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Will_Newsome comments on How confident is your atheism? - Less Wrong
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I am thiiiiiiiiis confident!
(Holds arms wide, then accepts any well-specified bet as if the actual probability of Christianity were zero, i.e., with betting prices corresponding to the probability of the specified evidence being observed, given the fixed assumption that Christianity is false.)
I'm surprised to see this dialogue make so little mention of the material evidence* at hand with regards to the specific claims of Christianity. I mean; a god which was omnipotent and omnibenevolent would surely create a world with less suffering for humanity than what we conjecture an FAI would orchestrate, yes? Color me old-fashioned but I assign the logically** impossible a zero probability (barring of course my being mistaken about logical impossibilities).
* s/s//** s/v/c/See Plantinga's free will defense for human and the variant for natural evils; it defuses the logical argument from evil. (Of course it does this by postulating 'free will', whatever that is, but I don't think free will is nearly as clear cut a p=~0 as the existence of evils...)
There are other arguments too, that I haven't seen made in the theology literature. Like, God instantiated all possible universes with net positive utility, because that's more utility than just instantiating the universe with the most utility. This is an extremely basic idea, I really don't know why I haven't seen it before.
I've seen this argument but didn't manage to find the paper. It goes further: imagine that the space of possible universes looks like a sphere in R^n centered at the origin and one axis represents a utility function that encodes God's preferences about whether a universe should exist(1) or not and the 0 on the axis is just where God's preferences switch from "would rather exist than not" to "would rather not exist"(2). Then the vast majority of universes that God instantiates are just barely worth existing, and you should expect to find yourself in a universe where the problem of evil is not resolved by "actually things are pretty great, good job God!" or by "we live in a hell dimension, God is the worst".
(1) Assume "should exist" makes sense. I realize none of us knows what this means.
(2) Luckily? For an underlying reason? Anyway it's one plausible shape, more likely than any specific squiggly blob, and the argument works for lots of other shapes like a cone with its point in the +util direction.
I've seen that before; somewhere in Luke's collection of papers dealing with the FWD.
Okay, that's good to know.
It's only somewhat related, but do you know of any good rebuttals to Plantinga's evolutionary argument against naturalism? I find his argument really quite clever. I couldn't immediately think up a refutation, but I haven't looked at the literature.
It's been a while since I was reading about it, but my reaction was bullet-biting: "Sure. Does anyone actually think our faculties are perfectly reliable? I sure don't, and I'd nominate religion itself as a perfect example of how evolution-molded psychologies can go horribly epistemologically wrong."
What exactly is the "net positive utility"? Where exactly is the zero? For example if we assume that existing is always better than not existing, then all existing universes automatically have net positive utility.
If we assume a Christian model where people will get most of their utility in afterlife, this model would put a limit on Heaven : Hell population ratio. The exact numbers would depend on how many people in Heaven plus how many people in Hell give a total zero utility. For example assuming that positive utility of one person in Heaven is greater in absolute value than negative utility of all people in Hell, this model would say that all worlds where at least one person gets to Heaven will be instantiated. Assuming this, the exceptionality of Jesus in our universe is an evidence for all other people going to Hell.
(Just joking. With proper definitions and priors you can prove anything.)
An omnipotent omnibenevolent being would have no need for such "shorthand" tricks to create infinite worlds without suffering. Yes you could always raise another aleph level for greater infinities; but only by introducing suffering at all.
Which violates omnibenevolence.