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topynate comments on Moore's Paradox - Less Wrong
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There seems to be some confusion here concerning authority. I have the authority to say "I like the color green." It would not make sense for me to say "I believe I like the color green" because I have first-hand knowledge concerning my own likes and dislikes and I'm sufficiently confident in my own mental capacities to determine whether or not I'm deceiving myself concerning so simple a matter as my favorite color.
I do not have the authority to say, "Jane likes the color green." I may know Jane quite well, and the probability of my statement being accurate may be quite high, but my saying it is so does not make it so.
I chose to believe in the existance of God - deliberately and conciously. This decision, however, has absolutely zero effect on the actual existance of God.
Critical realism shows us that the world and our perception of the world are two different things. Ideally any rational thinker should have a close correlation between their perception of the world and reality, but outside of first-hand knowledge they are never equivalent.
You are correct - it is harder for me to say "God exists" than it is for me to say "I believe God exists" for the same reason it is harder for a scientist to say "the higgs-boson exists" than it is to say "according to our model, the higgs-boson should exist."
The scientist has evidence that such a particle exists, and may strongly believe in it's existence, but he does not have the authority to say definitively that it exists. It may exists, or not exist, independent of any such belief.
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.