[ExI] atheists declare religions as scams.

[The Avantguardian]

----- Original Message ----
> From: Anders Sandberg <anders at aleph.se>
> To: ExI chat list <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org>
> Sent: Fri, January 7, 2011 4:39:13 AM
> Subject: Re: [ExI] atheists declare religions as scams.
> 
> On 2011-01-07 09:19, Sondre Bjellås wrote:
> > No religion are sane. Religions are invalid as basis for morality, as
> > the morality in all religions are not based upon realities in the world
> > and doesn't stand up to scientific scrutiny.
> 
> While the epistemic basis for religions is clearly bad, I doubt there is much 
>science itself can say about the correctness of morality.

Science could measure the efficacy of moral systems by observing, analyzing, and 
comparing various indicator statistics of societies, cultures, and subcultures 
that espouse those moral systems. The main problem with this approach is that 
these measurements would have to be conducted after the fact since that is a 
limitation of the empirical method in that all predictive science is 
extrapolatory. Minor problems with the scientific approach would include the 
difficulty in choosing a set of indicators to compare that is both meaningful 
and readily measureable. For example possible measures might include average 
wealth, gini index, crime rate, happiness surveys, evolutionary stability, and 
others but is any combination of these measures sufficiently representative of 
"goodness"?

I guess what I am saying is that if you can pin down a definition of "good", 
then science can measure it for you. Approaching this problem from a background 
as a biologist, I would say that the most important measure is evolutionary 
stability. A society of altruistic saints and martyrs might be philosophically 
blameless but probably would not survive very long in the real world.
 
> If you are a moral realist (moral claims can be true or false), it is not 
>obvious that the truth of moral statements can be investigated through a 
>scientific experiment. How do you measure the appropriateness of an action?

Scientific investigation of the appropriateness of an action would entail having 
a test group perform said action many times and then look at the statistical 
distribution of outcomes. If there is a lack of sufficient historical data 
regarding agents that have performed the action, one would need to set up an 
experiment involving real or simulated moral agents divided into groups that 
either perform or do not perform said action and then compare their outcomes.
  
> How do you test if utilitarianism is correct?

Philosophically speaking one would ask oneself if one agreed with the premises 
of utilitarianism and then check to make sure the conclusions follow logically 
from those premises. That is the maximum extent of certainty one can have in 
*any* axiomatic system of knowledge due to considerations such as the 
Münchhausen Trilemma and Gödel's Incompleteness Theorems. On the other hand, to 
empirically test utilitarianism one has merely to set up an experiment involving 
two desert islands. Populate one desert island with a group of utilitarians and 
another island with a control group of non-utilitarians and then compare 
outcomes. Alternatively one could program and play Simcity: the Utilitarian 
Edition and see what happens. 

>And if you are a moral noncognitivist (moral claims are not true or false, but 
>like attitudes or emotions) or error theorist (moral claims are erroneous like 
>religion) at most you can collect statistics and correlates of why people 
>believe certain things. If you are a subjectivist (moral claims are about 
>subjective human mental states; they may or may not be relative to the speaker 
>or their culture) you might be able to investigate them somewhat, with the usual 
>messiness of soft science.

All these philosophical categories only confounds the central question: does the 
given moral system succeed in its objectives? Note that what one thinks about 
the moral system can be quite independent of whether the morals themselves work 
or not.
 
> Note that logic and philosophy can say a lot about the consistency of moral 
>systems: it is pretty easy to show how many moral systems are self-contradictory 
>or produce outcomes their proponents don't want, and it is sometimes even 
>possible to prove more general theorems that show that certain approaches are in 
>trouble (e.g. see http://sciencethatmatters.com/archives/38 ) Philosophy has 
>been doing this for ages, to the minor annoyance of believers.

This is the unavoidable result of moralities being axiomatic systems. Starting 
from moral axioms such as "thou shall not murder" and "thou shall honor thy 
father", it is quite easy to come up with morally undecidable situations such 
as "should thou honor thy father if he is a murderer?" This is Gödel's 
incompleteness in action. So a moral system can never be both complete and 
consistent from a philosophical standpoint. But despite this unavoidable flaw, a 
system of morals could lead to the evolutionary success of those who adhere to 
it from an empirical standpoint.
  
> Science is really good at undermining factually wrong claims (like the Earth 
>being flat or that prayer has measurable positive effects on the weather). It 
>might also be possible to use it to say things about properties of moral systems 
>such as their computational complexity, evolutionary stability or how they tie 
>in with the cognitive neuroscience and society of their believers. It is just 
>that science is pretty bad at proving anything about the *correctness* of moral 
>statements unless it is supplemented by a theory of what counts as correct, and 
>that tends to come from the philosophy department (or, worse, the theology 
>department...)

If a system of morality does not promote the survival of those that subscribe to 
it or worse yet undermines it (think Shakers) then *correctness* is an 
irrelevant indicator of moral efficacy. When they are in contradiction, reality 
trumps conviction. 

With regard to myself, for over a decade now, I have subscribed to a 
game-theoretical view of morality. In fact for its simplicity tit-for-tat is 
IMHO a perfectly valid and efficacious moral code. If you think about it, it 
subsumes both an-eye-for-an-eye and the Golden Rule into its pithy 
succinctness. 

Stuart LaForge 

"There is nothing wrong with America that faith, love of freedom, intelligence, 
and energy of her citizens cannot cure."- Dwight D. Eisenhower