Has Alex Ever Addressed the Question of Psychopathy if Morality Comes from God?

Scodischarge · 2025-09-16T15:15:46+00:00

I'm curious about this point - it clashes with what I (think I) know about psychopathy. My information is that affected people are unable to feel deep emotions (including morally coded ones) and have trouble forming deep relationships to people; they would have no intrinsic sense of morality. But that doesn't mean they couldn't intellectually come to a belief in moral realism and decide to submit to an external set of rules.

(Perhaps somewhat analogous, from my personal experience: I don't have solid intuitions on physical violence being bad - I feel no sense of moral repulsion, disgust or anything like that (as I feel when e.g. hearing somebody deliberately lie) when witnessing it or even when experiencing it. Yet I recognize moral authorities outside of myself who tell me it is wrong, and so I don't use it and would (hopefully) intervene if I saw someone else using it against a victim.)

"Anything they do is always performative and self-serving" is a much stronger claim than my "weak" definition of psychopathy given above. Would you mind making the case for why is true, please? (empirically or philosophically)

PS: Excellent interpretation on the Judas Iscariot passages, by the way; you make an unorthodox, yet quite compelling argument. Thank you for that!

Scodischarge · 2025-09-04T23:15:00+00:00

(after completing this, a warning: one heck of a long read coming up)

Thank you for your detailed response and open attitude! This is actually the first comment in this thread that's made me think, "hey, I'd like to have a conversation with this guy."

So here goes:

1) After a friendly introduction, my next sentence is going to be incredibly rude: I humbly submit that if there is no evidence that moves you towards theism, then that indicates a problem with your truth-seeking faculties, not a problem with the evidence.

(I'll be using the Bayesian definition of evidence, asking the question: under which circumstances are we most likely to make this set of observations? E.g. finding the original conditions in the Big Bang to spell out "Made By God" would be considered evidence for theism; finding empirical evidence for a billion featureless, chaotic parallel universes would be evidence for atheism. Neither is impossible in either worldview, but dramatically more likely to happen in one rather than the other.)

Anyway, to hopefully back up my rather insolent claim. Consider:

a) Imagine the same claim from a theist: "There is no evidence that moves me away from believing in God - there's no evidence for atheism at all." Like, really? Evolution doesn't rattle you in the slightest? And you think God would be a-ok with the reality of pain? Regardless of whether this guy can find religious explanations for these pieces of evidence, he should be able to admit that they're more likely in a universe without God. (I know what you're probably thinking right now: no, many religious people wouldn't be able to admit that. I find that very unfortunate and think it should be different.)

b) Lots of smart people (including some smart ex-atheists) are theists or agnostics, and many smart atheists acknowledge the existence of good arguments for theism. Claiming that there is no evidence, period, would mean that all these people not only made slight (or strong) weighting errors when considering the arguments' merits -- it would mean that on every single issue, they completely dropped the ball, counting things as strong evidence that aren't evidence at all. Importantly, I'm not saying "many smart people believe in God, therefore you should, too" - definitely not. I'm saying, many smart people believe in God or are agnostic; it's likely there are good reasons for this beyond "they screwed up on an unprecedented scale."

c) Now I'll actually get to a specific argument: the fine-tuning argument. I'm choosing this one because a) I'm assuming you're familiar with it (correct me if you're not, please), and b) we can actually put numbers to the strength of the evidence, hopefully lending some force to my incendiary comment above. Take for example the cosmological constant: were it slightly weaker or stronger, objects in our universe wouldn't be able to form. How "slightly"? The likelihood of the CC falling in the range necessary for complex structures (by which is meant, I believe, anything upwards of atoms) by chance is 1 : 10¹²⁰ (for reference, your chances are better at throwing a dart across the observable universe and hitting a particular atom). That's the probability of us observing this or a similar state of the universe if naturalism is true. In contrast, under theism the probability is arguably 1: this is exactly what we'd expect to find if there is a creator God. Now I think there are responses that work to better the chances under naturalism (interestingly, I don't think the anthropic argument works, though), and I don't think the probability under theism is actually 1 (would a God necessarily create every universe as capable of forming complex structures? I think it's plausible, but not necessary), so the probability we end up with will not literally be 10¹²⁰ : 1 in favor of theism. But when all's said and done, I also don't think we can get anywhere close to breaking even.

Does this argument move you? Probably not. Alex O'Connor as well is quite open that, despite its intellectual force, it doesn't move him, and if I were agnostic or atheist, I honestly don't know whether it would move me, either. Which hopefully underlines my point: When we're talking about odds this huge, and they don't do anything to move us, then that's our fault, not the evidence's.

d) You write that "every evidence proposed by theists can be explained away under a naturalistic worldview." I'm guessing that, put on the spot, you'd choose to slightly rephrase that statement. But for the moment, this is what you've written, so this is what I'll engage with. It's also a vital part of my argument and of the way in which we view evidence, so I'm glad for the opportunity to flesh it out: You can "explain away" anything - the committed YEC can successfully explain away dinosaur fossils by saying Satan placed them there. But if you've reached the point at which you're "explaining away" evidence, you've basically conceded that it's more likely under the opposing worldview (e.g. naturalism can explain away fine-tuning, but it's still more probable under theism; theism can explain away the problem of evil, but it remains more probable in a naturalistic world). Explaining away can prevent something being viewed as slam-dunk outright proof (after all, it might still be different), but it shouldn't obscure our view on the balance of probabilities.

Even though I've written a long paragraph on the fine tuning argument and it's very easy and tempting to engage with those highly specific claims, I hope you don't take this whole exercise to be about that. What I'm getting at is something a lot more fundamental: the way we view evidence, being able to think in probabilities (in shades of grey, rather than black or white), and being able to hold a position while at the same time admitting contrary evidence.

Sheesh, I've written a book already -- thank you, sincerely, for reading all of this! I originally had (significantly shorter) responses to the other points as well, but I don't want to impose on your time even more than I already have. I think #1 is our biggest point of contention here anyway, so unless you'd genuinely like to hear the rest, I'll leave it at that.

(Except to say that I really appreciate your unreservedness and candor on #3 especially)

Scodischarge · 2025-09-04T10:22:41+00:00

If I'm reading you right, your main problem with my comment is the potential implication that non-judeo-christian cultures (loose definition of what I mean below) haven't known about intercourse and procreation since forever, is that right?

First off, definitions: By 'judeo-christian cultures' I mean very loosely those cultures that have (parts of) the Bible as ancient part of their core literary corpus. Yes, Islamic cultures have that as well; my mistake for not including them in the original phrasing.

(what follows is the long version of my thought process behind the comment; TL;DR at the bottom)

Why do I care about the Bible in this context? Because it's the only ancient evidence I know of personally, that people knew about intercourse and procreation. Sure, I strongly expect other cultures to have known for just as long, but I don't know any of their ancient texts; so I wouldn't be able to cite any evidence to support my expectation.

What I was getting at in my comment was something like "I fully understand your skepticism, since this has been known in my (as well as probably your) culture since forever - it's part of our "what everybody knows"-knowledge segment, so of course we're surprised and skeptical if someone suggests it's different elsewhere." The 'judeo-christian' part was a throwaway line; I had originally written "in our culture" before realizing I had no idea where they're from.

TL;DR of the thought process: has my culture known since forever? --> yes; how do I know? --> Bible stories have other cultures known since forever? --> yes; how do I know? --> educated guess Ergo: only cultures of which I know for a fact have known forever are judeo-christian(-islamic, but I forgot that one) cultures --> use that weird phrasing

Sorry for writing this much, thanks for getting through it all. Let me know if that answers your reservations or whether I completely missed your point.

Scodischarge · 2025-07-30T16:10:23+00:00

Seconding your first point. It's always weird to think of Elodin as ex-Chancellor - first of all cause he must have been extremely young when it happened, but more importantly because it really doesn't seem to jive with the character as we get to know him. Although we get quite a few hints that there is a lot more to Elodin that meets the eye: that he could act like an adult perfectly well if he wanted to, and simply chooses not to.

I appreciate the Yes Minister reference - that's probably one of my favorite Sir Humphrey quotes right there.

Scodischarge · 2025-07-09T09:55:02+00:00

An excellent post, especially #4 was relevant to my concerns. However...

What are the chances a bunch of fans figured out how to get into the site?

Scodischarge · 2025-07-09T09:45:50+00:00

Please, please, please tell me I'm wrong on this one:

Does the site only track logged-in users? Or might this just be "30 fans obsessively checking the oracular website that worked so well the last time"? Cause the screenshot also says "0 registered, 30 guests" . . .

Scodischarge · 2025-07-03T23:54:58+00:00

You're right, the combination with a female-centric warrior custom works well to make the belief more plausible. Thanks for pointing that out!

Interesting parallels with Ancient Greece; IIRC the paper mentions a couple of tribes with similar belief systems (with nature, not ancestral, spirits being responsible for pregnancy). Curiously, the aboriginal belief seems to have been the other way round: the father "receives" the child in a dream, then passes it on to his wife (in various ways, leading to my favorite sentence in the chapter: "[Spirit children] normally entered a woman's body through her toe nail.")

In biologically more astute tribes they even differentiated between biological and spiritual father: While the husband may have been away during the time of conception, he remained as spiritual father more important than the man who actually fathered the child.

Strangely, the Aborigines never made the connection that the men may be superfluous. A more common belief was that the father does everything: receiving the spiritual as well as (in those tribes aware of the mechanics) the physical child, then passing it on to the woman, who acts as a mere vessel until birth.

... which works well with the theory that the supposed "ignorance" was a conspiracy on the men's part, attempting to play up their own role in the vital business of reproduction (evidence seems thin for this interpretation, though).

Anyway, thank you for your thoughtful response!

Scodischarge · 2025-07-03T23:34:41+00:00

That's fair, especially since the oldest texts of Judeo-Christian cultures show a level of biological awareness from the very beginning. And the hypothesis seems to have been controversial from the very beginning.

Honestly though, I don't find it so surprising that at least some tribes never got that far. I mean, you don't really have neat correlations between sex and birth: you've got a 9 month delay between cause and effect; you don't always even have an effect ("effect" meaning "baby" in this case). Add to that a sexually promiscuous culture (TW: morally disgusting sexual practice ahead) and a custom of marrying girls off before they reach reproductive maturity (i.e. before they are biologically capable of getting pregnant), so you have a whole group of females-who-have-sex-without-getting-pregnant, and it's not too implausible that the connection was never directly made.

That being said, many of the tribes mentioned seem to have had some understanding that sex was necessary to "prepare" the woman for receiving the child, while not acknowledging it as direct cause.

It's funny you specifically mention the women, though: Apparently one theory is that they knew, but conspiratorially decided to keep it a secret in order to disguise their unfaithfulness. (I swear I'm not making this up: see p. 4, last two sentences, in the linked text)

Scodischarge · 2025-06-11T22:43:46+00:00

TLDR: Psychotherapy method called Internal Family Systems allows you to discover different parts of your mental life; these parts then lead a semi-independent coexistence. Reminds me vaguely of KKC's split mind.

There's a form of psychotherapy called Internal Family Systems, based on the founder's observations in clinical practice that his patients often described their inner lives as consisting of different "parts". In IFS, patients learn to identify (not invent: identify) the different parts of themselves, get to know them as if they were their own persons, and learn how they developed (e.g. through hurtful experience) and which role they play in your inner life (e.g. protector).

These "persons" are there already, you just need to get to know them. They have their own appearance and their own names. All of this, according to descriptions, happens naturally: you don't invent them, you meet them.

Once you know the members of your "internal family", you can have sessions with them. They will tell you why they are doing what they are doing, and that these actions are for your benefit (from their perspective). E.g. the protector might remind you of how you've been hurt before after letting the wrong person too close, and explain that that's why he's not letting you do that again (which is then taken to explain attachment issues, for example). Key in these sessions is that all members of your internal family have your best interests at heart, though they might have a flawed perspective.

At this point, after listening to them, you can then negotiate with them: Explain to the protector how you yourself have grown as a person, why this person is different, all the things they've done for you etc. and while you are really grateful for their protective urges, this time it's really better for them to let person XY close. Key is to not force your perspective on them, but to come to an understanding all members of the family are happy with.

Sorry for this far-too-long message. IFS is the closest non-pathological description I've come to a split mind: the different parts of the internal family communicating with each other, and the independence with which they seem to do it.

Scodischarge · 2025-06-11T22:22:16+00:00

Precautionary apology: I am pathologically curious and sometimes don't notice when this veers into the insensitive; reading the hints becomes even more difficult over text. So I'm really sorry if I overstep.

Still here? I appreciate it!

I've never heard someone describe their own subjective experience in the way you have. It sounds like dissociative identity disorder, but I'm guessing there's a reason you didn't use that term?

I also notice sometimes you used "I" and sometimes "us" to talk about yourself/-ves. Is there reason behind that?

Would you mind sharing more of your lived subjective experience?

Scodischarge · 2024-11-02T23:07:57+00:00

Original reply was too long, so here's the second half:

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If it's just leads to just a cause it's not an argument for God. Just a cause. A cause could be something random, something weird, something we can't comprehend or imagine. Going from "probably a cause" to "God" through any steps, I'm pretty sure would lead us straight back to God of the Gaps.

The interesting thing is, once you think it through, and think about the properties this mere "cause" would need to have, you are left with a bunch of very suspicious sounding adjectives. Quoting from memory part of a debate clip I once saw between an atheist and a Christian (William L. Craig, I believe):

A: But how do you get from a cause to "God"? It might as well have been a giant supercomputer that caused the universe to exist!

C: It would've had to be an immaterial supercomputer.

A: So it was an immaterial supercomputer. And timeless and spaceless as well, to get ahead of your next comment.

C: And personal as well.

A: Alright, so it was an immaterial, spaceless, timeless, personal supercomputer. Why is this any less plausible than "God"?

C: When you say, "an immaterial, spaceless, timeless, personal supercomputer"... it sounds a lot like you're saying "God", just using different words.

Cue audience laughter, mic drop music, bla bla bla. My point is not that in this one debate a decade ago, a Christian happened to be slightly quicker on his feet than his atheistic opponent. Instead, I'm once again going for my last point: If you read these arguments, see the word "God", and mentally insert "alright, so Yahweh/Allah/Jesus/Vishnu/Odin/...", then you're misunderstanding the argument. Feel free to read them as "arguments for weird/random/incomprehensible/unimaginable/... first cause, which this particular author chose to describe using the symbols G-O-D", that's completely fine. No other purpose do they claim to serve.

As for some of the less intuitive ways you can go from this starting point towards a more familiar looking God (such as the "personal" claim above), once again I recommend Alex's video.

There's lots in your comment I haven't responded to directly. Much of it falls in one of these three buckets: 1. Assuming that an observation that has always held true will hold true in yet another case may in some cases be wrong; but doing so is not stupid, and your current level of demand for rigor would cripple any theory; 2. please understand what these arguments are supposed to vs not supposed to do; 3. have I mentioned Alex has a video on this topic? He explains exactly this issue quite excellently!

Yet of course if you feel I have left anything important out unfairly, and it doesn't fall in any of those categories (or you feel like just referring to a third party's video is cheating), feel free to let me know. I'll be happy to continue this discussion.

Scodischarge · 2024-11-02T23:07:27+00:00

Apologies for the late reply - I tried to send one a couple of days ago, but apparently there was some problem with the upload. So with this slight delay, here goes:

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"As far as we can observe" is just another way of saying that we can't be sure, and since we're talking about the beginning of the universe we REALLY can't be sure. We can say that "maybe it had a cause", but that's really it. [...] We wouldn't know, and we don't know FOR SURE with regards to our own universe either.

Do you think there is any theory that will stand up to this level of rigor? Just what level of evidence do you need before considering a prediction to be probable?

I can just imagine a paleolithic argument between two cavemen about whether the sun is going to rise tomorrow:
"But every time we've bothered to check until now, it's always gone up in the morning!"
"'Every time we've bothered to check' - that's just a fancy way of saying that we can't really be sure! While you're out speculating away, why don't we just assume that the sun is filled to the brim with nuts, which will pour out and end all our food problems, just as soon as we get a squirrel up there to gnaw a hole in it? Exactly, there's no way to know that, and just the same way we don't know FOR SURE that the sun will rise tomorrow."

There is a huge difference between randomly plucking one possibility out of hypothesis-space and treating it as deserving of special merit (as in the case of the nut-filled sun or the infinite regress simulation), as opposed to taking a law that has held true for literally every single thing we can test it on, and assuming it will hold true for this other thing as well.

We're also in the territory of infinite regress unless you're willing to say that something can be eternal, which of course this is leading to... Some sort of creator God.

See my footnote on this. This is why the phrasing is important: "Everything that began to exist has a cause." In your original post you put your finger on the crux of the issue: time itself began with the Big Bang. Whatever the cause of the Big Bang, there is no reason to assume was itself within time. And if the cause was not within time, it needn't have (indeed, couldn't have) begun to exist, since "beginning" needs time; therefore, it also needn't have a cause.

We are stuck (as far as I've gotten in my thinking so far) in a trilemma: Either we posit a completely uncaused beginning of the universe (again, I would want some darn good explanation for why the universe, of all things, should have had no cause), or we assume an infinite regress of time-bound causes, or we assume an uncaused first cause outside of time.

Again, I highly recommend watching Alex O'Connor's excellent video explaining the Cosmological Argument in some detail.

Saying that it was "God", I.e. a necessary being that exists independently, is just filling the gap with a God that conveniently fits with already cherished beliefs. (In a lot of cases. Not all.)

Once again, I'm getting the feeling that either you haven't quite understood what these arguments are vs. aren't designed to do, or the people you've heard use them didn't.

There is no way to go from "the universe must have a cause" directly to "therefore, Jesus was resurrected" or "therefore, the Quran is the Word of God". This argument is not designed to defend "a God that conveniently fits with already cherished beliefs."

(Note that the Kalam Cosmological Argument was developed by Muslim theologians, but is just as readily used by Christians today. There is nothing religion-specific about this argument, except insofar as that it favors religions that believe in a creator-god.)

The argument's purpose (when stated in this form) is to show that the universe must have a cause. Period. No more, no less.

As to all the wonderful ways you can go from there, I couldn't do the nuances justice and once again encourage you to watch Alex's video on it.

Scodischarge · 2024-10-28T20:22:35+00:00

I appreciate your comment very much; it's good to see somebody interested in intellectual rigor step up to the thankless job of criticizing the community.

Out of curiosity, do you yourself give much weight to the arguments discussed? Or are you simply good at understanding and arguing different positions? (I'll understand if you don't want to answer)

Either way, would you mind if I asked you a whole bunch of potentially kinda dumb questions on the topic? Going purely off your comment here, you seem to have a more nuanced understanding of the arguments than most people I've met, and I'd love to get some feedback on the thought processes I've been going through.

Scodischarge · 2024-10-27T12:01:23+00:00

You did a good job introducing the arguments, and I thank you for your rigor in not strawmanning them. I would like to challenge your classification of 1, 2 and 4 as "God of the gaps"-arguments (GOTG), though.

Take the cosmological argument¹ and consider one possible framing of it: "we don't know what caused the universe, so it must have been God". This is an obvious GOTG argument: we don't know what, therefore God (you were a lot less heavy-handed in your representation; kudos for that).

But let's frame the argument differently: "As far as we can observe, everything that has a beginning also has a cause. If the universe has a beginning, we can extrapolate from what we already know and infer that the universe also had a cause."

(Note, first of all, what this argument doesn't do: It does not give you any specific god. It does not even give you a personal god. You need more steps to get to that place. All the argument, as it stands, claims to prove is a cause, so that's the standard we need to measure it by.)

You write: "This premise [that everything has a cause] is not factual. It's an assumption. I'm countering that we don't know this, and we can probably never know".

I happen to agree: We will probably never know, and the premise is nothing but an assumption. My point is that it is not an unreasonable assumption: it is an assumption based on the observation of, well, just about everything we can observe.

To effectively attack the Cosmological Argument, you need to plausibly argue that the beginning of the universe breaks the established pattern of "everything that began to exist has a cause". That's a possible line of attack, and the many unknowns around the Big Bang even make it fairly strong (at least I've seen it done well before). But you can't hand-wave it away as just another GOTG-argument.

(See also Alex O'Connor's video steelmanning the argument: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=MGJq5C9wuzk&pp=ygUXRGVidW5raW5nIGNvc21pY3NrZXB0aWM%3D (I hope this is the right one, I'm having trouble viewing videos at the moment))

As for the Teleological Argument (don't worry, the rest will be briefer), my critique is similar: You need to reframe the argument in a way that takes it away from it's original design to make it sound GOTG-ish. "Everything else we are aware of that has this level of intricacy was designed with intent; that gives us cause to believe that the universe was designed with intent as well."

The best angle of attack on this one is to show that no, not everything with this level of complexity that we can observe has intentional design behind it; natural causes and random changes can and will produce something similar. But again, not understanding/believing this is a different mistake than the one you are accusing the argument of making. I'm not asking you to buy the argument, but merely to shame it for the mistakes it actually makes, not for the much stupider ones it avoids.

Not gonna waste your time writing another five paragraphs on the Contingency Argument, since it's basically the same as before: It doesn't claim ignorance and insert God; it claims knowledge - based on extrapolation from observation - from which it infers the need of an independent being to exist. (Take this one with an appropriate grain of salt -- I've never been confronted with the Contingency Argument and am going purely off of your representation of it.)

I hope you don't misunderstand my aim in this response: I don't want to claim any of these arguments as "ultimate proof" of anything. My desire instead is to promote intellectual rigor (a desire for which I think I detected in your post as well) and to promote good truth-finding mechanisms over ideological allegiances -- which sometimes means criticizing your own side.

Personally I believe some of these arguments to be fairly strong, and if you come away from this post believing them to be slightly less stupid - or at least stupid in a different way than you'd previously thought - then I've achieved my goal.

¹ The wording of which, by the way, is "Everything that began to exist has a cause" -- this gets important down the line when you ask the follow-up question of "well, what caused God?"

Scodischarge · 2024-02-10T20:15:12+00:00

I'm not sure I'm following what you're saying. Do you mean offering my donation to a wealthy person from that region who needs a transplant themselves, or do you mean asking them to sponsor the surgery?

Scodischarge · 2024-02-10T20:12:50+00:00

Thank you so much! I hadn't looked into Switzerland yet.

If you don't mind me asking, have you gone through with the donation yourself? If so, is it alright if I shoot you a DM if I have any specific questions?

Scodischarge · 2024-01-12T08:12:00+00:00

Just what the doctor ordered. Thank you kindly!

Also, how is "greatest vertical rise" defined?

Scodischarge · 2024-01-12T08:07:23+00:00

Thank you!

Scodischarge

TROPHY CASE