army1987 comments on Religion's Claim to be Non-Disprovable - Less Wrong

124 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 04 August 2007 03:21AM

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Comment author: Bugmaster 08 February 2012 02:26:28AM 0 points [-]

...it is almost as certainly true, on Bayesian grounds, that belief in resurrection as a function of the power of a super-natural God is not a rejection of science.

I believe that it is. Either an incredibly powerful agent such as the one described in the Bible exists and acts upon the world, or he doesn't. If he exists, and if he pops in from time to time to perform miracles, then we should see some evidence of him doing that. If we did, then science as we know it would not work, because we'd have no predictable natural laws against which to run our tests. Science does appear to work, however, which means that either gods do not exist, or they do exist but aren't actually doing anything, which is no better than not existing at all.

Comment author: [deleted] 08 February 2012 11:24:57AM *  2 points [-]

If he exists, and if he pops in from time to time to perform miracles, then we should see some evidence of him doing that.

Well, unless from time to time means “once every couple of millennia”... (Though Occam's razor says you should assign a very small prior to that.)

Comment author: Bugmaster 08 February 2012 11:29:30PM 0 points [-]

Right. As the miracle events become more and more rare, our probability estimate of their existence becomes lower and lower -- in the absence of some direct evidence, that is. This is why we believe in meteorite impacts, but not in resurrections.