Less Wrong has a number of participants who endorse the idea of assigning probability values to beliefs. Less Wrong also seems to have a number of participants who broadly fall into the "New Atheist" group, many of the members of which insist that there is an important semantic distinction to be made between "lack of belief in God" and "belief that God does not exist."
I'm not sure how to translate this distinction into probabilistic terms, assuming it is possible to do so-- it is a basic theorem in standard probability theo... (read more)
From my perspective, a belief needs to be about empiric facts to have a probability attached to it. I need to be able to clearly describe how the belief could be tested in principle.
In addition to beliefs about empiric facts there are also beliefs like "Nobody loves me." that aren't about specific empiric facts but that still matter a great deal.
0MrMind
I cannot speak for other atheists, but as far as I'm concerned I agree with you.
Since we have a hard time defining even a human being, I accept that "God" cannot be clearly defined in any model, but I accept that there are narrations that points to some being of divine nature, and I accept that as a valid 'reference' to God(s). To those, I give a very low probability, with very little Knightian uncertainty (meaning that I also give very little probability to future evidence that would raise this probability, and high probability to evidence that will lower this value). For that account of the divine, I consider myself a full fledged atheist.
There are other narrations though, and I've heard of definitions that basically reduce to "the law of physics", to which I give obviously very high probability with very high meta-certainty.
There might be definitions or narrations that are in the middle, though. On that account, I cannot say precisely what my probabilities are, and thus would be appropriate to say that I lack a belief in this kind of god, more than a definite belief in the non-existence.
4Erfeyah
Shouldn't a lack of belief in god imply:
P(not("God exists")) = 0.5
P("God exists") = 0.5
(I am completely ignoring the very important part of defining God in the sentence as I take the question to be asking of a way to express 'not knowing' in probabilistic terms. This can be applied to any subject really.)
0gjm
It seems to me that someone could quite consistently hold the following position:
2Vaniver
You're right about the probabilistic statements, with a potentially tangential elaboration. There are nonsense sentences--not contradictions ("A and not A") but things that fail to parse ("A and")--and it doesn't make sense to assign probabilities to those. One might claim that "God exists" is a nonsense sentence in that way, but I think most New Atheists don't take that approach.
The distinction that people are drawing is basically which framing should have the benefit of the doubt, since not believing a new statement is the default. This is much more important for social rationality / human psychology than it is for Bayesianism, where you just assign a prior and then start calculating likelihood ratios.
Less Wrong has a number of participants who endorse the idea of assigning probability values to beliefs. Less Wrong also seems to have a number of participants who broadly fall into the "New Atheist" group, many of the members of which insist that there is an important semantic distinction to be made between "lack of belief in God" and "belief that God does not exist."
I'm not sure how to translate this distinction into probabilistic terms, assuming it is possible to do so-- it is a basic theorem in standard probability theo... (read more)