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?
The probability of a rare event is most likely to be overestimated when the alternative is not fully specified… [Researcher Craig Fox] asked [participants] to estimate the probability that each of the eight participating teams would win the playoff; the victory of each team in turn was the focal event.
… The result: the probability judgments generated sucessively for the eight teams added up to 240%!
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.
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?
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.
If not, then 5% for Christianity is 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.
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.