A Baysian Catholic says hello

[Bb]

Hello all,

I thought I'd follow the advice and give a little intro about myself here.
I'm a Canadian, a Catholic and a scientist. I take my religious faith seriously, and always have. For me, taking my faith seriously means asking questions and finding out why its so unbelievably inconsistent.
After much soul searching and philosophy study during the inevitable teenage rebellion against my religion, I came back to it, going to church regularly, but with a modified Catholic philosophy. The result being that if we got right down to it and compared notes many conservative catholics probably wouldn't consider me catholic at all. (eg. "its not a metaphor, it IS the body of Christ!" ... right ...)

Anyways, I am trying to explain my resulting religious philosophy in a series of essays on my blog
http://bayesianbeliever.blogspot.com/
Take a look if you want more details.

Basically, I believe that your personal philosophy of the meaning of life the universe and everything needs to be active and alive. If you come from a religious background then that background faith forms the prior philosophy that you modify throughout your life based on the evidence you see. I use Bayesian statistics as the central metaphor to explain this philosophy and provide a term for reasonable religious people of any faith. Thus I now call myself a Bayesian Catholic. The evidence I use can come from reading books, speaking with people of my own faith and others and life experiences. I therefore respect all faiths and believe they all can be paths to knowledge or enlighthenment or whatever is being sought. The most important element is that the person thinks about their philosophy and can back it up with something from the real world. This could be an emotion, an experience or hard scientific facts. Quoting scripture can be a useful tool for citing ancient wisdom. But quoting scripture as evidence itself makes no sense given the historical construction of all scriptural documents by fallible human beings.

Well, thats me. You'll find out more in my posts when I get some time.
till then

Bb

[Zzyzx]

.
Hi Bb,

Welcome to the forum. I may be your Non-Theist counterpart. My area of specialization was (long retired) Earth science / geology (specifically, fluvial geomorphology). Yours?

I would be particularly interested in your comments (in thread or PM) regarding the "Flood Debate" between Otseng and me in the Head to Head sub-forum -- if you have time to peruse the thread (heavens, don't read the thing, just read a few places).


Zzyzx

[McCulloch]

Welcome from Toronto.

I have a mathematical background, how is it that Bayesian statistics is a central metaphor for faith?

[Bb]

Thanks,
I think you may be right Zzyzx, I've seen a few of your posts already, you seem quite insightful. Look forward to discussing with you. I will take a look at that topic.

My area of research is computer science, so a lot of math and statistics. I am not claiming my metaphor will be useful for everyone, but I'm finding it useful. The main idea is that a Bayesian model is one that involves a prior distribution, evidence acquired over time and a normalization constant created from all possible worlds.

In the same way, I think a reasonable religious person who actively engages their faith needs to consider new evidence they acquire throughout their life. But their prior philosophy, their original religious faith in which they were brought up always affects their view. Now some people try to rid themselves of their original religion altogether, which is fine. But for me, I still feel Catholic, even though there is a lot that I disagree with the church about. But thats all political, and its all part of the portions of my original religious system that have been removed because they are inconsistent. But my prior is still there.

So over time I hope that I am improving my own personal approximation of the Truth of existence. It just struck me one day that this was a good metaphor for how I approach my faith and that it might be useful for others to explain how one can remain Catholic or any other religion while diverging from the accepted dogma of that religion.

By the way, McCulloch, your two quotes in your signature are awesome, exactly what I'm talking about. Its nice to find this board, always happy to find reasonable people who aren't afraid to be religious/spiritual.

Bb

[otseng]

Welcome to the forum Bb!

I particularly like this line from your blog:
"My goal is to create a discussion between people of all people of faith and atheists alike to heal the wounds and pain caused by fundamentalist religious belief in our world."

[Bb]

had a look at the flood debate, how long did that go on for?

truly fascinating.

I've never gotten into anywhere near as long and protracted a debate as that with someone believing in a non-scientific theory. I have a lot of patience but I'm not sure I would have had the patience for that. To his credit Osteng keeps trying and he obviously is very attached to his FM. But I always find it amazing that people can be so willing to ignore evidence while simultaneously claiming they are being scientific by account for random facts like the age of niagara falls etc.

Creationists arguing that evolution is an abomination are another example. I already accepted evolution completely when I finally read On the Origin of Species. After that it was so clear that no further arguments are needed, even if, as with plate tectonics and geology, we don't have ALL the answers.

I did disagree with some claims you made at the very early stage of the debate, before I skipped to the end where you say that religion and science are incompatible because religion is trying to prove itself. I agree that is usually the case but I think that many religious people these days don't see it as so black and white. They are religious but feel no need to prove it true in opposition to science. The religion functions as their personal philosophy of the universe. It provides a root to community and a set of metaphors for understanding the world. Science has many very accurate theories but it does not provide very many metaphors for organizing all that is ecompassed in human experience.

There are exceptions of course, some areas of science seem to be useful metaphors and are integrated by many people into their personal philosophies or into 'New Age' religions. Some examples are Chaos theory from mathematics, relativity and quantum uncertainty from physics, universal computation from computer science.

Thats why I wouldn't try to get rid of religion entirely but to reform it to fully accept and indeed embrace what science has shown us in the past few centuries. And thats why I can consider myself a Christian even while routing for you through that whole debate and wanting to write in my own exclaimed responses which would have
assuredly been much less well thought out.

Bb

[Confused]

Welcome to the forum. I can't compete with the fancy specialties of Mack or ZZ, but I can save your life, medically speaking. Does that count? LOL.

Look forward to seeing your contribution.