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wedrifid comments on A sense of logic - Less Wrong
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Comments (269)
The key word there is enough. ;)
I... I just realized... there's no evidence whatsoever of the Glowing Purple Space Cannibals, nobody's ever even postulated their existence...
I hope people do realize that I was just comparing the probabilities of "God exists and wants to be believed in" and "God exists and doesn't want to be believed in" -- obviously God's silence is even better evidence in favour of God not existing at all, it's just I wasn't comparing that possibility with anything.
In the interests of deconverting someone, right? Convincing someone to be an atheist because God wants them to ... that gives me bad logic feelings in my gut.
"In the interests of deconverting someone, right?"
Not really. I'm not particularly interested in deconverting people, same way that I don't tend to go to little children and tell them there's no Santa.
But if a person wants to argue his faith is logical, then he's trespassing on my turf -- so it was more in the interests of defending logical thinking that I pointed out an obvious unwarranted assumption in the logical argument.
What do you think of the argument "If God wanted me to believe in him, he would have made it easier to do so"? If this circumvents the bad logic feeling, it might be quite effective. Especially if you buttress it with the argument that a loving God would want us to embrance a scientific worldview that provides us with medical advances and a way to solve our problems.
While it may be based on a false counterfactual, which seems dodgy, I think it is quite useful to displace a paradigm by finding footholds from within it, and this argument also provides a safe line of retreat (if God wants me to believe in him, he can find a way to convince me).
(Off-topic: Why is it you don't have a user page?)
I don't actually know what to think. I can't see any problems with it extrapolating out to real life actions, but I spent some time in classes on logic, so the danger of "*if [false premise] then [anything]" is well-known to me. (From falsehood, anything is permitted and so on). I think as long as you presented the argument to someone who held their beliefs truly it would be effective and safe, but if you presented it to a believer-in-belief it probably would fail. Still safe, though.
(I actually don't know how to make one. Is the user page at all related to overviews of my comments? I have been wondering for a while why everyone seems to have overviews, but I don't.)
You are considering a different counterfactual to the one Aris intended.