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A fifth alternative: Lord, Liar, Lunatic, Legend, or Just Plain Wrong. It's amazing that the simplest explanations -- that someone might simply be mistaken, that they might have sanely and honestly misinterpreted the data -- gets so completely ignored and erased.
Yeah, but 'Just Plain Wrong' is how I would describe thinking Hawaii is in the Caribbean; It's not how I would describe having followers that think you are God in flesh.
Oops, I meant to choose "Accept: turn" instead of "Accept: straight"
The scientific method applied to God was not looked upon favorably in those times (or many thereafter). The specific reason in the Bible that Jesus did not throw himself down from the cliff or turn stones into bread was to not "test God." Therefore any miraculous evidence would probably constitute a test. The situation is like Omega appearing and offering tantalizing amounts of utility if only a complicated (but tractable) hypothetical situation is correctly solved, with the additional condition that using rational thought processes causes immediate failure.
In fact, I should probably post a detailed description of FBDT (Faith-Based Decision Theory) that beats the pants off of TDT and other rational decision theories.
In response to
Why Don't People Help Others More?
This was really well written. Thanks for posting it.
In response to
How confident is your atheism?
I'm thinking there is a false dichotomy here. If Christianity is false it doesn't mean that atheism is true. Both Christianity and atheism could be false. Christianity being true only depends on the resurrection of Jesus, and that depends on how regularly dead bodies come back from the dead, how many stories we have about dead bodies coming back from the dead, and how many times we have had verified stories of dead bodies coming back from the dead.
There are certainly Jews who think that the events in the NT generally happened (e.g. Toledot Yeshu), Muslims who think that the events in the NT generally happened, but still think that Christianity is false. I mean, Christianity could be false and yet you might still end up in hell because Islam was the "true religion".
Yeah, it was a false dichotomy. I see that now.
From Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow (p 325):
The probability of a rare event is most likely to be overestimated when the alternative is not fully specified... [Researcher Craig Fox] asked [participants] to estimate the probability that each of the eight participating teams would win the playoff; the victory of each team in turn was the focal event.
... The result: the probability judgments generated sucessively for the eight teams added up to 240%!
Do you (r_claypool) have reason to suspect that Christianity is much more likely to be true than other, (almost-) mutually exclusive supernatural worldviews like, say, Old Norse Paganism? If not, then 5% for Christianity is absurdly high.
Do you (r_claypool) have reason to suspect that Christianity is much more likely to be true than other, (almost-) mutually exclusive supernatural worldviews like, say, Old Norse Paganism?
No, I've read way more Christian apologetics than I care to admit, and the basic tenants of the Bible like -- "God could find no better way to forgive humans than to have one tortured on a cross" -- are no more substantiated by apologists than whatever is part of Old Norse Paganism.
If not, then 5% for Christianity is absurdly high.
But it still doesn't feel absurdly high.
Neither, I'd guess. The 5% is a number that sounds disbelieving but open-minded.
That's about right. Five percent was basically a buffer for, "I don't have full confidence in my epistemology, maybe I'm confused and Christian faith actually is a virtue."
But I get what everyone has said about privileging the hypothesis. If by faith I'm supposed to choose a religion, after choosing I'd have no answer for, "Why did you trust in those unverifiable claims as opposed to some other unverifiable claims?" This would be true of all religions and supernatural claims, or at least the ones I'm aware of.
In response to
How confident is your atheism?
Depends on what you mean by "Christianity being true". If you mean "The miracles described in the Bible actually happened in the real world, and there is a supernatural God that cares about our actions and occasionally interferes in the world", then the chances are vanishingly small, less than one in a million.
On the other hand, if you mean "Following religious practice and giving priests a respectable position in society is good for individual well-being, as well as maintaining a harmonious and prosperous society; religious teachings are moral fables that help foster group coordination", then yeah, I'd put a much higher probability to that, though the exact value would depend of the religion being considered, etc.
I probably should have clarified to say, "the chance that Jesus of Nazareth is a resurrected God." I think all modern Christianities have this belief in common, and my estimations are based on this lowest common denominator.
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The question is whether it's possible to simply be mistaken about having divine powers, without having an underlying mental disorder. And clearly the answer is 'yes;' and clearly this possibility has a higher prior probability than 'Jesus is Lord.' So neglecting the option is unconscionable, and is where the trilemma gets nearly all of its plausibility as an argument for Christianity.
Suppose a few really unlikely events happened, and caused everyone around you to think you were the messiah and/or divine. Would it be inconceivable, barring true insanity or deliberate deception, to come to think oneself the messiah and/or divine? Do you think that every psychic, every cult leader, is either (independently) insane or deliberately lying? It just ain't so; self-deception is stronger than that.
That reminds me of Yvain's 'The Last Temptation of Christ'