Scott Alexander

My own contribution to/dismissal of the God debate

PNRJ core principles, ethics, tribal paradigm , , , , , , , ,

Aug 30 JDN 2461283

News of my death has been greatly exaggerated. I don’t know if I’m ready to go back to weekly blogging, but I will at least try to write here occasionally again.

I value Scott Alexander’s contribution to/dismissal of the God debate (he insists it’s a dismissal, but it seems awfully long and carefully-argued for that), and I would like to add my own contribution/dismissal.

I used to be a fairly major voice for atheist apologetics in my community; I was the founder and, for four years, president of a chapter of the Secular Student Alliance at the University of Michigan, and I participated in several public debates.

One was at the University of Michigan with Frank Turek, and I think I’ll call it a draw; he was a very skilled debater and I was a bit underprepared for his full-on assault, but I still think I won on the substance. (His gotcha question was: “What is the ultimate foundation of morality?” as if this is something you can just answer with a single sound byte. I wrote an entire book about that. Large sections of it are published on this blog.)

I also did one at Rochester College which I thoroughly dominated (if I do say so myself). Along with the Christian head of the panel, there was a neopagan, and some sort of fuzzy-headed woo-type person whose views weren’t entirely clear, and there was a very clear hierarchy in which I won, the Christian fared decently well, and the other two failed catastrophically in defending any of their significant points.

During that time, I learned a lot about what is and isn’t happening in these God debates.

I now think public in-person debates are pretty much useless. It’s a performance. It’s theatre. The most-prepared person usually wins, and I’m pretty sure at Rochester they thought the Christian would be that, but it was actually me; I not only knew the Ontological Argument and Pascal’s Wager, I actually had prepared answers for them.

I think that written debate, via blogging or published articles, is still valuable. This is a much better format for clarifying thoughts and solidifying arguments, and it gives both the writer and the reader a chance to actually think about things rather than having to respond in the moment. But even this is limited, for reasons I’ll get to in a moment.

Scott Alexander makes the very solid point that theism seems to be privileging a very specific hypothesis that the world is fine-tuned by some sort of inscrutable powerful being, which is the sort of hypothesis that could be used to explain literally anything, and thus ultimately explains nothing.

But I’ve got an even bigger point I’d like to make:

This whole debate is a motte and bailey.

For the uninitiated, a motte and bailey was a defensive strategy in Medieval times: You had a fortress called the motte which was small but highly defensible, and a wider open area called the bailey which was expansive and rich in resources but too large to readily defend. Your people would live on the bailey and reap its fruits most of the time, but when attacked, they would retreat to the motte to fend off attackers until the danger had passed.

In argumentation, a motte and bailey is when you have one view that you actually believe and care about and live your life according to, but can’t rationally defend easily (or perhaps at all)—the bailey—and another that you can rationally defend, but don’t actually care about—the motte.

In religion, the motte is what is called deism: The proposition that there could maybe exist some sort of powerful entity that created the universe, which might or might not have consciousness as we would understand it and might or might not have some sort of plan or intentions behind the way it designed and created the universe, and that it is reasonable to consider such a being with a sense of profound awe and mystery.

The bailey is, well, actual religion: The claim that the creator of the universe wrote this specific book which told your ancestors to commit genocide and tells you to mutilate children’s penises and kill gay people and drink wine every seven days while pretending/convincing yourself that it’s actually the blood of said creator of the universe who is also somehow human and died (but not really!) and sacrificed himself (for a weekend) for our sins, including ones committed by people who lived thousands of years ago (who probably never even existed), sins so bad that they apparently make it totally okay for kids to die of cancer (even though the entire concept of sacrificing one person to atone for the sins of another is morally incoherent). This creator of the universe loves us and wants to make us live happily forever—but if we’re bad, he’ll instead make us suffer forever, because that’s what love means! (This is not abusive at all.) And we should definitely ask this creator to do stuff for us, and he totally will, as long as we are pious enough—and if he doesn’t, well, we must not have been pious enough. Also, you should believe with all your heart in this one very specific interpretation of this specific book, even though there are thousands of other interpretations and dozens of other books that other people believe just as firmly with just as little evidence.

(Because I mostly write for an American audience, I’m picking on Christianity in particular here, but rest assured: I can do the same thing for Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, and plenty of other religions. They are all absurd, and most of them are evil.)

Deism is a rationally defensible proposition.

I disagree with it, but it is the sort of abstract, theoretical disagreement that has very few practical consequences, upon which reasonable people can in fact simply agree to disagree.

Religion is a blight upon human civilization.

It is a memeplex that defends itself by systematically undermining the human capacity for rational thought and critical analysis, frequently aligns itself with the most evil authoritarianism, and has held back scientific and moral progress since its emergence.

If you want to defend religion, it is simply not good enough to provide reasonable arguments for why maybe we might believe in an “ultimate mind” or a creator of the universe. You must defend hating gay people and mutilating children and supporting authoritarians and venerating a book that commands genocide. You must defend intercessory prayer and believing in Heaven and Hell.

If you wish to defend religion, you must defend what religious people actually do and believe, not what maybe some theoretical religious people could do and believe if they were vastly more kind and rational.

And if you are unprepared to do that, I have a very simple request:

Stop defending religion.

Nobody cares about your abstract, rarefied clockmaker God who designed Planck’s constant perfectly but is pitilessly indifferent to the suffering of children who die of cancer or drown in tsunamis. (I strongly suspect that you do not even actually care.)

People care about a personal God, a religious God, one that justifies them going to church on Sundays and praying to be healed and discriminating against gay people. They care about a God who will take them to Heaven if they are good but send them to Hell if they are bad. They care about the Bible, and they want it to be thought of as the best book ever even though it is in fact scientifically absurd and morally horrific—a good candidate for worst book ever, in fact, as even Mein Kampf does not include the line “save alive nothing that breathes”.

If you are truly motivated by reason and truth, you should hate those beliefs as passionately as I do, and want to resist them at every turn—and yet instead I see you making excuses for them, pretending that they are somehow compatible with modern science and modern ethics even though they plainly are not.

People are suffering and dying because of religion. Stop telling people it’s okay to believe in religion.

Productivity by itself does not eliminate poverty

PNRJ core principles, development economics, ethics, inequality, market failure , , , , , , ,

Jan 25 JDN 2461066

Scott Alexander has a techno-utopian vision:

Between the vast ocean of total annihilation and the vast continent of infinite post-scarcity, there is, I admit, a tiny shoreline of possibilities that end in oligarch capture. Even if you end up there, you’ll be fine. Dario Amodei has taken the Giving What We Can Pledge (#43 here) to give 10% of his wealth to the less fortunate; your worst-case scenario is owning a terraformed moon in one of his galaxies. Now you can stop worrying about the permanent underclass and focus on more important things.

I agree that total annihilation is a very serious risk, though fortunately I believe it is not the most likely outcome. But it seems pretty weird to me to posit that the most likely outcome is “infinite post-scarcity” when oligarch capture is what we already have.

(Regarding Alexander’s specific example: Dario Amidei has $3.7 billion. If he were to give away 10% of that, it would be $370 million, which would be good, but hardly usher in a radical utopia. The assumption seems to be that he would be one of the prevailing trillionaire oligarchs, and I don’t see how we can know that would be the case. Even if AI succeeds in general, that doesn’t mean that every company that makes AI succeeds. (Video games succeeded, but who buys Atari anymore?) Also, it seems especially wide-eyed to imagine that one man would ever own entire galaxies. We probably won’t even ever be able to reach other galaxies!)

People with this sort of utopian vision seem to imagine that all we need to do is make more stuff, and then magically it will all be distributed in such a way that everyone gets to have enough.

If Alexander were writing 200 years ago, I could even understand why he’d think that; there genuinely wasn’t enough stuff to go around, and it would have made sense to think that all we needed to do was solve that problem, and then the other problems would be easy.

But we no longer live in that world.

There is enough stuff to go around—at the very least this is true of all highly-developed countries, and it’s honestly pretty much true of the world as a whole. The problem is very much that it isn’t going around.

Elon Musk’s net wealth is now estimated at over $780 billion. Seven hundred and eighty billion dollars. He could give $90 to every person in the world (all 8.3 billion of us). He could buy a home (median price $400,000—way higher than it was just a few years ago) for every homeless person in America (about 750,000 people) and still have half his wealth left over. He could give $900 to every single person of the 831 million people who live below the world extreme poverty threshold—thus eliminating extreme poverty in the world for a year. (And quite possibly longer, as all those people are likely to be more productive now that they are well-fed.) He has chosen to do none of these things, because he wants to see number go up.

That’s just one man. If you add up all the wealth of all the world’s billionaires—just billionaires, so we’re not even counting people with $50 million or $100 million or $500 million—it totals over $16 trillion. This is enough to not simply end extreme poverty for a year, but to establish a fund that would end it forever.

And don’t tell me that they can’t really do this because it’s all tied up in stocks and not liquid. UNICEF happily accepts donations in stock. Giving UNICEF $10 trillion in stocks absolutely would permanently end extreme poverty worldwide. And they could donate those stocks today. They are choosing not to.

I still think that AI is a bubble that’s going to burst and trigger a financial crisis. But there is some chance that AI actually does become a revolutionary new technology that radically increases productivity. (In fact, I think this will happen, eventually. I just think we’re a paradigm or two away from that, and LLMs are largely a dead end.)

But even if that happens, unless we have had radical changes in our economy and society, it will not usher in a new utopian era of plenty for all.

How do I know this? Because if that were what the powers that be wanted to happen, they would have already started doing it. The super-rich are now so absurdly wealthy that they could easily effect great reductions in poverty at home and abroad while costing themselves basically nothing in terms of real standard of living, but they are choosing not to do that. And our governments could be taxing them more and using those funds to help people, and they are by and large choosing not to do that either.

The notion seems to be similar to “trickle-down economics”: Once the rich get rich enough, they’ll finally realize that money can’t buy happiness and start giving away their vast wealth to help people. But if that didn’t happen at $100 million, or $1 billion, or $10 billion, or $100 billion, I see no reason to think that it will happen at $1 trillion or $10 trillion or even $100 trillion.