Dreaded_Anomaly comments on The annoyingness of New Atheists: declaring God Dead makes you a Complete Monster? - Less Wrong
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Yes, exactly. Telling someone that the experiences which have convinced them of their religious beliefs aren't actually strong evidence for those beliefs requires explaining at minimum* Occam's Razor and Bayesian statistics. I've tried shortcuts, such as saying "it's just like how a patient is usually less qualified to diagnose their symptoms than a doctor," but that has never succeeded in conveying the message. If someone doesn't actually understand why entities shouldn't be multiplied beyond necessity and how to use evidence to evaluate claims, they're not going to accept what you say about their claims. We can keep trying to explain these concepts, and I do, but they have to decide they want to learn them.
*It's usually much more than just that, because religious people tend to come from a very anthropocentric worldview, where morality is objective, life has inherent meaning, human beings have souls, etc. We might speak the same language, but we're using very different systems of thought.
Edit to add: Eliezer has a very good post on this subject which makes the point better than I did: it's not enough just to cite Occam's Razor, Bayes' Theorem, etc.; there has to be understanding. Importantly, developing that understanding requires taking doubt seriously.
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Empirically many people deconvert for reasons that have nothing to do with Bayesianism. Indeed most former theists I know don't even know what Bayesianism is. If this is what it would take then almost no one would ever deconvert. People can deconvert for many different reasons. Occam's Razor or Bayesianism can be reasons, but there are a lot of other reasons that people deconvert, such as realizing that their holy texts are full of contradictions, or deciding the only reasonable interpretations of the texts are literalist ones which contradict the physical evidence.
That's all true. My statement was intended to apply only to those people who have had "religious experiences" and are convinced because of those. In general, people become convinced of religious beliefs for a variety of reasons, and similarly can become unconvinced for a variety of reasons.
Occam's Razor has never even been a factor in my turning: I was never looking for "the simplest theory", only "the most consistent theory". It is religion's inconsistencies and predictive uselessness that did the trick for me. Perhaps Occam is implicit in that?
Consistency and predictive ability are also important for beliefs, and recognizing that religion lacks them may help turn away someone who is already feeling unsteadiness. The people about whom I'm talking are those who are absolutely convinced of their beliefs by subjective experiences (because, in my experience, these are the most difficult people against whom to argue). We can't deny the fact of the experience, but we can deny the explanation it is claimed to support.