Towards A More Mature Atheism

Human intelligence evolved as a social intelligence, for the purposes of social cooperation, social competition and social domination. It evolved to make us efficient at cooperating at removing obstacles, especially the kinds of obstacles that tend to fight back, i.e. at warfare.  If you ever studied strategy or tactics, or just played really good board games, you have probably found your brain seems to be strangely well suited for specifically this kind of intellectual activity. It’s not necessarily easier than studying physics, and yet it somehow feels more natural. Physics is like swimming, strategy and tactics is like running. The reason for that is that our brains are truly evolved to be strategic, tactical, diplomatic computers, not physics computers. The question our brains are REALLY good at finding the answer for is “Just what does this guy really want?”

(If you still think human intelligence evolved to make us better dealing with nonhuman threats and challenges such as hunting, google “Ecological Dominance – Social Competition”.)

Thus, a very basic failure mode of the human brain is to overdetect agency.

I think this is partially what SSC wrote about in Mysticism And Pattern-Matching too. But instead of mystical experiences, my focus is on our brains claiming to detect agency where there is none. Thus my view is closer to Richard Carrier’s definition of the supernatural: it is the idea that some mental things cannot be reduced to nonmental things.

Overdetecting agency is to be expected. Evolve a computer to predict the will of other computers and it will sometimes see a will where there is none.

For example, when our friend is struck by a lightning, our most natural thought is that something wanted it so – an angry god, an evil spirit, or a witch who cursed him. What could be the meaning of such a tragic death otherwise?

Meaning actually means will and agency. It took me a while to figure that one out. When we look for the meaning of life, a meaning in life, or a meaningful life, we look for a will or agency generally outside our own.

Meaning simply is will. When we see a person doing weird random looking movements, it looks meaningless. When he informs us he is doing dynamic stretching to ease his back pain, we find the movements meaningful because we understand the will, the purpose behind it. And when we want to make our friends tragic, early death meaningful, it means we want to think something wanted him dead, had a higher purpose or  goal with killing him.

To give you a lighter example,  programmers well know the phenomenon of releasing frustration and stress through arguing with the software as if it was a person: “Why does this stubborn piece just refuse to compile?!” It is not that we actually think it refuses to do so – but human-like refusal, as opposed to a technical problem, relaxes our brains as it feels far more comfortable dealing with that. It evolved to do so. It evolved to argue, not to debug.

There are even some people who overdetect agency so hard that they claim history itself has something like agency and purpose. They are called Marxists, Leftists, Progressives. No wonder these views are often called political religions. Religion means an agency behind the universe, Progressivism means an agency behind human history. The fact that the Progressive religion is today basically the default view and most people believe in its tenets even without actually being aware of it is the great tragedy of our times.

Whether you are an atheist or not is often affected by what you are interested in. If you are interested in physics, it is likely you are an atheist: if galaxy was made by anthropomorphic God and we in His own image, why is it filled with vacuum and why can’t we breath that?

If your interest is in human concerns, in the social, such a history or politics, or if you are just a generally very sociable person, the lure of religion becomes far stronger. After all you are dealing with human agency and its effects all the time, so your agency-detecting circuits are firing hot and easily overdetect agency behind things and events.

What I would like to say here is that religious people aren’t idiots. They are normal human beings operating in the normal human way: they focus their attention on the social, thus their agency detecting and decoding radars are running on full power, and thus overdetecting agency behind events is almost unavoidable. From that, religion is only a small step.

In fact, it is very often the atheists who are the damaged goods. Many loudmouth Internet Atheists are autistic neckbeards with about zero social skills or interest in people, thus they hardly use their agency detection circuits, hence they don’t overdetect agency behind the universe, and that is how they are atheists. Bloggers at The Orthosphere tend to talk about atheism as “spiritual autism”, but in fact, far too often it is just basic standard autism. Not being much interested in people, not being very good at detecting agency, also leads to not overdetecting it and thus not forming a god hypothesis. Autists not forming a theory of mind also don’t form a theory of God. After all a theory of God, or religion, is really just a theory of mind behind the universe.

Of course, scientific and technological progress usually depends on such autistic misfits. The human social world is so fascinating, with its cooperation, competition, domination games that it can easily suck up every energy and intellegence a person has. To be able to focus hard on something like predicting supernovae and dark matter like Fritz Zwicky did, you need a certain disinterest in the human, social world. And the result is far too often that you get the kind of personality Zwicky had.

At any rate, we should respect the religious more.  They simply operate the way the human brain was “designed” to. To deal with agency everywhere. And we should understand many atheists are not atheists because they are so intelligent, but because they suck so much at dealing with agency in general, which results in poor social skills and lack of empathy.

I am a double oddball – kind of autistic, but still far more interested in human social dynamics, such as history, than in natural sciences or technology. As a result, I do feel a calling to religion – the human world, as opposed to outer space, the human city, the human history, is such a perfect fit for a view like that of Catholicism! The reason for that is that Catholicism is the pinnacle of human intellectual efforts dealing with human agency. Ideas like Augustine’s three failure modes of the human brain: greed, lust and desire for power and status, are just about the closest to forming correct psychological theories far earlier than the scientific method was discovered. Just read your Chesterbelloc and Lewis. And of course because the agency radars of Catholics run at full burst, they overdetect it and thus believe in a god behind the universe. My brain, due to my deep interest in human agency and its consequences, also would like to be religious: wouldn’t it be great if the universe was made by something we could talk to, like, everything else that I am interested in, from field generals to municipal governments are entities I could talk to?

Besides the primary reason people dislike the practical aspects of religion today is sexuality and I don’t intend to have sex with anyone but my wife, so in practice my conversion would cost me exactly nothing. No extra self restraint or abnegation required from me  – and the reward would be meaning and peace…

So I actually have to fight hard to resist this temptation. Even though being religious would be so comfortable for me – history would not look so tragicomically, depressingly pointless, like a really bad jest. Perhaps one day my desire for psychological comfort will overcome my desire for truth and I will go down on my knees praying, and feeling grateful that this bloody, brutal comedy of errors we call history had some meaning after all.

Anyway, the really funny thing I want to say is that I would be very comfortable at basically handing over the whole business of politics to the religious.

WHAT?! Yes, I said exactly that. No, not the kind of religious folks like the Fundies in the US. I mean the kind of religious folks like Mazarin and Richelieu who were priests, in fact cardinals. The religious are religious because they are so experienced at dealing with agency that they overdetect it. Since politics is largely about dealing with agency, they are supposed to be good at it. And they were good at it.

I also dislike that atheists often refuse to propose a falsifiable theory because they claim the burden of proof is not on them. Strictly speaking it can be true, but it is still good form to provide one.

Since I am something like an “nontheistic Catholic” anyway (e.g. I believe in original sin from the practical, political angle, I just think it has natural, not supernatural causes: evolution, the move from hunting-gathering to agriculture etc.), all one would need to do to make me fully so is to plug a God concept in my mind.

If you can convince me that my brain is not actually overdetecting agency when I feel a calling to religion, if you can convince me that my brain and most human brains detect agency just about right, there will be no reason for me to not believe in God. Because if there would any sort of agency behind the universe, the smartest bet would be that this agency would be the God of Thomas Aquinas’ Summa. That guy was plain simply a genius.

How to convince me my brain is not overdetecting agency? The simplest way is to convince me that magic, witchcraft, or superstition in general is real, and real in the supernatural sense (I do know Wiccans who cast spells and claim they are natural, not supernatural: divination spells make the brain more aware of hidden details, healing spells recruit the healing processes of the body etc.) You see, Catholics generally do believe in magic and witchcraft, as in: “These really do something, and they do something bad, so never practice them.”

I proposed magic and witchcraft because it is a human universal while Catholicism or say Judaism aren’t. Virtually every culture had superstitions like that, such as believing in curses. Thus, a supernatural belief that is a human universal, such as curses, is far more likely to be true and far more easy to argue for than a supernatural belief, such as any given religion, which is believed by only some cultures.

In a universe where curses can work, Aquinas’ God is real. This is basically how to falsify my atheism.

As a summary, what I think is a more mature atheism means:

• Respecting religious people, because their mistake is a normal, nature consequence of the human mind being so good at dealing with agency that it overdetects it, and humans who are really social and sociable easily fall into that trap.
• Understanding that atheists are often atheists not because they are so smart, but because they are so autistic and asocial.
• Politics is all about agency, and agency is something the religious are good at dealing with, so there is little point in trying to kick religion out of politics.
• If wisdom is largely about dealing with the agency of other humans, and smartness is largely about solving technical problems, then atheists are more smart and the religious are more wise.
• Despite all the heretics burnt and holy wars waged, the overall social consequences of religion must be positive, when compared to not some sort of a pie-in-the-sky dream of humans being actually rational, but with the realistic alternatives that our poor, damaged, fallen, misevolved brains could believe in. The most likely alternatives are worshiping totalitarian dictators or losing the animating spirit, the energy, and becoming passive, lazy “lotus eaters”.
• Yudkowsky got it almost right – religion is not simply a symptom of a generally low sanity waterline, but a way of dealing with that, a way to mitigate that, and that is why it deserves respect. Religion is a way to civilize generally insane humans. If you think putting a bunch of Anglican missionaries into tribal Africa was generally a good, civilizing thing, and I find it difficult to imagine thinking otherwise, then putting a bunch of Roman missionaries into tribal Germania was also a good thing, unless you can argue that skin color can matter really so much.
• Atheists can offer falsifiable objections instead of just putting the burden of proof on their opponents.
• One good falsifiable objection is precisely the hypothesis that the human brain overdetects agency because it evolved primarily to deal with agency.
• To make it testable, atheists should try to offer fairly simple and universal overdetection scenarios, I proposed magic and witchcraft, or even only the subset of that which is called curses. Evil eye etc.
• If curses could work, it would mean our brains would not overdetect agency, but it would detect some real hidden agency.
• If there would be a real hidden agency behind things, we should probably accept the smartest theory of it, which is Aquinas’ Summa and thus go and kneel in the nearest Catholic church.