steven0461 comments on Theists are wrong; is theism? - Less Wrong

5 Post author: Will_Newsome 20 January 2011 12:18AM

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Tags: antitheism atheism contrarianism philosophy religion singularity

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Comment author: Will_Newsome 20 January 2011 01:54:08AM 8 points [-]

The only fact necessary to rationally be an atheist is that there is no evidence for a god. We don't need any arguments -- evolutionary or historical or logical -- against a hypothesis with no evidence.

I contend that there is evidence for a god. Observation: Things tend to have causes. Observation: Agenty things are better at causing interesting things than non-agenty things. Observation: We find ourselves in a very interesting universe.

Those considerations are Bayesian evidence. The fact that many, many smart people have been theistic is Bayesian evidence. So now you have to start listing the evidence for the alternate hypothesis, no?

The reason I don't spend a cent of my time on it is because of this, and because all arguments for a god are dishonest, that is, they are motivated by something other than truth.

Do you mean all arguments on Christian internet fora, or what? There's a vast amount of theology written by people dedicated to finding truth. They might not be good at finding truth, but it is nonetheless what is motivating them.

I should really write a post on the principle of charity...

It's only slightly more interesting than the hypothesis that there's a teapot around venus.

I realize this is rhetoric, but still... seriously? The question of whether the universe came into being via an agenty optimization process is only slightly more interesting than teapots orbiting planets?

As a side note, I have spent time on learning about the issue, because it's one of the most damaging beliefs people have, and any decrease in it is valuable.

I agree that theism tends to be a very damaging belief in many contexts, and I think it is good that you are fighting against its more insipid/irrational forms.

Comment author: steven0461 20 January 2011 02:15:15AM 3 points [-]

We find ourselves in a very interesting universe.

Some of it anyway.

Comment author: Will_Newsome 20 January 2011 02:17:40AM -1 points [-]

Isn't it interesting how there's so much raw material that the interesting things can use to make more interesting things?

Comment author: [deleted] 24 January 2011 04:26:51AM 3 points [-]

Really? Your explanation for why there's lots of stuff is that an incredibly powerful benevolent agent made it that way? What does that explanation buy you over just saying that there's lots of stuff?

Comment author: DSimon 23 January 2011 09:28:16PM 2 points [-]

Again, some of it. The vast vast majority of raw material in the universe is not used, and has never been used, for making interesting things.

Comment author: Will_Newsome 24 January 2011 04:25:43PM 1 point [-]

Why are you ignoring the future?

Comment author: Perplexed 26 January 2011 11:36:16PM 3 points [-]

Back when I used to hang around over at talk.origins, one of the scientist/atheists there seemed to think that the sheer size of the universe was the best argument against the theist idea of a universe created for man. He thought it absurd that a dramatic production starring H. sapiens would have such a large budget for stage decoration and backdrops when it begins with such a small budget for costumes - at least in the first act.

Your apparent argument is that a big universe is evidence that Someone has big plans for us. The outstanding merit of your suggestion, to my mind, is that his argument and your anti-argument, if brought into contact, will mutually annihilate leaving nothing but a puff of smoke.

Comment author: DSimon 26 January 2011 01:13:45PM 0 points [-]

Are you proposing that in the future we will necessarily end up using some large proportion of the universe's material for making interesting things? I mean, I agree that that's possible, but it hardly seems inevitable.

Comment author: timtyler 27 January 2011 09:30:36AM *  2 points [-]

I think that is more-or-less the idea, yes - though you can drop the "necessarily ".

Don't judge the play by the first few seconds.

Comment author: DSimon 28 January 2011 01:49:00PM *  2 points [-]

The reason I put in "necessarily" is because it seems like Will Newsome's anthropic argument requires that the universe was designed specifically for interesting stuff to happen. If it's not close to inevitable, why didn't the designer do a better job?

Comment author: timtyler 28 January 2011 09:36:43PM *  2 points [-]

Maybe there's no designer. Will doesn't say he's 100% certain - just that he thinks interestingness is "Bayesian evidence" for a designer.

I think this is a fairly common sentiment - e.g. see Hanson.

Comment author: Will_Newsome 29 January 2011 01:21:45AM 0 points [-]

Necessarily? Er... no. But I find the arguments for a decent chance of a technological singularity to be pretty persuasive. This isn't much evidence in favor of us being primarily computed by other mind-like processes (as opposed to getting most of our reality fluid from some intuitively simpler more physics-like computation in the universal prior specification), but it's something. Especially so if a speed prior is a more realistic approximation of optimal induction over really large hypothesis spaces than a universal prior is, which I hope is true since I think it'd be annoying to have to get our decision theories to be able to reason about hypercomputation...

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