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lessdazed comments on A Rationalist's Tale - Less Wrong
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E.g. this is what most theism actually looks like: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/divine-simplicity/ . A lot of it is simply hypotheses about attractors for superintelligences and the Platonic algorithms that they embody. Trust me, I am not just being syncretic.
Please make a claim. Are you saying that if one were to take a proxy for quality like citations to papers/capita of religious studies branches of universities, or the top theological seminaries attached to the most competitive Ivy League Schools, or similar, you are 95% confident that at least 70% of the theist professors believe something like this?
Or is it a stronger claim? With 50% confidence, what percentage of counties and county-equivalents in the United States have most self-identified theists or spiritualists or whatever believing something like this? 50%? 10%?
In what percentage are there at least ten such people?
I don't see how that is the claim at issue. Most people are incompetent. That tells us little about what theism is. How would knowing the answer tell us anything useful about whether or not theism itself is or isn't a tenable philosophical position? I really dislike focusing on individual people, I'd rather look at memes. Can I guess at how many of the SEP's articles on theism are not-obviously-insane and not just if-a-tree-falls debates? I think that question is much more interesting and informative. I'd say... like, 30%.
Why call it "theism"?
That's what the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy calls it. Most biologists are mediocre at biology (many are creationists, God forbid!); that doesn't mean we should call the thing that good biologists do by some other name. (If this is a poor analogy I don't immediately see how, but it does have the aura of an overly leaky analogy.) If you asked "why reason in terms of theism instead of decision theory?" then I'd say "well we should obviously reason in terms of decision theory; I'd just prefer we not have undue contempt for an interesting memeplex that we're not yet very familiar with".
Biology is the repository of probable information left over after putting data and experiments through the sieve of peer review (the process is also "biology"). The more important ideas get parsed more. Mediocre enough biologists don't add to biology.
Theology starts with a belief system and is the remnants that by their own lights theologians have not discarded. The process of discarding is also called theology. Unsophisticated people are likely to fail to see what is wrong with more of the original belief set than sophisticated ones, they don't add to showing what is wrong with the belief pile. It isn't a crazy analogy, but it's not quite symmetrical.
To call this theism says more about the language than the beliefs you describe. Is the word closest in idea-space to this memeplex theism? OK, maybe, but it could have been "hunger for waffles and other, lesser breakfast foods" with a few adjustments to the history without adjusting anything at all about the ideas. These beliefs didn't originate as the unfalsifiable part of an arbitrary cult focused on breakfast, as it happens.
it's interesting as the least easy to falsify, arguably unfalsifiable core of motivated, unjustified belief. It's not interesting as something at all likely to be true.