I presume that you use the Higgs boson example because the boson hasn’t been experimentally observed? In other words, the Higgs boson is an example where the evidence for existence is from reasoning to the most likely hypothesis, i.e. abduction.
If your belief in God is similar, that means you adopt the hypothesis that God exists because it better explains the available data.The physicist, of course, has access to much stronger evidence than abduction, for instance the LHC experiments, and will give much more weight to such evidence. That’s an example of induction, which is key to hypothesis confirmation. Once the LHC results are in, the physicist fully expects to be saying either “the Higgs boson exists” or “the Higgs boson doesn’t exist, or if it does it isn’t the same thing we thought it was”. However, he may well expect with 95% probability to be saying the former and not the latter.
I propose that you hesitate to say X when you have no inductive evidence that X. I also venture that in the case of the proposition “God exists”, your belief is qualitatively different from that of pre-modern Christians, in that you are less likely to accept ‘tests’ of God’s existence as valid. The medieval church, for instance, thought heliocentrism was heretical, in that it explicitly contradicted Christianity. This amounts to saying that a proof that the Earth orbits the Sun would be a disproof of Christianity, whereas I don’t believe that you would see any particular material fact as evidence against God’s existence.
I presume that you use the Higgs boson example because the boson hasn’t been experimentally observed? In other words, the Higgs boson is an example where the evidence for existence is from reasoning to the most likely hypothesis, i.e. abduction.
If your belief in God is similar, that means you adopt the hypothesis that God exists because it better explains the available data.The physicist, of course, has access to much stronger evidence than abduction, for instance the LHC experiments, and will give much more weight to such evidence. That’s an example of induction, which is key to hypothesis confirmation. Once the LHC results are in, the physicist fully expects to be saying either “the Higgs boson exists” or “the Higgs boson doesn’t exist, or if it does it isn’t the same thing we thought it was”. However, he may well expect with 95% probability to be saying the former and not the latter.
I propose that you hesitate to say X when you have no inductive evidence that X. I also venture that in the case of the proposition “God exists”, your belief is qualitatively different from that of pre-modern Christians, in that you are less likely to accept ‘tests’ of God’s existence as valid. The medieval church, for instance, thought heliocentrism was heretical, in that it explicitly contradicted Christianity. This amounts to saying that a proof that the Earth orbits the Sun would be a disproof of Christianity, whereas I don’t believe that you would see any particular material fact as evidence against God’s existence.