Will_Newsome 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: Will_Newsome 19 June 2012 01:36:28AM 7 points [-]

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.

Comment author: gwern 19 June 2012 01:44:48AM 2 points [-]

I've seen that before; somewhere in Luke's collection of papers dealing with the FWD.

Comment author: Will_Newsome 19 June 2012 01:54:10AM 2 points [-]

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.

Comment author: gwern 19 June 2012 02:01:30AM 4 points [-]

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."