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Desrtopa comments on Open Thread, May 1-14, 2013 - Less Wrong
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That's a salient difference if his involvement is providing us with evidence, but not if it isn't.
Suppose we posit that gravitational attraction is caused by invisible gravity elves, which pull masses towards each other. They'd be inextricably tied up in every part of our existence. But absent any evidence favoring the hypothesis, why should we suspect they're causing the phenomenon we observe as gravity? In order for it to make sense for us to suspect gravity elves, we need evidence to favor gravity elves over everything else that could be causing gravity.
I suppose it's fair to say that if our universe was created by a clockmaker God who didn't interfere with our world, then it wouldn't matter to us whether or not He existed. But since there's a lot of reason to think that God does interact with us humans (like, transcripts of His conversations with them), then it does matter.
Well, I'm willing to discuss the evidence for and against that proposition. Naturally, I would not be an atheist if I thought the weight of evidence was in favor of an interventionist god existing.
Naturally. But there have been a lot of debates about which way the evidence points, and none of them seem to have convinced anyone.
Some of them have certainly convinced people. I've convinced a number of people myself, and I've known plenty of other people who were convinced by debates with other people (or even more often, by observing debates between other people, since it's easier to change your mind when you're not locked in an adversarial debate mindset. This is why it's important not to fall into the trap of thinking of your debate partner as an opponent.)
A lot of religious debates are not productive, people tend to go into them very attached to their conclusions, but they're by no means uniformly fruitless.
I like debates a lot, and I've very much enjoyed whatever you call this here. But I'm not interested in a full-blown debate here and now, especially since there are about five of you.
We don't actually have any idea what causes gravity. Your elves may well be Higgs Bosons or something like that. (God Particles...)
So no, we don't have any evidence that "elves" of some kind cause gravity, or that anything at all does. And so the question is open—we don't suspect anything, but we don't particularly suspect nothing either.
It's rather disingenuous to speak of the Higgs Boson as gravity elves though.
With gravity, we're not really in a state of no evidence, because as I said before, if you have an effective predictive model, then you have evidence for the things the model predicts. So we have evidence favoring things that could plausibly fit into our existing models over things that couldn't.
If we're discussing, for instance, what caused the universe to come into existence, and it turns out that there is a first cause, but it has nothing that could be described as thoughts or intentions, then it doesn't save the god hypothesis to say that something was there, because what was there doesn't resemble anything that it's useful to conceive of as god.