If I were to consider the arguments of 20 other groups similar to Christian theologians, I would probably misunderstand them at least 1 time in 20.
Not all arguments which you misunderstand-and-disbelieve are actually sound.
Today I would give myself a 1 in 20 chance of being wrong. [...] I would probably misunderstand them at least 1 time in 20.
So far so good.
If I convert that into "There is a 5% probability that the God of the Bible exists and will send me to hell"
Don't. That's a mistake. There's a 5% chance (say) that you've seriously misunderstood some of the things that Christian theologians think and why they think them. That's not the same thing -- it's not anything like the same thing -- as a 5% chance that they are right about Christianity and you're going to burn in hell for getting it wrong. It's perfectly possible that both they and you are wrong, and unless your reasons for being an atheist are much worse than I expect that's the most likely state of affairs conditional on your being wrong.
I bet there are a lot more than 20 groups of people with mutually inconsistent beliefs, whose beliefs you have at least a 5% chance of having seriously misunderstood or otherwise failed to refute perfectly.
I am thiiiiiiiiis confident!
(Holds arms wide, then accepts any well-specified bet as if the actual probability of Christianity were zero, i.e., with betting prices corresponding to the probability of the specified evidence being observed, given the fixed assumption that Christianity is false.)
There are other arguments too, that I haven't seen made in the theology literature. Like, God instantiated all possible universes with net positive utility, because that's more utility than just instantiating the universe with the most utility. This is an extremely basic idea, I really don't know why I haven't seen it before.
So, first off, I would agree that you're doing something seriously wrong, and what you're doing wrong is you're privileging the hypothesis.
Consider P1: "The God of the Bible exists and will send me to Hell."
Now consider P2: "There is a God, but the Bible is systematically wrong about God's plan. Everything the Bible says God wants, God actually wants the opposite of, and if I follow the Bible God will send me to Hell."
Regardless of how small or large a value I assign to p(P1), what really matters for my decision-making is p(P1)/p(p2). If that ratio is close to 1, then I ought not treat the Bible as my guide to how to act, regardless of either value. P1 could have a 50% chance of being true, and it still wouldn't matter.
That having been said, OK.
First off, like Emile, I have trouble unambiguously interpreting "Christianity is true."
Call C1 the set of all statements asserted by any Christian-identified theologian.
My confidence that the conjunction of C1 is false is roughly equal to my confidence that (a) I can in fact recognize logical contradictions and (b) two propositions that contradict one another are not both true. I don't know how to attach a n...
How is this one chance out of twenty specific of Christianity? This doesn't seem to have any good predictive power. You can misunderstand the arguments of one out of twenty groups for any topic. Why not worry about all these other topics as well?
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.
While ordinarily, I might upvote something that is asking for help calibrating a belief, I think this has far too much potential to turn into an "I'm more atheist than you" fest. Especially when the title is "How confident is your atheism?" After reading a couple of the comments, I had that urge until I realized what was happening.
So I will be explicitly ignoring your request for numbers. But if you're really dead set on coming up with a number for yourself (I don't think the discussion is productive enough beyond estimation to, say, three or four orders of magnitude accuracy, but your call) I would suggest trying to think of other beliefs that you find as plausible as Christianity, ie., all of the other religions. You've got to necessarily have room for them in your estimation. Also, you should take into account reasons that creatures evolving in the ancestral environment would become religious.
(I upvoted this post because I saw that its score was at -1. I normally avoid doing this, but here I make an exception because, while this is not a quality article, I think this sort of thing should be encouraged here on Less Wrong, the sort of "I have a doubt and I want to know about to do about it" posts that this is an example of.
Saying,
This back-and-forth from certainty to uncertainty makes me feel like I'm doing something seriously wrong.
took at least some courage. Let us not punish that. On the other hand I do feel like this is more appropriate for the open threads, but nobody checks them the week before a new one anyway.)
Do you really think there's a 40% chance that one out of the Bahá'í, Christians, Jews, Mandaeans, Muslims, Sikhs, theistic Hindus, or Zoroastrians are right?
Or do you think maybe there's a 5% chance that some form of religion is right, and that there might be a sub-chance of that that theism is right, and then there's a sub-sub-chance of any of the particular living theisms I just listed is right?
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.
How has nobody yet mentioned Confidence Levels Inside and Outside an Argument? Anyway, I take gjm's line on this: I should assign at least 5% probability that my reasoning for rejecting Christianity is invalid in some way that I'm unaware of, but that's different from a 5% probability that Christianity is true.
For one thing, my reasoning that Christianity is very likely false is essentially the same as my reasoning that other theisms are false, so at the very least a whole bunch of other religions get lumped into that same 5%. (That is, if Zeus exists, then my reasoning was just as wrong as if Yahweh exists.) Furthermore, there are other possibilities—such as that I'm mentally unbalanced and hallucinating my high intelligence, or that I'm a brain in a vat whose reasoning is being systematically tweaked for a mad scientific experiment—which don't seem all that correlated with whether Christianity is true or not.
Since in my case as well as yours, Christianity plays a unique role vis-a-vis other theisms, there is some justification for promoting it a bit within the space of "things that might actually be the case if my reasoning is bad" (in the same sense that a lottery winn...
After all, the God of the Bible is CLEARLY just a big, mean alpha-monkey and...
Is a mean God that much less likely than a benevolent God?
What chance do you place on some variant of Christianity turning up to be true, and what chance do you think a god of some sort exists?
Not-quite-numbers: specifically Christianity: at a noise level (i.e. same as pastafarianism). Some kind of omniscience/omnipotence, including being in a matrix-like simulation: somewhat above the noise level, but not high enough to change anything I do or worry about.
Christianity has a much more coherent theology than pastafarianism.
Christianity loses me at "God sacrificed his only begotten son to save the world". Omnipotent God had to sacrifice? Omnipotent God had to impregnate a mortal woman to produce a god-child? What is he, Zeus? Save his own world from whom? Why such a circuitous route? I'm sure all these questions have a perfectly reasonable answer to a Christian, but it is silly to argue that the whole thing is coherent in any objective sense.
Just to play advocatus dei for a moment, most of the above makes a lot more sense to me in the context of a God trying to reconcile his perspective with that of a set of mortals with whom he shares a preexisting special relationship and set of behavioral rules but whose psychology he doesn't fully understand. Seen in this light, the whole New Testament story starts to look like self-modification on God's part in service to a package of, essentially, legal reforms designed to relax the fairly brutal and self-limiting Old Testament rules. I'm not a theist, though, and from a Christian perspective a lot of this is rank heresy: it's compatible with functional omnipotence but requires only limited omniscience, for example, and it's flatly inconsistent with a lot of trinitarian perspectives. Still, that's about as best I can make sense of the mythology without falling back on "mysterious ways".
Similarly, a theistic friend of mine likes to describe God in terms of a frustrated roleplaying GM who's fed up with trying to keep his players from going off the rails; Jesus in this metaphor could be thought of as a GM-run character joining the campaign for a session or two in order to capture the experience from a player perspective and maybe point the story in a less disastrous direction. Not necessarily a great idea, but it beats "rocks fall, everybody dies".
Dude says he can construct a Pastafarian theology better than Thomism in one month, gets upvoted, dude who expresses doubt of this gets downvoted. LW is completely batshit insane sometimes. (From a strictly epistemic standpoint anyway. Politically speaking I'm sure blindly shouting "boo God yay science" is a reasonable strategy.)
You seem to be reasoning as if Christianity has a prior high enough to make it worth considering, then basing your atheism on having heard and invalidated the Christians' arguments. Instead, consider that Christianity is a huge, complex hypothesis with a very low prior, and then update down based on seeing the arguments for it and finding them bad. You can do that because if Christianity were true you'd be more likely to see good arguments, and if it's false you're more likely to see bad arguments.
Each individual religion starts off with a prior low enoug...
Given what we know about the ways that religions start and spread, we know that they are not generally truth-tracking. The fact that we observe a particular religious belief in the populace (or that we happen to have been born to a family that teaches it) is not a good indicator of that belief being true. Religious beliefs — unlike practical (how-to) knowledge or scientific theories — are not selected for their accuracy.
Further, the various religions contradict one another on pretty much everything (except baseline tribal morality): if Christian theology i...
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...
I watched the Ten Commandments the other day to revisit some classic cinema, and in the scene where god appears as a burning bush, I couldn't help but think, "Wow, that's all he could muster?" And then picture some outer-universe aliens tinkering with gigantic equipment with immense power inputs to try and interfere in some other world, only able to project tiny amounts of fire into a bush and a disembodied voice, the best efforts of all their minds at cross-dimensional communication resulting in nothing much at all, and the translator broken at that.
5%
The feelings you get about this number are feelings that most any belief system would produce - you'd say the same thing with the same 5% if we replaced Christianity with Catholicism, for example.
So I take all beliefs systems as the reference class for that feeling. Smear that 5% over all belief systems - not just the ones that exist, but the possible ones that are as coherent and likely to arise as Christianity - and you should stop worrying somewhat.
...After talking with 20 groups that have a very different worldview, I might think they are all are m
Christianity isn't a single proposition though. There is a lot of content there. A lot of unverified content.
The probability that you should believe Christianity because of some fear of hell (act on your worry) is something less than the probability that there is a God times the probability that God had a son given that there is a God times the probability that Jesus was the one and only son of God given that God had a son times the probability that there are souls given all of the above times the probability that God sends these souls somewhere GAOTA time...
For me, there are the odds that "God" exists and there are the odds that I can ever fully shake the conditioning and indoctrination of my childhood, such that a charismatic, confident, person could ever get me to hesitate or win some sort of personal "victory" in a fact to face confrontation.
The former is zero, the latter is somewhat higher.
What chance do you place on some variant of Christianity turning up to be true, and what chance do you think a god of some sort exists?"
Both a bit vague - but maybe 0.1% and 5%, respectively.
"There is a part of me that wants to say the chance is far less than 1 percent. But when I consider what 1% must mean about my ability to follow complex arguments and base my judgement on the right premises, it seems absurd to say that.
This argument is clearly fallacious, given that we all have things we assign a chace of <<<1% to, regardless of our ability to evaluate arguments. See: story of Joseph Smith and the golden plates, fairies, Xenu, Flying Spaghetti Monster, etc.
And if you go on the omni- definiton of God, my confidence in atheism is higher than my confidence in no-fairies because of the problem of evil.
That some variant of Christianity turns up to be true ? Very, very, very low. Considering the size of the hypothesis space that includes Christianity (it includes about all other religions that ever existed, and most of the fictional ones, and many more you could think about), and the very low amount of evidence, it has to be counted in power of ten. If you consider the core of Christianity to be about 100 bits of information (and that's a very low estimate), and that you have, what, 10 bits of evidence you're left with a probability of 2^-90 of Christiani...
99%
If I were to consider the arguments of 20 other groups similar to Christian theologians, I would probably misunderstand them at least 1 time in 20.
Just because you misunderstand them, it does not mean they are right. If someone tried to convince me that 2+2=5, and I would have trouble following their complex explanations (but I also wouldn't be able to find an obvious error), I would not accept it as an evidence that 2+2=5. (More precisely, it would be just an epsilon evidence.)
My atheism toward Christian God (or any other) is very like my skepticism toward the Little Red Riding Hood adventure.
The same thing.
10^-50.
...Today I would give myself a 1 in 20 chance of being wrong. If I were to consider the arguments of 20 other groups similar to Christian theologians, I would probably misunderstand them at least 1 time in 20. After talking with 20 groups that have a very different worldview, I might think they are all are mistaken, but once in a while, maybe 5% of the time, it would actually be me.
Wow, 5%!?! If I convert that into "There is a 5% probability that the God of the Bible exists and will send me to hell", I feel scared. But I know how to cheer myself up
Jaynes discusses Hempel's Paradox on pages 143 to 144 of Probability Theory: the Logic of Science. I take away a broad lesson: one must always know what alternative hypotheses are available. Failing to be clear about your alternative hypotheses is my first candidate for what you are doing wrong.
My second candidate comes from rule IIIb for plausible reasoning (page 9).
... always take into account all the evidence relevant to the question ...
One conspicuous feature of the world is the presence of rival faiths, each well attested by miracles about which ...
I suppose that the existence of something resembling a god is possible if we are actually living in a simulation. Even the christian god would be somewhere in that space of possibilities, though given the space of possibilities, that one specific possibility would still have to have extraordinarily low probability.
But let's say the christian god shows up on our world one day and says "hey all, yup, I'm totally real, now get on your knees and praise me or suffer eternal torment!"
I don't know about anybody else, but my atheism wouldn't so much as w...
The bible is not internally consistent, therefore it is impossible for it to accurately describe a coherent deity. The question is nonsensical on its face. You have to instead start picking and choosing which parts of the bible to believe and which parts to ignore (or trust someone else do to that for you), which is why we have tens of thousands of varieties of christianity.
So you must return to the fundamental question of rationality: what do I think I know, and how do I think I know it? Or more specifically - what is your criteria for deciding that part...
Today I would give myself a 1 in 20 chance of being wrong. If I were to consider the arguments of 20 other groups similar to Christian theologians
There actually are more than 20 religious groups out there. Do you think you are wrong about one of them being the true religion?
There are a lot of different gods. If you have 5% for any single God existing, I don't think you are an atheist.
For me P(A god punishes people for not believing in the Bible with eternal hell | A god exists) is less than 5%.
The ridiculousness of an eternal loving god who punishes no...
r_claypool retooled the question as: "the chance that Jesus of Nazareth is a resurrected God". Like most on this thread, I can't come up with a number aside from "exceedingly improbable".
Kudos to TheOtherDave for an excellent comment.
IMHO, Kierkegaard nailed it when he observed that faith in Christianity is imcompatible with reason. While the latest flavour du jour for Christian apologists in support of the truth of the resurrection is the minimalist three facts approach (i.e. death of the cross, empty tomb and reports of post-resurrection appreances), most will back peddle when asked whether they accept all of the other miraculous reports contained in the New Testament.
Other people have pointed out the problems with singling out Christianity and ignoring a lot of disjoint possibilities. As to your question, someone on another site named a level of evidence that feels like it would make me consider deities as explanations. Representatives of a deity (or the deity itself) would need to publicly create specimens of a species believed extinct. They would need skeptical observers, well-versed in stage magic, to declare themselves baffled. And then they'd have to hand the specimens over to skeptical biologists for another kind...
I'll try to assign probabilities to 5 propositions:
(A) I'm deluded, insane and unaware of this
0.03% of the population (that's 3 people in every 10,000) have Delusional Disorder. If I did have that (or various other disorders) I would be as certain as I am now that I was sane, so that puts an upper limit on how confident anyone can rationally be about their own sanity.
(B) I'm sane, but some form of supernatural exists (whether that's ghosts, an afterlife, supernatural karma, magic spells, or a sentient Gaia)
Given how hard science has looked for such thing...
Note: It mangled my footnote symbols. Simply go in order of appearance if you wish to find them.
As a strong agnostic, I must say I find the numbers given here amusing. Simply put, there is very little evidence either way, and it is highly likely that it is IMPOSSIBLE to have decent evidence either way about an omnipotent god. I believe that there is an infinitesimal possibility that there is any significant way to tell which way you should lean.* Therefore, I find these probabilities meaningless (but not uninteresting).
Now, probabilities on whether or not ...
"Probability of Christianity" is way too vague, so I can't answer that. I'm 50% confident in my philosophical (meta-ethical, decision theoretic, cosmological) theism, 92.5% confident in my phenomenal-belief-in-decisions-relevant-transhumanly-intelligent-entities. My confidence in atheism is some weird mixture of the inverse of those two because those two variants of theism strike me as pretty disjunctive, and either would falsify atheism. These are impression-belief mixtures: not entirely Aumann-adjusted, but a little. My impressions are more confident of theism, but my betting odds are less confident.
I think pinning a probability number on this (outside of context of being forced to gamble or otherwise forced into making a decision dependent on probability of this) is simply innumerate. Suppose you attach a number to it. Then there's a situation where it is too high (Pascal's wager) and possible situations where it is too low (we discover that incredibly simple laws, simpler than laws of physics, lead to emergence of singleton intelligence that proceeds to simulate universes with life, and then you start rejecting Occam's razor because you were too atheist)
Today I would give myself a 1 in 20 chance of being wrong. [...] I would probably misunderstand them at least 1 time in 20.
So far so good.
If I convert that into "There is a 5% probability that the God of the Bible exists and will send me to hell"
Don't. That's a mistake. There's a 5% chance (say) that you've seriously misunderstood some of the things that Christian theologians think and why they think them. That's not the same thing -- it's not anything like the same thing -- as a 5% chance that they are right about Christianity and you're going to burn in hell for getting it wrong. It's perfectly possible that both they and you are wrong, and unless your reasons for being an atheist are much worse than I expect that's the most likely state of affairs conditional on your being wrong.
I bet there are a lot more than 20 groups of people with mutually inconsistent beliefs, whose beliefs you have at least a 5% chance of having seriously misunderstood or otherwise failed to refute perfectly.
A friend recently asked how strongly I believe that my deconversion from Christianity was not a mistake. Here's my response, and for those of you who are not Christians, I'm just wondering what numbers you would give:
"There is a part of me that wants to say the chance is far less than 1 percent. But when I consider what 1% must mean about my ability to follow complex arguments and base my judgement on the right premises, it seems absurd to say that.
Trying to honestly estimate the chance that I'm wrong about the Bible being generally reliable is a fascinating exercise... I know the number is low, but I'm not sure how low.
Today I would give myself a 1 in 20 chance of being wrong. If I were to consider the arguments of 20 other groups similar to Christian theologians, I would probably misunderstand them at least 1 time in 20. After talking with 20 groups that have a very different worldview, I might think they are all are mistaken, but once in a while, maybe 5% of the time, it would actually be me.
Wow, 5%!?! If I convert that into "There is a 5% probability that the God of the Bible exists and will send me to hell", I feel scared. But I know how to cheer myself up: I just say, "No way, the chance I'll end up in hell MUST be less than 5%. After all, the God of the Bible is CLEARLY just a big, mean alpha-monkey and... [rehearse all the atheistic arguments here]".
This back-and-forth from certainty to uncertainty makes me feel like I'm doing something seriously wrong.
So what about you? What chance do you place on some variant of Christianity turning up to be true, and what chance do you think a god of some sort exists?"
Numbers please.
