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hairyfigment comments on How confident is your atheism? - Less Wrong Discussion

12 Post author: r_claypool 14 June 2012 08:18PM

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Comment author: hairyfigment 15 June 2012 02:12:32AM *  -1 points [-]

Other people have pointed out the problems with singling out Christianity and ignoring a lot of disjoint possibilities. As to your question, someone on another site named a level of evidence that feels like it would make me consider deities as explanations. Representatives of a deity (or the deity itself) would need to publicly create specimens of a species believed extinct. They would need skeptical observers, well-versed in stage magic, to declare themselves baffled. And then they'd have to hand the specimens over to skeptical biologists for another kind of confirmation. This level of evidence feels like it would bring my belief in some deity's existence to more than 1%. (ETA: but see the dream thread.)

Now for "the chance that Jesus of Nazareth is a resurrected God", it would take all that plus additional evidence on the level of the following: Christians moving mountains through faith alone, plus a persuasive-sounding explanation of why I haven't observed this happening before. That seems like it would bring my credence above 1%. Though now that I've written this, .01 feels possibly too high to be internally consistent.