Do atheists or theists have a more accurate
world-view?
Having seen the bizarre abuse of Christianity by right-wingers in
the US and the equally bizarre abuse of Islam by right-wingers in
the
stans,
I've been occupied by atheism, theism, and placing my own belief
structures in the space of possible belief structures.
My first tangible result is a larval set of 3 hypotheses that I
believe are falsifiable by the following test.
First the "theoretical" setup. And please bear with my pretentious
misuse of prior works. My goal is to formulate the hypotheses and
test so that they are informative regardless of the weakness of my
"theory", but still with enough hooks to flesh out an actual
theory.
- Shannon's Theorem 10 goes something like this:
Given a system, S, and a "good" controller, C, for S, the
variability of C (V_c) must be greater than or equal to the
variability of S. I.e.
V_c >= V_s.
This is common sense, actually. E.g. the competent manager of a
complex enterprise must be flexible enough to handle all the wacko
things that a complex enterprise might do. Or, a competent parent
must be flexible enough to counter all the wacko things their
teenager might do. (Of course, the theorem doesn't, at all apply to
managing businesses or raising teenagers... but as I said, bear
with me.)
- If a controller is part of the system it's trying to control,
then the variability of the part is likely to be less than the
variability of the whole. I.e.
V_c < V_s.
My point being that any human (theist or not) is a part of the
world; so the human (the controller, "good" or not) is part of the
system she's trying to control.
- Defn: Let's say we have two distinct (but perhaps not disjoint)
controllers in the system: A, T in S. Define M(A,T) as "A is a
better controller than T of system S".
- Premise:
V_a > V_t => M(A,T).
OK. Now all we have to do is devise a measure for V_c, i.e. the
variability of any given human. My first idea for this abuses the
research that provides evidence that liberals are more "open to new
experiences". I'm not claiming that conclusion is true (in fact, I
think true conservatives -- the people who focus on conserving
resources -- are much more capable of handling variability in the
environment than liberals -- the people who generously lather
resources where they are needed). But the sense of the rhetoric is
what I'm after.
- Defn: My proposal is that the variability of a human is
correlated with the intensity of the emotions they exhibit when
placed in unfamiliar and high variance contexts. For example, we
pluck your average Iowan and toss her into the audience of a cage
fight in Thailand and measure her physiological response. If that
response is generally positive, then that person has a high
variability ... a high capability for handling unfamiliar and
exciting situations. That (admittedly vague setup) constitutes my
measure for V_c.
Now we also need a measure for "theism" and "atheism". I don't like
the idea of relying on self-reporting, because nobody I talk to has
a clear description of what it means to be an "atheist". So, I
suspect people are just "group identifying". They choose to call
themselves "atheist" if and only if they identify with the people
they've seen calling themselves "atheist". And most "theists" I
talk to don't even know what the word "theist" means. 8^O
- Defn: So my proposal for measuring whether someone is an
"atheist" or a "theist" would consist of a dialectic survey
designed to tease out a person's spiritual views while trying to
factor away group identification. I don't know how to do this. I'm
just a damned programmer, after all. ;-)
Hypotheses:
-
V_a ~= V_t
-- I.e. there is no statistically significant difference between
the reactions of atheists and theists to unfamiliar and exciting
contexts.
-
V_a >= V_t
-- I.e. Atheists show more postive or neutral reactions than
theists.
-
V_t >= V_a
-- I.e. Theists show more positive or neutral reactions than
atheists.
The interpretation of the results would be relatively open, I
think. But my "theoretical" setup above would probably lead me to
believe that whoever showed the greater variability has the more
accurate and/or more useful world-view.
And just to get it out of the way, my
bias is toward
theists. I tend to believe that theism inherently handles
ignorance. I.e. theists tend to accept that they are very flawed
and ignorant. At least that's part of the metaphysics ... that "God
works in mysterious ways". As such, they are trained to navigate
despite such flaws and aren't particularly upset when wacky things
happen (e.g. miracles).
Atheists, in contrast, often admit that some things are unknown;
but they rarely seem to admit that some things are
unknowable. The "atheists" who admit that some (or most)
things are unknowable tend to call themselves "agnostic". This
inference of mine makes me think that atheists are less tolerant of
ambiguity, mystery, ignorance, etc. Hence, wacky, anomalous events
don't necessarily evoke competent navigation in the midst of
uncertainty. In fact, if we read too much into the idea that many
scientists are atheists, we could jump to the conclusion that wacky
events ("miracles") cause atheists to become extremely curious and
obsessive ... burrowing away in dead-end rat holes for decades,
wasting their lives trying to know the unknowable. (Thank God for
these ahteists because without them, we'd still be hacking each
other to bits so we can own the Oh Great and Powerful Tim's carcass
or plant our flag on some sacred rock in the middle of a
desert.)
So, my bet is that the theists would show greater variability than
the atheists. But I've been wrong before. ;-) -----