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

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

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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: Alex_Altair 20 January 2011 02:45:43AM 5 points [-]

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?

I suppose that their ratio is very high, but that their difference is still extremely small.

As for your evidence that there is a god, I think you're making some fundamentally baseless assumptions about how the universe should be "expected" to be. The universe is the given. We should not expect it to be disordered any more than we should expect it to be ordered. And I'd say that the uninteresting things in the universe vastly outnumber the interesting things, whereas for humans they do not.

Also, I must mention the anthropic principle. A universe with humans much be sufficiently interesting to cause humans in the first place.

But I do agree that many honest rational people, even without the bias of existent religion, would at least notice the analogy between the order humans create and the universe itself, and form the wild but neat hypothesis that it was created by an agent. I'm not sure if that analogy is really evidence, anymore than the ability of a person to visualize anything is evidence for it.

Comment author: Jack 20 January 2011 07:47:42PM 1 point [-]

We should not expect it to be disordered any more than we should expect it to be ordered.

You can't just not have a prior. There is certainly no reason to assume the the universe as we have found has the default entropy. And we actually have tools that allow us to estimate this stuff- the complexity of the universe we find ourselves in is dependent on a very narrow range values in our physics. Yes I'm making the fine-tuning argument and of course knowing this stuff should increase our p estimate for theism. That doesn't mean P(Jehovah) is anything but minuscule-- the prior for an uncreated, omnipotent, omniscient and omni-benevolent God is too low for any of this to justify confident theism.