Puritanical Warfare

The LA Times sheds additional light on the complex question of America’s founding and the religious ideals of historical figures in this piece.  Author John M. Barry described Roger Williams breaking away from the Massachusetts Pilgrims to found Rhode Island, quoting his view of religious liberty:

[even] “the most Paganish, Jewish, Turkish, or Antichristian consciences and worships” [should be allowed to pray or not pray]

“forced worship stinks in God’s nostrils.”

Williams is notable because he stands in stark contrast to John Winthrop who is the source of the “city upon a hill” that is a common reference point in presidential aspirational speeches:

For we must Consider that we shall be as a City upon a Hill, the eyes of all people are upon us

Yet, for all that shiny exceptionalism, Puritans believed slavery was justified by the Old Testament, harassed and executed Quakers, reviled one another as heretics, and believed that God had killed Native Americans using smallpox to give the land to the Puritans:

But for the natives in these parts, God hath so pursued them, as for 300 miles space the greatest part of them are swept away by smallpox which still continues among them. So as God hath thereby cleared our title to this place, those who remain in these parts, being in all not 50, have put themselves under our protection.

The goal of a GOP candidate using the “hill” quote is to invoke the ghost of Reagan. Sadly, the important historical lessons about tolerance and the evolutionary seeds of our modern understanding of the ethics of freedom get lost when it becomes jingoistic.… Read the rest

Solomonoff Induction, Truth, and Theism

LukeProg of CommonSenseAtheism fame created a bit of a row when he declared that Solomonoff Induction largely rules out theism, continuing on to expand on the theme:

If I want to pull somebody away from magical thinking, I don’t need to mention atheism. Instead, I teach them Kolmogorov complexity and Bayesian updating. I show them the many ways our minds trick us. I show them the detailed neuroscience of human decision-making. I show them that we can see (in the brain) a behavior being selected up to 10 seconds before a person is consciously aware of ‘making’ that decision. I explain timelessness.

There were several reasons for the CSA community to get riled up about these statements and they took on several different forms:

  • The focus on Solomonoff Induction/Kolmogorov Complexity is obscurantist in using radical technical terminology.
  • The author is ignoring deductive arguments that support theist claims.
  • The author has joined a cult.
  • Inductive claims based on Solomonoff/Kolmogorov are no different from Reasoning to the Best Explanation.

I think all of these critiques are partially valid, though I don’t think there are any good reasons for thinking theism is true, but the fourth one (which I contributed) was a personal realization for me. Though I have been fascinated with the topics related to Kolmogorov since the early 90s, I don’t think they are directly applicable to the topic of theism/atheism.  Whether we are discussing the historical validity of Biblical claims or the logical consistency of extensions to notions of omnipotence or omniscience, I can’t think of a way that these highly mathematical concepts have direct application.

But what are we talking about? Solomonoff Induction, Kolmogorov Complexity, Minimum Description Length, Algorithmic Information Theory, and related ideas are formalizations of the idea of William of Occam (variously Ockham) known as Occam’s Razor that given multiple explanations of a given phenomena, one should prefer the simpler explanation.… Read the rest