Open Thread, May 1-14, 2013

If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post (even in Discussion), then it goes here.

Right, I don't see how there could be any evidence to convince a person to the point of a 0.0001 chance of God. And so when all of these people say that they've concluded that the chance of God is negligible, I think that they're subject to a strong cognitive bias worsened by the fact that they're supposed to be immune to those.

The problem is that you're not being consistent in your handling of unfalsifiable theories. A lot of what's been brought to the table are Russell's Teapot-type problems and other gods, but I think I can find one that's a bit more directly comparable. I'll present a theory that's entirely unfalsifiable, and has a fair amount of evidence supporting it. This theory is that your friends, family, and everyone you know are government agents sent to trick you for some unclear reason. It's a theory that would touch every aspect of your life, unlike a Russell's Tea... (read more)

7Prismattic13y

Two things that your perpsective appears to be missing here: 1) Lots of people here were raised in religious families; they didn't start out privileging atheism. (Or they aren't atheists per se; I'm agnostic between atheism and deism; it's just the anthropomorphic interventionist deity I reject.) 2) You aren't the first believer to come here and present the case you are trying to make. See, for example, the rather epic conversation with Aspiringknitter here. You aren't even the first Mormon to make the case here. Calcsam has been quite explicit about it. Note that both of those examples are people who've accumulated quite a bit of karma on LessWrong. People give them a fair hearing. They just don't agree that their arguments are compelling.

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