You're looking at Less Wrong's discussion board. This includes all posts, including those that haven't been promoted to the front page yet. For more information, see About Less Wrong.

badger comments on The elephant in the room, AMA - Less Wrong Discussion

22 Post author: calcsam 12 May 2011 02:59PM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (428)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: badger 15 May 2011 05:32:32AM *  2 points [-]

In particular, I'm saying Pr(calcsam experiences warm feelings after reading the Book of Mormon | LDS church is true, social interaction with members) > Pr(warm, glowy feelings | LDS church is false, social interaction with members).

I agree that it's really difficult to say exactly what these probabilities are. If you forced me to assign numbers, I would assign something close to 1 for the former and .1-.8 for the latter. To be valid, these should really be the result of probability flows through an entire network of beliefs, but I think the direction of the inequality is apparent. I agree that spiritual experiences for different religions will tend to offset one another. Whether these in total constitute net positive or negative evidence for a god in general depends of your prior about how these experiences are distributed. Based on my interpretation of LDS doctrine, many non-LDS individuals would feel the spirit, even during non-LDS services, just not as strongly.

In any other forum but this one, I wouldn't go around saying this is evidence, but it is, if only weakly.