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Desrtopa comments on Open Thread, May 1-14, 2013 - Less Wrong
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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...