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hairyfigment comments on Religious and Rational? - Less Wrong Discussion
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This is one of the false moves of Christian apologetics. Religious people start with faith in their sensory experience as well. Fetuses don't "start with conceptions of the divine", and there is no concept of "the bible" or "the koran" to have faith in without faith in sensory experience.
Religious folks start from sensory experience as well, but at some point they start overriding sensory experience and the methodology they use with it with religious commitments. I suppose they're not alone in that, and not the worst. "There is a man in the sky who will punish/reward me depending on whether I obey him" is only wrong, and not "not even wrong".
Having said that, in my experience Christians are more rational than most where their "concepts of the divine" do not intrude, and this fellow is doing "God's work" in trying to bring a conscious commitment to rationality to Christians.
Could be much worse than that. I'm sure babies don't start with a Bayesian prior which assigns some probability to induction working, but nor do they start with object permanence. That may be a conclusion.
I think object permanence as a conclusion is demonstrable - babies learn that, first google check says at 8 months.
On a prior on induction, neurons are be doing something to develop. I wonder if some of that something somewhere looks like induction. I'd guess so.
Mm, that doesn't rule out a hardwired conclusion (a question which might be hard to formalize) which always occurs given the development of the brain. In principle, I suppose, we could isolate babies and show them a lot of videos or holograms inconsistent with object permanence.