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HalFinney comments on Closet survey #1 - Less Wrong
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The fact that so many people believe in God is strong evidence that some sort of God is real.
Or strong evidence that we have an innate disposition to assign agency to natural phenomena that we don't understand and to make those agents in our image.
You are correct, that many people believe in something is strong evidence, but it's not overwhelmingly strong, and in the particular case of belief in the supernatural it doesn't win over the weight of the counter-evidence.
Given that they all believe different things, it's not at all clear to me that people's beliefs on net are evidence for rather than against "some sort of God". As in that quote:
This is an excellent point! The vast majority of people do not believe in any particular God. Combining this majoritarian evidence...
On the other hand, I'm not sure how finely we should grain possible Gods here. If everyone believed in the same God except with a different number of nose hairs, surely that would be evidence in favor of that God.
Not necessarily, steven. It would only be evidence if at least a few different civilizations had arrived at the same concept of God independently. After all, it's easy to imagine a world in which nearly everyone is a Catholic simply because Catholics were much more effective at proselytizing and conquering than they were in our world.
Likewise, that a small majority of people are either Christian, Muslim, or Jewish is not evidence for the Abrahamic deity, because these three religions didn't arise independently. Christianity wouldn't have existed without Judaism, and Islam wouldn't have existed without Christianity and Judaism.
The point is that they might have arguments that you didn't consider, not that there's no other way to account for the coincidence.
I thought we were discussing majoritarian evidence, that is, whether everyone believing in a certain God would be evidence for that God, given that a minority believing in a certain God isn't evidence for that God. That the believers might have arguments that we didn't consider is a different topic.
Also, it's not merely that there might be another way to account for a majority-held belief in the Abrahamic God, it's that it is a historical fact that there is a causal chain that goes from Judaism to Christianity to Islam. In other words, we know it's not a coincidence that the populations of three different civilizations ended up believing in a similar God, and therefore there's no need to account for it.
That doesn't sound to me like an explanation. In fact, it's not even clear that it's saying anything. What do you mean? How does "a way of thinking" differ from whatever else "believing in God" might be?
As a general point -- independently of the question of the existence of God -- I think that before we can say many people believing something is strong evidence that the thing is true, we need to consider why many people have the belief: how did they all come to believe it, and what sorts of evidence do they have for the belief?
Before we consider those sorts of questions, all we can say is that it is evidence, but not whether it is strong or weak evidence.
.... and the Earth is flat, women are inherently less intelligent, spirits bring the rain, mingling blood creates babies, the brain cools the blood, and every other belief once believed by massive segments of the Earth's population is correct.
.... I would suggest that you start by reading all of http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/How_To_Actually_Change_Your_Mind , and if you already have, then I would suggest that perhaps this website is not for you. Or that you really, really need it. One of the two.
The person you're responding to is unlikely to ever see your reply; the comment was posted close to four years ago, and I think he's been gone from Less Wrong for most of that. Also, while I think his assertion in this case is mistaken, I think you're taking a rather patronizing attitude to someone who's rightfully earned a considerable amount of respect here.