There was no evidence of black swans, until there was.
To many people there is evidence of God, it's just that to others that evidence is (via Occam's razor or other tools) evidence of the vastness of the universe, evolutionary adaptions, the big bang, spontaneous remission etc.
I don't have the tools to evaluate many of their arguments, and at my age i'm fairly certain (not due to age, but due to my track record where advanced math and such is concerned as well as other interests and commitments) that will not be able to acquire the skills and knowledge to evaluate them.
In many of my social and professional activities I have to rub elbows with folks who are of varying degrees of religious, and it makes my life more interesting if I can listen to them with the possibility, however faint that they are right.
Why does this bother you so?
In many of my social and professional activities I have to rub elbows with folks who are of varying degrees of religious, and it makes my life more interesting if I can listen to them with the possibility, however faint that they are right.
A good bayesian will always assign a small chance that anyone is right, even the homeless guy down the street claiming that the aliens are living in the sewers and stealing our nuclear energy. That doesn't mean it is likely. Moreover, how interesting it is to temporarily entertain a claim has nothing to do with how li...
"Religious Belief Systems of Persons with High Functioning Autism":
Caldwell-Harris et al 2011.
Mostly as one would expect, although I am troubled that the second survey did not find any difference in agnostics, only the other categories.
See also: "How to be deader than dead".