Life in Silico

In my original post, I said that the idea that God is beyond proof is a popular fashion, but a false one. Eliezer Yudkowsky says much the same thing here, calling it a Big Lie to cover up religion’s inability to stay relevant in our world:

Back in the old days, saying the local religion “could not be proven” would have gotten you burned at the stake.  One of the core beliefs of Orthodox Judaism is that God appeared at Mount Sinai and said in a thundering voice, “Yeah, it’s all true.”  From a Bayesian perspective that’s some darned unambiguous evidence of a superhumanly powerful entity.  (Albeit it doesn’t prove that the entity is God per se, or that the entity is benevolent - it could be alien teenagers.)  The vast majority of religions in human history - excepting only those invented extremely recently - tell stories of events that would constitute completely unmistakable evidence if they’d actually happened.  The orthogonality of religion and factual questions is a recent and strictly Western concept.  The people who wrote the original scriptures didn’t even know the difference. …

Not only did religion used to make claims about factual and scientific matters, religion used to make claims about everything. Religion laid down a code of law - before legislative bodies; religion laid down history - before historians and archaeologists; religion laid down the sexual morals - before Women’s Lib; religion described the forms of government - before constitutions; and religion answered scientific questions from biological taxonomy to the formation of stars.  The Old Testament doesn’t talk about a sense of wonder at the complexity of the universe - it was busy laying down the death penalty for women who wore men’s clothing, which was solid and satisfying religious content of that era.  The modern concept of religion as purely ethical derives from every other area having been taken over by better institutions.  Ethics is what’s left.

Or rather, people think ethics is what’s left.  Take a culture dump from 2,500 years ago.  Over time, humanity will progress immensely, and pieces of the ancient culture dump will become ever more glaringly obsolete.  Ethics has not been immune to human progress - for example, we now frown upon such Bible-approved practices as keeping slaves.  Why do people think that ethics is still fair game?

Intrinsically, there’s nothing small about the ethical problem with slaughtering thousands of innocent first-born male children to convince an unelected Pharaoh to release slaves who logically could have been teleported out of the country.  It should be more glaring than the comparatively trivial scientific error of saying that grasshoppers have four legs.  And yet, if you say the Earth is flat, people will look at you like you’re crazy.  But if you say the Bible is your source of ethics, women will not slap you.  Most people’s concept of rationality is determined by what they think they can get away with; they think they can get away with endorsing Bible ethics; and so it only requires a manageable effort of self-deception for them to overlook the Bible’s moral problems.  Everyone has agreed not to notice the elephant in the living room, and this state of affairs can sustain itself for a time. …

The idea that religion is a separate magisterium which cannot be proven or disproven is a Big Lie - a lie which is repeated over and over again, so that people will say it without thinking; yet which is, on critical examination, simply false.  It is a wild distortion of how religion happened historically, of how all scriptures present their beliefs, of what children are told to persuade them, and of what the majority of religious people on Earth still believe.