tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7905515.post2288133830856257620..comments2024-03-14T11:09:32.759-05:00Comments on Falkenblog: An Economist's Rational Road to ChristianityEric Falkensteinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07243687157322033496noreply@blogger.comBlogger49125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7905515.post-8682824178053138432016-02-29T08:48:43.019-06:002016-02-29T08:48:43.019-06:00Plucky,
Good comments. I agree ridicule is really ...Plucky,<br />Good comments. I agree ridicule is really pernicious. The sad thing is most feel that 'sarcasm' is the highest form of comedy, witty, but often it's just repeating what someone says and then staring, saying O.M.G., or repeating what they say in an amusing tone (white southern twang), and then appreciating the fact that the speaker/writer and his audience are 'on the same team.' <br /><br />I think Christ's emphasis on the individual is really key. If you start with that focus, you get classical liberalism and decentralized markets. When you start by talking about aggregates, society or classes, you get the Big State.<br /><br />EEric Falkensteinhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/07243687157322033496noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7905515.post-20723116621957993192016-02-28T23:46:47.551-06:002016-02-28T23:46:47.551-06:00(3/3)
One other criticism I would make is that you...(3/3)<br />One other criticism I would make is that you assert the concordance of the New Testament with what we know about economics, but most of your evidence is in the negative, i.e. all the things progressives get wrong. I think your argument and essay would be strengthened by some more specific, positive examples. One of my personal favorites is on the topic of revealed preferences. It is foundational to the logical structure of economics, even if it wasn't formalized until the 30's. And yet it has never been put more eloquently than, "For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also" (Luke 12:34, identically in Matthew 6:21).<br /><br />In the classic Samuelson formulation, the assumption is preferences lead to choices, and choices reveal the underlying preference (hence of course the name). What's subtly brilliant about Jesus's formulation is not just the empirical observation that preferences can be deduced from choices, but the suggestion (which comes off stronger in the fuller contexts in Luke & Matthew) that the direction of causality can go the other direction as well- that choices today can affect your preferences in the future. Jesus's formulation not only encompasses revealed preference but also loss aversion! Especially astonishing given that loss aversion is the demonstrated human behavior that most clearly breaks the economic definition of rationality in preferences and wrecks risk models!<br />Pluckynoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7905515.post-86565442007002213262016-02-28T23:46:09.664-06:002016-02-28T23:46:09.664-06:00(2/3)
Ridicule, as mentioned, is both an appeal to...(2/3)<br />Ridicule, as mentioned, is both an appeal to that emotional prejudice and an attempt to shape it. Sometimes its use is legitimate, like say when you are trying to get a kid to wear a seatbelt and a) don't have the time to rehearse all the statistics involved and b) want to impress on them that <i>not</i> wearing a seatbelt ought to be unthinkable as a choice and will be subject to punishment. When employed on serious intellectual pursuits its use is almost always at minimum unrigorous and often dishonest. Yet this is exactly how you describe both your old-self's and elite secular humanists' attitude towards Christianity. It is raw, unadulterated prejudice. A refusal to even consider, and more to the point a very clear social signal that adherence to Christianity is grounds for expulsion from the ranks of people to be taken seriously. <br /><br />This dynamic creates very distinct signalling mechanism for a certain class of people. At some point, everyone at the top of the intelligence pyramid looks around and realizes they are smarter than pretty much everyone they know and wants to be recognized as such. This usually happens at the peak-egotism time of late adolescence. Occurring then, it overlaps with a time of high sensitivity to social cues and a need to form an independent identity. Such people <i>need</i> a way to signal their intelligence. Amongst the highly intelligent, "I'm smarter than you" is a critically central piece of one's identity, no matter how well it is masked. Atheism serves this purpose- it becomes a shorthand way of signalling intelligence, both to others but just as importantly to oneself. On top of that, it has added appeal to the juvenile penchant for the frisson of subversion (this is basically the story of the spaghetti monster). It gives one a reason to look down on many of one's elders, and a conversational vehicle to implicitly establish an atheist "us" as superior to those silly idiots. The key thing to remember about all the above is that at no point does it matter whether or not atheism is accurate. It merely solves a social and psychological need. It's another form of "Will over Reason" as you put it. <br /><br />I was going to search for more concrete examples of this, but anonymous (2nd comment at the top) provided a perfect example. "What bothers me is that someone as intelligent and eloquent as you [...]" is the dead giveaway. There is nothing quite like the incredulity and hostility of the intelligent atheist towards the intelligent Christian in contemporary society (i.e. not necessarily true in general or throughout history), because the mere existence of the latter is a threat to the identity of the former. I would guess that based on your description of your earlier self you know that feeling well.<br />Pluckynoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7905515.post-45564187018326722772016-02-28T23:45:14.633-06:002016-02-28T23:45:14.633-06:00This is really great. I'm thrilled for you and...This is really great. I'm thrilled for you and happy to have another brother in Christ. <br /><br />(apologies for length, this is one long comment broken up into several posts)<br /><br />While I can understand why you glided over it in the interests of making positive arguments for theism and Christianity, its worth discussing the sociologically-driven nature and roots of secular humanism and atheism. There are 3 key quotes I'd like to dig into: <br /><br />A: "This creates a true paradox: at the margin, an increase in prosperity causes more happiness and more atheism, but given any level of prosperity, religion increases happiness. Educated people today choose atheism because religion seems logically absurd, as it was wrong on heliocentrism and now seems to contradict evolution. Among the academics who teach young people, the proportion of progressives increases the higher you go in those hierarchies."<br /><br />B: "The contempt and ridicule directed at intelligent design intimidates young people to concede evolution, which is merely expedient; however, given evolution as a fact, it is harder to believe anything in the Bible is true or even useful."<br /><br />C: "I was a secular humanist most of my life, contemptuous of Christianity because I thought it was not merely based on myth, but that it also mislabeled pride as a vice and humility as a virtue."<br /><br />The key element I want to focus on is ridicule. As an argumentative tactic, ridicule is a deeply underhanded one. It consists of 2 parts- 1) an appeal to prejudice, in that it calls for an idea to be preemptively rejected before being fully considered and 2) a threat of ostracism by communicating a social norm holding the idea in question to be "out of bounds". Properly speaking, ridicule has no legitimate role in formal reasoning or rational argument.<br /><br />It is used in ordinary life because of that appeal to prejudice. "Prejudice" for obvious reasons is notionally held in bad odor today, but it plays a necessary function in decision-making. In your discussion of the relationship of emotions to decision-making, you sold emotions a little bit short. Chess is perhaps the ur-example of a decision-making process that ought (one would think) to be utterly rational and cold-blooded. That's not what researchers actually find among elite chess players though. They <i>do</i> use their emotions. The decision/event tree of chess is simply too large to be analytically tractable. Even though chess computers now beat grandmasters as a matter of course, it is still beyond supercomputing power to solve chess. Supercomputers beat grandmasters by mimicking some human thought processes. The key one is pruning the decision tree in order to make the remainder analytically tractable, i.e. refusing to consider certain choices and their consequences without examination, i.e. "prejudice" in its most literal meaning. Humans do this with their emotions, very much including chess grandmasters. They do it in order to shrink the decision space down to a size that is manageable, something that is necessary for most decisions a person has to make. Hence Damasio's result you referenced- without the ability to use emotions in decisions, the result is not rationality but paralysis.Pluckynoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7905515.post-82390559383033324302016-02-24T15:50:36.634-06:002016-02-24T15:50:36.634-06:00God bless you ... but don't expect your "...God bless you ... but don't expect your "broadminded" friends to do so. There are few things that are seen as more contemptible in the intellectual West than a believing Christian. Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7905515.post-22402240987512246542016-02-24T15:37:32.524-06:002016-02-24T15:37:32.524-06:00You may enjoy reading the work of the poet philoso...You may enjoy reading the work of the poet philosopher Frederick Turner (a professor in Dallas, not the 19th century theorist of the frontier). His books Natural Religion and Culture of Hope tie in to many of your themes here. He attempts to reconcile theist views with science.Gibsonhttps://twitter.com/William_Blakenoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7905515.post-11851176288793201792016-02-24T15:10:43.886-06:002016-02-24T15:10:43.886-06:00There is very little rationality and sound reasoni...There is very little rationality and sound reasoning in this post. Just a couple of random observations:<br />1) "Something created us" + "Created things have a purpose" are not necessary true: they are acts of faith, conveniently chosen hypothesis to "prove" that god must exists.<br />2) There's a lot of "god of the gaps" type of reasoning: if something is not explained by science, then it must be god. As science progress, the god of the gaps shrink: not a good thing for a believer and indeed theologians nowadays avoid arguments like these completely.<br /><br />I understand that in the US there's a strong movement supporting ID, but here in the rest of the world we look at it as something really ridicolous. The scientific community has repeadetely shown the flaws of ID; the fact that a person with such a profile falls in the trap of ID is really worrying.Lukenoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7905515.post-90333823441634979882016-02-24T12:48:36.692-06:002016-02-24T12:48:36.692-06:00Mr. Falkenstein, congrats for this courageous and ...Mr. Falkenstein, congrats for this courageous and wholly sensible post. Many of your arguments resonated strongly with me, as I've gone through a number of them in my own journey. You may enjoy (or not, the contrast with your clear and concise style makes me realize what a mediocre writer I still am) this post, as I try to give in it a perspective of how the humanist/ mostly atheist perspective became so dominant in our culture: http://purebarbell.blogspot.com.es/2016/02/elements-for-critique-of-desiderative.html<br />(Sorry for the somewhat tongue-in-cheeky tone) Be it as it may, I'll be mulling many of your ideas, and sharing with friends for a long time, many thanks for it and God bless you and your familyVintage Rockerhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04778131632227119571noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7905515.post-35757287921554365502016-02-24T10:58:58.003-06:002016-02-24T10:58:58.003-06:00Malcom: even w/ pupil, eye would bleach, couldn...Malcom: even w/ pupil, eye would bleach, couldn't see, without much larger blood contact w/ photo receptors in human eye <br />I don't quite understand how all those rules in Leviticus make sense. However, I don't think I can, because it was a long time ago.<br /><br />Moldbug: defined Progressives quite well. Usual left/right focus on equality, compassion, fairness (eg, Haidt's Moral Foundations), but Moldbug focused on the 'Puritanical atheist' element to progressives, while conservatives today want to have more decentralized control. McCloskey wrote a fine book on bourgeois morality, how it is key to human flourishing and real virtue.Eric Falkensteinhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/07243687157322033496noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7905515.post-53166008355667071702016-02-24T08:49:10.818-06:002016-02-24T08:49:10.818-06:00I'm curious what input Mencius Moldbug and Dei...I'm curious what input Mencius Moldbug and Deirdre McCloskey had in your conversion. I don't recall them as being very active Christians.Dulimbainoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7905515.post-60197285710543826802016-02-24T04:24:48.669-06:002016-02-24T04:24:48.669-06:00"He gave us our moral intuition, so there'..."He gave us our moral intuition, so there's no dilemma; we independently see good morals consistent with biblical teaching."<br /><br />Whilst I actually think the New Testament provides some rather good moral guidance, how do you square it with some of the events in the Old Testament? Personally, I don't think it's intellectually coherent to ignore certain actions that are endorsed by scripture because they conflict with the morality that has supposedly been divinely inculcated in us.<br /><br />Oh, and as for the octopus and its day/night vision, surely that's the whole point of the pupil?Malcolm Tuckernoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7905515.post-84377810044541815062016-02-23T23:44:07.913-06:002016-02-23T23:44:07.913-06:00Man Eric, I knew you were a contrarian, and you...Man Eric, I knew you were a contrarian, and you've argued yourself into some pretty wacky positions over the years - the global warming denial comes to mind - but this takes the cake!<br /><br />But as you acknowledge, this isn't about being right, it's about finding meaning, so in that sense I'm kind of happy for you.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7905515.post-91092762044390469652016-02-23T18:47:57.045-06:002016-02-23T18:47:57.045-06:00Jonathan E: I don't take it literally, almost ...Jonathan E: I don't take it literally, almost every verse has a metaphor in it ('the trees will clap their hands'). I think Jesus is divine, but specifics of his life and death I'm sure are inaccurate. As poorly documented as it is to modern standards, it's far better documented than for, say, Socrates or Alexander the Great. <br /><br />I read and enjoyed Darwin's Cathedrals, by David Wilson. What I think he misses is that it works on this world because it is actually true. He sees Christianity, and religion in general, as a successful meme. It's kind of like the euthyphro dilemma: things that are Good are both independent of God, and because God said so. He gave us our moral intuition, so there's no dilemma; we independently see good morals consistent with biblical teaching.Eric Falkensteinhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/07243687157322033496noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7905515.post-50437729437421522212016-02-23T17:21:13.519-06:002016-02-23T17:21:13.519-06:00Enjoy your new life in the insane asylum, as you a...Enjoy your new life in the insane asylum, as you and your fellow inmates now puzzle over every event small and large, asking what its place in God's Plan is.Mitchellhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/10768655514143252049noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7905515.post-15223686912027569542016-02-23T16:40:35.414-06:002016-02-23T16:40:35.414-06:00Eric,
Thank you for the fascinating essay.
I'...Eric,<br /><br />Thank you for the fascinating essay.<br /><br />I'd like to dig into something a bit different from the ID controversy you have stirred up with some of the other commenters.<br /><br />I know enough about the New Testament to know that characterizing it as a champion of classical liberalism requires a great deal of selective reading. My question is, how literally do you take the rest of it? Do you take a fundamentalist perspective on Jesus's divinity? (And if so, which version of Christology do you subscribe to?) Or do you approach Christianity from the perspective that it provides a community of faith through which you choose to approach the Divine, however much its founding myth (in the scholarly sense) may not be strictly historical?Jonathan Enoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7905515.post-90782048882456994692016-02-23T12:00:20.302-06:002016-02-23T12:00:20.302-06:00Thank you for writing this. It best expresses my ...Thank you for writing this. It best expresses my view of Christianity, and why living a Christian life is important. <br /><br />It also expresses my key, daily struggle with Christianity: It is an intellectual position, rather than a conversion experience. I have never had an "encounter with the divine", like so many of my co-religionists have. This makes the "personal relationship with Christ" more difficult, and I struggle with that.<br /><br />However, so much of Christianity points to daily truths. Your notion of the "as if" argument rings true to me, although I've never been able to express it quite so well as you have.<br /><br />So again, thank you for an important, illuminating piece. I want you to know that it isn't just an explanation of your own conversion, but helped me to understand myself better.robbbbbbhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09670148220321106816noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7905515.post-81990334053335523782016-02-23T10:14:54.866-06:002016-02-23T10:14:54.866-06:00Malcom: seawater is like night all the time, in te...Malcom: seawater is like night all the time, in terms of total light load (high frequency light gets shut out right away). At 1 meter half surface light is lost.<br /><br />Napsterbater: sure, email me at gmail (efalken). I think William James's 'Will to Believe' lecture (google it) helps better understand the rational jump to faith. Eric Falkensteinhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/07243687157322033496noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7905515.post-14558788104995969502016-02-23T10:13:41.050-06:002016-02-23T10:13:41.050-06:00Faith in general can often be argued from a ration...Faith in general can often be argued from a rational perspective. There is a decent literature in economics on this and it is well-summarized by Iannaccone, 1998 (http://international.ucla.edu/media/files/PERG.iannoconne.pdf). From there, choosing a Christian faith seems mainly to serve to maximize the social capital from the decision to adopt faith to begin with. <br />That said, there are MUCH better arguments for evolution, the Big Bang, and a whole lot of other scientific theories than you give credit for. It is also not necessary to disbelieve in evolution to believe in God, even a Christian one (at least if you believe the current Roman Catholic Pope). <br />I suspect that your own journey may be more similar to the models put forth in Iannaccone (maximizing perceived corporeal-life and afterlife surplus, maximizing social capital, etc.). And that's fine. <br />P.S. In case you're curious, I'm neither atheist nor Christian, so I don't really have a horse in the race. James Banghttps://www.blogger.com/profile/07691644145739301784noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7905515.post-79233183524510003562016-02-23T09:56:06.320-06:002016-02-23T09:56:06.320-06:00It takes a strong mind to spot the dynamic whereby...It takes a strong mind to spot the dynamic whereby the rationalist point of view is worse in all regards that it cares about than the spiritualist point of view. No one is dogmatic like an atheist, no one more prone to bullying than a humanist.<br /><br />Your carrying the logic through to actual re-conversion back to Christianity is new, and fascinating. Worship, belief, faith, these things are not logical and you can't ape them through an intellectual process. You either feel them deeply or you don't. And if you don't, are you really a Christian?<br /><br />So I'm awfully curious. As someone whose flirted with the idea of re-embracing religion myself, and being ultimately unable to, I'd be very interested in perhaps a short email discussion regarding the inner "mechanics" of what you've decided.Napsterbaterhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09998642250164917563noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7905515.post-48662639943034324412016-02-23T09:31:11.370-06:002016-02-23T09:31:11.370-06:00Except that octopuses are not remotely blind in da...Except that octopuses are not remotely blind in daylight...Malcolm Tuckernoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7905515.post-60079551102026870592016-02-23T06:24:07.259-06:002016-02-23T06:24:07.259-06:00aram: an intelligent human can create an RNA that ...aram: an intelligent human can create an RNA that can read a little bit of himself. To get from there to life is vast. That does not extrapolate, any more than saying a monkey will type 'wore' randomly generates Shakespeare: could, but improbable. And yes I considered being wrong. I started reading about this in the 1990s, and have been ever since. After a while, for reasons mentioned in my pdf, I concluded ID is correct.<br /><br />Malcolm: many night creatures have to get around in the day, and can't afford to be blind<br />Eric Falkensteinhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/07243687157322033496noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7905515.post-79568471031133260842016-02-23T05:49:09.777-06:002016-02-23T05:49:09.777-06:00Eric,
The arguments against the cephalopod eye do...Eric,<br /><br />The arguments against the cephalopod eye do tend to veer into serious strawman territory since they all compare it to the human eye. More to the point, why are nocturnal vertebrates also lumbered with the inverted retina when they would most certainly benefit from the cephalopod structure?Malcolm Tuckernoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7905515.post-72703006593899305682016-02-22T22:28:06.112-06:002016-02-22T22:28:06.112-06:00Interesting argument. Presumably most biologists ...Interesting argument. Presumably most biologists disagree with you about the feasible of life emerging from evolution, hence your characterization of them as angry, dismissive, etc. Since you are not a biologist, doesn't this give you pause?<br /><br />Isn't a super-complicated creator harder to explain than a few self-replicating amino acids? My apologies if I've missed this point somewhere in your pdf.<br /><br />Finally, I think it's probably true that religion makes people (on average) nicer, or otherwise better. This argument, I believe, reduces the probability that religion is true, since it gives a reason for people to be religious apart from its truth or falsehood.aramnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7905515.post-87104620483834585662016-02-22T21:45:25.497-06:002016-02-22T21:45:25.497-06:00Mike,
Thanks for the good faith argument! I think ...Mike,<br />Thanks for the good faith argument! I think the octopus eye wouldn't scale to a human, in that we process much more light, but can see color and have much greater resolution. This requires more blood to repair and take away toxins like free radicals caused by all this light. The sea blocks most light that reaches our eyes at the depths of octopodes, so they are basically like night animals in terms of their eyes. <br /><br />The key light-sensitive molecule has a bent shape (cis-retinal) and when it absorbs light the molecule becomes the ‘straight’ form (trans-retinal). This causes several unstable intermediate chemicals to form, and after about one minute, trans-retinal completely separates from opsin, causing the photopigment to appear colorless, as when you are blinded by a flash bulb. So, the heavy blood flow for humans is necessary given the amount of light and get, and the discrimination we have (much stronger than an octopus, that can't recognize food if it doesn't move). <br /><br />So, the idea that an octopus eye is better than a human eye isn't true, given the functionality we are used to. Eyes have different designs that are optimized for different uses (though I'm sure, through genetic drift and mutation, they are all far from perfect). <br /><br />But convergent evolution would seem to not be a really strong argument for evolution, because it implies the feasible 'space' of tissues that work are actually quite finite, compared to the bazillion of possibilities always noted as potential intermediaries to some complex protein/tissue/organ. I mean, if random, how did bats and whales glom onto the Prestin gene for echolocation? As the neutral drift evolutionists argue, most evolution is random, so this is astronomically improbable. Yet if you need step-by-step selection, there isn't enough time given how long these things have existed an the number of nucleotides that need to change. <br /><br /><br /> http://www.asa3.org/ASA/PSCF/2000/PSCF3-00Bergman.htmlEric Falkensteinhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/07243687157322033496noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7905515.post-76287966927558723952016-02-22T21:29:05.302-06:002016-02-22T21:29:05.302-06:00Well done, Eric! After much reading and investiga...Well done, Eric! After much reading and investigating, I reached the same conclusion as you -- the weight of the scientific evidence points strongly toward a Creator. As you have concluded, I believe those who are willing to diligently pursue the evidence, wherever it rationally leads, will also discover that Jesus Christ is the risen Savior. <br /><br />Jesus replied, "Love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your MIND." (Matthew 22:37) God does not call us to give up our reasoning. Rather, He asks us to fully employ our minds and reasoning abilities in our pursuit of Him, and He can be found. I commend you for your rational approach to answering the most important question of life.Rich Fullertonnoreply@blogger.com