= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
V_V comments on Robert Aumann on Judaism - Less Wrong Discussion
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (60)
So can you please explain what he means? I really don't understand in what sense it can be said that "the world is 15 billion years old" and "the world was created by God in six days" can both be literally true. And it doesn't sound like he means the Omphalos argument that the world was created looking old. Rather, it sounds like he's saying that in one sense of "truth" or in one "model of the world" it really is 15 billion years old, and in another sense / model it really is young, and those two truths / models are somehow not contradictory. I just can't seem to wrap my head around how that might make any sense.
The sentence "Frodo carried the One Ring to Mount Doom" is not literally true, but it is true within the fictional narrative of the Lord of the Rings. You can simultaneously believe it and not believe it, in a certain sense, by applying the so called "suspension of disbelief", a mental mechanism which probably evolved to allow us to consider hypothetical conterfactual beliefs for decision making and which we then started using to make fiction.
I think that theists like Robert Aumann who support the non-overlapping magisteria position are doing something similar: they accept "the world is 15 billion years old" as an epistemic "Bayesian" belief which they use when considering expectations over observations, and they apply suspension of disbelief in order to believe "the world was created by God in six days" in the counterfactual context of religion.