A friend recently asked how strongly I believe that my deconversion from Christianity was not a mistake. Here's my response, and for those of you who are not Christians, I'm just wondering what numbers you would give:
"There is a part of me that wants to say the chance is far less than 1 percent. But when I consider what 1% must mean about my ability to follow complex arguments and base my judgement on the right premises, it seems absurd to say that.
Trying to honestly estimate the chance that I'm wrong about the Bible being generally reliable is a fascinating exercise... I know the number is low, but I'm not sure how low.
Today I would give myself a 1 in 20 chance of being wrong. If I were to consider the arguments of 20 other groups similar to Christian theologians, I would probably misunderstand them at least 1 time in 20. After talking with 20 groups that have a very different worldview, I might think they are all are mistaken, but once in a while, maybe 5% of the time, it would actually be me.
Wow, 5%!?! If I convert that into "There is a 5% probability that the God of the Bible exists and will send me to hell", I feel scared. But I know how to cheer myself up: I just say, "No way, the chance I'll end up in hell MUST be less than 5%. After all, the God of the Bible is CLEARLY just a big, mean alpha-monkey and... [rehearse all the atheistic arguments here]".
This back-and-forth from certainty to uncertainty makes me feel like I'm doing something seriously wrong.
So what about you? What chance do you place on some variant of Christianity turning up to be true, and what chance do you think a god of some sort exists?"
Numbers please.
No. The many worlds interpretation is still restricted by the laws of physics and the available quantum states of interacting wavefunctions. In many worlds, every possible thing happens given the above constraints (with the appropriate measure), but not every "nonzero" thing. There are plenty of "nonzero" things we can imagine that aren't actually possible. See Gell-Mann's principle: "Everything not forbidden is compulsory." (emphasis added)
Further, "true" in a simulation does not actually qualify as true for most religions, given their own stated claims. The conflation of the simulation argument with theism has been previously discussed at length on LW. See, e.g., this comment from the very large thread:
I never said it violated any laws of physics, but within a computer simulation you could easily have a simulated God with the power to change the simulation or people walking on water etc. That's exactly why I said "in simulation". Obviously even if MWI is true that does not makes universes with different laws real.
In a simulation you could also make it so that after a person "die" he ends up in a "heaven" or "hell". This is 100% inevitable in Many Worlds