Desrtopa comments on Questions on Theism - Less Wrong
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First of all, congratulations! These kinds of questions are extremely challenging to even ask from within certain philosophical frameworks, and the fact that you're here at all means that you've accomplished something exceptional. Further, by using the question of miracles specifically, you've focused on empirical, testable claims with verifiable consequences. The epistemology that you're associating with atheism or agnosticism is fundamentally the ability to ask exactly these questions, the habit of doing so reflexively, and the willingness to follow those questions to real answers.
The basic Bayesian response to the question of miracles isn't just "are they lying, or is there a God?" Ask the question a different way: in a hypothetical universe in which Christianity is false, how many claims of miraculous events do we expect? In a hypothetical universe in which Christianity is true, how many true (and false!) claims of miraculous intervention do we expect? Do we expect a difference in the kind of miracles that are claimed to occur? For example, we experience people claiming that God cured infertility or cancer, but never people claiming that God cured their amputation. It's an interesting discrepancy, and which universe is that most consistent with? Etc. Don't think about it in terms of picking apart each individual claim. Just ask yourself about an interventionist God in terms of your honest expectations for such a God, and consider the world-as-it-is in comparison. Use the miraculous as a prediction that can succeed or fail, rather than simply as an explanation that is immune to correction.
The main prediction that comes to mind is that if Christianity is true, one would expect substantially more miracle claims by Christians (legitimate claims plus false ones) than by any other religion (false claims only). If it is false, one would expect similar miracle claims by most religions that believe in them. Does anyone have data on this one way or the other?
Only anecdotal, but it's hard to get good hard data on this because it would require collecting data in so many different languages.
You might be able to get better data by narrowing the field somewhat. For instance, by looking at the comparison in reported miracles between Mormons and conventional Christians (I recall from an earlier discussion on the topic here that Mormons reported a higher rate of answered prayers than any Christian denomination, except possibly devout Pentecostalists depending on how the measurement was taken.)
Interesting. Mormons getting answered prayers wouldn't be too surprising-they aren't conventional Christians, but they're trying to pray to the same God-maybe it works? Getting higher rates of answers is unexpected though.
Mormons tend to be more committed, so that could explain the higher rate of answers, assuming it is real.
I don't think this requires an assumption that it's real at all; a higher level of commitment could very easily lead people to be more lax in their standards for whether a prayer has been "answered," if we're looking at it in psychological rather than supernatural terms.