s worth listing some ways in which the singularity and the rapture do resemble each other. Both deal with something beyond human rules emerging into the world, something so powerful that, if it wanted to, it could make human effort from that point on irrelevant. Some predictions about the singularity have included ideas that this power would suddenly help us “transcend” human life and our human bodies, with uploading, in the critic’s mind, parallelling God snatching true believers up to Heaven. And with such an event looming on the horizon, it’s only to be expected that both groups would take the possibility very seriously, in some cases even making it a central concern in their lives.
Now, some differences:
It’s also interesting to think about what would happen if we applied “Rapture of the Nerds” reasoning more widely. Can we ignore nuclear warfare because it’s the Armageddon of the Nerds? Can we ignore climate change because it’s the Tribulation of the Nerds? Can we ignore modern medicine because it’s the Jesus healing miracle of the Nerds? It’s been very common throughout history for technology to give us capabilities that were once dreamt of only in wishful religious ideologies: consider flight or artificial limbs. Why couldn’t it happen for increased intelligence and all the many things that would flow from it?
It would be tragic if, by thinking of some subjects as inherently religious, we let the religious impose their terms on our understanding of the world.
Posted by steven on 17 Jul 2007 | Tagged as: Religion
People argue a lot about whether Christian and especially Islamic scriptures spur believers on to violent behavior. But did you know that Zen Buddhists, too, can get the wrong ideas from their sacred writings?
From the Gateless Gate:
CASE 36. GOSO’S NO WORDS, NO SILENCE
Goso said, “When you meet a Man of the Way on the road, greet him not with words, nor with silence. Tell me, how will you greet him?”
Mumon’s Comments:
If you can answer Goso exactly, it will be extremely heartening. If you cannot answer properly yet, then you must do your best to watch out everything.Meeting the man of the Way on the road,
Greeting him not with words, nor with silence.
Give him an uppercut,
Then he will understand you at once.
Worst secret handshake ever.
Posted by steven on 12 Jul 2007 | Tagged as: Evolution, Religion, Philosophy
Many atheists claim belief in evolution and belief in theism (e.g., Christianity or Islam) are compatible. This claim tends to be motivated not by evidence but by political gain. After all, most people are theists, and if they can be convinced evolution doesn’t contradict their religion, more people will accept evolution, which is good. I have two problems with this stance. One, convincing people of the right belief for the wrong reasons goes against my ethics. Two, I care not just about convincing creationists of evolution, but also about convincing theists of atheism.
So here’s why evolution and theism are incompatible — or at least, why theistic evolutionists have a lot of explaining to do.
Theists believe God created humans. There are any number of ways humans could have been, but we are this particular way, with two arms, two legs, two lungs, anger, love, pain, and so on; and according to theists, the reason we are this way is God chose us to be this way. (A theist who denies this is off the hook as far as this argument goes, but is definitely not any sort of mainstream Christian or Muslim, and probably not really a theist either.)
According to the theory of evolution, humans arose from earlier species all the way to the beginning of life on Earth, in a long sequence of small incremental changes. These changes happened because of natural selection (and random drift); given the environment, organisms with certain genes reproduced more than those with other genes, and so those genes became fixed.
So theism says the explanation for the information contained in the human genome is God, whereas evolution says the explanation is past environments were some way and not some other way, and random chance went some way and not some other way. The only way these two statements can be reconciled is if the information in past environments and random chance came from God. So a theistic evolutionist is forced to claim God created humans by intervening at many times throughout prehistory (setting the initial conditions only doesn’t work due to quantum mechanics) in such a way as to make environments and random chance favor our ancestors.
There’s an old joke that says that to make a statue of an elephant, you just need to take a big rock and cut away everything that doesn’t look like an elephant. The position theistic evolutionists are forced to take is that God made humans by killing off everything that didn’t look enough like a human.
It won’t do to say that “God created the process of evolution”. Whatever that means exactly, you can never put enough information into the nature of the “process of evolution” to specify that what comes out is humans. Evolution is a simple algorithm; there aren’t enough degrees of freedom.
We have to presume God could have just created humans complete and in the blink of an eye. If he instead created humans slowly by manipulating environments and chance over billions of years, then that cries out for an explanation. It’s an extremely complicated, high-maintenance way of doing things. It’s dishonest, in that it’s very carefully tuned to leave no evidence, so as to make reasonable observers conclude no God was involved. It flatly contradicts any reading of holy writings, certainly any that would have been reasonable in past centuries, which again implies dishonesty. And there simply doesn’t seem to be any reason.
Conclusion: evolution and God can be made compatible only with far-fetched excuses. To believe in both you have to believe God went out of his way to hide his existence. You might as well believe the desperate story of some creationists that God put all the fossils there to test our faith. People who do claim to believe in both should be expected to explain, the same way I’d be expected to explain if I claimed to believe both in modern meteorology and in Thor throwing lightning, or both in gravity and in the invisible Man pushing the people down.