Having been sincerely religious as a young adult has its drawbacks for my present self (e.g. lost time and effort), but one positive effect is that I’m not as worried about this, because I’ve felt what it’s like to find that my entire worldview fails on its own terms. (Basically, I eventually came to realize that it was completely out of character for the deity I knew— or any deity derived from the scriptures and theologies I professed— to create a universe and humanity completely un-optimized along any recognizable moral axis. But I digress.)
I was lucky enough to have a starting point with an intellectual and philosophical tradition (rather than, say, the extremes of evangelical Christianity), so I can’t credit myself too much. But unlike people who haven’t ever had to fundamentally change their minds about the world, I can point to a set of evidence that would make me switch to another worldview, and I can be reasonably confident that I’d do so if given that evidence. (It would generally take more evidence for me than for a pure Bayesian, but working inefficiently is better than refusing to work at all.)
Having been sincerely religious as a young adult has its drawbacks for my present self (e.g. lost time and effort), but one positive effect is that I’m not as worried about this, because I’ve felt what it’s like to find that my entire worldview fails on its own terms. (Basically, I eventually came to realize that it was completely out of character for the deity I knew— or any deity derived from the scriptures and theologies I professed— to create a universe and humanity completely un-optimized along any recognizable moral axis. But I digress.)
I was lucky enough to have a starting point with an intellectual and philosophical tradition (rather than, say, the extremes of evangelical Christianity), so I can’t credit myself too much. But unlike people who haven’t ever had to fundamentally change their minds about the world, I can point to a set of evidence that would make me switch to another worldview, and I can be reasonably confident that I’d do so if given that evidence. (It would generally take more evidence for me than for a pure Bayesian, but working inefficiently is better than refusing to work at all.)