One encounters a given statement. One assesses in one’s mind the statement’s truth or falsity. The conclusion one reaches is one’s belief.
If one has not yet encountered a given statement, or is simply unequipped to assess it, or refuses to assess it (or at least tell anyone the conclusion reached), then one cannot say it is any more or less likely to be true than false. The probability in one’s mind of the statement being true must remain exactly 50%. The moment the probability of truth moves, in one’s mind, infinitessimally towards 51% then one believes the statement. A similar move towards 49% constitutes a “believe not” the statement.
I am an atheist: I think it more likely that no Gods exist than Gods exist. I believe in NoGod.
A quote in another thread from Apos:
Surely our “states of mind” are all we have, given that one can only believe in (and never know) an external reality, since Descartes’ Deceiver might, just might (with an ascribed probability of near zero), be typing this for me?
And, if our minds are all we have, then the difference between absence of belief and belief (or between absence of belief and belief-not) is as arbitrary as the difference between 50% and >50% (or <50%), is it not? Surely, one has simply not bothered to change one’s “default” belief?
I don’t have any great problem with your main statement, but I am curious why you choose the >50% and <50% measures when a binary 1 or 0 would do the same trick. The % method impliesto me a scale or a continuum where differing values are permitted and which suggest shades and tints of values.
I suspect your choice of scale weakens your basic argument.
Perhaps, Zendar, but surely there are things one strongly believe, such as that one is not a victim of Descartes’ Deceiver, and things which one believes much less strongly, such as that a horse valued at evens will win the race.
Sure, and absence of liking for chocolate is really a liking for unchocolate, failure to wear trousers equates to the wearing of nontrousers, lack of interest in playing golf is the same as playing a game called nongolf.
Mange, your examples would be more faily paraphrased as:
Statement:You like chocolate.
If your assessment of the truth of this statement leaves you unmoved from the 50% default, we would not be talking about your ambivalence towards the taste of chocolate but your inability to tell whether or not you liked it. One would similarly assess the truth or falsity statement “You are wearing trousers” or “You are playing golf”. (Incidentally, “you are wearing no trousers” or “you are playing no golf” work fine grammatically, but this is not really the point I am forwarding for debate).
I am not attempting to paint NoGod as an entity in itself. I am contending that ascribing personal probabilities to statements is all we can do, and that an ascription of <50% to the probability that the statement “God exists” is true follows precisely the same processes as an ascription of 50% or more.
Mange, your examples would be more fairly paraphrased as:
Statement:You like chocolate.
If your assessment of the truth of this statement leaves you unmoved from the 50% default, we would not be talking about your ambivalence towards the taste of chocolate but your inability to tell whether or not you liked it. One would similarly assess the truth or falsity of the statements “You are wearing trousers” or “You are playing golf”. (Incidentally, “you are wearing no trousers” or “you are playing no golf” work fine grammatically, but this is not really the point I am forwarding for debate).
I am not attempting to paint NoGod as an entity in itself. I am contending that ascribing personal probabilities to statements is all we can do, and that an ascription of <50% to the probability that the statement “God exists” is true follows precisely the same processes as an ascription of 50% or more.
Okay. So if you do not believe that aliens are going to paint the Empire State Building pink next Tuesday, it is the same as believing that aliens are going to paint said building at said date?
I don’t see it. I think your problem is a matter of relativism, though. Is a choice to believe in something a point midway on a spectrum or a larger leap? I’d have to call “not believing” in things one has no experience in or evidence for, a ground state, and to believe is an effort beyond the default.
Yes, but you’re still talking about a lack of liking of chocolate rather than an active dislike of chocolate. It is possible to not like chocolate but not dislike it either.
In general, unless you can come up with a decent argument why the ¬ operator should be commutative then your reasoning is spurious.
But I hate unnecessary analogies - you just end up debating the analogy. The thing itself is simple enough for us not to go there.
The default position should be to not believe in God, for the same reason that the default position is to not believe in Santa Claus, the tooth fairy, the IPU or goblins at the back of your garden. It then remains to convince you otherwise.
It’s like falsifying a null hypothesis.
If the arguments presented are not sufficient to convince you, you are merely not convinced yet. That doesn’t mean that you’ve taken a strong stance and declared that God does not exist. You’re simply saying that you’ve seen nothing yet to make you change from your default position. You don’t “believe” that God doesn’t exist - you lack the impetus to believe that God does exist.
Can you not see that B(¬G) is a much much stronger statement thatn ¬B(G)?
To refute this by stating that this is no different to believing there is no God is begging the question, since that is what the OP is stating in the first place. I assert that there is a difference and my post above attempts to defend that position.
Or electrons, or dinosaurs, or an external reality? Given that our minds are all we have, then any appeal to “proof” or “evidence” simply puts us back a step: there is no qualitative difference between belief in dinosaurs and belief that we are not in a Matrix.
I think I see your problem Mr Meat. It’s a common problem amongst those who haven’t studied measure theory, i.e. 99.99% of the population.
It makes no sense to talk about what you believe in terms of a percentage. You have to be very careful with probabilities; they almost certainly don’t mean what you think they mean. The existence of God is not a probabilistic event. Either he exists or he does not exist. You can’t say that there is a 50% chance that he exists.
What you can say is that IF God exists, the chance that the universe would be like this is 50%. But that is a reflection of the dataset and not of the existence of God. It’s like confidence intervals - they reflect the probability that the range contains the mean not the probability that the mean is within the range. A subtle but important difference.
Let’s examine ¬B(G) with this in mind. This doesn’t mean “I believe that the chance God exists is less than 50%”. If anything it means, “I believe that given the existence of God, the chance that the universe would present itself as it does is less than 50%”.
On the other hand, B(¬G) means, “Given that God doesn’t exist, the chance that the universe would present itself as it does is more than 50%”
These are two different statements. (In statistical terms, one is analogous to a Type I error and the the other to a Type II error). Both statements are predicated on a given axiom and the axiom is different in each case. They are therefore not trivially comparable and certainly cannot be said to be the same.
I realise that the above is pretty impenetrable. I’m more than willing to go into more detail on any point if necessary. In the meantime I’m going to try to construct a simple numerical example of the difference between the generic A(¬B) and ¬A(B) statements.
We don’t believe in dinosaurs- there is evidence to suggest that they were around. Since there is no evidence around that we live in a matrix it would require belief.
Let’s say that you have a die. It may or may not be loaded. If it is loaded then there is a 50% chance of getting a 6. Otherwise, of course, there is a 1/6 (or 17%) chance of getting a 5.
You roll the die and you get a 6.
If we start from the default position that the die is not loaded then the probability of getting such a result is 17%. Statistically, this is not low enough to convince anyone to change their mind. We’d therefore stick to ¬B(L)
On the other hand, if we start from the default position that the die is loaded then the probability of getting such a result is 30%, which ALSO isn’t low enough to convice anyone to change their mind. We’d therefore stick to B(L)!
It admit that this example still doesn’t quite get to the heart of the matter, but I’m going to see if I can come up with something better…