Why Catholicism Is True

[rotting bones]

I don't think the origin of the universe is combinatorial to begin with. My intuition tells me that the laws of physics are not mutually independent combinations. They are interconnected at a deep level we don't understand.

I suspect as much. There's most likely a very restricted number of parameters, or maybe one parameter.

I think the disagreement between atheists and monotheists is over whether the simple origin of the universe has agency or not. Humans evolved with mirror neurons that perceive agency as fundamental.

Although there is the anthropic principle to consider. If there is an infinity of possible universe, of course we can't anywhere else than in one of those that support life.

The idea is that fully coherent life-supporting universes are vanishingly rare in the combinatorial model. See the scholarly response to 17 objections here: https://youtu.be/erpKBoPQxN0?t=6671

The question of miracles is interesting, I think. (Though Joe Schmid isn't.)

I'm paying close attention to what he says to model characters after him. He's a relatively smart guy I've been watching for a while. The video about atheist religious experiences I posted a while back was his interview. It doesn't look like I will ever get to live in a rational society. My fiction has to reflect my lived experiences.

If we define miracles, or the supernatural (to use a less loaded term) as acausal, unpredictal and unreproducible events outside usual natural laws -- there's really no reason to believe no such events ever occur. But we can't do anything about these, we can't reason about these or draw conclusions. Also, how are we sure they're Catholic miracles, as opposed to a preta from one of the lower bardos playing a prank on us?

There's a 10 hour video arguing for that: https://youtu.be/Lk2W9mKTzIQ These aren't hours of rambling. He's reading tightly edited notes and adding explanatory commentary.

The idea is that the miracles he can find substantial evidence for in scholarship are all associated with promoting Catholic (and more rarely, Christian) causes. Many of these miracles legitimate specifically Catholic beliefs. To give an isolated example, an appearance of Mary is not what Reformed Christians would expect.

I have seen an argument that in some cases, these could be rare laws of nature we don't understand. (In some cases, these laws can be probabilistic, having a random component to them.) Having grown up in India, I know how easy it is to fool smart people with stage magic. I don't think we need to posit rare laws of nature. Humans are dumb enough without them.

[Raphael]

All this talk about various video lengths in hours is starting to make me wonder how long a video of me reading out all of my latest tract would be.

[Travis B.]

All this talk about various video lengths in hours is starting to make me wonder how long a video of me reading out all of my latest tract would be.

My response to all these videos is TL;DW.

[rotting bones]

Sorry, I'm not watching YouTube videos, specially seven hour ones.

Sure, stay ignorant then. At least you're not calling for me to be banned like when I posted about Moldbug.

This is what liberals do, ignore everything new and important while focusing on bullshit in their tiny bubbles. Then when the world blows up in their face, they make a surprised pikachu face. The things people you talk to say are important are not the ones the outer world cares about.

Although when I say "watch", I mean playing it in the background like a podcast while assembling my desk.

Umm that is precisely the point -- that the multiverse accounts for fine-tuning by producing countless different universes, the vast, vast, vast majority of which are not life-supporting along with a small number of life-supporting ones, and that the universe that we see is specifically life-supporting for the very reason that if it weren't life-supporting we wouldn't be here to observe it.

The argument went totally over your head. There are many, many more partial universes than coherent ones. The fact that we're seeing a coherent universe rather than a partial one is grotesquely unlikely.

If one rejects the multiverse then one is left with explaining how the universe we are in just happens to be precisely one of the very few possible universes that could be life-supporting in the first place, e.g. a God created it that way on purpose.

The main thing is why do we just happen to be a universe that, out of the very many possible universes, is one of the very, very few that are life-supporting?

This assumes it makes sense to posit a combinatorial model of the origin of the universe in the first place.

Most of us here don't keep track of every single thing you have said over the whole history of the ZBB. I don't.

I addressed this argument in this thread before your post. If you don't care what I have to say, I can't be bothered to explain it again.

You seem a bit fixated on one particular guy's focus on miracles. I've never heard of the guy, and I don't give a crap as to what he thinks.

Why are you posting here, then?

[Raphael]

Sorry, I'm not watching YouTube videos, specially seven hour ones.

Sure, stay ignorant then. At least you're not calling for me to be banned like when I posted about Moldbug.

This is what liberals do, ignore everything new and important while focusing on bullshit in their tiny bubbles. Then when the world blows up in their face, they make a surprised pikachu face. The things people you talk to say are important are not the ones the outer world cares about.

I don't think that the group of people who aren't interested in watching 7 hour long theological videos is limited to the liberals of the world.

[Travis B.]

I don't think the origin of the universe is combinatorial to begin with. My intuition tells me that the laws of physics are not mutually independent combinations. They are interconnected at a deep level we don't understand.

I suspect as much. There's most likely a very restricted number of parameters, or maybe one parameter.

I think the disagreement between atheists and monotheists is over whether the simple origin of the universe has agency or not. Humans evolved with mirror neurons that perceive agency as fundamental.

Atheists in many cases, such as my own, that one simply does not observe anything in our universe that provides positive evidence of divinity, so one must fall back on the null hypothesis.

For instance, the 'cosmic programmer' hypothesis is the most plausible hypothesized form of divinity to me, yet at the same time I have seen zero positive evidence for it, so I cannot actually believe in it.

Although there is the anthropic principle to consider. If there is an infinity of possible universe, of course we can't anywhere else than in one of those that support life.

The idea is that fully coherent life-supporting universes are vanishingly rare in the combinatorial model. See the scholarly response to 17 objections here: https://youtu.be/erpKBoPQxN0?t=6671

Can you link things other than YouTube videos? No, I'm not going to watch that.

The question of miracles is interesting, I think. (Though Joe Schmid isn't.)

I'm paying close attention to what he says to model characters after him. He's a relatively smart guy I've been watching for a while. The video about atheist religious experiences I posted a while back was his interview. It doesn't look like I will ever get to live in a rational society. My fiction has to reflect my lived experiences.

I am personally of the view that people who put any special weight on 'lived experiences' can go to hell. To me, emphasizing 'lived experiences' means rejecting reason, because it puts one's subjectivity over rationality.

If we define miracles, or the supernatural (to use a less loaded term) as acausal, unpredictal and unreproducible events outside usual natural laws -- there's really no reason to believe no such events ever occur. But we can't do anything about these, we can't reason about these or draw conclusions. Also, how are we sure they're Catholic miracles, as opposed to a preta from one of the lower bardos playing a prank on us?

There's a 10 hour video arguing for that: https://youtu.be/Lk2W9mKTzIQ These aren't hours of rambling. He's reading tightly edited notes and adding explanatory commentary.

Seriously, do you expect us to watch that?

The idea is that the miracles he can find substantial evidence for in scholarship are all associated with promoting Catholic (and more rarely, Christian) causes. Many of these miracles legitimate specifically Catholic beliefs. To give an isolated example, an appearance of Mary is not what Reformed Christians would expect.

Of course, this more raises questions about why Catholics are liable to believe in miracles than Reformed Christians are, i.e. maybe the reason is that Reformed theology is less miracle-prone than Catholic theology, so Reformed Christians are less likely to report miracles.

I have seen an argument that in some cases, these could be rare laws of nature we don't understand. (In some cases, these laws can be probabilistic, having a random component to them.) Having grown up in India, I know how easy it is to fool smart people with stage magic. I don't think we need to posit rare laws of nature. Humans are dumb enough without them.

The key thing is that the most plausible laws of nature are the simplest ones which apply to everything. If someone posited a rare law of nature without demonstratable positive evidence for it, what reason would there be to believe in it?

[Travis B.]

Sorry, I'm not watching YouTube videos, specially seven hour ones.

Sure, stay ignorant then. At least you're not calling for me to be banned like when I posted about Moldbug.

This is what liberals do, ignore everything new and important while focusing on bullshit in their tiny bubbles. Then when the world blows up in their face, they make a surprised pikachu face. The things people you talk to say are important are not the ones the outer world cares about.

Although when I say "watch", I mean playing it in the background like a podcast while assembling my desk.

Maybe some of us have other things to do than spend whole days watching YouTube videos.

Umm that is precisely the point -- that the multiverse accounts for fine-tuning by producing countless different universes, the vast, vast, vast majority of which are not life-supporting along with a small number of life-supporting ones, and that the universe that we see is specifically life-supporting for the very reason that if it weren't life-supporting we wouldn't be here to observe it.

The argument went totally over your head. There are many, many more partial universes than coherent ones. The fact that we're seeing a coherent universe rather than a partial one is grotesquely unlikely.

No, it did not go over my head at all. The fact that we are seeing a coherent universe stems from the fact that our existence requires a coherent universe for us to observe it in the first place. If our universe weren't coherent we wouldn't be here commenting on it.

Of course, this raises the question of why our universe is coherent, and that raises three possibilities -- either there are very, very many universes, or our universe was deliberately created this way, or all other universes are impossible to begin with.

If one rejects the multiverse then one is left with explaining how the universe we are in just happens to be precisely one of the very few possible universes that could be life-supporting in the first place, e.g. a God created it that way on purpose.

The main thing is why do we just happen to be a universe that, out of the very many possible universes, is one of the very, very few that are life-supporting?

This assumes it makes sense to posit a combinatorial model of the origin of the universe in the first place.

The main model that rejects a combinatorial model of the origin of the universe is one in which all other universes are impossible -- do you have any evidence that this is the case?

Most of us here don't keep track of every single thing you have said over the whole history of the ZBB. I don't.

I addressed this argument in this thread before your post. If you don't care what I have to say, I can't be bothered to explain it again.

I'm sorry, but I don't read every single thing you have ever said on the Zeeb, including previous incarnations.

You seem a bit fixated on one particular guy's focus on miracles. I've never heard of the guy, and I don't give a crap as to what he thinks.

Why are you posting here, then?

Because I'm responding to your arguments, which pertain to a lot more than just this particular Joe Schmid guy.

[rotting bones]

Maybe some of us have other things to do than spend whole days watching YouTube videos.

To be fair, I didn't watch parts of the videos that didn't interest me. I skipped the entire miracle video. We know from books like High Weirdness that paranormal experiences are colored by the beliefs of the experiences.

On the other hand, these YouTube videos pertain to the latest arguments in the philosophy of religion. Each segment in each of these videos are published as papers or books.

Do you not read linguistics papers? Does this not take time? Do you believe it's possible to understand other fields without spending a comparable amount of time?

How do you get ideas for fiction if not by studying philosophy and observing people?

No, it did not go over my head at all. The fact that we are seeing a coherent universe stems from the fact that our existence requires a coherent universe for us to observe it in the first place. If our universe weren't coherent we wouldn't be here commenting on it.

Of course, this raises the question of why our universe is coherent, and that raises three possibilities -- either there are very, very many universes, or our universe was deliberately created this way, or all other universes are impossible to begin with.

You're assuming that the universe we perceive must be coherent. However, theists are idealists. Just like they can conceive of a mostly random text with one paragraph of Shakespeare embedded in it, they can conceive of a mostly incoherent universe with an island of coherence embedded in it.

The main model that rejects a combinatorial model of the origin of the universe is one in which all other universes are impossible -- do you have any evidence that this is the case?

Parsimony.

I'm sorry, but I don't read every single thing you have ever said on the Zeeb, including previous incarnations.

Note that I didn't beg you to comment on anything. You came here unasked and started talking about how you're not going to engage with the topic of the thread. You also ignored the answers I already gave.

Because I'm responding to your arguments, which pertain to a lot more than just this particular Joe Schmid guy.

Joe Schmid is a future William Lane Craig if not Jordan Peterson. You just don't know it yet. He has the ambition to become a contemporary Doctor of the Church. I think he will be promoted by the right as a Young Pope type figure.

[rotting bones]

Sorry, I'm not watching YouTube videos, specially seven hour ones.

Sure, stay ignorant then. At least you're not calling for me to be banned like when I posted about Moldbug.

This is what liberals do, ignore everything new and important while focusing on bullshit in their tiny bubbles. Then when the world blows up in their face, they make a surprised pikachu face. The things people you talk to say are important are not the ones the outer world cares about.

I don't think that the group of people who aren't interested in watching 7 hour long theological videos is limited to the liberals of the world.

But Jordan Peterson watchers are not limited by this. Personally, I basically don't watch fiction. I can only find original ideas in real life.

[Raphael]

Personally, I basically don't watch fiction. I can only find original ideas in real life.

I don't completely agree with that, but I think to a limited extent, I do.

[rotting bones]

Atheists in many cases, such as my own, that one simply does not observe anything in our universe that provides positive evidence of divinity, so one must fall back on the null hypothesis.

For instance, the 'cosmic programmer' hypothesis is the most plausible hypothesized form of divinity to me, yet at the same time I have seen zero positive evidence for it, so I cannot actually believe in it.

If you define theism in terms of the "divine", I would say this assumes a metaphysical agent makes sense to begin with. This is not at all obvious to me as an atheist.

Can you link things other than YouTube videos? No, I'm not going to watch that.

I also linked to a brief overview in a few sentences. It's the link I gave you.

His books are paywalled. You might find his papers. This material is probably going to be in his dissertation. You can read it once it's published. But his consumers will probably be impressionable kids on YouTube.

I am personally of the view that people who put any special weight on 'lived experiences' can go to hell. To me, emphasizing 'lived experiences' means rejecting reason, because it puts one's subjectivity over rationality.

My lived experience has characters like him as villains. He posted a 24-hour argument about the truth of Catholicism and he has said he wants to be a saint. He loves so deeply that he rejects homosexuality. Here comes another conservative pundit.

Seriously, do you expect us to watch that?

I didn't, but I know the full argument is in there. It's like a course on Catholicism.

Of course, this more raises questions about why Catholics are liable to believe in miracles than Reformed Christians are, i.e. maybe the reason is that Reformed theology is less miracle-prone than Catholic theology, so Reformed Christians are less likely to report miracles.

Because Reformed Theology is a modern ideology created when technology was much more developed. Ideas created in modern times tend to stress necessity like a spring unwinding. These days, there's a reaction against necessity. Philosophers are trying to talk about "information" as an analogy with computers.

The key thing is that the most plausible laws of nature are the simplest ones which apply to everything. If someone posited a rare law of nature without demonstratable positive evidence for it, what reason would there be to believe in it?

He claims there's positive evidence for miracles. A second person said that instead of miracles, it could be evidence for rare laws of nature instead. (A third person (me) is saying smart people are too easy to fool for this to be necessary. The fraud allegations mention carbolic acid, for example.)

[Travis B.]

Maybe some of us have other things to do than spend whole days watching YouTube videos.

To be fair, I didn't watch parts of the videos that didn't interest me. I skipped the entire miracle video. We know from books like High Weirdness that paranormal experiences are colored by the beliefs of the experiences.

On the other hand, these YouTube videos pertain to the latest arguments in the philosophy of religion. Each segment in each of these videos are published as papers or books.

Do you not read linguistics papers? Does this not take time? Do you believe it's possible to understand other fields without spending a comparable amount of time?

How do you get ideas for fiction if not by studying philosophy and observing people?

I can read much faster than I can watch YouTube videos.

No, it did not go over my head at all. The fact that we are seeing a coherent universe stems from the fact that our existence requires a coherent universe for us to observe it in the first place. If our universe weren't coherent we wouldn't be here commenting on it.

Of course, this raises the question of why our universe is coherent, and that raises three possibilities -- either there are very, very many universes, or our universe was deliberately created this way, or all other universes are impossible to begin with.

You're assuming that the universe we perceive must be coherent. However, theists are idealists. Just like they can conceive of a mostly random text with one paragraph of Shakespeare embedded in it, they can conceive of a mostly incoherent universe with an island of coherence embedded in it.

If our universe is incoherent, then the portion we are able to observe must be a very large island of coherence within it.

The main model that rejects a combinatorial model of the origin of the universe is one in which all other universes are impossible -- do you have any evidence that this is the case?

Parsimony.

Anything beyond that?

I'm sorry, but I don't read every single thing you have ever said on the Zeeb, including previous incarnations.

Note that I didn't beg you to comment on anything. You came here unasked and started talking about how you're not going to engage with the topic of the thread. You also ignored the answers I already gave.

You were complaining about how people don't read what you have said on the Zeeb, when it then turned out that the exchange with Sal you were talking about was in 2006 -- I was barely a Zeeb user at that time, even though I had an account then.

Because I'm responding to your arguments, which pertain to a lot more than just this particular Joe Schmid guy.

Joe Schmid is a future William Lane Craig if not Jordan Peterson. You just don't know it yet. He has the ambition to become a contemporary Doctor of the Church. I think he will be promoted by the right as a Young Pope type figure.

So Joe Schmid wants to be a theologian. And how does this make him special compared to all the people who are already thought of as major theologians, such as Alvin Plantinga?

[rotting bones]

I can read much faster than I can watch YouTube videos.

Well, this looks like his list of publications: https://philpapers.org/asearch.pl?onlin ... c1=&ap_c2=

If our universe is incoherent, then the portion we are able to observe must be a very large island of coherence within it.

The argument is that the universe is not incoherent. This is astronomically rarer than semi-coherent universes.

Anything beyond that?

A sufficiently unparsimonious theory can accommodate any observation and therefore explains nothing. This description fits the multiverse hypothesis. I see no reason to think there is one. The same goes for other possible worlds.

You were complaining about how people don't read what you have said on the Zeeb, when it then turned out that the exchange with Sal you were talking about was in 2006 -- I was barely a Zeeb user at that time, even though I had an account then.

No, that was just me saying that I agree. I think I've said it in this incarnation of the forum too, but I could be wrong about that.

So Joe Schmid wants to be a theologian. And how does this make him special compared to all the people who are already thought of as major theologians, such as Alvin Plantinga?

Media savviness. He's going to be given a platform to preach traditional Catholicism through rigorous argumentation. Like William Lane Craig, he's a public figure.

Not all theologians are saints. You have to inspire the laity so much, they will pray in your name. The only way a YouTuber can do that is by raking in the converts.

[Travis B.]

I can read much faster than I can watch YouTube videos.

Well, this looks like his list of publications: https://philpapers.org/asearch.pl?onlin ... c1=&ap_c2=

I just read https://philpapers.org/archive/FRISLA-2.pdf, and frankly it sounds like an attempt to prove through formal logic that if God could exist at all, God must exist, and negate the mirror argument that if God could not exist one bit, God must not exist, even though that may just be what I got out of it through skimming it.

If our universe is incoherent, then the portion we are able to observe must be a very large island of coherence within it.

The argument is that the universe is not incoherent. This is astronomically rarer than semi-coherent universes.

Your argument has the implicit assertion that we cannot be in a coherent or locally coherent universe by the sake of being required to be in a coherent or locally coherent universe by virtue of simply existing as observers. Rather, 'this universe' must be 'this universe' for a specific reason, specifically that it is the only universe.

Anything beyond that?

A sufficiently unparsimonious theory can accommodate any observation and therefore explains nothing. This description fits the multiverse hypothesis. I see no reason to think there is one. The same goes for other possible worlds.

The advantage of the multiverse hypothesis is that it avoids requiring a reason for this universe in its current form being 'special' besides that we exist. Your hypothesis, that all other universes are impossible, requires currently unknown physics that would constrain the set of possible universes such that this is the only one possible.

You were complaining about how people don't read what you have said on the Zeeb, when it then turned out that the exchange with Sal you were talking about was in 2006 -- I was barely a Zeeb user at that time, even though I had an account then.

No, that was just me saying that I agree. I think I've said it in this incarnation of the forum too, but I could be wrong about that.

Ah gotcha.

So Joe Schmid wants to be a theologian. And how does this make him special compared to all the people who are already thought of as major theologians, such as Alvin Plantinga?

Media savviness. He's going to be given a platform to preach traditional Catholicism through rigorous argumentation. Like William Lane Craig, he's a public figure.

Not all theologians are saints. You have to inspire the laity so much, they will pray in your name. The only way a YouTuber can do that is by raking in the converts.

I don't see the reason to obsess about him simply because he could be (not is) a traditionalist Catholic figure, when compared to people like the SSPX people who are traditionalist Catholics with influence.

[Raphael]

I can read much faster than I can watch YouTube videos.

Unlike you, I sometimes do watch podcasts on Youtube. However, when I've read something for a while, and then I talk to people in real life or watch videos, I do sometimes get frustrated that it suddenly takes so much longer for the same number of words to arrive inside my head. That said, I think we're both unusual in that regard. There are many people for whom watching videos is a lot easier and more convenient than reading. I'm not sure how many people who fit that description really want to watch 7 hour videos, though.

rotting bones suggests listening to this stuff in the background during a long time while you're doing something else. That would probably work for many people, but I myself am so bad at multitasking that I couldn't really do that. If I listen to a podcast, or even just music, while I'm trying to do something else, then soon, I'll either unconsciously stop doing the other thing, or unconsciously stop listening to the sound.

Hey, in my ideal word, every message people want to spread would be available as sound only, video, and transcript, for maximum audience choice.

[zompist]

There are, and always have been, fads in metaphysics. Multiverses seem to be the current fad. If you're philosophically minded it should be jarring that people are familiar with the idea from superhero movies.

Many physicists like Everett's multiple worlds hypothesis. Note that rb's arguments form probability do not apply to it, because the multiple worlds are infinite. That a state of affairs is "vanishingly unlikely" means nothing if there are infinite chances of getting it. (However, Everett's universes don't embody different physics. They are simply what happens if you leave the Schrödinger equation running from the Big Bang onwards.)

But my actual point is, the multiverse is metaphysics, not physics. It's not science, because it's not testable or falsifiable. Everett's version in particular is a misinterpretation of what the Schrödinger equation is. Science no longer tells us what will happen, it tells us the probability of things happening. Many people hate that, so there's a huge metaphysical rush to restore the certainty with metaphysical leaps.

BTW, disagreeing with Salmoneus should not make you despair. If you have any emotion about it, be proud. He was a smart guy who used his smartness to be wrong in spectacular ways.

[Travis B.]

To me, rejecting the multiverse means either accepting God (note that this does not mean accepting any particular religion) or positing that there must only be one universe, which requires explaining why this universe is the universe and not some other universe.

[Travis B.]

I should also note that rejecting the multiverse on the basis that it is metaphysics (with the implication that it is wrong as a result) to me seems to be trying to say that the world is a certain way (i.e. only one universe) by definition. It is rhetorically attemping to say "I am right because by definition I am right".

[zompist]

I should also note that rejecting the multiverse on the basis that it is metaphysics (with the implication that it is wrong as a result) to me seems to be trying to say that the world is a certain way (i.e. only one universe) by definition. It is rhetorically attemping to say "I am right because by definition I am right".

Jeez. Saying that something is metaphysical is saying that is metaphysical. It can't be proven or disproven, which means it is not science. If you think that means it's "rejected" or "wrong" is on you. Don't make false implications, AKA making up shit, because you really want to argue against someone else.

[Travis B.]

I should also note that rejecting the multiverse on the basis that it is metaphysics (with the implication that it is wrong as a result) to me seems to be trying to say that the world is a certain way (i.e. only one universe) by definition. It is rhetorically attemping to say "I am right because by definition I am right".

Jeez. Saying that something is metaphysical is saying that is metaphysical. It can't be proven or disproven, which means it is not science. If you think that means it's "rejected" or "wrong" is on you. Don't make false implications, AKA making up shit, because you really want to argue against someone else.

The problem is not with calling it metaphysics, of course it is metaphysics. The problem is when people (note that I was not meaning to imply that you were one of these people) use that as reason to favor their own preferred position, because of course their preferred position is 'more scientific' than the metaverse.