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simplicio comments on Something's Wrong - Less Wrong
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I don't see any reasons why (2) - unknown natural process - gets to benefit from being a "set of zillions of potential processes, many of which have a far better prior" and (1) - goddidit - does not.
If you want to sum the probability of a hypothesis by performing some weighted sum over the set of zillions of it's neighbors in hypothesis space, that's fine. But if that is your criteria, you need to apply it equally to the other set of hypothesises you are considering - instead of considering only one specific example.
Bostrom's simulation argument gives us one potential generator of 'goddidits', and a likely high prior for superintelligent aliens gives us another potential generator of 'goddidits'. Either of those generators could spawn zillions of potential processes which have far better priors than Yaweh, but could look similar.
None of this leads to any specific conclusion - I'm just pointing out an unfairness in your methodology.
You're quite right. When I said this, I was thinking of "goddidit" as a set of very specific claims from a single religious tradition, which I should've stated.
Mmm actually you did state it as a fairly specific claim. I'm just saying one can't fairly compare highly specific complex hypothesizes vs wide general sweeps through hypothesis-space. This is itself a good argument against the specific "yawheh did it", but not against the more general "goddidit" which you originally were referring to:
You're right - but there is another side to this coin. An atheist has a top-level belief (or it's negation) which sends down cascading priors and privileges naturalistic hypothesizes. So far this has worked splendidly well across the landscape.
But there is no guarantee this will work everywhere forever, and it's at least possible that eventually we may flip or find an exception for the top-level prior - for example we may eventually find that pretty much everything has a naturalistic explanation except the origin of life - which turns out to have been seeded by alien super-intelligence (ala Francis Crick) - for example.
I entirely agree. While I don't know of any good reasons to think the origin of life was not a happy accident, it is not inconceivable a priori (simulations, seeding etc.).
When I describe myself as an atheist (which I try not to do), I really mean that
(1) all the anthropomorphic creation myths are really laughable,
(2) there's not much positive evidence for less laughable creators, and
(3) even if you showed me evidence for a creator, I would be inclined toward what I will call meta-naturalism - i.e., still wanting to know how the hell the creator came to be.
Basically, I doubt the existence of gods that are totally ontologically distinct from creatures.