Eliezer:
If a belief is true you will be better off believing it, and if it is false you will be better off rejecting it.I think you should try applying your own advice to this belief of yours. It is usually true, but it is certainly not always true, and reeks of irrational bias.
My experience with my crisis of faith seems quite opposite to your conceptions. I was raised in a fundamentalist family, and I had to “make an extraordinary effort” to keep believing in Christianity from the time I was 4 and started reading through the Bible, and finding things that were wrong; to the time I finally “came out” as a non-Christian around the age of 20. I finally gave up being Christian only when I was worn out and tired of putting forth such an extraordinary effort.
So in some cases your advice might do more harm than good. A person who is committed to making “extraordinary efforts” concerning their beliefs is more likely to find justifications to continue to hold onto their belief, than is someone who is lazier, and just accepts overwhelming evidence instead of letting it kick them into an “extraordinary effort.” In other words, you are advocating a combative, Western approach; I am bringing up a more Eastern approach, which is not to be so attached to anything in the first place, but to bend if the wind blows hard enough.
The larger point, that the space of possible minds is very large, is correct.
The argument used involving ATP synthase is invalid. ATP synthase is a building block. Life on earth is all built using roughly the same set of Legos. But Legos are very versatile.
Here is an analogous argument that is obviously incorrect:
People ask me, “What is world literature like? What desires and ambitions, and comedies and tragedies, do people write about in other languages?”
And lo, I say unto them, “You have asked me a trick question.”
“the” is a determiner which is identical in English poems, novels, and legal documents. It has not changed significantly since the rise of modern English in the 17th century. It’s is something that every English document has in common.
Any two works of literature from different countries might be less similar to each other than Hamlet is to a restaurant menu.