I'd assign around a 5% chance that there exists something approximating God (using this liberally to include the large variety of entities which fall under that label).
Interesting. I'd assign high probability to there being a Creator computing roughly 'this' part of spacetime, a high probability to it being omniscient and omnipotent, a fair probability to it being omnibenevolent, and a low probability to it being 'personal' in the Christian sense (maybe 5%, but this is liable to change a ton when I think about it more and get a better sense of what a personal God is).
I also think it's unlikely that Christ was the memetic son of God (genetic son of Joseph), though not terribly unlikely. Not less than .1%, probably more. I think it is likely that Christ died for our sins given my interpretation of those words, which may be entirely unlike what Christians mean. (I mean something like Christ set it up such that we're more likely to have a positive singularity, though this is very disputable, and I'm mostly following that line of reasoning because meta-contrarianism is fun.) I think it's unlikely that Christ was able to cast resurrection on himself, but I agree with Yvain that it's odd that the resurrection myth spread so far and so fast. User:Kevin tells me that Christianity was largely a cannabis cult, and weed in large doses is a hallucinogen. This allegedly explains most of the perceived miracles in the Bible. For example, turning water into wine is no problem if you have a tincture of cannabis on hand.
Moreover, how much attention should we pay to apologetics in general?
Not much. We can come up with better apologetics than anyone else could, I think, if we put our minds to it. My theodicy tends to be more persuasive than any I find in apologetics. Which is funny, since it's largely inspired by Eliezer's fun theory plus a few insights from decision theory and cosmology.
So putting them in the same category as religion may be misleading.
I didn't mean to do so. Apparently the word 'theism' has lots of weird connotations I didn't intend to convey. (That said, I see value in many religions. Not all of it is the progeny of bad epistemology.)
Incidentally, I'm curious, would you similarly object if LW said explicitly that homeopathy was a closed subject? What about evolution? Star formation? If these are different, why are they different?
No, I would not object. Those have all made predictions and been tested. Theism/atheism is a Bayesian question, not a scientific one. Unfortunately it might be a (subjective?) Bayesian decision theory question, in which case it will never be fit for Less Wrong.
...a high probability to it being omniscient and omnipotent, a fair probability to it being omnibenevolent...
I realize this is a necromancer post, but I'm interested in your definitions of the above. How do you square up with some of the questions regarding:
I won't go on...
Many folk here on LW take the simulation argument (in its more general forms) seriously. Many others take Singularitarianism1 seriously. Still others take Tegmark cosmology (and related big universe hypotheses) seriously. But then I see them proceed to self-describe as atheist (instead of omnitheist, theist, deist, having a predictive distribution over states of religious belief, et cetera), and many tend to be overtly dismissive of theism. Is this signalling cultural affiliation, an attempt to communicate a point estimate, or what?
I am especially confused that the theism/atheism debate is considered a closed question on Less Wrong. Eliezer's reformulations of the Problem of Evil in terms of Fun Theory provided a fresh look at theodicy, but I do not find those arguments conclusive. A look at Luke Muehlhauser's blog surprised me; the arguments against theism are just not nearly as convincing as I'd been brought up to believe2, nor nearly convincing enough to cause what I saw as massive overconfidence on the part of most atheists, aspiring rationalists or no.
It may be that theism is in the class of hypotheses that we have yet to develop a strong enough practice of rationality to handle, even if the hypothesis has non-negligible probability given our best understanding of the evidence. We are becoming adept at wielding Occam's razor, but it may be that we are still too foolhardy to wield Solomonoff's lightsaber Tegmark's Black Blade of Disaster without chopping off our own arm. The literature on cognitive biases gives us every reason to believe we are poorly equipped to reason about infinite cosmology, decision theory, the motives of superintelligences, or our place in the universe.
Due to these considerations, it is unclear if we should go ahead doing the equivalent of philosoraptorizing amidst these poorly asked questions so far outside the realm of science. This is not the sort of domain where one should tread if one is feeling insecure in one's sanity, and it is possible that no one should tread here. Human philosophers are probably not as good at philosophy as hypothetical Friendly AI philosophers (though we've seen in the cases of decision theory and utility functions that not everything can be left for the AI to solve). I don't want to stress your epistemology too much, since it's not like your immortal soul3 matters very much. Does it?
Added: By theism I do not mean the hypothesis that Jehovah created the universe. (Well, mostly.) I am talking about the possibility of agenty processes in general creating this universe, as opposed to impersonal math-like processes like cosmological natural selection.
Added: The answer to the question raised by the post is "Yes, theism is wrong, and we don't have good words for the thing that looks a lot like theism but has less unfortunate connotations, but we do know that calling it theism would be stupid." As to whether this universe gets most of its reality fluid from agenty creators... perhaps we will come back to that argument on a day with less distracting terminology on the table.
1 Of either the 'AI-go-FOOM' or 'someday we'll be able to do lots of brain emulations' variety.
2 I was never a theist, and only recently began to question some old assumptions about the likelihood of various Creators. This perhaps either lends credibility to my interest, or lends credibility to the idea that I'm insane.
3 Or the set of things that would have been translated to Archimedes by the Chronophone as the equivalent of an immortal soul (id est, whatever concept ends up being actually significant).