In other words, little to no practical difference from what we live in.
.. No. If our universe were optimized for maximal faith in Christianity, there would be no Christians other than you, much more conclusive empirical evidence (e.g., impossible-to-fake video footage) showing that Jesus did not rise from the dead, etc., and your brain would just come pre-wired to believe in Jesus with equal and maximal confidence no matter what evidence you encountered. Basically your brain would just be a circuit that chants 'JESUS IS LORD', associated with a strong conviction-feeling, and seeks out and absorbs as much Christianity-refuting evidence as possible, without having any mechanism for modifying the 'JESUS IS LORD' conviction pump in your brain.
If built-in beliefs aren't allowed, then the second best step would be to literally torture you -- like, you've never lived a day of your life without undergoing something roughly as unpleasant as scaphism -- until you're driven literally insane and can do nothing but grind your teeth and gibber endlessly about Jesus being lord. That's much, much closer to what a universe optimized for faith (and faith alone) would look like. We aren't literally in such a universe; any comparison of your own day-to-day existence to actual torture must suggest either a loose grasp on the English language, or a fundamental misunderstanding of just what real torture is like.
Certainly vague, hand-wavey threats are not optimizing for unjustified-belief. Threats can't drive most people past the brink of madness, arguably can't inspire belief at all. Try waving a gun around and threatening to kill someone, or kill eir family, if ey doesn't spontaneously believe that the Moon is made of green cheese. The person might claim to believe the Moon is made of green cheese, but they wouldn't actually believe.
otherwise people who believed in a God that values faith would be constantly surprised by the world we live in
That's not how human belief works. Humans do not automatically notice their confusion in all instances, nor do they automatically form internally consistent belief structures without putting any work into it. 'Person X believes strongly in Y' does not in general suggest 'the evidence available to person X is overwhelmingly predicted by the truth of Y'.
Note that if someone who believes in a God that values faith, claims to have found strong objective evidence for the existence of their God, they're coincidentally also claiming to have found strong evidence that said god doesn't value faith
Doesn't this apply to you? You just claimed to have strong evidence that your God's existence predicts the empirical world approximately as well as your God's nonexistence does. But a God who actually valued faith would make sure that his hypothesis seemed to do a worse job of predicting the world, so that more faith was required to accept him. Every time you refute one of my arguments, your faith weakens.
Doesn't this strike you as a slightly odd obsession for a creator-of-everything? Self-deception and bad arguments, as ends in themselves? It at least strikes me as odd.
Doesn't this apply to you? You just claimed to have strong evidence that your God's existence predicts the empirical world approximately as well as your God's nonexistence does.
Yes, but I didn't claim it as evidence of anything other than that such belief isn't particularly maladaptive (consequenceless beliefs won't interfere with your predictive power). If it helps you understand my point, P(the world we live in | invisible unicorns in a far away galaxy fart rainbows) is also very high, which is not at all an argument in favor of invisible unicorns (on...
In “What is Evidence?” I wrote:1
Cihan Baran replied:2
I admit, I cannot conceive of a “situation” that would make 2 + 2 = 4 false. (There are redefinitions, but those are not “situations,” and then you’re no longer talking about 2, 4, =, or +.) But that doesn’t make my belief unconditional. I find it quite easy to imagine a situation which would convince me that 2 + 2 = 3.
Suppose I got up one morning, and took out two earplugs, and set them down next to two other earplugs on my nighttable, and noticed that there were now three earplugs, without any earplugs having appeared or disappeared—in contrast to my stored memory that 2 + 2 was supposed to equal 4. Moreover, when I visualized the process in my own mind, it seemed that making xx and xx come out to xxxx required an extra x to appear from nowhere, and was, moreover, inconsistent with other arithmetic I visualized, since subtracting xx from xxx left xx, but subtracting xx from xxxx left xxx. This would conflict with my stored memory that 3 - 2 = 1, but memory would be absurd in the face of physical and mental confirmation that xxx - xx = xx.
I would also check a pocket calculator, Google, and perhaps my copy of 1984 where Winston writes that “Freedom is the freedom to say two plus two equals three.” All of these would naturally show that the rest of the world agreed with my current visualization, and disagreed with my memory, that 2 + 2 = 3.
How could I possibly have ever been so deluded as to believe that 2 + 2 = 4? Two explanations would come to mind: First, a neurological fault (possibly caused by a sneeze) had made all the additive sums in my stored memory go up by one. Second, someone was messing with me, by hypnosis or by my being a computer simulation. In the second case, I would think it more likely that they had messed with my arithmetic recall than that 2 + 2 actually equalled 4. Neither of these plausible-sounding explanations would prevent me from noticing that I was very, very, very confused.3
What would convince me that 2 + 2 = 3, in other words, is exactly the same kind of evidence that currently convinces me that 2 + 2 = 4: The evidential crossfire of physical observation, mental visualization, and social agreement.
There was a time when I had no idea that 2 + 2 = 4. I did not arrive at this new belief by random processes—then there would have been no particular reason for my brain to end up storing “2 + 2 = 4” instead of “2 + 2 = 7.” The fact that my brain stores an answer surprisingly similar to what happens when I lay down two earplugs alongside two earplugs, calls forth an explanation of what entanglement produces this strange mirroring of mind and reality.
There’s really only two possibilities, for a belief of fact—either the belief got there via a mind-reality entangling process, or not. If not, the belief can’t be correct except by coincidence. For beliefs with the slightest shred of internal complexity (requiring a computer program of more than 10 bits to simulate), the space of possibilities is large enough that coincidence vanishes.4
Unconditional facts are not the same as unconditional beliefs. If entangled evidence convinces me that a fact is unconditional, this doesn’t mean I always believed in the fact without need of entangled evidence.
I believe that 2 + 2 = 4, and I find it quite easy to conceive of a situation which would convince me that 2 + 2 = 3. Namely, the same sort of situation that currently convinces me that 2 + 2 = 4. Thus I do not fear that I am a victim of blind faith.5
1See Map and Territory.
2Comment: http://lesswrong.com/lw/jl/what_is_evidence/f7h.
3See “Your Strength as a Rationalist” in Map and Territory.
4For more on belief formation and beliefs of fact, see “Feeling Rational” and “What Is Evidence?” in Map and Territory. For more on belief complexity, see “Occam’s Razor” in the same volume.
5If there are any Christians reading this who know Bayes’s Theorem, might I inquire of you what situation would convince you of the truth of Islam? Presumably it would be the same sort of situation causally responsible for producing your current belief in Christianity: We would push you screaming out of the uterus of a Muslim woman, and have you raised by Muslim parents who continually told you that it is good to believe unconditionally in Islam.
Or is there more to it than that? If so, what situation would convince you of Islam, or at least, non-Christianity? And how confident are you that the general kinds of evidence and reasoning you appeal to would have been enough to dissuade you of your religion if you had been raised a Muslim?