I find Dawkins less offensive than most theologians. He commits many
fewer logical fallacies. His main one is premature certainty.
The evidence in favor of an external god of any traditional form is,
frankly, a bit worse than unimpressive. It's lots worse. This doesn't
mean that gods don't exist, merely that they (probably) don't exist in
the hardware of the universe. I see them as a function of the software
of the entities that use language. Possibly they exist in a muted form
in most pack animals, or most animals that have protective adults when
they are infants.
To me it appears that people believe in gods for the same reasons that
they believe in telepathy. I.e., evidence back before they could speak
clearly indicated that the adults could transfer thoughts from one to
another. This shaped a basic layer of beliefs that was later buried
under later additions, but never refuted. When one learned language, one
learned how to transfer thoughts ... but it was never tied back into the
original belief, because what was learned didn't match closely enough to
the original model of what was happening. Analogously, when one is an
infant the adult that cares for one is seen as the all powerful
protector. Pieces of this image become detached memories within the
mind, and are not refuted when a more accurate and developed model of
the actual parents is created. These hidden memories are the basis
around which the idea of a god is created.
Naturally, this is just my model of what is happening. Other
possibilities exist. But if I am to consider them seriously, they need
to match the way the world operates as I understand it. They don't need
to predict the same mechanism, but they need to predict the same events.
E.g., I consider Big Bang cosmology a failed explanation. It's got too
many ad hoc pieces. But it successfully explains most things that are
observed, and is consistent with relativity and quantum theory.
(Naturally, as they were used in developing it...but nevertheless
important.) And relativity and quantum theory themselves are failures,
because both are needed to explain that which is observable, but they
contradict each other in certain details. But they are successful
failures! Similar commentary applies to string theory, but with
differences. (Too many ad hoc parameters!)
Any god that is proposed must be shown to be consistent with the
observed phenomena. The Deists managed to come up with one that would do
the job, but he never became very popular. Few others have even tried,
except with absurdly evident special pleading. Generally I'd be more
willing to accept "Chariots of the Gods" as a true account.
And as for moral principles... I've READ the Bible. The basic moral
principle that it pushes is "We are the chosen people. Kill the
stranger, steal his property, and enslave his servants!" It requires
selective reading to come up with anything else, though I admit that
other messages are also in there, if you read selectively. Especially
during the periods when the Jews were in one captivity or another.
(I.e., if you are weak, preach mercy, but if you are strong show none.)
During the later times the Jews were generally under the thumb of one
foreign power or another, so they started preaching mercy.
John G. Rose wrote:
I don’t know some of these guys come up with these almost sophomoric
views of this subject, especially Dawkins, that guy can be real
annoying with his Saganistic spewing of facts and his trivialization
of religion.
The article does shed some interesting light though in typical NY
Times style. But the real subject matter is much deeper and
complex(complicated?).
John
*From:* Ed Porter [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
*Sent:* Sunday, December 09, 2007 12:42 PM
*To:* agi@v2.listbox.com
*Subject:* RE: [agi] AGI and Deity
Upon reviewing the below linked article I realized it would take you a
while to understand what it is about and why it is relevant.
It is an article dated March 4, 2007, summarizing current scientific
thinking on why religion has been a part of virtually all known
cultures including thinking about what it is about the human mind and
human societies that has made religious beliefs so common.
Ed Porter
-----Original Message-----
*From:* Ed Porter [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
*Sent:* Sunday, December 09, 2007 2:16 PM
*To:* agi@v2.listbox.com
*Subject:* RE: [agi] AGI and Deity
Relevant to this thread is the following link:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/04/magazine/04evolution.t.html?ref=magazine&pagewanted=print
<http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/04/magazine/04evolution.t.html?ref=magazine&pagewanted=print>
Ed Porter
-----Original Message-----
*From:* John G. Rose [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
*Sent:* Sunday, December 09, 2007 1:50 PM
*To:* agi@v2.listbox.com
*Subject:* RE: [agi] AGI and Deity
This example is looking at it from a moment in time. The evolution of
intelligence in man has some relation to his view of deity. Before
government and science there was religion. Deity and knowledge and
perhaps human intelligence are entwined. For example some taboos
evolved as defenses against disease, burying the dead, not eating
certain foods, etc. science didn’t exist at the time. Deity was a sort
of peer to peer lossily compressed semi-holographic knowledge base
hosted and built by human mobile agents and agent systems. Now it is
evolving into something else… But humans may readily swap out their
deities with AGIs and then uploading can replace heaven J
An AGI, as it reads through text related to man’s deities, could start
wondering about Pascal’s wager. It depends on many factors... Still
though I think AGIs have to run into the same sort of issues.
John
*From:* J Marlow [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Here's the way I like to think of it; we have different methods of
thinking about systems in our environments, different sort of models.
One type of model that we humans have (with the possible exception of
autistics) is the ability to try to model another system as a person
like ourselves; its easier to predict what it will do if we attribute
it motives and goals. I think a lot of our ideas about
God/gods/goddesses come from a tendency to try to predict the behavior
of nature using agent models; so farmers attribute human emotions,
like spite or anger, to nature when the weather doesn't help the crops.
So, assuming that is a big factor in how/why we developed religions,
then it is possible that an AI could have a similar problem, if it
tried to describe too many events using its 'agency' models. But I
think an AI near or better than human level could probably see that
there are simpler (or more accurate) explanations, and so reject
predictions made based on those models.
Then again, a completely rational AI may believe in Pascal's wager...
Josh
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