I do not expect this theory to last, or even be true, but it has the highest probability of being correct.
Quoth Anna: "If you can predict what you'll believe a few years from now, consider believing that already." If you have evidence that future evidence will require you to adjust your belief in a particular direction, then according to the laws of probability theory, you have evidence on which you're failing to update your current belief.
Anyway, aside from that in particular, you're pretty confused about several things, and I'm wondering if you've read "A Technical Explanation of Technical Explanation" and the sequences "Mysterious Answers to Mysterious Questions" and "Reductionism)".
Stress on the particular direction. Expecting to change, but not any particular direction just calls for lowering confidence. But this is just a quibble about the phrasing. As applied here, it does actually work.
I would like to argue that there could be a more tolerant view of religion/theism here on Less Wrong. The extent to which theism is vilified here seems disproportionate to me.
It depends on the specific scenario how terrible religion is. It is easy to look at the very worst examples of religion and conclude that religion can be irrational in a terribly wrong way. However, religion can also be nearly rational. Considering that any way we view the world is an illusion to some extent. Indeed the whole point of this site is to learn ways to shed more of our illusions, not that we have no illusions.
There are the religious beliefs that contradict empirical observation and those that are independent of it...
A) Could it be rational for a person to hold beliefs that are independent of empirical observation if (a) the person concedes that they are
irrationalnot empirically based and (b) is willing to drop them if they prove to not be useful?B) Could it be rational for a person to hold unusual beliefs as a result of contradicting empirical observations?
As a least convenient world exercise, what is the most rational belief in God that you can think of?