shminux comments on How confident is your atheism? - Less Wrong

12 Post author: r_claypool 14 June 2012 08:18PM

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Comment author: r_claypool 15 June 2012 04:52:06AM 0 points [-]

Do you (r_claypool) have reason to suspect that Christianity is much more likely to be true than other, (almost-) mutually exclusive supernatural worldviews like, say, Old Norse Paganism?

No, I've read way more Christian apologetics than I care to admit, and the basic tenants of the Bible like -- "God could find no better way to forgive humans than to have one tortured on a cross" -- are no more substantiated by apologists than whatever is part of Old Norse Paganism.

If not, then 5% for Christianity is absurdly high.

But it still doesn't feel absurdly high.

Comment author: shminux 15 June 2012 05:13:09PM *  2 points [-]

Have you tried tracing your reasoning that leads to this feeling, step-by-step, and see which step bumps the odds to 5%? For a programmer, the analogy would be "the output of this code is 5%, which is suspiciously high, let's trace the program with a debugger and see which instruction is responsible". More often than not, you find that there is a path through your code that you haven't thought of before, or a step that seemed innocuous enough has a different effect from what you expected. Another standard technique is to work backwards from the final answer and see where it comes from.