You’re assuming that “no God” is the null hypothesis. Is there a good, rational reason for this? One could just as easily argue that you should be an atheist if and only if it’s clear that atheism is correct. Without any empirical evidence either way, is it more likely that there is some sort of Deity or that there isn’t?
IMO there’s no such thing as a null hypothesis; epistemology doesn’t work like that. The more coherent approach is bayesian inference, where we have a prior distribution and update that distribution on seeing evidence in a particular way.
If there were no empirical evidence either way, I’d lean towards there being an anthropomorphic god (I say this as a descriptive statement about the human prior, not normative).
The trouble is that once you start actually looking at evidence, nearly all anthropomorphic gods get eliminated very quickly, and in fact the whole anthropomorphism thing starts to look really questionable. The universe simply doesn’t look like it’s been touched by intelligence, and where it does, we can see that it was either us, or a stupid natural process that happens to optimize quite strongly (evolution).
So while “some sort of god” was initially quite likely, most particular gods get eliminated, and the remaining gods are just as specific and unlikely as they were at first. So while the “gods” subdistribution is getting smashed, naturalistic occamian induction is not getting smashed nearly as hard, and comes to dominate.
The only gods remaining compatible with the evidence are things like “someone ran all possible computer programs”, which is functionally equivalent to metaphysical “naturalism”, and gods of very specific forms with lots of complexity in the hypothesis that explains why they constructed the world to look exactly natural, and then aren’t intervening yet.
Those complex specific gods only got a tiny slice of the god-exists pie at the beginning and cannot collect more evidence than the corresponding naturalistic explanation (because they predict the same), so they are pretty unlikely.
And then when you go to make predictions, what these gods might do gets sliced up even further such that the only useful predictive framework is the occamian naturalism thing.
There is of course the chance that there exists things “outside” the universe, and the major implication from that is that we might some day be able to break out and take over the metauniverse as well.
IMO there’s no such thing as a null hypothesis; epistemology doesn’t work like that. The more coherent approach is bayesian inference, where we have a prior distribution and update that distribution on seeing evidence in a particular way.
If there were no empirical evidence either way, I’d lean towards there being an anthropomorphic god (I say this as a descriptive statement about the human prior, not normative).
The trouble is that once you start actually looking at evidence, nearly all anthropomorphic gods get eliminated very quickly, and in fact the whole anthropomorphism thing starts to look really questionable. The universe simply doesn’t look like it’s been touched by intelligence, and where it does, we can see that it was either us, or a stupid natural process that happens to optimize quite strongly (evolution).
So while “some sort of god” was initially quite likely, most particular gods get eliminated, and the remaining gods are just as specific and unlikely as they were at first. So while the “gods” subdistribution is getting smashed, naturalistic occamian induction is not getting smashed nearly as hard, and comes to dominate.
The only gods remaining compatible with the evidence are things like “someone ran all possible computer programs”, which is functionally equivalent to metaphysical “naturalism”, and gods of very specific forms with lots of complexity in the hypothesis that explains why they constructed the world to look exactly natural, and then aren’t intervening yet.
Those complex specific gods only got a tiny slice of the god-exists pie at the beginning and cannot collect more evidence than the corresponding naturalistic explanation (because they predict the same), so they are pretty unlikely.
And then when you go to make predictions, what these gods might do gets sliced up even further such that the only useful predictive framework is the occamian naturalism thing.
There is of course the chance that there exists things “outside” the universe, and the major implication from that is that we might some day be able to break out and take over the metauniverse as well.