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paper-machine comments on Open Thread, May 1-14, 2013 - Less Wrong
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The 2012 survey showed something around 10% non-atheist, non-agnostic.
From most plausible to least plausible:
It's possible to formulate something like an argument that religious practice is good for neurotypical humans, in terms of increasing life expectancy, reducing stress, and so on.
Monocultures tend to do better than populations with mixed cultural heritage, and one could argue that some religions do very well at creating monocultures where none previously existed, e.g., the mormons, or perhaps the Catholic Church circa 1800 in the states.
I've heard some reports that religious affiliation is good for one's dating pool.
See, but these are only arguments that religion is useful. Rationalists on this site say that religion is most definitely false, even if it's useful; are there any rational thinkers out there who actually think that religion could realistically be true? I think that's a much harder question that whether or not it's good for us.
Yes.
This is great, thanks. I know there must be people out there, but I'm not entirely convinced most atheists ever bother to actually consider a real possibility of God.
I no longer have any idea what evidence would convince you otherwise.
Rationalists who take religion seriously, for instance.
Take seriously in what sense?
For instance, I spent about six years seriously studying up on religions and theology, because I figured that if there were any sort of supreme being concerned with the actions of humankind, that would be one of the most important facts I could possibly know. So in that sense, I take religion very seriously. But in the sense of believing that any religion has a non-negligible chance of accurately describing reality, I don't take it seriously at all, because I feel that the weight of evidence is overwhelmingly against that being the case.
What sense of "taking religion seriously" are you looking for examples of?
That's what I mean—a non-negligible chance. If your estimation of the likelihood of God is negligible, then it may as well be zero. I don't think that there is an overwhelming weight of evidence toward either case, and I don't think this is something that science can resolve.
This doesn't follow. For example, if you recite to me a 17 million digit number, my estimate that it is a prime is about 1 in a million by the prime number theorem. But, if I then find out that the number was in fact 2^57,885,161 -1, my estimate for it being prime goes up by a lot. So one can assign very small probabilities to things and still update strongly on evidence.
Why not?
So, you're saying that in your view no atheist could possibly take the question of the truth of religion seriously? Or, alternately, that one could be an atheist but still give a large probability of God's existence? Both of these seem a bit bizarre...
See my first comment in this thread. There's a 10% minority that takes religion seriously. Presumably some of them consider themselves rationalists, or else they wouldn't bother responding to the survey.