How confident is your atheism?
A friend recently asked how strongly I believe that my deconversion from Christianity was not a mistake. Here’s my response, and for those of you who are not Christians, I’m just wondering what numbers you would give:
“There is a part of me that wants to say the chance is far less than 1 percent. But when I consider what 1% must mean about my ability to follow complex arguments and base my judgement on the right premises, it seems absurd to say that.
Trying to honestly estimate the chance that I’m wrong about the Bible being generally reliable is a fascinating exercise… I know the number is low, but I’m not sure how low.
Today I would give myself a 1 in 20 chance of being wrong. If I were to consider the arguments of 20 other groups similar to Christian theologians, I would probably misunderstand them at least 1 time in 20. After talking with 20 groups that have a very different worldview, I might think they are all are mistaken, but once in a while, maybe 5% of the time, it would actually be me.
Wow, 5%!?! If I convert that into “There is a 5% probability that the God of the Bible exists and will send me to hell”, I feel scared. But I know how to cheer myself up: I just say, “No way, the chance I’ll end up in hell MUST be less than 5%. After all, the God of the Bible is CLEARLY just a big, mean alpha-monkey and… [rehearse all the atheistic arguments here]”.
This back-and-forth from certainty to uncertainty makes me feel like I’m doing something seriously wrong.
So what about you? What chance do you place on some variant of Christianity turning up to be true, and what chance do you think a god of some sort exists?”
Numbers please.
Not all arguments which you misunderstand-and-disbelieve are actually sound.
So far so good.
Don’t. That’s a mistake. There’s a 5% chance (say) that you’ve seriously misunderstood some of the things that Christian theologians think and why they think them. That’s not the same thing—it’s not anything like the same thing—as a 5% chance that they are right about Christianity and you’re going to burn in hell for getting it wrong. It’s perfectly possible that both they and you are wrong, and unless your reasons for being an atheist are much worse than I expect that’s the most likely state of affairs conditional on your being wrong.
I bet there are a lot more than 20 groups of people with mutually inconsistent beliefs, whose beliefs you have at least a 5% chance of having seriously misunderstood or otherwise failed to refute perfectly.
I am thiiiiiiiiis confident!
(Holds arms wide, then accepts any well-specified bet as if the actual probability of Christianity were zero, i.e., with betting prices corresponding to the probability of the specified evidence being observed, given the fixed assumption that Christianity is false.)
I was literally just about to post a thread asking about the fixation on putting numerical values on our confidences all the time, then I saw this. So, thanks for that. Wrapped that little dilemma right up.
I’m surprised to see this dialogue make so little mention of the material evidence* at hand with regards to the specific claims of Christianity. I mean; a god which was omnipotent and omnibenevolent would surely create a world with less suffering for humanity than what we conjecture an FAI would orchestrate, yes? Color me old-fashioned but I assign the logically** impossible a zero probability (barring of course my being mistaken about logical impossibilities).
* s/s//
** s/v/c/
See Plantinga’s free will defense for human and the variant for natural evils; it defuses the logical argument from evil. (Of course it does this by postulating ‘free will’, whatever that is, but I don’t think free will is nearly as clear cut a p=~0 as the existence of evils...)
There are other arguments too, that I haven’t seen made in the theology literature. Like, God instantiated all possible universes with net positive utility, because that’s more utility than just instantiating the universe with the most utility. This is an extremely basic idea, I really don’t know why I haven’t seen it before.
I’ve seen this argument but didn’t manage to find the paper. It goes further: imagine that the space of possible universes looks like a sphere in R^n centered at the origin and one axis represents a utility function that encodes God’s preferences about whether a universe should exist(1) or not and the 0 on the axis is just where God’s preferences switch from “would rather exist than not” to “would rather not exist”(2). Then the vast majority of universes that God instantiates are just barely worth existing, and you should expect to find yourself in a universe where the problem of evil is not resolved by “actually things are pretty great, good job God!” or by “we live in a hell dimension, God is the worst”.
(1) Assume “should exist” makes sense. I realize none of us knows what this means.
(2) Luckily? For an underlying reason? Anyway it’s one plausible shape, more likely than any specific squiggly blob, and the argument works for lots of other shapes like a cone with its point in the +util direction.
I’ve seen that before; somewhere in Luke’s collection of papers dealing with the FWD.
Okay, that’s good to know.
It’s only somewhat related, but do you know of any good rebuttals to Plantinga’s evolutionary argument against naturalism? I find his argument really quite clever. I couldn’t immediately think up a refutation, but I haven’t looked at the literature.
It’s been a while since I was reading about it, but my reaction was bullet-biting: “Sure. Does anyone actually think our faculties are perfectly reliable? I sure don’t, and I’d nominate religion itself as a perfect example of how evolution-molded psychologies can go horribly epistemologically wrong.”
You seem to be at the wrong meta level. (Er, sorry, social norms dictate that now I have to explain why I think that, but really I’m too lazy. Just interpret this comment as saying that you might want to look at the argument again to make sure you’re appreciating its meta-level points.)
So, by “meta level” I assume Will just means “the rest of Plantinga’s argument” which is that if beliefs aren’t reliable than there is no reason to believe naturalism (not a reliable belief).
The key of course is the phrase “perfectly reliable” which Gwern uses and Plantinga does not. Plantinga admits that beliefs are not perfectly reliable- when he says reliable he means something like “the vast majority of the time”. He has a specific argument that a belief causing adaptive behavior is not an indicator of its truth. It goes something like this: behavior is caused by combinations of beliefs and desires. But many (most?) beliefs and belief-desire combinations that would cause adaptive behavior are false. For instance, a hominid would behave adaptively if he desired to get eaten by a lion but falsely believed that any lion he saw would try to protect him from other lions. Similarly, there is nothing to keep evolution from selecting from beliefs that are false but don’t impact survival behavior (like, say believing trees are trees vs. believing they are witch trees.
This argument is weak: evolution acts not on the set of possible beliefs but on the set of available beliefs. Plantinga has to argue that evolving the false-but-adaptive beliefs is just as likely as evolving true beliefs. Opponents of Plantinga need to develop this argument into something more robust and explain specifically why beliefs about practical things like simple observations are reliable. (Having a single method for forming new beliefs about evolutionary unprecedented threats seems a) more parsimonious and evolutionarily available and b)likely to produce reliable beliefs.
That there are cases of routinely false belief that are ruled false only by reference to beliefs we have reason to trust is just icing on the cake: theism doesn’t have a good explanation for the existence of cognitive biases if it is being using to explain reliableness. Don’t bite the whole bullet; just half of it, catching it with your teeth.
There is also the matter of methodological naturalism vs. metaphysical naturalism. The former renders Plantinga’s argument useless and is a more reasonable position than the latter anyway.
Aw, man! I don’t doubt that you’re right, but I can’t figure out how.
What exactly is the “net positive utility”? Where exactly is the zero? For example if we assume that existing is always better than not existing, then all existing universes automatically have net positive utility.
If we assume a Christian model where people will get most of their utility in afterlife, this model would put a limit on Heaven : Hell population ratio. The exact numbers would depend on how many people in Heaven plus how many people in Hell give a total zero utility. For example assuming that positive utility of one person in Heaven is greater in absolute value than negative utility of all people in Hell, this model would say that all worlds where at least one person gets to Heaven will be instantiated. Assuming this, the exceptionality of Jesus in our universe is an evidence for all other people going to Hell.
(Just joking. With proper definitions and priors you can prove anything.)
An omnipotent omnibenevolent being would have no need for such “shorthand” tricks to create infinite worlds without suffering. Yes you could always raise another aleph level for greater infinities; but only by introducing suffering at all.
Which violates omnibenevolence.
I don’t buy it. A superhuman intelligence with unlimited power and infinite planning time and resources could create a world without suffering even without violating free will. And yet we have cancer and people raping children.
Oh, it did try. Unfortunately, Adam exercised his free will in the wrong way. Better luck next universe.
Perhaps betting huge amounts of other people’s suffering on Adam’s ability to resist eating an apple was a really stupid idea.
“If it weren’t for my horse, I never would’ve graduated college.” >_<
Plus the dubious moral view that the seemingly incoherent variety of free will is of immense axiological importance.
This calls into question your claim that you won’t accept bets that would call into question your ability to pay if you lose.
What do think is the probability (given the fixed assumption that Christianity is false) that sometime before 2045 you will have the psychological experience of a vision of Christ claiming to be risen from the dead?
Preeeeeeeeeeeetty small, and I nonetheless won’t accept any bets that I couldn’t pay off if I lost, because that’s deontologically dishonorable.
wow awesome way to put it. I feel same way about a lot of stuff like that.
So, first off, I would agree that you’re doing something seriously wrong, and what you’re doing wrong is you’re privileging the hypothesis.
Consider P1: “The God of the Bible exists and will send me to Hell.”
Now consider P2: “There is a God, but the Bible is systematically wrong about God’s plan. Everything the Bible says God wants, God actually wants the opposite of, and if I follow the Bible God will send me to Hell.”
Regardless of how small or large a value I assign to p(P1), what really matters for my decision-making is p(P1)/p(p2). If that ratio is close to 1, then I ought not treat the Bible as my guide to how to act, regardless of either value. P1 could have a 50% chance of being true, and it still wouldn’t matter.
That having been said, OK.
First off, like Emile, I have trouble unambiguously interpreting “Christianity is true.”
Call C1 the set of all statements asserted by any Christian-identified theologian.
My confidence that the conjunction of C1 is false is roughly equal to my confidence that (a) I can in fact recognize logical contradictions and (b) two propositions that contradict one another are not both true. I don’t know how to attach a number to these sorts of claims. I literally cannot imagine a scenario that would cause me to update my belief in that conjunction by a noticable amount. If the stars in the sky arranged themselves in a pattern that spelled out “C1 is all true, Dave!” I would still consider it vanishingly unlikely that C1 was all true. If I woke up tomorrow morning convinced that C1 was all true, I would still consider it vanishingly unlikely that C1 was all true. If I have to put a number on this, the number I put on it is zero. (Yes, I’ve read that article, and I’m saying this advisedly.)
At the other extreme, my confidence that the disjunction of C1 is true is, in the same way, one.
Call C2 the set of assertions about the actions of God described in the Old Testament as it has come down to us, starting with “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth” and going on from there, including all the “and the Lord said to Moses” verses, etc. My confidence that there exists an entity of whom the conjunction of C2 is true is not quite as brainbreaking as the C1 equivalent; I can imagine events that would cause me to update that confidence by some noticeable degree. I still don’t know how to calibrate it, though.
Call C3 the set of assertions about the actions of Jesus described in the New Testament. My confidence that there existed an entity of whom the conjunction of C3 is true is a lot higher than the other two conjunctions… but I still don’t know how to calibrate it. Basically, we’re still in the realm of “too small for me to conceive of”.
My problems with “a god of some sort exists” are of a different sort… I can’t quite figure out what that proposition even means. How is it different from “something exists”, for example? (My confidence in that statement is very high.)
How is this one chance out of twenty specific of Christianity? This doesn’t seem to have any good predictive power. You can misunderstand the arguments of one out of twenty groups for any topic. Why not worry about all these other topics as well?
From Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow (p 325):
Do you (r_claypool) have reason to suspect that Christianity is much more likely to be true than other, (almost-) mutually exclusive supernatural worldviews like, say, Old Norse Paganism? If not, then 5% for Christianity is absurdly high.
No, I’ve read way more Christian apologetics than I care to admit, and the basic tenants of the Bible like—“God could find no better way to forgive humans than to have one tortured on a cross”—are no more substantiated by apologists than whatever is part of Old Norse Paganism.
But it still doesn’t feel absurdly high.
Have you tried tracing your reasoning that leads to this feeling, step-by-step, and see which step bumps the odds to 5%? For a programmer, the analogy would be “the output of this code is 5%, which is suspiciously high, let’s trace the program with a debugger and see which instruction is responsible”. More often than not, you find that there is a path through your code that you haven’t thought of before, or a step that seemed innocuous enough has a different effect from what you expected. Another standard technique is to work backwards from the final answer and see where it comes from.
it might not feel absurdly high because absuridty is often a heuristic about what should be laughed at rather than what is unlikely. When people say something is absurd they mean it should be laughed at along with its claimer.
5% is a “respectable” estimate except perhaps in some very untheist countries. (I don’t know and am too lazy to look it up is why I am saying perhaps, not because I know and want to make the fact seem small.)
The other difference I see between old norse paganism and religion is that there are all sorts of people who don’t otherwise appear to be crazy who say christianity is true and you can’t properly internalise the idea that they are all wrong/lying.
Oh and this just occured to me. It could be you are sort of/on some level afraid of hell. You may have had the idea of someone being wrong, in contravention to” popular wisdom raised to your attention and be unconciously avoiding conclusions that leave you in that scenario especially when the punishment for being wrong is hell.
The question that stopped me thinking christianity, while unlikely, was unlikelier than the other religions was was: If you were raised by old norse pagan/aztec/muslim/hindu parents in an old norse pagan/etc place do you think you would have a higher instinctive estimate of its probability?
Another thing to consider is that the people telling you that Jesus is a resurrected God say all kinds of other stupid stuff which is probably untrue (so p(christianity in general) is low for that reason and the probability that Jesus is a resurrected God goes way down if christianity is not true otherwise. Also, christians are in fact, on further inspection, generally visibly crazy, for a relevantly/appropriately strict definition of sane and present as their evidence a book that it has somehow become doctrine is God’s word despite being tampered with by humans all the time.
While ordinarily, I might upvote something that is asking for help calibrating a belief, I think this has far too much potential to turn into an “I’m more atheist than you” fest. Especially when the title is “How confident is your atheism?” After reading a couple of the comments, I had that urge until I realized what was happening.
So I will be explicitly ignoring your request for numbers. But if you’re really dead set on coming up with a number for yourself (I don’t think the discussion is productive enough beyond estimation to, say, three or four orders of magnitude accuracy, but your call) I would suggest trying to think of other beliefs that you find as plausible as Christianity, ie., all of the other religions. You’ve got to necessarily have room for them in your estimation. Also, you should take into account reasons that creatures evolving in the ancestral environment would become religious.
(I upvoted this post because I saw that its score was at −1. I normally avoid doing this, but here I make an exception because, while this is not a quality article, I think this sort of thing should be encouraged here on Less Wrong, the sort of “I have a doubt and I want to know about to do about it” posts that this is an example of.
Saying,
took at least some courage. Let us not punish that. On the other hand I do feel like this is more appropriate for the open threads, but nobody checks them the week before a new one anyway.)
Do you really think there’s a 40% chance that one out of the Bahá′í, Christians, Jews, Mandaeans, Muslims, Sikhs, theistic Hindus, or Zoroastrians are right?
Or do you think maybe there’s a 5% chance that some form of religion is right, and that there might be a sub-chance of that that theism is right, and then there’s a sub-sub-chance of any of the particular living theisms I just listed is right?
Neither, I’d guess. The 5% is a number that sounds disbelieving but open-minded.
That’s about right. Five percent was basically a buffer for, “I don’t have full confidence in my epistemology, maybe I’m confused and Christian faith actually is a virtue.”
But I get what everyone has said about privileging the hypothesis. If by faith I’m supposed to choose a religion, after choosing I’d have no answer for, “Why did you trust in those unverifiable claims as opposed to some other unverifiable claims?” This would be true of all religions and supernatural claims, or at least the ones I’m aware of.
Depends on what you mean by “Christianity being true”. If you mean “The miracles described in the Bible actually happened in the real world, and there is a supernatural God that cares about our actions and occasionally interferes in the world”, then the chances are vanishingly small, less than one in a million.
On the other hand, if you mean “Following religious practice and giving priests a respectable position in society is good for individual well-being, as well as maintaining a harmonious and prosperous society; religious teachings are moral fables that help foster group coordination”, then yeah, I’d put a much higher probability to that, though the exact value would depend of the religion being considered, etc.
I probably should have clarified to say, “the chance that Jesus of Nazareth is a resurrected God.” I think all modern Christianities have this belief in common, and my estimations are based on this lowest common denominator.
They may all profess that belief, but is it the real reason they’re Christians and not atheists? What if metaphysical claims are just identity markers, that Christians hold because they are completely abstract and divorced from reality?
The “religion is good for social and individual well-being” argument is a bit of a steel man; it’s easy to make fun of stupid arguments by Christians, but maybe Christianity is actually beneficial for complicated reasons, and many Christians see the benefits but mistakenly believe in simpler reasons (and those that can articulate complex reasons are ignored, because complex explanations are boring and look like tortuous rationalizations).
The important question shouldn’t be “is such-and-such point of Christian doctrine factually true?”, but rather, “is it better for me and society that I identify as an atheist rather than as a Christian?” . Reducing the second question to the first is a cheap way out. Sure, there are good arguments for why secularism is better than religion, but those are waaay less overwhelming than the arguments of physics and biology (and frickin’ common sense) over theology.
Which is a special case of “What falsehoods should I prefer to believe to their corresponding truths?”, which is a far broader question.
Identifying as a Christian isn’t believing a falsehood, but it does give an incentive to believe certain falshehoods. See here for talk of unbelieving pastors:
(I want to make it clear that the argument I’m describing isn’t “believe in pleasant lies if it makes you good and happy”)
Ah, I see. Thanks for the clarification, I had indeed misunderstood.
The important question might instead be “what is it best for me to identify as?” …where “best for me” and “best for society” and “best for me and society” are three different interpretations of that question, and which one I pick depends on how important I think I am relative to society, and where “identify as atheist” and “identify as Christian” are two of a near-infinite number of choices.
How has nobody yet mentioned Confidence Levels Inside and Outside an Argument? Anyway, I take gjm’s line on this: I should assign at least 5% probability that my reasoning for rejecting Christianity is invalid in some way that I’m unaware of, but that’s different from a 5% probability that Christianity is true.
For one thing, my reasoning that Christianity is very likely false is essentially the same as my reasoning that other theisms are false, so at the very least a whole bunch of other religions get lumped into that same 5%. (That is, if Zeus exists, then my reasoning was just as wrong as if Yahweh exists.) Furthermore, there are other possibilities—such as that I’m mentally unbalanced and hallucinating my high intelligence, or that I’m a brain in a vat whose reasoning is being systematically tweaked for a mad scientific experiment—which don’t seem all that correlated with whether Christianity is true or not.
Since in my case as well as yours, Christianity plays a unique role vis-a-vis other theisms, there is some justification for promoting it a bit within the space of “things that might actually be the case if my reasoning is bad” (in the same sense that a lottery winner might well consider it more likely than average that they’re in a simulation). But my estimate still comes out more like 0.1% than like 5%.
I didn’t write it explicitly, but my 99% answer was based on reasoning like: there is a 1% chance that my way of reasoning is invalid because of something I am not aware of. That means, instead of 1% chance meeting Zeus, I estimate a 1% chance of some argument that could change my reasoning about the subject. In other words, it’s not 1% chance that I am wrong about this, but rather 1% chance I am irrational about this.
Typically arguments on that kind of topic contain huge number of potentially sloppy inference steps with each step having rather low probability of being valid, leading up to a very very low probability of correctness of the argument (we’re speaking in the range of 10^-20 easily). It’s incredibly easy to make evidence so weak it is not worth the paper it is written on. Furthermore even dramatically raising probability of validity of each step doesn’t make the result worthwhile, but leads to massive overestimation of the probability of correctness of the argument because people fail at exponents. Actually I think the biggest failure of the LWism is the ideology of expecting updates on arguments with probabilities in the range well below 10^-10 , people just fail imagining just how low the probability of a conjunction can get and/or don’t multiply because of residual belief of some common mode correctness as if it was oracle speaking.
Is a mean God that much less likely than a benevolent God?
This is a good point in some sense, but you get into the “tricksy” side of the ontological argument with it. Suppose you are comparing the belief that a particular supernatural entity exists to whom various miracles and plans and worldly outcomes are being attributed, call this entity X. Now compare that to a hypothetically defined entity who is perfect in every conceivable way, maxing out all notional “awesome traits” as much as is logically possible, and call whatever this definition captures Y. One of the traits of Y is that “it exists” because it would be a paltry perfect being who was simply imaginary :-P
If it is obvious from trivial inspection that X != Y, and Y would have the power and inclination to forbid the existence of X or curtail its plans such that the various world outcomes couldn’t have been caused by something like X, then X, as stipulated based on certain worldy facts, must not exist. Someone interested in particular worldly outcomes, like the banning of condoms or the forbidding of women from eating bananas (to take two random examples), might claim that the hypothetical X connected to these worldly issues is Y to dodge this conclusion and buttress their worldly interests.
To me, this technique seems like a potential insult to Y and thus, in some abstract sense (logically conditional on Y’s actually existing in some form or another, and objecting to people being dumb about it, and the worldly issues ascribed to Y actually being dumb) it might even be a form of blasphemy. A lot depends on how you hug the question when unpacking pre-existing poetically expressed claims into expectations for practical consideration, discussion, and nominal truth evaluation.
(AFAIK discerning the relationship or lack thereof between possible Xes and Y is called discernment, e.g. discernment of spirits, or sometimes paracletics. That said, I haven’t been very impressed with the stuff I’ve found. I’m really intrigued by Plantinga’s idea of a defeater-defeater, but I have no freakin’ idea how something like that would work in practice. Or at least, I don’t see how you could get the certainty that Plantinga seems to think is possible. I personally have never had an experience that I felt could not possibly have come from anywhere except God. …Phenomenology is hard, let’s go shopping.)
So, you’re saying that it shows that that particular proof of God is flawed?
Not-quite-numbers: specifically Christianity: at a noise level (i.e. same as pastafarianism). Some kind of omniscience/omnipotence, including being in a matrix-like simulation: somewhat above the noise level, but not high enough to change anything I do or worry about.
Christianity has a much more coherent theology than pastafarianism.
Christianity loses me at “God sacrificed his only begotten son to save the world”. Omnipotent God had to sacrifice? Omnipotent God had to impregnate a mortal woman to produce a god-child? What is he, Zeus? Save his own world from whom? Why such a circuitous route? I’m sure all these questions have a perfectly reasonable answer to a Christian, but it is silly to argue that the whole thing is coherent in any objective sense.
Just to play advocatus dei for a moment, most of the above makes a lot more sense to me in the context of a God trying to reconcile his perspective with that of a set of mortals with whom he shares a preexisting special relationship and set of behavioral rules but whose psychology he doesn’t fully understand. Seen in this light, the whole New Testament story starts to look like self-modification on God’s part in service to a package of, essentially, legal reforms designed to relax the fairly brutal and self-limiting Old Testament rules. I’m not a theist, though, and from a Christian perspective a lot of this is rank heresy: it’s compatible with functional omnipotence but requires only limited omniscience, for example, and it’s flatly inconsistent with a lot of trinitarian perspectives. Still, that’s about as best I can make sense of the mythology without falling back on “mysterious ways”.
Similarly, a theistic friend of mine likes to describe God in terms of a frustrated roleplaying GM who’s fed up with trying to keep his players from going off the rails; Jesus in this metaphor could be thought of as a GM-run character joining the campaign for a session or two in order to capture the experience from a player perspective and maybe point the story in a less disastrous direction. Not necessarily a great idea, but it beats “rocks fall, everybody dies”.
It’s more of a Jewish thing, but I find apologetics becomes a lot easier when I recall that God has a (trollish) sense of humor. Imagine Christians taking Christianity super seriously, and atheists getting all sneering and masturbatory about how the plot seems to be totally incoherent, and everything gets all heated, and in the background God’s just going “trolololololol”. By hypothesis He trolls you because He loves you—recall that Socrates and the Buddha also tended towards trollishness, mostly as a didactic method. Also relevant is that saints and members of Christian monasteries often tended to flout societal norms, and that an emphasis on the “foolishness” of Christian doctrine has been around since at least Paul: “For since in the wisdom of God the world through its wisdom did not know him, God was pleased through the foolishness of what was preached to save those who believe.” This book about psi and “the trickster” is relevant. Muflax recently wrote a blog post on gods and trolling.
It all makes sense now!
...And then giving up after the plot backfires?
I don’t think any modern christianity would agree that god could seriously misunderstand human psychology as you say.
What do you mean? Google tells me the school of open theism, which includes “one of the twenty most influential Christian scholars alive today,” would likely allow for this possibility. Given that some self-described Christian denominations don’t seem to require belief in God, it would surprise me greatly if none of them allowed God to learn on this scale.
Though as I said before, I think I could make the source material of Pastafarianism as consistent with itself and observations as any school of theology has made the Christian Bible.
Which of the many exclusive theologies do you mean? And what will you give me if I can make pastafarianism at least equally coherent? ^_^
How about Thomism?
Let’s just say I’d be really surprised if you can do this.
Are we both talking about logical consistency of the theory with itself and observations? (You know about self-hating number theory, how it shows that truth doesn’t enter into this?) Or do you mean to include some aesthetically consistent style that you perceive in Thomism but not Pastafarianism? (In that case, your aesthetic preference is wrong.)
If one of those is right, are you willing to put $500 against $50? I’d need you to tell me all the questions and problems you think Pastafarianism should address. I’d also want up to one month per issue.
I’m talking about logical consistency with itself and observation as well as with itself on a meta-level.
So you admit that it’s possible for aesthetic preferences to be wrong.
I can’t make bets involving money as that would break my pseudonymity. Also, who would judge?
Dude says he can construct a Pastafarian theology better than Thomism in one month, gets upvoted, dude who expresses doubt of this gets downvoted. LW is completely batshit insane sometimes. (From a strictly epistemic standpoint anyway. Politically speaking I’m sure blindly shouting “boo God yay science” is a reasonable strategy.)
I’d forgotten that mass-downvoter and sockpuppeteer Eugine Nier was the one who refused this bet. (Of course he wants to keep his anonymity!) I’d also mostly forgotten that you defended his nonsense. In retrospect, you encouraged him to try and drive me away from the site.
Note that I was totally correct, and the two of you were totally wrong. There is nothing special about the Bible that prevents me from just taking all the dishonest tricks used by Thomism to defend it, and applying them to Pastafarianism. In fact, a religion that praises pirates is a more natural fit for the theology originally written by Aristotle (tutor of famed pirate/emperor Alexander).
hahahaha
haaaaaaaaaaaahahahahaha
Ah, well.
Just for the sake of clarity, do you think it contradicts facts about the ‘natural’ meaning of “natural law”—about the rules that every smart human (or suitably extrapolated human) who cares about “being provident for itself and for others,” would agree with? Certainly if we assumed no such rules exist, that would contradict the ‘natural’ reading.
Thomism does feel self-consistent to me if I assume that every law comes from a medieval ruler or similar source. Now assume instead that pirates are divine beings. I’m thinking here of John “I Wanna Be a Pirate” Rackham, Anne Bonny, and Mary “Totally a Man” Read. See also “Kenpachi”.
That was also a joke? I do think you’d change your positive opinion of Thomism (v Pastafarianism) if you looked at all aspects of the situation.
You seem to be reasoning as if Christianity has a prior high enough to make it worth considering, then basing your atheism on having heard and invalidated the Christians’ arguments. Instead, consider that Christianity is a huge, complex hypothesis with a very low prior, and then update down based on seeing the arguments for it and finding them bad. You can do that because if Christianity were true you’d be more likely to see good arguments, and if it’s false you’re more likely to see bad arguments.
Each individual religion starts off with a prior low enough not to be worth investigating—that’s why you don’t see me finding and engaging Zoroastrians in theological debate. As an upper bound on that probability, there are at least 200 or so religions, at most one of which can be true: 0.5% probability right there, not counting “atheism is true” and “some religion not yet invented is true”. When you investigate a religion and find its arguments bad, the probability goes down from there.
Given what we know about the ways that religions start and spread, we know that they are not generally truth-tracking. The fact that we observe a particular religious belief in the populace (or that we happen to have been born to a family that teaches it) is not a good indicator of that belief being true. Religious beliefs — unlike practical (how-to) knowledge or scientific theories — are not selected for their accuracy.
Further, the various religions contradict one another on pretty much everything (except baseline tribal morality): if Christian theology is true, then Vaishnava theology is false; if Muslim theology is true, then Mormon theology is false; and so on. And there are a lot of them; and many of them mutually forbid acting on the recommendations of the others, so you can’t generally hedge your Pascal’s Wager between them.
I’m thinking there is a false dichotomy here. If Christianity is false it doesn’t mean that atheism is true. Both Christianity and atheism could be false. Christianity being true only depends on the resurrection of Jesus, and that depends on how regularly dead bodies come back from the dead, how many stories we have about dead bodies coming back from the dead, and how many times we have had verified stories of dead bodies coming back from the dead.
There are certainly Jews who think that the events in the NT generally happened (e.g. Toledot Yeshu), Muslims who think that the events in the NT generally happened, but still think that Christianity is false. I mean, Christianity could be false and yet you might still end up in hell because Islam was the “true religion”.
Yeah, it was a false dichotomy. I see that now.
I watched the Ten Commandments the other day to revisit some classic cinema, and in the scene where god appears as a burning bush, I couldn’t help but think, “Wow, that’s all he could muster?” And then picture some outer-universe aliens tinkering with gigantic equipment with immense power inputs to try and interfere in some other world, only able to project tiny amounts of fire into a bush and a disembodied voice, the best efforts of all their minds at cross-dimensional communication resulting in nothing much at all, and the translator broken at that.
One time! One time I did that!
Not necessarily, depends on what His goal was.
The feelings you get about this number are feelings that most any belief system would produce—you’d say the same thing with the same 5% if we replaced Christianity with Catholicism, for example.
So I take all beliefs systems as the reference class for that feeling. Smear that 5% over all belief systems—not just the ones that exist, but the possible ones that are as coherent and likely to arise as Christianity—and you should stop worrying somewhat.
As others have pointed out, probably 5% of the time you are mistaken, but that says nothing about the chance they are mistaken; unless you and them are mutually exclusive truth-tracking belief systems with all the evidence. Better assume you’re perfectly spherical and updating takes place in a vacuum...
My numbers? The measure of worlds where a belief system like Christianity meaningfully alters my behaviour (how I choose to act in lots of situations, not just situations involving Christians) is something like one in ten thousand. As you make more specific claims (e.g. Bible says I’m going to Hell, I should act in accordance with {subset of Bible} ) I penalise by one in ten thousand, times one in the complexity of the statement you made.
To provide a more concrete mechanism for what you suggest:
5% is clearly a non-normalized probability. You can add up all those 5%’s, as well as whatever probability you’d apply to atheism, and then divide 5% by that sum. You now have a normalized probability that fits into a proper distribution.
Yes, this is a much clearer and more applicable technique.
Christianity isn’t a single proposition though. There is a lot of content there. A lot of unverified content.
The probability that you should believe Christianity because of some fear of hell (act on your worry) is something less than the probability that there is a God times the probability that God had a son given that there is a God times the probability that Jesus was the one and only son of God given that God had a son times the probability that there are souls given all of the above times the probability that God sends these souls somewhere GAOTA times the probability that God sends people who don’t believe in him to Hell GAOTA.
Some of those things are pretty likely given the prior statement, but several of them are non-obvious.
And if you are going to act on a belief in a general diety… well, what policy do you take? He may only punish believers. He may only punish people who wear shoes. He may only grant souls to pillows and only send red pillows to heaven, blue pillows to hell, and all others (including mixes) to purgatory. Diety-space is HUGE and complex propositions without strong evidence are almost always wrong.
I am not even sure “Lots of humans believe it” counts as evidence. Is it more likely that something is true, given that lots of people believe it? I think the inverse is true: if something is true it is more likely that lots of people will believe it. But P(B|A)!=P(A|B)
I know you were speaking loosely, but you can’t just multiply probabilities when they’re not made independent.
That’s false.
Let’s say that we have 3 sets of propositions, A, B, and C. A is 40% likely. B is 90% likely if A is the case and 1% likely if A is not the case. C is 10% likely if B is not the case, 50% likely if A and B are both true, and 5% likely if B is true but A isn’t.
B and C are clearly dependent variables. Nevertheless, simple math tells us that C is 8.17% likely, all other things being equal. Since Christianity is only true if all of the relevent propositions are true (as opposed to the scenario above) you can just multiply the probabilities together. (Unlike our A, B, C scenario, which also required some amount of addition.) You just multiply the probability within the conditional: that if God has a son that his one and only son is Jesus, rather than simply the probability that Jesus existed or that Jesus was the son of God. If Christianity could be true without Jesus being the one son of God, then addition would be required along with the multiplication, but this is not the case as the belief “Christianity” implies a zero-probability for these scenarios.
I somehow didn’t notice the “given all of the above” shorthand.
For me, there are the odds that “God” exists and there are the odds that I can ever fully shake the conditioning and indoctrination of my childhood, such that a charismatic, confident, person could ever get me to hesitate or win some sort of personal “victory” in a fact to face confrontation.
The former is zero, the latter is somewhat higher.
Exactly zero, or just epsilon?
I can answer your question with a certainty higher than either of those.
Both a bit vague—but maybe 0.1% and 5%, respectively.
This argument is clearly fallacious, given that we all have things we assign a chace of <<<1% to, regardless of our ability to evaluate arguments. See: story of Joseph Smith and the golden plates, fairies, Xenu, Flying Spaghetti Monster, etc.
And if you go on the omni- definiton of God, my confidence in atheism is higher than my confidence in no-fairies because of the problem of evil.
I agree that stronger statements about gods require tighter probability constraints. Eventually, that runs afoul of logical contradiction, and at that point nothing meaningful can be said about the god in question. But I think you’re stomping a bit hard when you say that it is an argument (and hence that it is fallacious).
That some variant of Christianity turns up to be true ? Very, very, very low. Considering the size of the hypothesis space that includes Christianity (it includes about all other religions that ever existed, and most of the fictional ones, and many more you could think about), and the very low amount of evidence, it has to be counted in power of ten. If you consider the core of Christianity to be about 100 bits of information (and that’s a very low estimate), and that you have, what, 10 bits of evidence you’re left with a probability of 2^-90 of Christianity being true. Those numbers are very imprecise, but if anything, they give a probability higher of what it really is.
That some variant of “theism” is true, including the fact that the universe may be a simulation and the programmers/administrators of the simulation have “godlike” powers in it ? That I would give a much more reasonable chance of being true, but still no real evidence for it, so maybe a 10-20% probability.
That said, I find it really hard to give numbers for my those kind of believes which means… I need to become stronger !
99%
Just because you misunderstand them, it does not mean they are right. If someone tried to convince me that 2+2=5, and I would have trouble following their complex explanations (but I also wouldn’t be able to find an obvious error), I would not accept it as an evidence that 2+2=5. (More precisely, it would be just an epsilon evidence.)
My atheism toward Christian God (or any other) is very like my skepticism toward the Little Red Riding Hood adventure.
The same thing.
10^-50.
Or, it is really rather strong evidence but there are all sorts of other evidence (including other people’s beliefs) that overwhelm it.
Or, “lots of people believe X” is (when that’s all you’ve got) strong evidence, but it can be broken down into sub-possibilities depending on how they come to believe X, and when you look at that in the case of (say) Christianity it turns out not to be very good evidence after all. (For instance, because most people who believe it turn out to believe it mostly because other people induced them to believe it when they were too young to think it through properly.)
(I think the contrary evidence would be plenty strong enough even if “lots of people believe it” were good evidence in this case, but it happens not to be.)
“Some people believe it” counts as evidence. But if you think the spread of Christianity seems likely to happen without any deities (see this possible explanation) then the vast majority of the people who’ve professed belief in it do not constitute any additional evidence. Some of those living after their countries dispensed with heresy/blasphemy laws seem like exceptions.
This is compatible with what Thomas said, as long as his prior for the Christian hypothesis is sufficiently lower than that for the Red Riding Hood hypothesis, and that doesn’t seem unreasonable given certain construals of the “Christian hypothesis”.
What’s the probability that you’re in a simulation? What’s the probability that one of the religions in the simulation is a message from the simulator? And is the product of those probabilities really as small as 10^-50?
What does God want with a simulation? We could technically reconcile a sim with “Christian God” as normally understood, who does not get his power from clever engineering. But that just brings us back to the point that our world does not look designed, much less designed by a specifically Christian deity.
Maybe Yaweh is a drunk or a crackhead who just happened to get a hold of some hightech simulation equipment, or perhaps such equipment is common place in his universe?
If Many Worlds is true, it HAS to be true just by the fact that every nonzero thing HAS to happen, so why the fuck I was down voted makes no sense.
No. The many worlds interpretation is still restricted by the laws of physics and the available quantum states of interacting wavefunctions. In many worlds, every possible thing happens given the above constraints (with the appropriate measure), but not every “nonzero” thing. There are plenty of “nonzero” things we can imagine that aren’t actually possible. See Gell-Mann’s principle: “Everything not forbidden is compulsory.” (emphasis added)
Further, “true” in a simulation does not actually qualify as true for most religions, given their own stated claims. The conflation of the simulation argument with theism has been previously discussed at length on LW. See, e.g., this comment from the very large thread:
Do you have any opinion on whether continuum-many things are possible, or whether there’s just a finite or countable number of possibilities?
I suspect the nature of quantum mechanics limits the possibilities to the countable regime. Max Tegmark discusses this topic here, in the section “How many parallel universes are there?”.
You know, perhaps I should apologize for my question, just a little bit; or for the intent behind it. One of my objections to MWI is that it’s ill-defined to a degree that laypeople would not guess, from the way that its advocates talk. I noticed on Rolf’s thread that you are a physicist, and I thought, OK, I’ll see how much this guy has really thought about it… Then it dawned on it me that you were just explicating rather than advocating MWI—that is, explaining a few details of an idea that you know something about because of your profession, but not necessarily an idea that you would champion as The Answer.
Nowadays I try to limit my arguing about MWI to discussions with physicists who really believe it. They need to be physicists so that it can be a technical discussion, and they need to be believers so that I can demand answers to specific questions. Most physicists have rigorous justifications for their physical opinions only for those parts of physics that they need professionally, and that usually doesn’t extend to “quantum foundations”.
Most physicists are intrigued or even enthusiastic about that topic, and they’ll certainly have opinions and thoughts about it, but when pressed they’ll admit to agnosticism, shrug their shoulders, take resort in diffident positivism, etc. When it comes to MWI, you can’t have a critical discussion if for the other person it’s just a fuzzy opinion, rather than an idea as clear as relativity or a specific equation of motion.
I could undoubtedly have a serious debate with someone like Tegmark, because he’s very serious about the multiverse concept, and he’s written technical works of quantum cosmology which provide a framework for questions like, countable or uncountable, what’s the ontological meaning of the measure, how do you avoid a preferred frame, and so on. But the framework is subtly or even radically different for each serious MWI advocate, which is why it’s just about impossible to set down a general-purpose critique of MWI.
Yes, this is what I was doing.
My personal view is that the many worlds interpretation is probably closer to being correct than other popular (e.g. collapse-based) interpretations. What I mean by this is that it wouldn’t surprise me if the “correct” interpretation has not been fully realized by anyone yet, but once it is developed, we will be able to look back and say that many worlds was not as far off.
I lean toward the wave function having real physical significance rather than being just a mathematical tool; people said the same thing about quarks, once upon a time. (Many people still think quarks are just a mathematical tool, despite the 17-year-old discovery of the top quark which is too heavy to hadronize before it decays.)
As Rolf mentioned in his thread, high energy experiment doesn’t really deal directly with interpreting quantum mechanics and wave functions. While I’m probably better versed in QM than many physicists whose focus is on classical scales, I would not claim to have a conception of many worlds which is as clear as relativity.
I never said it violated any laws of physics, but within a computer simulation you could easily have a simulated God with the power to change the simulation or people walking on water etc. That’s exactly why I said “in simulation”. Obviously even if MWI is true that does not makes universes with different laws real.
In a simulation you could also make it so that after a person “die” he ends up in a “heaven” or “hell”. This is 100% inevitable in Many Worlds
You supported your claim with the statement “every nonzero thing has to happen,” which, on its face, ignores the constraint of the laws of physics. You haven’t shown that your claim is compatible with the laws of physics as we understand them, and for a claim of “100% inevitability” that burden of proof is on you. The physical possibility of that level of simulation is far from a settled question.
And again, even if this claim is true, it doesn’t imply or equate to the actual truth of any religion.
The statement that “every non-zero thing has to happen” in this context obviously refers to the wavefunction of QM. I am not arguing FOR the simulation hypothesis, but I thought it was generally accepted that simulation is possible… And IF it is, then due to the non-zero of MWI (if MWI IS TRUE) automatically means that these absurd simulations HAS to exist.
I never said that this would equate to actual truth of any religion. I am as atheistic as one can possibly be. Obviously these would not be actual Gods in the sense that they are supernatural, but they would be so pragmatically WITHIN this simulation.
Clearly, that was not obvious to me. There is a common misunderstanding that many worlds implies that “everything is possible,” and that statement seemed to match this pattern.
It is accepted by many, but it has not been demonstrated to the level where solely postulating many worlds qualifies as an acceptable argument for your point.
I am not sure how else I could have been expected to interpret “then all religions has to be true (in a simulation).”
Well, I am sorry for being so sloppy with my answer. But it seems we have cleared it up.
Now I would love to see you answer Mitchell_Porters question
The simulation implies the Bible God as strongly as it implies the Little Red Riding Hood. How probable is that the naughty wolf is our simulator?
Apply this reasoning to a contemporary computer game of quest or combat. In a medieval setting, you might have good guys, bad guys, and extra background characters. Our discussion is like being a character in such a game, trying to guess what it’s all about; and your proposition amounts to saying that the intentions and interventions of The Players are just as likely to be centered on the second cow from the right in scene 4, as they are to be centered on one of the obviously major factions of opinion whose struggles define our history and tear our world apart.
So no, it ought to be a few orders of magnitude more likely that one (or even all) of those big civilizational blocs on our planet is puppeted by hidden intelligences, than it is likely that a character from a minor French fable is the unique signature-within-the-sim of our creator-artist.
I think we can at least agree that our world, and manifest human nature, have the capacity to produce the world’s religions, and the histories they have engendered, without any external intervention. So judged according to the absence of obviously beyond-the-world or beyond-the-sim information, in texts like the Bible, the Quran, etc, one should indeed demote the probability that these religions are cosmologically, ontologically, or nonmetaphorically true. But how much demotion of probability, that’s the question.
Are you telling me, that the LRRH is 1000 times less likely the Creator’s word to us, than let say the Bible?
I don’t see a good justification for this. But even if it is, 10^-50 or 10^-53 is all very small. It is deep down somewhere, near the zero.
The big bad wolf, as described in the story, doesn’t have the ability to create a stimulation (or do any programing whatsoever), whereas God, as described in the bible, does.
Oh no. The story deliberately hides the Wolf’s powers. THAT is not very unlikely compared to the rest, is it?
Coincidentially I was pondering this very question a few weeks ago. If many worlds interpretation is true, then all religions has to be true (in a simulation)
Most religions make metaphysical claims which contradict mwi.
READ THE FUCKING PART THAT SAYS; IN A SIMULATION
You are one sad fuck
Tell us what you really think!
What I think is that the people on here is clearly way, way, way dumber than I would ever have thought :)
Somehow my factual statement that MWI implies that there will be computer simulations in a tiny tiny tiny fraction of ‘worlds’ in which there will be God-like entities within the simulations, have made the retards on here think that the downvote button is morphine
The downvotes are largely attributable to you being a jerk. Also, your speculations about MWI and simulations are not as transparently correct as you imagine. As wedrifid says, most major religions cannot be fully simulated. Besides the problem with logical contradictions that he pointed out (and you bizarrely misinterpreted), there’s also the issue that many religions attribute capabilities to god that render him/her/it unsimulatable. For instance, an omniscient god would presumably know all arithmetic truths. Unless MWI somehow makes hypercomputation possible, how will this be simulated?
That’s a good point. Many worlds can’t make a simulator logically omniscient no matter how thin you slice up that measure.
Are you asserting that this would be a testable attribute of a putative omniscient god that could not be demonstrated by a simulated god? Or merely that it is an attribute that could not be simulated, even if I as an observer would have no way of telling the difference between the real thing and a sufficiently properly rigged demo?
Definitely the latter. Probably also the former, but constructing the test (or proof that such a test exists) requires math skills I don’t have and so there is some chance that it isn’t possible after all.
If you are polynomial time (BPP), then for any problem whose answer can be demonstrated to you by an interactive proof protocol with an untrusted logically omniscient prover (IP), that protocol can also be executed by a prover who is limited to PSPACE. (The set of problems that can be thus proved is also PSPACE).
Proof: for any given BPP verification algorithm (you), the prover’s task is selecting a strategy that maximizes your chance of acceptance. Which is equivalent to choosing the optimal move in a game tree with polynomial depth (because of your limited time) and constant branching factor (a branch being one bit of the prover’s message, or one bit of randomness you generate). Depth-first traversal of that tree takes little memory.
If you found two different purported gods and played them against each other (MIP) you could get a higher bound on their power, but only if you somehow knew that they weren’t colluding.
I literally cannot believe the low level of intelligence on here. Baffling
It’s possible that I have made an embarrassing error in my comment, although given your track record in this thread, I don’t consider your response to be particularly strong evidence of this. Still, if you would care to elaborate, I will gladly listen.
It just baffles me that people get hung up on tiny insignificant details. I could go on to argue for my statements here, but I just remember your username. You are the same person who did not care to elaborate on your MWI statements when I asked you, so I don’t see any reason to answer you either.
Leave.
what you actually said was “Coincidentially I was pondering this very question a few weeks ago. If many worlds interpretation is true, then all religions has to be true (in a simulation)” That isn’t what you claim you said:”that MWI implies that there will be computer simulations in a tiny tiny tiny fraction of ‘worlds’ in which there will be God-like entities within the simulations, have made the retards on here think that the downvote button is morphine.”
The second is not even just one very poorly expressed meaning of the first, which would make your anger misplaced but understandable if you thought your meaning was clear. Nobody took this as your meaning. But the reason isn’t just that you said it badly. It’s a different claim. “God like entities” are not enough for “all religions are true.”
You can’t have a simulation in which christianity is true “God created the world (and nobody created him)” can’t be true in a simulation (even if there is a god-like entity that created the simulation from inside an outer simulation). Also, there’s all the moral stuff that come with religions which is meta-wrong as well as often moral wrong.
Are.
All religions that are possible to simulate. (So none of them as far as I am aware, but there would at least be every possible near-enough simulation of said religions except with the logical self-contradictions resolved in one way or another.)
Grammar nazi.
Are you seriously telling me that you do not have the imagination to think how a simulation could manipulate the laws within the simulated Universe? Why wouldn’t it be possible to simulate miracles? Hell if MWI is true there was really a guy named Jesus in one universe who walked on water because all the particles in the water he walked on by the “law of nonzero probability” turned to solid matter.
When gratuitously insulting people and generally behaving like an ass you need to take more care not to make screwups yourself.
Me telling you that seems exceedingly unlikely.
Miracles are trivial. That’s why I didn’t mention them and instead made a note about logical self-contradictions in the divinity specifications. In case you didn’t notice this amounts to what is essentially an agreement with a clarification.
5% chance that some Christian theologians have it right is not a 5% chance you go to Hell if you disagree. As with everything else, the Bible contradicts itself on this. (Rob Bell has a great collection of conflicting things the Bible says about this in his book “Love Wins.”
Jaynes discusses Hempel’s Paradox on pages 143 to 144 of Probability Theory: the Logic of Science. I take away a broad lesson: one must always know what alternative hypotheses are available. Failing to be clear about your alternative hypotheses is my first candidate for what you are doing wrong.
My second candidate comes from rule IIIb for plausible reasoning (page 9).
One conspicuous feature of the world is the presence of rival faiths, each well attested by miracles about which the faithful will admit no doubts. This occurs both between religions (Muslim, Christian, Jew) and within religions (Orthodox, Catholic, Protestant).
It is tempting at this point to rush ahead down a well-worn path to atheism. “Since the rivals are mutually exclusive and the situation symmetrical they must all be wrong.” I’ve put the argument in quotes because I’m suggesting that we hold off and pause for reflection. Since we can see what is coming, we face a choice. We can either leave out the existence of rival religions because, for many people, it settles the issue, and we feel that including them therefore prejudges the issue. Or we can include the existence of rival religions and wonder whether the situation really is symmetrical.
Rule IIIb requires us to ask whether the existence of rival religions (with well attested miracles …) is relevant. We know that it is highly relevant. We even feel an itch to leave it out to avoid it over powering other considerations.
Rule IIIb then instructs us to take them into account. Ouch! The probability calculation has already gone badly wrong, just because it left out the rival religions and before we ever get to thinking about what the existence of rival religions implies for the issue we are considering.
I suppose that the existence of something resembling a god is possible if we are actually living in a simulation. Even the christian god would be somewhere in that space of possibilities, though given the space of possibilities, that one specific possibility would still have to have extraordinarily low probability.
But let’s say the christian god shows up on our world one day and says “hey all, yup, I’m totally real, now get on your knees and praise me or suffer eternal torment!”
I don’t know about anybody else, but my atheism wouldn’t so much as wobble. Why? Because I don’t see atheism as disbelief in any specific entities. To me, it is the dismissal of the concept of divinity—that you can’t have a fundamental authority or something fundamentally moral any more than you can have something that is fundamentally complicated—it is disbelief in the obligation to worship.
This post belongs in Discussion.
The bible is not internally consistent, therefore it is impossible for it to accurately describe a coherent deity. The question is nonsensical on its face. You have to instead start picking and choosing which parts of the bible to believe and which parts to ignore (or trust someone else do to that for you), which is why we have tens of thousands of varieties of christianity.
So you must return to the fundamental question of rationality: what do I think I know, and how do I think I know it? Or more specifically—what is your criteria for deciding that part X of the bible is accurate, and part Y is not? Or alternatively, what is your criteria for deciding to trust Priest A over Theologian B?
Seeing as there is no good physical evidence to make these distinctions, it is appropriate to weigh them as strongly as you’d weigh any other bedtime story. The only remaining question is “How confident am I that my senses are entangled with reality as it actually is, and not the product of hallucination/dark lords of the matrix/other reality-shattering plot twist?” Which really has nothing to do with christianity.
To answer your question: I’d be willing to bet $10 vs my immediate termination that any particular sect of christianity (as defined by the Center for the Study of Global Christianity ) you presented to me is inaccurate. I’d fully anticipate having several hundred thousand dollars afterwards and still be breathing if this was repeated to exhaustion.
There actually are more than 20 religious groups out there. Do you think you are wrong about one of them being the true religion?
There are a lot of different gods. If you have 5% for any single God existing, I don’t think you are an atheist.
For me P(A god punishes people for not believing in the Bible with eternal hell | A god exists) is less than 5%.
The ridiculousness of an eternal loving god who punishes nonbelievers with eternal torments for not following his edicts is just too great. It’s ridiculous even when I would assume for the sake of the argument that a god exists.
r_claypool retooled the question as: “the chance that Jesus of Nazareth is a resurrected God”. Like most on this thread, I can’t come up with a number aside from “exceedingly improbable”.
Kudos to TheOtherDave for an excellent comment.
IMHO, Kierkegaard nailed it when he observed that faith in Christianity is imcompatible with reason. While the latest flavour du jour for Christian apologists in support of the truth of the resurrection is the minimalist three facts approach (i.e. death of the cross, empty tomb and reports of post-resurrection appreances), most will back peddle when asked whether they accept all of the other miraculous reports contained in the New Testament.
‘Leap of faith – yes, but only after reflection’ -Kierkegaard
Other people have pointed out the problems with singling out Christianity and ignoring a lot of disjoint possibilities. As to your question, someone on another site named a level of evidence that feels like it would make me consider deities as explanations. Representatives of a deity (or the deity itself) would need to publicly create specimens of a species believed extinct. They would need skeptical observers, well-versed in stage magic, to declare themselves baffled. And then they’d have to hand the specimens over to skeptical biologists for another kind of confirmation. This level of evidence feels like it would bring my belief in some deity’s existence to more than 1%. (ETA: but see the dream thread.)
Now for “the chance that Jesus of Nazareth is a resurrected God”, it would take all that plus additional evidence on the level of the following: Christians moving mountains through faith alone, plus a persuasive-sounding explanation of why I haven’t observed this happening before. That seems like it would bring my credence above 1%. Though now that I’ve written this, .01 feels possibly too high to be internally consistent.
I’ll try to assign probabilities to 5 propositions:
(A) I’m deluded, insane and unaware of this
0.03% of the population (that’s 3 people in every 10,000) have Delusional Disorder. If I did have that (or various other disorders) I would be as certain as I am now that I was sane, so that puts an upper limit on how confident anyone can rationally be about their own sanity.
(B) I’m sane, but some form of supernatural exists (whether that’s ghosts, an afterlife, supernatural karma, magic spells, or a sentient Gaia)
Given how hard science has looked for such things, for decades, this is the Black Swan problem. Were evidence of souls to become detectable to science, it would be an immense paradigm shift, easily comparable to the overthrow of the Geocentric worldview, a 1 in 1,000 year occurrence in science. None the less, it has to be possible to put a number on the chances of science itself being systematically wrong on a conceptual level. Let’s say we can, at most, reduce the chance of this down to 1 in 1,000,000 because we don’t have a long enough baseline to estimate the ways in which such things can be incorrect.
(C) Some form of deistic religion, whether that’s Pastafarianism, Christianity or Hinduism, is correct in that an intelligent individual supernatural creator of the universe does exist (and some humans have attained at least partial knowledge of this Truth)
Rather than estimate this directly, I’d like to say that the chances of it being correct IF (B) is correct, are about 50:50, since it is one of the most common supernatural beliefs.
(D) Some form of deistic Christianity is essentially correct (an intelligent individual supernatural creator of the universe exists and picked a Jewish carpenter on just one planet in just one galaxy as his supreme messenger of Love and Truth)
Either astronomy is wrong, the Drake Equation (predicting other sentient species) is wrong, OR we’re talking a 1 in 10^22 coincidence that I happens to be a member of the chosen species (and chronologically rather near to the key event: Jesus’ presence on Earth). We’ve already factors in the changes of science being drastically wrong in (B). The sentient species on other planets is harder because of the Fermi Paradox but, even given that, based purely upon how near we are to the event compared to how long the genus Homo has been around (remember, even Neanderthals laid flowers on graves), you have to add in at least a 1 in 100,000 improbability factor for going from step (C) to step (D).
(E) The specific type of Christianity believed by a majority of Catholics (eg there is a Hell, and you will burn it in for an eternity if not ‘saved’, Adam&Eve, Noah, etc are real events not allegories) is essentially correct in most details
Talking animals? Unicorns? Global flood genocide by a loving God? Kill men who sleep with men? Get real. Let’s throw in a further 1 in 1,000,000,000 for this step, and that’s generous.
(A) is by far the most significant factor. If I’m sane, then odds of (D) or (E) being correct are astronomically low. And while from my own perspective I can only narrow down the odds of my own insanity to 3 in 10,000 someone reading this post or meeting me in the street has the benefit of an external view on that. And it is important to note that, even if I am insane, that doesn’t mean that (E) is necessarily correct, just that I can no longer rely upon the accuracy of my estimates as to how unlikely it is.
Note: It mangled my footnote symbols. Simply go in order of appearance if you wish to find them.
As a strong agnostic, I must say I find the numbers given here amusing. Simply put, there is very little evidence either way, and it is highly likely that it is IMPOSSIBLE to have decent evidence either way about an omnipotent god. I believe that there is an infinitesimal possibility that there is any significant way to tell which way you should lean.* Therefore, I find these probabilities meaningless (but not uninteresting).
Now, probabilities on whether or not Zeus exists are much more doable. Within reason, the less powerful the god, the easier it should be to get evidence. At the extreme low end, a sufficiently advanced alien could truly be Prometheus. We could prove he exists just by finding him.* Though that level of technology advantage would mean we might need to doubt the evidence anyway.
There are certain theologies that rule themselves out, but this is hardly a convincing argument against the remainder of them. It is true you should not unduly elevate religious beliefs out of the possibility that a particular one is true, but there is actual evidence in favor of them, such that people are not necessarily crazy to come to the exact opposite conclusion than the readers of this blog favor. The weighting of scant evidence can drastically skew the results, and the weighting is probably not rational on either side. Additionally, it is clear that Christianity as a whole is not logically contradictory, because they have direct postulates that contradict the postulates used to show they are logically contradictory, which means you cannot add those postulates in if you want a deductive proof.
*Honestly, I believe that the idea of having any sufficient evidence of whether or not an omnipotent being exists is a logical contradiction. There is no state of the universe which an omnipotent being would be unable to implement, and thus no state of the universe is evidence that an omnipotent being does not exist. (Technically, evidence for an omnipotent being could be gathered due to an extremely unlikely configuration of things, but similar evidence could be created by any sufficiently advanced being).
**That means he gave humans the advancement that was control over fire, and got punished over it by other sufficiently advanced beings. The punishment described in the legends could simply occur in VR, or in some grizzly fashion.
*Evidence against him would be much harder, but perhaps sufficiently advanced aliens have been recording all of humanity the entire time, and have proof we discovered fire independently.
**This may be a slightly self serving way of seeing things, but you can always include me in that statement if you think agnostics incorrectly weight the evidence.
*Their postulate: P Your Postulate: ~P The contradiction therefore only means one of the postulates is wrong, not that the conclusion is wrong. One such postulate would be that an omnibenevolent being would not allow such suffering if they could help it, but theirs is that they would. There is no proof either way; suffering might sometimes be beneficial. We cannot even eliminate certain forms of suffering as possibly being beneficial overall. This is usually where the free will arguments start being brought up, but chaos theory can explain it as well.
“Probability of Christianity” is way too vague, so I can’t answer that. I’m 50% confident in my philosophical (meta-ethical, decision theoretic, cosmological) theism, 92.5% confident in my phenomenal-belief-in-decisions-relevant-transhumanly-intelligent-entities. My confidence in atheism is some weird mixture of the inverse of those two because those two variants of theism strike me as pretty disjunctive, and either would falsify atheism. These are impression-belief mixtures: not entirely Aumann-adjusted, but a little. My impressions are more confident of theism, but my betting odds are less confident.
Retracted the above because I don’t really like Bayes for this sort of thing. If we had better decision theory and game theory then I would have the tools to answer.
I think pinning a probability number on this (outside of context of being forced to gamble or otherwise forced into making a decision dependent on probability of this) is simply innumerate. Suppose you attach a number to it. Then there’s a situation where it is too high (Pascal’s wager) and possible situations where it is too low (we discover that incredibly simple laws, simpler than laws of physics, lead to emergence of singleton intelligence that proceeds to simulate universes with life, and then you start rejecting Occam’s razor because you were too atheist)
If we do not count the tiny possibility of simulated universe run by some “God”, then I say my atheism is 99,99999% and Christian God atheism: 100%
100% is not a probability. You’re saying you’re infinitely certain that yaweh doesn’t exist, so much that your model literally can’t handle the possibility and would divide by zero if it were actually true. You are literally unable to see potential evidence for yaweh and are operating on blind assumption. You need infinite evidence to get 100% certainty.
I think that this is actually possible, i.e. it is possible to state “Yahweh doesn’t exist” with certainty: if Yahweh is internally mathematically inconsistent, i.e. Yahweh’s existence would be a proof that 1 = 0.
However, there are probabilities involved in any assertion that Yahweh is inconsistent; unless you have a complete definition of Yahweh (e.g. highlighted phrases in a specific Bible) that involves something as clear as “Yahweh is green” and “Yahweh is not green”, but there are the standard problems due to language being imperfect telepathy (etc) that make this unlikely to be possible.
Well, Eliezer Yudkowsky doesn’t assign probability exactly 1 to 2 + 2 = 4 either, and whereas at first I thought that was nuts, this made me realize he does have a point (as I think any difference between “2 + 2 = 4” and “51 is prime” is only quantitative).
I used to think this, then this paper that lukeprog linked, on logical uncertainty, gave me a coherent model that says otherwise. I’m still not sure which model I like better.
Looks interesting. I’ll have a read of it.
You must be one of those sad motherfuckers who just HAVE to pick at everything. Get your OCD checked out man.
If I have to restate my statement so it’s “CORRECT” for you: I am as certain that Yaweh does not exist as I am that there is not a pedophile-purple-invisible-GoblinTractor-hybrid who made everything.