mark_spottswood comments on Talking Snakes: A Cautionary Tale - Less Wrong

107 Post author: Yvain 13 March 2009 01:41AM

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Comment author: jimmy 14 March 2009 09:39:08AM 1 point [-]

I agree, and think that you explained it well, but I would personally go back to calling christianity absurd after looking into it and finding no evidence.

If you look, and find no evidence, what seperates christianity from "Barack Obama is a wooly mammoth"?

Comment author: mark_spottswood 16 March 2009 04:57:38PM 8 points [-]

Christianity is false, but it is harder to falsify it then it is to show that Barrack Obama is not a non-sapient extinct mammal. I can prove the second false to a five-year-old of average intelligence by showing a picture of Obama and an artist's rendition of a mammoth. It would take some time to explain to the same five-year-old child why Christianity does not make sense as a description of the world.

This difference—that while both claims are false, one claim is much more obviously false than the other—explains why Christianity has many adherents but the Obama-Mammoth hypothesis does not. And we can usually infer from the fact that many people believe a proposition that it is not transparently false, making it more reasonable to investigate a bit before rejecting it.