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elharo comments on What Bayesianism taught me - Less Wrong
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I don't think it is. If Zeus really had eaten the homework, I wouldn't expect it to be reported in those terms. Some stories are evidence against their own truth -- if the truth were as the story says, that story would not have been told, or not in that way. (Fictionally, there's a Father Brown story hinging on that.)
And even if it theoretically pointed in the right direction, it is so weak as to be worthless. To say, "ah, but P(A|B)>P(A)!" is not to any practical point. It is like saying that a white wall is evidence for all crows being black. A white wall is also evidence, in that sense, for all crows being magenta, for the moon being made of green cheese, for every sparrow falling being observed by God, and for no sparrow falling being observed by God. Calling this "evidence" is like picking up from the sidewalk, not even pennies, but bottle tops.
Yes, in a world in which Zeus existed, people would not proclaim the importance of faith in Zeus, anymore than they proclaim the importance of faith in elephants or automobiles. Everyone would just accept that they exist.
I don't know: consider the classic cargo cult. It proclaims the importance of faith in airplanes.
Or consider Christianity: people who fully believe in Jesus Christ (=from their point of view they live in the world in which Jesus exists) tend to proclaim the importance of faith in Jesus.
Yes, that's the point - people don't tend to proclaim the importance of faith in things that actually exist. You won't hear them say "have faith in the existence of tables" or "have faith in the existence of chairs".
I would suspect that this is because a) everybody believes in tables and chairs (with the exception of a few very strange people, who are probably easy enough to spot), and b) nobody (again with a few odd exceptions) believes in any sort of doctrine or plan of action for chair-and-table-believers, so faith doesn't have many consequences (except for having somewhere to sit and place things on).
We, on the other hand, proclaim the importance of confidence in rational thought, for the same reasons that theists proclaim the importance of belief in their god: it is a belief which is not universal in the population, and it is a belief which we expect to have important consequences and prescriptions for action.