This is very true. I think Michael Knowles is a good guy and he is clearly more philosophically knowledgeable than your average political commentator (he is often insightful, in my opinion, when he discusses current events from his unique Catholic perspective), but you're right that his dismissal of January 6th is not helpful.
Also, I think we should just say more broadly that snark in general is almost never helpful. It might be useful when it comes to combating certain groups that are both exceedingly dumb and very angry and aggressive (i.e. holocaust deniers or new atheists), but otherwise, it's just better to treat people kindly and hope that they reciprocate. Dunking on people on X has done basically nothing good for the world, ever.
I agree. I actually find Knowles extremely funny and used to listen to him a lot, but I've been finding it increasingly grating the more I hear him say stupid things about subjects I know about.
I was one of the New Atheists in the 2000s and look back on it as a movement of snark and moral outrage but not a lot else. I'm not sure if religious people responding in kind would have helped. I'd guess if anything, it would weaken the religious position, because the congregations are seeing their pastors stoop to the Atheist's level.
This is really true in the discord and tiktok debate space especially. I’ve chatted with so many people irl about politics and it’s really so much different than online.
I think being snarky is usually a bad idea. However, I reject the idea that because you couldn’t beat someone in a debate, you can’t brush off their position. In order to gain a good understanding of the Miracle of the Sun I would have to do many hours of research. The same is true for many, many other claimed miracles from many religions. Only someone who really dedicated their life to this, could be informed on all of them. Does that mean only they can have an informed opinion on religion? I don’t think so. I don’t think they even have a particularly above average level of informed view. It’s perfectly acceptable to rely on heuristics. What are my priors on God having decided that they would reveal miracles only to small numbers and never on video, on top of all the other contradictions and extremely unlikely claims in Catholicism? Essentially zero (this is of course not a full argument). Thus, I do not think I am under any requirement to even consider the Miracle of the Sun before rejecting it. I similarly don’t need to investigate each new anti-vax claim, or 9/11 conspiracist, etc.
There are, of course, countless claims of miracles captured on camera and video, and also of course, none that skeptics find convincing. It is actually an immediate and well-established implication of Catholicism that there will not be miracles that would compel an otherwise skeptical observer to convert, but regardless, I think you’re right that it’s very dangerous to trust just anybody with a good argument. That’s not necessarily enough to say you should snark at them, though!
Yes, I shouldn’t have said none. But no indisputable ones. I find the idea that miracles are hidden to this degree because you need to have faith or some similar reason to be clear post hoc justification that no one would think made sense if it wasn’t the only possible argument. Thus, it lowers my probability estimates about 10000x. Agreed that snark is not justified.
The central, uttermost heart of the Christian faith is that God created man to have free will so as to be able to choose--freely--to love God. A permanent undeniable miracle would make an obvious mockery of free will and thus an obvious mockery of the faith from bottom to top. There would be no hair left on the head of Christ. The fact that many non-Christians don't understand Christianity's most elementary details and make misinterpretations like this doesn't really have any bearing on the faith itself.
First of all, I don’t see why free will would preclude extremely obvious manifestations, because one would still have to attribute that manifestation to a Christian God AND make the commitments that putting faith in that God carries. Plenty of people would still fall short, just as I assume Christians believe plenty of people in medieval Europe fell short, even though about 100% of them believed in the Christian God and the miracles attributed to that God.
Second, Christianity already has the greatest challenge to free will ever conceived as a central piece of doctrine: a God with perfect knowledge of the future! It’s funny to think that free will is clearly compatible with predestination, but just as clearly incompatible with my deceased grandmother telling me about the afterlife.
Third, if free will to worship God is dependent on uncertainty, doesn’t it seem like it’s unequally distributed? A child raised in a Christian family in a 95% Christian community is given much less opportunity to doubt in Christ’s divinity than, say, a child raised in a Muslim family in a 100% Muslim country. How meaningful is that first child’s belief, and for that matter how meaningful is the second child’s nonbelief?
Fourth, the Bible actually shows people encountering unambiguous miracles and converting on the spot, most famously Saul on the road to Damascus. But Paul’s salvation is not in doubt, right? More Damascus miracles could save a lot of souls, including in Damascus today!
Free will would preclude extremely obvious manifestations *that are obviously associated with Christianity*, which most would be, certainly including the miracle of the sun. As for why God doesn't make really obvious miracles that are studiously ambiguous about which faith they emanate from, I mean, I dunno, I had never imagined such an idea, and it's unclear why you would imagine God might play such a game.
I don't know what you mean to say by the end of your first paragraph. Of course it's possible to gain faith and then still afterwards sin, is that all you're saying?
Yes, indeed, it is mysterious that God is both all-knowing and that the fundamental gift he gives mankind is free will. I'm not sure if you want me to summarize Boethius, Aquinas, and their commentators for you here or what; there's a lot to say. But "predestination", specifically, is a heresy in Catholicism. God does not predestinate the damned to damnation.
In your "third" paragraph, you seem to think that I'm talking mainly about the free will to choose to believe that Christ was divine. But that's not what I said at all. It is possible and indeed easy to perform the role of a Christian without any true faith. It's a more subtle problem how the free will to turn to God can be present for those who never hear about Christianity (or are prevented from conversion on pain of death, say), but the Catholic position is that such people can be saved via implicit faith, though certainly your best bet is to be a Catholic, and once you know the truth and willingly turn away from it, you're in deep trouble.
Yes, there are examples of particular people seeing undeniable miracles and being converted on the spot. People are converted in all kinds of ways. Even Saul was still free not to become Paul. What is not ever going to happen before the end of time, since this is in itself essentially constitutive of the end of time, is a simultaneous undeniable vision available to all people (and certainly not permanently, as in a video that people somehow allow to convince them isn't faked.)
And finally, regarding your last sentence, for Christians, God is not playing some arcade game where he's trying to rack up a high score on souls saved. God is not *trying* to do anything, does not have competition, does not even make choices in any familiar sense of the word. If you think you see a method by which God could better achieve his desires, then you are either not talking about the Christian God or you are mistaken either about the method or the desires.
I don't understand why it would be a "game" for God to make it clear that the supernatural is real in some non-doctrinal way, but the situation you say we're in now, in which God manifests the supernatural in ways that aren't even unambiguously real, is not a "game." Anyway, if God did manifest that Catholicism was true, that still would not interfere with free will, because people unwilling to believe Catholicism is true would be free to believe that the event was faked, or that it was performed by demons to deceive us. (In the discussion at Ethan Muse's post, in fact, he attributes some other supposedly supernatural phenomena like past life regression to demonic interference.)
Thanks for the clarification that what you are precluding is a *permanent* undeniable miracle, and for introducing me to the doctrine of implicit faith, which I was unfamiliar with—I'll give more thought to those points.
To be quite frank, if God will condemn me to eternal hell for failing to come to the correct conclusion about his existence, then he is an unspeakably evil being. Making it obvious that he exists and what the moral truths are, would in no way inhibit my free will to follow or not follow them.
I agree with a lot of this post but there's something subtly off about it for me.
A frame that I've found very helpful for considering apparent human irrationalities is to see any apparent mistakes both from a "bias" angle and a "heuristic" angle. "Taking arguments seriously" seems like a classic example of what some people see as a bias and many people naturally see a a heuristic.
See Scott on epistemic learned helplessness, though I wouldn't go that far:
For me, the idea of miracles is so ridiculous that if a single Substack post convinced me of that point, I'd be more worried about my mental health than anything else. I might need to check in with my friends and give them consent to involuntarily commit me if that happens.
Presumably other people have different priors, and feel similarly about shrimp being conscious, or that gender identity is distinct from biological sex, or that free trade can result in greater prosperity than forced labor and sending people to gulags.
I agree snark seems like a poor way to navigate the world. But casting it as a "profoundly ignorant" thing to reject beliefs without hearing all the arguments for it seems off to me. Or perhaps a better framing is that you think of it as "profoundly ignorant" (derogatory) while I think of it as "profoundly ignorant" (complimentary), at least sometimes.
I agree that it can be reasonable to not update much in favor of some hypothesis even if you couldn't argue with whomever presented it successfully. But there's something off about being snarky and dismissive without knowing anything about the object level. It's weird to say "haha, what a dumbass, I have higher order evidence that he's wrong even though I can't refute him."
I don't like snark and I think it's corrosive to clear thinking and an informed democracy. But again if you take the bias vs heuristic view, you can see snark as a defense mechanism against being tricked by smarter charlatans, hucksters, cults, memetic drug-dealers, Pascal-reading muggers, and the like.
Someone like me can just offer a heuristic defense for normalcy (like the one above) and consider the matter closed until stronger evidence reaches me. But a more agreeable and/or open-minded and/or less intelligent person may feel a need to respond more substantively, and thus will become embroiled in demon-worship and/or paying off 17th dimensional muggers, unless they can preemptively harden their hearts with snark.
it’s one thing to have an immovable prior that there is no such thing as the supernatural, so that you scoff at miracles (though of course you’re scoffing therein at the vast majority of all humans ever including the vast majority of people much wiser than you, until very recent times), but you can’t really say “Jan 6 being not a big deal is just a foundation stone in my ontology of the universe.” It seems to be pretty obviously a contingent fact that you have to either find out about or not be too overconfident about!
"including the vast majority of people much wiser than you" Doubt they're much wiser! They believed in miracles! :P Also I don't have an immovable prior, just that my prior that I could go insane is much higher (for comparison, estimated prevalence of schizophrenia alone is 0.25%-0.75%; surely any reasonable person would have a much lower credence than literal belief in the supernatural)!
You're clearly not unduly serious about this, but: I think a schizophrenic who's already Catholic would be likely to hallucinate Catholic visions, but I don't think it's particularly easy to hallucinate yourself into accepting dry, closely-argued reports that happen to depend on supernatural assumptions, schizophrenic or no. It seems like you'd have to just start directly begging the question by treating people becoming boringly mentally fastidious Catholics and otherwise going on with most of the tasks of their daily lives much as before is in itself a manifestation of insanity. But then you're just saying your prior on becoming a Catholic is higher than your prior on becoming a Catholic. Seems like an angel emoji belongs here...
I mean, you might be able to nitpick the right interpretation of the word "miracle", but no, I'm pretty sure it is true that basically all peasant farmers (already the majority of humans to ever live) and basically all hunter-gatherers believe in direct supernatural influence on the world against otherwise natural law.
I do nitpick that interpretation. A miracle is a discrete, unpredictable, observable supernatural event, not “if we do this ritual we’ll have a good harvest.”
To my analysis, one of the problems with snark is that the snarker is often #1 Inventing a transparently braindead reason for adopting their opponent's position #2 Dogmatically insisting that their opponent cannot possibly have been swayed by any other argument #3 Refusing to consider any variables outside their original consideration that might make their opponent's position more reasonable, because even saying "my opponent got tripped up by some complicated issue and ended up believing / doing something wrong" apparently lacks the satisfaction of portraying the enemy as basically subhumanly evil and stupid.
I am not unaware that this comment itself takes a somewhat snarky tone.
If I have learned much of anything, it's that when it comes to our political or religious views & assertions, even though there are multiple causal factors behind our thinking, the heavy lifting isn't done by our awareness of evidence but our emotional, evidence-free cognitive states. I am still surprised to see that it's true for many of the brightest people I know.
This is basically the case for 99% of people for economics. Every other person almost seems to think they're an expert on economics because they spend money or something.
(To some degree medicine as well, but it tends to be about particulars)
"This has become the dominant way of speaking among leftists today. Rather than the solemn seriousness of Chomsky, they speak almost exclusively in a sneering, condescending, dismissive drawl, as if no political issue is at all difficult, as if anyone remotely aware of the facts that they know (through memes on Twitter) would inevitably come to agree with them. Dudley Newright calls this speaking style millennial snot, and it’s pretty well encapsulated by the way that Adam Conover and Lance from the Serfs talk."
I don't know if it's correct to call it millennial. From reading history this seems like a tactic socialists have used since before Marx. Basically figuring that power is the only way to influence so the only way forward was always to belittle, to humiliate and to lie about their opponents (and historically literally murdering their opponents). The main difference with someone like Chomsky is that wasn't the typical run-of-the mill marxian centralized socialist.
Speaking as someone who perhaps would be deemed one of the snarky skeptics, I want to re-iterate, I did reply to you in good faith on the assertion.
It is simple intellectual survival to say sometimes: "NO, I WILL NOT TAKE YOU SERIOUSLY! This material has not met my bar for detailed examination. My preliminary assessment is that it is similar in type to well-examined but wrong material. The burden of proof is on you to meet that bar, not me to disprove what you have assembled."
Now, I know, *THIS CAN BE WRONG*. You do not need to rush to explain to me that it can lead to dogmatism, fanaticism, intellectual closure, etc. etc. I know all that. I understand that. Again, you don't need to tell me.
However, the other side is the frustration of constantly encountering peddlers of the most utter nonsense. Holocaust Deniers. Psychic powers. Alien abductions. Q-Anon. Anti-vaxxers. Catholic miracles (joke!).
Every single one of them who will be saying "Look at all the evidence I have!".
If you have no good response to this problem, it's just special pleading for your own beliefs.
But nobody has a good response in general to this problem, right? In the end you just have some personal Overton window which has some dependency on the Overton windows of people you respect, and you ignore things outside it.
Indeed. It's a whole field of philosophy and more. How to maintain an open mind without having your brains fall out? But people do think about it, and put forth some guidelines. It's not quite pure Overton window, though that's part of it. One good guideline, for example, is showing awareness of the existing arguments in the field, and where and why the view put forth addresses weaknesses. Though again, granted, perfection will never be possible.
The mentioned examples make me think about blank slatism, belief in learning styles, belief in multiple intelligences, natural = safe / unnatural = not safe, GMO opponents, "no sex differences", anti-free marketism, price control/cap on rentals believers. Unfortunately several of these happen to be mainstream because they align with the current academic and cultural majority; left liberalism.
I wanted to keep the list "uncontroversial", I figured I was being harsh enough. I was sorely tempted to put in "pseudo-scientific racism", but I refrained. As I said, I know the issue. Someone who says, e.g., "I have dealt with _Bell Curve_ style eugenicists over and over and over, and I don't want to deal with this warmed-over race science" can be in my view behaving rationally. How many times does one have to slog through propaganda from "The Institute For White Supremacy" ? I'm not going to solve that problem in a comment box.
"I'm not going to solve that problem in a comment box."
You're also not going to solve the holocaust-denier/anti-vaxxer belief you have about genetics either. Or likely about most of the things I listed, as you're clearly part of the anti-science left instead of the anti-science conservatives. Like Bentham said; the profoundly ignorant shouldn't be snarky.
"... the White community is so entitled because, for the time being, it is the advanced race. It is not easy, and it is unpleasant, to adduce statistics evidencing the median cultural superiority of White over Negro: but it is a fact that obtrudes, one that cannot be hidden by ever-so-busy egalitarians and anthropologists."
Note the snark! Where he sneers at those "ever-so-busy egalitarians" vs "fact" (and logic?).
You live in some type of conspiracy theory-world where you believe anyone who has the consensus view on topics you don't like (because you're far left) is bringing out some hidden "white supremacist" agenda. Are you just retarded?
You didn't answer the question, and it wasn't a conceptually difficult question.
I live too much on the Internet, where I am tired of dealing endlessly with pseudo-scientific racism. I don't want to accede to a rhetorical framework of the pseudo-scientific racist saying "N-lover!", err, "Blank-Slatist!". If they believe per Buckley above in a "superiority of White over Negro", I want them to be absolutely explicit about it. I want them to *own* what they are advocating. If they can't, well, that's the reply.
The “Lady of Fatima” thing is like the Deep JFK or Roswell conspiracies. No, me with 15 minutes of quick research could not out argue somebody who makes it their obsession. But that doesn’t mean I take their overall claim seriously.
I feel like this post is crying out for some acknowledgment that its author also engages in the activity being criticized. Would you agree that you sometimes get snarky? There’s nothing shameful about that; it’s a bad habit that you’re right to criticize, but it’s hard for people online to avoid sometimes. It would only be a serious problem if you saw it in your opponents but didn’t see it in yourself, or if you thought it was justified in your case but not in others’. I was a little discomfited by your line about not being snarky if you would lose a debate with the other person—couldn’t that be taken to mean those who would not lose the debate should feel free to be snarky?
As for the substance of Ethan’s post, I find your approach kind of un-Bayesian, or else just lacking in theory of mind. How specific do people really have to be when explaining that their P(a motivated reasoner is making unjustified inferences from a >100-year-old B&W photo) is much higher than their P(a beam of heat dried people’s clothes)?
I think it’s pretty serious to accuse anyone of being profoundly ignorant, and I don’t think that describes anyone I see commenting on Ethan’s post.
EDIT TO ADD: I definitely don’t think you’re ignorant, but I do think I’ve seen you comment in ways that make it seem like you aren’t taking certain ideas seriously, which I think is the problem you have with Ethan’s critics. I’m thinking of a time when I saw you say, in defense of your anti-nature stance, something like “I think avoiding horrific suffering is more important than looking at pretty trees.” I don’t imagine you’re actually ignorant of conservation arguments more sophisticated than “pretty trees,” but that’s the impression you chose to give.
I don’t think it’s that serious. I’m just saying they don’t know much about the subject which seems true in a lot of cases. I don’t know much about most things. But if I don’t know about physics, I won’t be snarky about some physics theory endorsed by a smart person. At least, this is the rule I try to observe but I have no doubt I fail sometimes
I think there's a big practical difference between, e.g. superstring theory, and nobody is allowed to use hormonal birth control because some guy claims God said so.
The religious constantly and consistently lie to everyone about every single piece of evidence they ever present (if they are kind enough to do so). It is actually perfectly reasonable to be arrogant about subsequent lies by the religious, given just how embarassingly deceitful they are at every turn. Fatima for instance was thouroughly debunked by Joe Nickel: "This Fatima “miracle” has been described in many very different ways. Some claimed that the sun
spun pinwheel-like with colored streamers, while others maintained that it danced. One reported, “I
saw clearly and distinctly a globe of light advancing from east to west, gliding slowly and
majestically through the air.” To some, the sun seemed to be falling toward the spectators. Still
others, before the “dance of the sun” occurred, saw white petals shower down and disintegrate
before reaching the earth (Larue 1990, 195–96; Arvey 1990, 70–71; Rogo 1982, 227, 230–32).
Precisely what happened at Fatima has been the subject of much controversy. Church authorities
made inquiries, collected eyewitness testimony, and declared the events worthy of belief as a
miracle (Zimdars-Swartz 1991, 90). However, people elsewhere in the world, viewing the very same
sun, did not see the alleged gyrations; neither did astronomical observatories detect the sun
deviating from the norm (which would have had a devastating effect on Earth!). Therefore, more
tenable explanations for the reports include mass hysteria and local meteorological phenomena such
as a sundog (a parhelion or “mock sun”).
On the other hand, several eyewitnesses of the October 13, 1917, gathering at Fatima specifically
stated they were looking “fixedly at the sun” or “tried to look straight at it” or otherwise made clear
they were gazing directly at the actual sun (quoted in Rogo 1982, 230, 231). If this is so, the
“dancing sun” and other solar phenomena may have been due to optical effects resulting from
temporary retinal distortion caused by staring at such an intense light or to the effect of darting the
eyes to and fro to avoid fixed gazing (thus combining image, afterimage, and movement).
Most likely, there was a combination of factors, including optical effects and meteorological
phenomena, such as the sun being seen through thin clouds, causing it to appear as a silver disc.
Other possibilities include an alteration in the density of the passing clouds, causing the sun's image
to alternately brighten and dim and so seem to advance and recede, and dust or moisture droplets in
the atmosphere refracting the sunlight and thus imparting a variety of colors. The effects of
suggestion were also likely involved, since devout spectators had come to the site fully expecting
some miraculous event, had their gaze dramatically directed at the sun by the charismatic Lucia, and
excitedly discussed and compared their perceptions in a way almost certain to foster psychological
contagion (Nickell 1993, 176–81).
Not surprisingly, perhaps, sun miracles have been reported at other Marian sites—at Lubbock,
Texas, in 1989; Mother Cabrini Shrine near Denver, Colorado, in 1992; Conyers, Georgia, in the
early to mid-1990s; and elsewhere, including Thiruvananthapuram, India, in 2008. Tragically, at the
Colorado and India sites, many people suffered eye damage (solar retinopathy)—in some instances,
possibly permanent damage (Nickell 1993, 196–200; Sebastian 2008).
At the Conyers site, the Georgia Skeptics set up a telescope outfitted with a vision-protecting
Mylar solar filter, and on one occasion I participated in the experiment. Becky Long, president of
the organization, stated that more than two hundred people had viewed the sun through one of the
solar filters and not a single person saw anything unusual"
i read ethan’s post at ur recommendation & i’m curious how it is that u both don’t agree w the conclusion of his post / are skeptical of it while also acknowledging u never win arguments against him. so u dont have a substantive rebuttal but also dont accept his conclusion? genuinely asking, bc i wonder if ur stance is similar to acx’s essay against taking ideas seriously bc there will inevitably be ppl who can out argue us, their rhetorical skills being separate from the rightness of their position
I agree that people are too quick to deem some claims true. And are cavalier about whether the things they believe are actually reliably and robustly true.
But I think you're conflating a theorem and its proof.
Take the four color theorem. Do I need to know the proof that the theorem is true, before I can use it? Answer: no. All I require is a reliable indicator that the theorem is true.
We use theorems about the world all the time, when we don't know the proofs. It would make no sense to expect us to know the proofs of every theorem we use.
By the same token, if one has determined (by some method one deems reliable) that "the Jan 6 affair was overblown", one doesn't necessarily need to know all the details of the issues.
[I am not endorsing the claim that "the Jan 6 affair was overblown". Indeed, I think the opposite. But I'm just making the point.]
Good stuff. This spectacular ignorance is also a pet peeve of mine. I blame the info silos of modern media, mostly. But also, this is a product of American individualism coupled with a poor public education system that often fails to teach critical thinking skills.
It’d be better if people had more shame about being wrong or sounding stupid.
Corollary: since by any reasonable standard we are all profoundly ignorant, no one should be snarky
This is very true. I think Michael Knowles is a good guy and he is clearly more philosophically knowledgeable than your average political commentator (he is often insightful, in my opinion, when he discusses current events from his unique Catholic perspective), but you're right that his dismissal of January 6th is not helpful.
Also, I think we should just say more broadly that snark in general is almost never helpful. It might be useful when it comes to combating certain groups that are both exceedingly dumb and very angry and aggressive (i.e. holocaust deniers or new atheists), but otherwise, it's just better to treat people kindly and hope that they reciprocate. Dunking on people on X has done basically nothing good for the world, ever.
I agree. I actually find Knowles extremely funny and used to listen to him a lot, but I've been finding it increasingly grating the more I hear him say stupid things about subjects I know about.
I'm in pretty much the same boat -- the number of times that he's asked everyone to just have faith in Donald Trump is getting a little bit cringey.
I was one of the New Atheists in the 2000s and look back on it as a movement of snark and moral outrage but not a lot else. I'm not sure if religious people responding in kind would have helped. I'd guess if anything, it would weaken the religious position, because the congregations are seeing their pastors stoop to the Atheist's level.
This is really true in the discord and tiktok debate space especially. I’ve chatted with so many people irl about politics and it’s really so much different than online.
I think being snarky is usually a bad idea. However, I reject the idea that because you couldn’t beat someone in a debate, you can’t brush off their position. In order to gain a good understanding of the Miracle of the Sun I would have to do many hours of research. The same is true for many, many other claimed miracles from many religions. Only someone who really dedicated their life to this, could be informed on all of them. Does that mean only they can have an informed opinion on religion? I don’t think so. I don’t think they even have a particularly above average level of informed view. It’s perfectly acceptable to rely on heuristics. What are my priors on God having decided that they would reveal miracles only to small numbers and never on video, on top of all the other contradictions and extremely unlikely claims in Catholicism? Essentially zero (this is of course not a full argument). Thus, I do not think I am under any requirement to even consider the Miracle of the Sun before rejecting it. I similarly don’t need to investigate each new anti-vax claim, or 9/11 conspiracist, etc.
There are, of course, countless claims of miracles captured on camera and video, and also of course, none that skeptics find convincing. It is actually an immediate and well-established implication of Catholicism that there will not be miracles that would compel an otherwise skeptical observer to convert, but regardless, I think you’re right that it’s very dangerous to trust just anybody with a good argument. That’s not necessarily enough to say you should snark at them, though!
Yes, I shouldn’t have said none. But no indisputable ones. I find the idea that miracles are hidden to this degree because you need to have faith or some similar reason to be clear post hoc justification that no one would think made sense if it wasn’t the only possible argument. Thus, it lowers my probability estimates about 10000x. Agreed that snark is not justified.
The central, uttermost heart of the Christian faith is that God created man to have free will so as to be able to choose--freely--to love God. A permanent undeniable miracle would make an obvious mockery of free will and thus an obvious mockery of the faith from bottom to top. There would be no hair left on the head of Christ. The fact that many non-Christians don't understand Christianity's most elementary details and make misinterpretations like this doesn't really have any bearing on the faith itself.
I find this very confused.
First of all, I don’t see why free will would preclude extremely obvious manifestations, because one would still have to attribute that manifestation to a Christian God AND make the commitments that putting faith in that God carries. Plenty of people would still fall short, just as I assume Christians believe plenty of people in medieval Europe fell short, even though about 100% of them believed in the Christian God and the miracles attributed to that God.
Second, Christianity already has the greatest challenge to free will ever conceived as a central piece of doctrine: a God with perfect knowledge of the future! It’s funny to think that free will is clearly compatible with predestination, but just as clearly incompatible with my deceased grandmother telling me about the afterlife.
Third, if free will to worship God is dependent on uncertainty, doesn’t it seem like it’s unequally distributed? A child raised in a Christian family in a 95% Christian community is given much less opportunity to doubt in Christ’s divinity than, say, a child raised in a Muslim family in a 100% Muslim country. How meaningful is that first child’s belief, and for that matter how meaningful is the second child’s nonbelief?
Fourth, the Bible actually shows people encountering unambiguous miracles and converting on the spot, most famously Saul on the road to Damascus. But Paul’s salvation is not in doubt, right? More Damascus miracles could save a lot of souls, including in Damascus today!
Free will would preclude extremely obvious manifestations *that are obviously associated with Christianity*, which most would be, certainly including the miracle of the sun. As for why God doesn't make really obvious miracles that are studiously ambiguous about which faith they emanate from, I mean, I dunno, I had never imagined such an idea, and it's unclear why you would imagine God might play such a game.
I don't know what you mean to say by the end of your first paragraph. Of course it's possible to gain faith and then still afterwards sin, is that all you're saying?
Yes, indeed, it is mysterious that God is both all-knowing and that the fundamental gift he gives mankind is free will. I'm not sure if you want me to summarize Boethius, Aquinas, and their commentators for you here or what; there's a lot to say. But "predestination", specifically, is a heresy in Catholicism. God does not predestinate the damned to damnation.
In your "third" paragraph, you seem to think that I'm talking mainly about the free will to choose to believe that Christ was divine. But that's not what I said at all. It is possible and indeed easy to perform the role of a Christian without any true faith. It's a more subtle problem how the free will to turn to God can be present for those who never hear about Christianity (or are prevented from conversion on pain of death, say), but the Catholic position is that such people can be saved via implicit faith, though certainly your best bet is to be a Catholic, and once you know the truth and willingly turn away from it, you're in deep trouble.
Yes, there are examples of particular people seeing undeniable miracles and being converted on the spot. People are converted in all kinds of ways. Even Saul was still free not to become Paul. What is not ever going to happen before the end of time, since this is in itself essentially constitutive of the end of time, is a simultaneous undeniable vision available to all people (and certainly not permanently, as in a video that people somehow allow to convince them isn't faked.)
And finally, regarding your last sentence, for Christians, God is not playing some arcade game where he's trying to rack up a high score on souls saved. God is not *trying* to do anything, does not have competition, does not even make choices in any familiar sense of the word. If you think you see a method by which God could better achieve his desires, then you are either not talking about the Christian God or you are mistaken either about the method or the desires.
I don't understand why it would be a "game" for God to make it clear that the supernatural is real in some non-doctrinal way, but the situation you say we're in now, in which God manifests the supernatural in ways that aren't even unambiguously real, is not a "game." Anyway, if God did manifest that Catholicism was true, that still would not interfere with free will, because people unwilling to believe Catholicism is true would be free to believe that the event was faked, or that it was performed by demons to deceive us. (In the discussion at Ethan Muse's post, in fact, he attributes some other supposedly supernatural phenomena like past life regression to demonic interference.)
Thanks for the clarification that what you are precluding is a *permanent* undeniable miracle, and for introducing me to the doctrine of implicit faith, which I was unfamiliar with—I'll give more thought to those points.
To be quite frank, if God will condemn me to eternal hell for failing to come to the correct conclusion about his existence, then he is an unspeakably evil being. Making it obvious that he exists and what the moral truths are, would in no way inhibit my free will to follow or not follow them.
I agree with a lot of this post but there's something subtly off about it for me.
A frame that I've found very helpful for considering apparent human irrationalities is to see any apparent mistakes both from a "bias" angle and a "heuristic" angle. "Taking arguments seriously" seems like a classic example of what some people see as a bias and many people naturally see a a heuristic.
See Scott on epistemic learned helplessness, though I wouldn't go that far:
https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/06/03/repost-epistemic-learned-helplessness/
For me, the idea of miracles is so ridiculous that if a single Substack post convinced me of that point, I'd be more worried about my mental health than anything else. I might need to check in with my friends and give them consent to involuntarily commit me if that happens.
Presumably other people have different priors, and feel similarly about shrimp being conscious, or that gender identity is distinct from biological sex, or that free trade can result in greater prosperity than forced labor and sending people to gulags.
I agree snark seems like a poor way to navigate the world. But casting it as a "profoundly ignorant" thing to reject beliefs without hearing all the arguments for it seems off to me. Or perhaps a better framing is that you think of it as "profoundly ignorant" (derogatory) while I think of it as "profoundly ignorant" (complimentary), at least sometimes.
I agree that it can be reasonable to not update much in favor of some hypothesis even if you couldn't argue with whomever presented it successfully. But there's something off about being snarky and dismissive without knowing anything about the object level. It's weird to say "haha, what a dumbass, I have higher order evidence that he's wrong even though I can't refute him."
I don't like snark and I think it's corrosive to clear thinking and an informed democracy. But again if you take the bias vs heuristic view, you can see snark as a defense mechanism against being tricked by smarter charlatans, hucksters, cults, memetic drug-dealers, Pascal-reading muggers, and the like.
Someone like me can just offer a heuristic defense for normalcy (like the one above) and consider the matter closed until stronger evidence reaches me. But a more agreeable and/or open-minded and/or less intelligent person may feel a need to respond more substantively, and thus will become embroiled in demon-worship and/or paying off 17th dimensional muggers, unless they can preemptively harden their hearts with snark.
it’s one thing to have an immovable prior that there is no such thing as the supernatural, so that you scoff at miracles (though of course you’re scoffing therein at the vast majority of all humans ever including the vast majority of people much wiser than you, until very recent times), but you can’t really say “Jan 6 being not a big deal is just a foundation stone in my ontology of the universe.” It seems to be pretty obviously a contingent fact that you have to either find out about or not be too overconfident about!
"including the vast majority of people much wiser than you" Doubt they're much wiser! They believed in miracles! :P Also I don't have an immovable prior, just that my prior that I could go insane is much higher (for comparison, estimated prevalence of schizophrenia alone is 0.25%-0.75%; surely any reasonable person would have a much lower credence than literal belief in the supernatural)!
You're clearly not unduly serious about this, but: I think a schizophrenic who's already Catholic would be likely to hallucinate Catholic visions, but I don't think it's particularly easy to hallucinate yourself into accepting dry, closely-argued reports that happen to depend on supernatural assumptions, schizophrenic or no. It seems like you'd have to just start directly begging the question by treating people becoming boringly mentally fastidious Catholics and otherwise going on with most of the tasks of their daily lives much as before is in itself a manifestation of insanity. But then you're just saying your prior on becoming a Catholic is higher than your prior on becoming a Catholic. Seems like an angel emoji belongs here...
I think if we do the math we may not find that the vast majority of humans to ever live believed in miracles.
I mean, you might be able to nitpick the right interpretation of the word "miracle", but no, I'm pretty sure it is true that basically all peasant farmers (already the majority of humans to ever live) and basically all hunter-gatherers believe in direct supernatural influence on the world against otherwise natural law.
I do nitpick that interpretation. A miracle is a discrete, unpredictable, observable supernatural event, not “if we do this ritual we’ll have a good harvest.”
I hate snark with a pure and burning passion. It's a quality-of-life thing.
To my analysis, one of the problems with snark is that the snarker is often #1 Inventing a transparently braindead reason for adopting their opponent's position #2 Dogmatically insisting that their opponent cannot possibly have been swayed by any other argument #3 Refusing to consider any variables outside their original consideration that might make their opponent's position more reasonable, because even saying "my opponent got tripped up by some complicated issue and ended up believing / doing something wrong" apparently lacks the satisfaction of portraying the enemy as basically subhumanly evil and stupid.
I am not unaware that this comment itself takes a somewhat snarky tone.
If I have learned much of anything, it's that when it comes to our political or religious views & assertions, even though there are multiple causal factors behind our thinking, the heavy lifting isn't done by our awareness of evidence but our emotional, evidence-free cognitive states. I am still surprised to see that it's true for many of the brightest people I know.
This is basically the case for 99% of people for economics. Every other person almost seems to think they're an expert on economics because they spend money or something.
(To some degree medicine as well, but it tends to be about particulars)
"This has become the dominant way of speaking among leftists today. Rather than the solemn seriousness of Chomsky, they speak almost exclusively in a sneering, condescending, dismissive drawl, as if no political issue is at all difficult, as if anyone remotely aware of the facts that they know (through memes on Twitter) would inevitably come to agree with them. Dudley Newright calls this speaking style millennial snot, and it’s pretty well encapsulated by the way that Adam Conover and Lance from the Serfs talk."
I don't know if it's correct to call it millennial. From reading history this seems like a tactic socialists have used since before Marx. Basically figuring that power is the only way to influence so the only way forward was always to belittle, to humiliate and to lie about their opponents (and historically literally murdering their opponents). The main difference with someone like Chomsky is that wasn't the typical run-of-the mill marxian centralized socialist.
Speaking as someone who perhaps would be deemed one of the snarky skeptics, I want to re-iterate, I did reply to you in good faith on the assertion.
It is simple intellectual survival to say sometimes: "NO, I WILL NOT TAKE YOU SERIOUSLY! This material has not met my bar for detailed examination. My preliminary assessment is that it is similar in type to well-examined but wrong material. The burden of proof is on you to meet that bar, not me to disprove what you have assembled."
Now, I know, *THIS CAN BE WRONG*. You do not need to rush to explain to me that it can lead to dogmatism, fanaticism, intellectual closure, etc. etc. I know all that. I understand that. Again, you don't need to tell me.
However, the other side is the frustration of constantly encountering peddlers of the most utter nonsense. Holocaust Deniers. Psychic powers. Alien abductions. Q-Anon. Anti-vaxxers. Catholic miracles (joke!).
Every single one of them who will be saying "Look at all the evidence I have!".
If you have no good response to this problem, it's just special pleading for your own beliefs.
But nobody has a good response in general to this problem, right? In the end you just have some personal Overton window which has some dependency on the Overton windows of people you respect, and you ignore things outside it.
Indeed. It's a whole field of philosophy and more. How to maintain an open mind without having your brains fall out? But people do think about it, and put forth some guidelines. It's not quite pure Overton window, though that's part of it. One good guideline, for example, is showing awareness of the existing arguments in the field, and where and why the view put forth addresses weaknesses. Though again, granted, perfection will never be possible.
The mentioned examples make me think about blank slatism, belief in learning styles, belief in multiple intelligences, natural = safe / unnatural = not safe, GMO opponents, "no sex differences", anti-free marketism, price control/cap on rentals believers. Unfortunately several of these happen to be mainstream because they align with the current academic and cultural majority; left liberalism.
I wanted to keep the list "uncontroversial", I figured I was being harsh enough. I was sorely tempted to put in "pseudo-scientific racism", but I refrained. As I said, I know the issue. Someone who says, e.g., "I have dealt with _Bell Curve_ style eugenicists over and over and over, and I don't want to deal with this warmed-over race science" can be in my view behaving rationally. How many times does one have to slog through propaganda from "The Institute For White Supremacy" ? I'm not going to solve that problem in a comment box.
"I'm not going to solve that problem in a comment box."
You're also not going to solve the holocaust-denier/anti-vaxxer belief you have about genetics either. Or likely about most of the things I listed, as you're clearly part of the anti-science left instead of the anti-science conservatives. Like Bentham said; the profoundly ignorant shouldn't be snarky.
I really need to make some sort of FAQ on this. Do you believe, as in William F. Buckley's famous editorial "Why The South Must Prevail" :
https://theintercept.com/2020/07/05/national-review-william-buckley-racism/
"... the White community is so entitled because, for the time being, it is the advanced race. It is not easy, and it is unpleasant, to adduce statistics evidencing the median cultural superiority of White over Negro: but it is a fact that obtrudes, one that cannot be hidden by ever-so-busy egalitarians and anthropologists."
Note the snark! Where he sneers at those "ever-so-busy egalitarians" vs "fact" (and logic?).
You live in some type of conspiracy theory-world where you believe anyone who has the consensus view on topics you don't like (because you're far left) is bringing out some hidden "white supremacist" agenda. Are you just retarded?
You didn't answer the question, and it wasn't a conceptually difficult question.
I live too much on the Internet, where I am tired of dealing endlessly with pseudo-scientific racism. I don't want to accede to a rhetorical framework of the pseudo-scientific racist saying "N-lover!", err, "Blank-Slatist!". If they believe per Buckley above in a "superiority of White over Negro", I want them to be absolutely explicit about it. I want them to *own* what they are advocating. If they can't, well, that's the reply.
The “Lady of Fatima” thing is like the Deep JFK or Roswell conspiracies. No, me with 15 minutes of quick research could not out argue somebody who makes it their obsession. But that doesn’t mean I take their overall claim seriously.
I feel like this post is crying out for some acknowledgment that its author also engages in the activity being criticized. Would you agree that you sometimes get snarky? There’s nothing shameful about that; it’s a bad habit that you’re right to criticize, but it’s hard for people online to avoid sometimes. It would only be a serious problem if you saw it in your opponents but didn’t see it in yourself, or if you thought it was justified in your case but not in others’. I was a little discomfited by your line about not being snarky if you would lose a debate with the other person—couldn’t that be taken to mean those who would not lose the debate should feel free to be snarky?
As for the substance of Ethan’s post, I find your approach kind of un-Bayesian, or else just lacking in theory of mind. How specific do people really have to be when explaining that their P(a motivated reasoner is making unjustified inferences from a >100-year-old B&W photo) is much higher than their P(a beam of heat dried people’s clothes)?
I admit to being snarky. I think I’m generally not profoundly ignorant when I’m snarky though!
I think it’s pretty serious to accuse anyone of being profoundly ignorant, and I don’t think that describes anyone I see commenting on Ethan’s post.
EDIT TO ADD: I definitely don’t think you’re ignorant, but I do think I’ve seen you comment in ways that make it seem like you aren’t taking certain ideas seriously, which I think is the problem you have with Ethan’s critics. I’m thinking of a time when I saw you say, in defense of your anti-nature stance, something like “I think avoiding horrific suffering is more important than looking at pretty trees.” I don’t imagine you’re actually ignorant of conservation arguments more sophisticated than “pretty trees,” but that’s the impression you chose to give.
I don’t think it’s that serious. I’m just saying they don’t know much about the subject which seems true in a lot of cases. I don’t know much about most things. But if I don’t know about physics, I won’t be snarky about some physics theory endorsed by a smart person. At least, this is the rule I try to observe but I have no doubt I fail sometimes
I think there's a big practical difference between, e.g. superstring theory, and nobody is allowed to use hormonal birth control because some guy claims God said so.
The religious constantly and consistently lie to everyone about every single piece of evidence they ever present (if they are kind enough to do so). It is actually perfectly reasonable to be arrogant about subsequent lies by the religious, given just how embarassingly deceitful they are at every turn. Fatima for instance was thouroughly debunked by Joe Nickel: "This Fatima “miracle” has been described in many very different ways. Some claimed that the sun
spun pinwheel-like with colored streamers, while others maintained that it danced. One reported, “I
saw clearly and distinctly a globe of light advancing from east to west, gliding slowly and
majestically through the air.” To some, the sun seemed to be falling toward the spectators. Still
others, before the “dance of the sun” occurred, saw white petals shower down and disintegrate
before reaching the earth (Larue 1990, 195–96; Arvey 1990, 70–71; Rogo 1982, 227, 230–32).
Precisely what happened at Fatima has been the subject of much controversy. Church authorities
made inquiries, collected eyewitness testimony, and declared the events worthy of belief as a
miracle (Zimdars-Swartz 1991, 90). However, people elsewhere in the world, viewing the very same
sun, did not see the alleged gyrations; neither did astronomical observatories detect the sun
deviating from the norm (which would have had a devastating effect on Earth!). Therefore, more
tenable explanations for the reports include mass hysteria and local meteorological phenomena such
as a sundog (a parhelion or “mock sun”).
On the other hand, several eyewitnesses of the October 13, 1917, gathering at Fatima specifically
stated they were looking “fixedly at the sun” or “tried to look straight at it” or otherwise made clear
they were gazing directly at the actual sun (quoted in Rogo 1982, 230, 231). If this is so, the
“dancing sun” and other solar phenomena may have been due to optical effects resulting from
temporary retinal distortion caused by staring at such an intense light or to the effect of darting the
eyes to and fro to avoid fixed gazing (thus combining image, afterimage, and movement).
Most likely, there was a combination of factors, including optical effects and meteorological
phenomena, such as the sun being seen through thin clouds, causing it to appear as a silver disc.
Other possibilities include an alteration in the density of the passing clouds, causing the sun's image
to alternately brighten and dim and so seem to advance and recede, and dust or moisture droplets in
the atmosphere refracting the sunlight and thus imparting a variety of colors. The effects of
suggestion were also likely involved, since devout spectators had come to the site fully expecting
some miraculous event, had their gaze dramatically directed at the sun by the charismatic Lucia, and
excitedly discussed and compared their perceptions in a way almost certain to foster psychological
contagion (Nickell 1993, 176–81).
Not surprisingly, perhaps, sun miracles have been reported at other Marian sites—at Lubbock,
Texas, in 1989; Mother Cabrini Shrine near Denver, Colorado, in 1992; Conyers, Georgia, in the
early to mid-1990s; and elsewhere, including Thiruvananthapuram, India, in 2008. Tragically, at the
Colorado and India sites, many people suffered eye damage (solar retinopathy)—in some instances,
possibly permanent damage (Nickell 1993, 196–200; Sebastian 2008).
At the Conyers site, the Georgia Skeptics set up a telescope outfitted with a vision-protecting
Mylar solar filter, and on one occasion I participated in the experiment. Becky Long, president of
the organization, stated that more than two hundred people had viewed the sun through one of the
solar filters and not a single person saw anything unusual"
i read ethan’s post at ur recommendation & i’m curious how it is that u both don’t agree w the conclusion of his post / are skeptical of it while also acknowledging u never win arguments against him. so u dont have a substantive rebuttal but also dont accept his conclusion? genuinely asking, bc i wonder if ur stance is similar to acx’s essay against taking ideas seriously bc there will inevitably be ppl who can out argue us, their rhetorical skills being separate from the rightness of their position
nvm just saw ur latest catholicism post lol
Only ~60% agree with your post.
I agree that people are too quick to deem some claims true. And are cavalier about whether the things they believe are actually reliably and robustly true.
But I think you're conflating a theorem and its proof.
Take the four color theorem. Do I need to know the proof that the theorem is true, before I can use it? Answer: no. All I require is a reliable indicator that the theorem is true.
We use theorems about the world all the time, when we don't know the proofs. It would make no sense to expect us to know the proofs of every theorem we use.
By the same token, if one has determined (by some method one deems reliable) that "the Jan 6 affair was overblown", one doesn't necessarily need to know all the details of the issues.
[I am not endorsing the claim that "the Jan 6 affair was overblown". Indeed, I think the opposite. But I'm just making the point.]
Good stuff. This spectacular ignorance is also a pet peeve of mine. I blame the info silos of modern media, mostly. But also, this is a product of American individualism coupled with a poor public education system that often fails to teach critical thinking skills.
It’d be better if people had more shame about being wrong or sounding stupid.