When is a Religious Belief Delusional?

[Angrboda]

@Jorg

We share that tick with qualitatively dumb abstraction systems of all description.  If some input (or series of inputs) is labeled as x (in case of believers "god") then regardless of whether those inputs are firing in error or are actually not, in an external sense, x "god" - the system takes the product x as inviolable truth from which it operates, not a conclusion it works too.  It can't do otherwise.

While I have no way of knowing this, and we have no way of determining so at present - the concept of and belief in god, from a functional standpoint (and not just this concept but any concept) may be as simple as a label for the output of a gate.  A river of impulse.  I sometimes like to remind myself of that, when I'm considering disparate mythologies and trying to come up with a common thread.  Dumb machine may be overthinking the operation of dumb machine.  Any arbitrary input can satisfy the function of being labeled as such-and-such, and by simple virtue of having been labeled it will present itself as religious conviction does in human beings.

Just as I can rig my pc to recognize the "k" keystroke as an "x", through programming -or- hardwiring.....or unintentionally as a defect of both/either.  Delusion requires no grander explanation than this, even if the experience of the delusion is orders of magnitude more grand that it's functional explanation.  Consider a person who thinks that an inch is precisely half as long as it is and how that explodes into a vast and wild series of misconceptions about the reality around them.  

-a potential innocent cause.

I'm well aware of the points you mentioned, yet in my view, religious belief goes beyond that. It's not simply a matter of being biased in favor of your own opinions, theists have a surety and certainty about their religious belief which goes beyond that, even with respect to other beliefs they hold. I can accept the Republican view point without considering it deluded. Religion goes far beyond the ordinary biases and perspective dependent facts. I could probably talk more if needed, but I have a long history of thinking about the way bias and belief and such works in all people, religious or not, and there's something more going on in religion which isn't accounted for, say, the belief that Republican policy and Trump are right, and liberals out to lunch. There's a manic attachment to their belief which is unusual. Is their claim that they "know" that God exists different. I think it is. At the very least, it has a different source than the certainty attached to other opinions, likely based on selective interpretation of personal experience. That on the face of it is neither here nor there, but the reasoning involved tends to further the case for delusion, rather than weaken it. As a former Hindu, I know what that type of reasoning is like, and in hindsight, it's clearly problem behavior, a la Skinner's pigeon's. (I responded without reading your whole post. I may have missed the mark, but I think my point is relevant. I'm not sure I follow your overall point. I'll give it another look later, maybe. Only thing that pops to mind is that the behaviors may be inevitable because of certain factors, that doesn't justify our grouping those behaviors with ones we characterize as rational, nor does it ameliorate any potential negative effects stemming from that rather unique cascade of effects. I can understand that a person from a broken home may be more likely to commit crimes, that doesn't in and of itself give us a reason to just dismiss it.)

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-I'd add to the above that this is part of why I appreciate presuppositional apologetics.  

From an academic standpoint, it's blatant knob polishing...but from a human standpoint, it's more authentic with regards to the nature of their belief.

I don't know about that. Still struggling with your ideas a bit, but if that were true, it should have propped up sooner and been more mainstream.

[The Grand Nudger]

It's formalization is relatively recent, but the trend of thought extends well back to the birth of christianity (and beyond).  

Every statement that begins with 

"Were it not for the gods, then" is, potentially, an invocation of proto-presuppositionalism. 

When one reasons from and not to a divine x.  You'll find that these arguments litter the ad hoc rationalizations of pre-christian cultures, and..in point of fact, survived and persisted within christian apologetics. The names of the gods being the only thing that changed. In the context of a cascading series of action by an abstraction system - these would be base inputs, and no amount of internal error checking could disabuse the system of the status "true" for their correlates, because..to the system, they are true by default of being inputs, just as k -is- x, and "input x" -is- true...to my intentionally programmed or malfunctioning pc.

This might (or at least could) explain why childhood indoctrination is the most compelling factor in ones eventual religious beliefs. It's innocent and blisteringly simple..label setting, no matter how much attendant strangeness might be employed or observed after the fact; like the man with half inch inches or an email I send you full of x's where k's should be (or semi-colons in place of apostrophes, lol). Functionally, a gated system is physically incapable of contending otherwise in the absence of reprogramming or repair. The misapprehension becomes the normal and accurate operation of the system and it's attendant truth tables. This is why we sometimes joke that computers, toasters, and thermostats, for example, are dumb by definition. The only way to correct these misapprehensions are multiple lines of independent parallel processing (and isolated process hardware) combined with some system of output or input weighting, like AST.

This is one of the benefits of independent construction and distributed processing, as opposed to central processing and straight line computational architecture. The fact that we don't seem to have any central system might be what allows us to (sometimes) overcome those sorts of ticks in any given single line..but what happens if all or most lines are mislabeled by continuous programming and maintenance, such as participation in religious activities or existence in a society of communal belief? Rather than performing an error checking function, each line could reenforce the k is x and x is true statement.....the counterfactual becoming a minority report that is discarded.

In sum, a dumb system literally and physically stuck on stupid.

(as mentioned before, ofc, we have no way of knowing, at present, whether our system of discernment is sufficiently analogous to other known and understood systems, and it may be that much more is going on - but this in itself would be a sufficient functional explanation for religious delusion and the level of certainty in belief noted....and if there were other things going on as well..it would be one hell of a multiplying effect)

[Neo-Scholastic]

I say that triangularity would exist in potential even if the physical universe had never come into being to manifest objects that sentient organisms would recognize as triangular. Is my belief in triangularity wrong or delusional?

While how triangularity works is indeed a mystery, we have little doubt that triangularity in general exists, even if we don't understand it. It's an interesting question, but rather beside the point here. If by a mathematical "object" then you're referring to things like triangularity, or mathematical notions such as number, or mathematical objects like the Mandelbrot set, then you haven't aquitted your analogy. We don't think that any of these things "exist" in the same sense that we think God exists.

I appreciate your well thought-out post and wonder, to what extent we are now debating a matter of degrees rather than of kind.

My primary concern of this thread is what I believe to be a mischaracterization of religious beliefs, most specifically the existence of God, as delusional albeit in a weak sense. IMHO using terms like delusional is overly inflammatory because of the connotations with mental illness and/or deficiency. From your previous statements I take it that you are not opposed to using delusion to denote beliefs you consider more than simply mistaken, perhaps indicative of shirking some intellectual duty.

I agree that the remarkable correspondence between mathematics, which is wholly conceptual, and material reality is a deep mystery. No analogy is perfect. I was merely trying to set a minimum baseline example. It is not uncommon to believe that mathematical truths are discovered rather than invented. As such there is at a minimum a tacit acknowledgment of a metaphysical component to mathematics that cannot be reduced to the properties of physical objects and the interior physical reactions of particularly complex walking and squawking electrochemical reactions.

My basic position is that even a severely limited notion of Platonic Ideas is not different in kind from the notion of Divinity. Clearly, the Classical concept of God has be developed to a much greater degree, and perhaps in some sense is more speculative because it depends more on premises derived from personal experience than it does on self-evident axioms. The Christian conception of God further relies on the acceptance of the NT documents as historically grounded. It seems to me being less axiomatic does not itself indicate of a flawed application of anyone’s rational faculties or moral deficiency on the part of those holding religious views.

One, it [acceptance of mathematical truth] tends to demonstrate it's existence pragmatically, in ways that things like the sensus divinatis do not.

This depends on what you mean by pragmatic. If you mean only applicability to technical pursuits, then I would agree. The sensus divinatis will not reveal natural facts about the world. IMHO it is supremely useful with respect to navigating through the interior life of meaning, values, and motivations, even if when a secular person attributes it to animal instinct. Again, this is not a debate about which is the case; but rather, if it is ‘more than wrong’ to attribute such common and self-validating personal experiences to divinity instead of explaining them away or reducing them to natural causes.

…we don't hold these things to be true [math] in the same sense that many/most Christians hold God to be true -- there's nothing tentative or conceptual about God belief.

This may be your experience with believers. It is obvious that there are examples of stubborn people insisting on unsupported certainties of which statements like “The bible says it. I believe it. That settles it,” would be a good example. I have no truck with such as those. So I acknowledge that there is a point at which religious beliefs can become delusional but I have clearly indicated in the OP basic criteria believers could use for discerning them.

And that last point brings into focus the other side of the question, and that is the behavior of theists in relation to their beliefs. The confidence enjoyed by most theists is not abetted by the evidence for such beliefs, though I admit there is some, and depending, could consider it persuasive; theists aren't operating on the basis of evidence, their behavior is motivated by conviction which is only retroactively justified by appeals to evidence and argument.

You are entitled to your opinion but I respectfully disagree. That may be true of some religious people but that kind of ad hoc reasoning is not unique to religion. Moreover, I think you exaggerate the normal process by which acquire, adopt, and maintain their faith. There is little doubt that people raised in a faith tend to adopt that faith before they have thoroughly examined it. Yet, with maturity people do examine the reasons why they believe. Some will find those reasons sufficient. Some won’t. Others will lose faith and come back to it. In my own case, I have great but not compete confidence that God exists, firm but not absolute confidence in the general reliability of the Gospel accounts, and much less confidence in doctrines that depend on literal readings.

Which points to another area in which theist behavior is similar to delusion -- theists spend an inordinate amount of time rationalizing their beliefs…

Supplying reasons to a skeptical audience is not the same as rationalizing. Making a blanket statement like that is highly prejudicial.

I'm sure there are people who think that these ideas and forms exist in, essentially, a separate universe, mysteriously influencing this one, in a case that parallels that of belief in God. However, those are the exception, rather than the norm, whereas in religion, thinking such things is just par for the course, and believed with irrepressible certainty.

That there is an essentially separate universe of Forms and/or deities, is not the case I was trying to make at all.

[polymath257]

What do you mean by a mathematical object?  That's a term of art, and it's not clear what your question is.

I say that triangularity would exist in potential even if the physical universe had never come into being to manifest objects that sentient organisms would recognize as triangular.  Is my belief in triangularity wrong or delusional?

Well, it is clearly wrong. It could also be delusional depending on the meaning of the phrase 'exist in potential'. Do you believe in the actual existence of possible worlds?

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While how triangularity works is indeed a mystery, we have little doubt that triangularity in general exists, even if we don't understand it.  It's an interesting question, but rather beside the point here.  If by a mathematical "object" then you're referring to things like triangularity, or mathematical notions such as number, or mathematical objects like the Mandelbrot set, then you haven't aquitted your analogy.  We don't think that any of these things "exist" in the same sense that we think God exists.

I appreciate your well thought-out post and wonder, to what extent we are now debating a matter of degrees rather than of kind.

My primary concern of this thread is what I believe to be a mischaracterization of religious beliefs, most specifically the existence of God, as delusional albeit in a weak sense. IMHO using terms like delusional is overly inflammatory because of the connotations with mental illness and/or deficiency. From your previous statements I take it that you are not opposed to using delusion to denote beliefs you consider more than simply mistaken, perhaps indicative of shirking some intellectual duty.

I agree that the remarkable correspondence between mathematics, which is wholly conceptual, and material reality is a deep mystery. No analogy is perfect. I was merely trying to set a minimum baseline example. It is not uncommon to believe that mathematical truths are discovered rather than invented. As such there is at a minimum a tacit acknowledgment of a metaphysical component to mathematics that cannot be reduced to the properties of physical objects and the interior physical reactions of particularly complex walking and squawking electrochemical reactions.

My basic position is that even a severely limited notion of Platonic Ideas is not different in kind from the notion of Divinity. Clearly, the Classical concept of God has be developed to a much greater degree, and perhaps in some sense is more speculative because it depends more on premises derived from personal experience than it does on self-evident axioms. The Christian conception of God further relies on the acceptance of the NT documents as historically grounded. It seems to me being less axiomatic does not itself indicate of a flawed application of anyone’s rational faculties or moral deficiency on the part of those holding religious views.

Let me give an example. Was the game of chess invented or discovered? I think we would agree it was invented. Now that it has been invented, do we invent or discover the best chess move for a given position? I would say we discover it.

The situation is very similar in mathematics. We invent the mathematical system and then discover the consequences of our assumptions.

I see you still think that math is based on 'self-evident axioms'. Perhaps you want to get up to date and study some of the math in the last 2 centuries.

[RoadRunner79]

I’m just curious polymath; are you just out of school?

[Angrboda]

My basic position is that even a severely limited notion of Platonic Ideas is not different in kind from the notion of Divinity. Clearly, the Classical concept of God has be developed to a much greater degree, and perhaps in some sense is more speculative because it depends more on premises derived from personal experience than it does on self-evident axioms. The Christian conception of God further relies on the acceptance of the NT documents as historically grounded. It seems to me being less axiomatic does not itself indicate of a flawed application of anyone’s rational faculties or moral deficiency on the part of those holding religious views.

But that's exactly where we disagree. I do see it as different in kind, and I think any rational investigation of the differences would demonstrate that fact. They simply are categorically different in simple ways. Take Poly's argument that mathematical objects are constructed rather than discovered. You simply cannot make a similar argument about God because they are not at all the same kind of thing.

[polymath257]

I’m just curious polymath; are you just out of school?

No. I have been a research mathematician for the last 32 years. Why do you ask?

[Pat Mustard]

Your post is exactly why some believers here feel like they can't have any sort of meaningful conversations with non-believers about anything. No matter the subject.

There aren't that many believers on here any more capable of carrying on meaningful conversations, full stop.

[RoadRunner79]

I’m just curious polymath; are you just out of school?

No. I have been a research mathematician for the last 32 years. Why do you ask?

Just had some thoughts, but I was wrong.

[polymath257]

No. I have been a research mathematician for the last 32 years. Why do you ask?

Just had some thoughts, but I was wrong.

I've also done considerable reading of physics at the research level, but don't have a doctorate in that subject (although I did pass the PhD quals).