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Eliezer_Yudkowsky comments on A sense of logic - Less Wrong
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Allowing a general concept of God ('creator' rather than the details of a religion's particular deity), I don't think the hypothesis is privileged. We see cause and effect relationships everywhere, and it is natural to wonder about the first cause. God-beliefs can be very complex and explain a lot more than that, but all God-beliefs seem to serve at least that purpose.
I would wonder about an intelligent species with no curiosity or speculations about their origins (and fate), especially if in other contexts they tended to have a spattering of not-fully-empirically-justified-beliefs if such were useful to explain things.
It is. It's not natural to wonder if the first cause is a complex structured intelligent being, because such complicated and internally correlated structures demand simpler preceding causes of which to be the effects, for if we try to model the structure as uncaused we have unexplained internal correlations, which is a no-no in causal graphs.
If you then start making special pleading excuses about an intelligence that you predict using a complex structured internally correlated model but which you claim to have no structure so that you can pretend it's simple even though you can't exhibit any simple computer program that does the same thing, it's really unnatural - not just physically unnatural, but epistemically unnatural.
I'd like to taboo the word "natural" here. Do you guys mean 'good and reasonable'? Or do we mean 'typically occuring in human societies'? Or something else entirely?
My reduction-proposal:
A "natural" hypothesis is one with high probability. A "natural" question is a query regarding the cause(s) of a low-probability observation.
So, in this exchange, byrnema pointed to a particular low-probability observation (the abundance of causal structure in the world around us), and Eliezer responded by noting that the proposed explanation (a complex first cause) has low probability, even conditioning on the observation.
To put it in even simpler terms: Bayes's theorem says P(H|E) = P(E|H)P(H)/P(E); byrnema said: "P(E) is small!"; and Eliezer said "Oh yeah, well P(H) is tiny!"
I agree.
I realize that I've been confused about distinguishing what may be natural for humans to believe about God verses what is 'natural' (probable and reasonable) to believe about God. If I go back and reconsider different things I've read about privileging-the-hypothesis-brand-arguments, they may sound different now. What mislead me from the beginning was an argument you made that if there was no theism, humans wouldn't reinvent it (agreed now, as long as the science paradigm handles the edges of knowledge well enough) and a perception that atheists believe that the main motivation for religion is authoritarian control rather than explanation.
As I replied to shockwave below, I agree that particular religious hypotheses are privileged due to human psychology, and this may be angling different than my position at the beginning where I was ambiguously trying to defend them as natural for humans to have.