Most people believe that it is impossible to travel faster than light, although they don't understand why that is and it is all very abstract to them. I speculate that this might be connected with the fact that it is impossible to travel faster than light.
This is too opaque for me to understand. What is the moral of that comment?
Religion apparently makes people happier. Is that evidence for the truth of religion, or against it?
(Of course, it matters which religion we're talking about, but let's just stick with theism generally.)
My initial inclination was to interpret this as evidence against theism, in the sense that it weakens the evidence for theism. Here's why:
We could also put this in mathematical terms, where F represents an increase in the prior probability of our encountering the evidence. Since that prior is a denominator in Bayes' equation, a bigger one means a smaller posterior probability--in other words, weaker evidence.
OK, so that was my first thought.
But then I had second thoughts: Perhaps the evidence points the other way? If we reframe the finding as "Atheism causes unhappiness," or posit that contrarians (such as atheists) are dispositionally unhappy, does that change the sign of the evidence?
Obviously, I am confused. What's going on here?