I don’t think you can really extend this hypothetical to religious belief. If we flip a coin we know beforehand that it’s a stochastic process and the result doesn’t exist until the coin is flipped. That’s definitely not the case for god. Even if we accept that we can never know the answer, there is currently a right and a wrong answer to the question, that we can make educated guesses at based on existing evidence.
No, I wouldn’t. I’d characterize my view as “think there’s a high probability it’ll be heads”, that’s as far as I’d go with those odds. I’d bet on it being heads every toss, but wouldn’t feel like a fool if it then came up tails.
What if we said the coin had already been flipped 5 billion years ago?
I don’t disagree that there is the question of evidence that influences our thinking, but I don’t think that is a big enough difference to change the definition of “belief” with respect to the 2 questions.
But, as begbert2 pointed out with the sun example, there are things we believe that are not 100% certain.
Well, the difference is that for a stochastic variable the factual answer is a probability… It doesn’t give meaning to ask what side the coin will land on before it’s been flipped, only the probability. It does give meaning to ask about the existence of god, even if we accept the premise that we can’t know the answer.
Even if the coin was flipped already it just feels really awkward to talk about “belief” in an outcome that was random by definition. I would never use that word in that context. I would call it a guess, and the probability would determine how confident I feel in my guess.
e: assuming, of course, a complete abscence of evidence.
I do agree that I notice that same awkwardness talking about belief when you know it’s random.
There is more than one concept of probability. More accurately, there is more than one way of thinking about the probabilistic model (and its associated mathematical machinery).
Coins and dice are amenable to a Frequentist interpretation (FI). But in matters of belief, applying FI is somewhat tortured. Subjective probabilities are often compared to betting contexts.
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/probability-interpret/
All of this is hard: I’ve seen interesting treatments, but none that really satisfy my misgivings.
Belief in the coin example is belief in how the coin ends up when the probability function collapses, and you know what happened. Viewed as this, belief can either be heads, tails, or none. (Not known.)
I think what is confusing is that there is an additional belief in what the odds are, and this in the god case is admitted to be unknown by pretty much everyone. In the coin case, most of us would start off with a belief that the odds are 50-50 and no belief in how the coin lands (no rational belief, that is.) If we observed the coin long enough, and it was always heads, we would change our belief on the probability of it being heads, and perhaps start to believe that it would be heads. In the 2/3 case, we might or might not believe it was going to be heads - we all have different thresholds of belief.
In my experience probabilities by their very structure always refer to the odds of things that have not yet happened - yet we constantly apply them to things that have already happened. The 2/3rds coin was flipped, caught, and covered by a hand. We speak of there being a 2/3rds chance it’s heads, while knowing that it’s currently either 100% heads, or 100% tails, and not 2/3rds anything. It’s a heisenburg uncertainty coin! Or rather we’re all real comfortable referring to things that have already happened by probabilities if we don’t know what the already-happened result was. Thus it is with gods, amongst many other things. It’s not really a big deal.
I think that you have shined the spotlight on the dispute here with you last sentence. “we all have different thresholds of belief.” As a general rule people are reluctant to use the term “belief” when referring to things they don’t have much confidence in - they rarely speak of having very weak levels of belief -er, except when they do. (People are annoyingly inconsistent as a class.)
Due to the evolution of terms, the god debate has been mainly framed in terms of theism and not-theism, aka (soft) atheism. (Or semi-squishy hard athesim? Heck if I know; I can’t keep up.) Logically, if you ain’t a theist, you’re a not-theist, so there’s no middle ground, by that way of looking at it. On the other hand you have the fact that people don’t like referring to small levels of belief as belief. If you have a threshold for claiming belief of 90%, then only at 90% belief or higher will you claim to believe in god, and only at 10% belief or lower will you claim to believe there isn’t a god. This leaves a whole shlock of middle ground where the person resists asserting any belief whatsoever.
So a part of (or most of) the problem is definitional - most atheists would tell you that if you don’t assert that you’re a theist, then you’re an atheist. This means that of the 0 to 100% belief continuum for the “does god exist” question, the atheists are claiming to own 90% of it when the people have a 90% threshold of belief/disbelief. Objectively I can see how that might be percieved as stacking the deck. However that is how the term is used nowadays by most atheists, so if you don’t like it, well, too bad I guess.
Personally I guess what bugs me most at the moment are these two positions, each or both of which people may or may not be asserting:
Annoyance 1) That “It is the case that there are one or more gods” and “It is not the case that there are one or more gods” are entirely separate and unrelated, with separate and distinct ‘belief continuua’. This is usually expressed by depicting there as being a range from 100% belief in gods to 0 belief to 100% belief in a lack of gods, with the questions only interecting at the point of complete disbelief in both statements. 100% for----0%----100% against, in other words.
This is of course annoying because the statements are explicitly the negations of each another; if one is true, the other is false. Their truth values, and the levels of certainty/belief/whatever in the statements, are inherently the precise negation of one another. The possible scale of belief is from 0% to 100% in one of the statements - with the belief value of the other being depicted on the same continuum, but in the opposite direction. However much you believe one of the statements, you disbelieve the other precisely the same amount.
I know where the ‘two separate beliefs’ mental model comes from - people notice that they don’t ‘believe’ either statement (due to their thresholds of belief not being met for either) and can’t reconcile it well with the fact that the statements are negations, and attempt to split them out by stretching the 0%----100% model to a 100% against----0%----100% for model. As a perk for them this new model appears to make the ‘new 0%’ in the middle the new null hypothesis, making their position of uncertain ambivalence more right than the atheist position of default disbelief. (This is of course not how null hypotheses work.)
This new incorrect model is annoying for a number of reasons, most of which become obvious when the agnostic attempts to frame it in terms of the (correct) 0%----100% model, by scaling it to match. This leaves them with a 0%----50%----100% model, with them claiming to be at the 50% point. Of course, as I pointed out (and I don’t recall being answered), there is no way that the agnostics are at 50% on the 0%----100% model. Pascal’s wager would be rocking their world - remember that the way to refute the wager is to recognise that you are not dealing with equally probable possibilities. Believing 50% in gods would arguably be the worst position to be in - the highest point of worry about what the gods might do before the confidence in your particular beliefs in them takes over and give you stability. 50% belief is a theist wracked with worry. Which most self-professed agnostics…aren’t.
So, what are they? They’re on the 0%----100% belief continuum, of course, and at far less than 50%. Based on their behavior as a class, I’d say they’re at 1% or less. The only discernible difference in behavior between them and stated atheists is who they choose to feel superior to and the way they phrase it; they don’t act any different than an atheist. Which leads into the second thing that bugs me about these self-professed agnostic-not-atheist types:
Annoyance 2) They’re pretty clearly using a double standard for their threshold of disbelief - between what they say, and what they do. Let’s pick an arbitrary number for their threshold of belief - say 5%. They say they aren’t 95% certain that gods don’t exist, so therefore they refuse to say they believe that. Fair enough - but then they don’t act like they’re that uncertain about it. They act like atheists - no prayers or rituals “just in case”. No constant existential angst about what their unknown/unpredictable/uncaring/evil god might do. No stockpiling of emergency supplies against the day the gods chang their minds and decide to levy desctruction across the land.
Now, I must immediately backtrack. I don’t stalk agnostics. Maybe they really all do all these things when I’m not looking, and just never mention it. But I don’t get that impression. I get the impression that they act like atheists do - except that they (misunderstand the null hypothesis and) claim a moral high ground in discussions about theism, claiming the middle ground and criticizing both sides.
Forget wishy-washy; these people seem to be acting hypocritical. They are acting based on one level of noncertainty and then criticising us atheists for not asserting another, much stricter one. Why should we atheists be credulous about gods? Why, because there’s not sufficient evidence to be certain they don’t exist. But, we don’t claim to be absolute-100%-we’ve-proven-it-to-ourselves certain; that’s the other guys. But we don’t proclaim that uncertainty, and that’s somehow bad now? Apparently so, to people who are claiming to have 50% uncertainty - which we know isn’t true.
Yeah, no mixed messages there. :rolleyes: Annoying.
I’m not going to quote your post, but a few things. First, you bring up the interesting case of the person who has not met his threshold of belief in a god but is leaning that way. Sometimes you can tell these people by their spirituality. I suspect many of them do believe in a god, a god of nature, but think they are atheists or agnostics because they don’t believe in any traditional deities, the ones they build buildings to.
Second, statements of fact about the universe - there is a god or gods, or there is not, are either-or. One is the opposite of the other. But the opposite of “I believe in a god or gods” is not “I believe there are no god or gods” - it is “I don’t believe there is a god or gods.” There are three choices. My threshold referred to not a level of belief, but more a level of confidence in the evidence that would cause one to feel comfortable believing. We may not be sure that the world is not an illusion caused by an evil hypnotist, but the evidence for the world being real is away above our thresholds.
I’m a little reluctant to tell a person that they believe in a god when they say they don’t. Keep in mind the caveat that you can believe every spiritual thing under the sun from crystals to ghosts to tarot to NDEs and still be an firm atheist if you don’t believe in gods. It’s sorta cheating to say that belief in other non-god things count as a belief in god, right? I mean, we don’t like to let people to that with science-as-god.
This is not to say that such people mightn’t be more credulous about gods than your average hardline sf-reading particle physist. I just think that most of them admit to being credulous about some sort of non-institutional god or gods by that point, leaving us no reason to speculate.
I don’t see any functional difference between “a level of confidence in the evidence that would cause one to feel comfortable believing” and “threshold of belief”. One could literally be the definition of the other, in fact.
Regardless; at this point I’ve lost interest in trying to distinguish between certainty and confidence and all that; having had that criticized in this thread I’ve come to the conclusion we can do without such distinctions. So let’s look at what we have without them.
Well, we have one continuum of belief: are there one or more gods. Assuming a person has ever considered the question, they have some level of certainty/confidence/whichever about this question, running from 0% to 100%. If they’re at 100% they’re certain there are gods; if they’re at 0% they’re certain there are no gods. Their position on the continuum is based on the sum of evidence they’ve accumulated, taking into account everything.
So. Suppose I’ve thought about all the evidence I can find and the implications of all the evidence I can’t find, and have considered and cross-referenced and tabulated everything in my brain, and when all is said and done it has kicked out an answer to how credulous I should be about the whole god thing.
Now the belief-threshold kicks in. Years of not having to qualify our belief that the sun will rise have taught us that we don’t need absolute certainty to assert a belief as if we had absolute certainty, supposing a threshold is met.
Suppose my threshold of belief is 5%. That means that at <5% belief I will declare there aren’t gods, that at above 95% belief I will declare that there are gods, and in the middle I won’t declare anything.
But in order to get to the point of noticing I haven’t met my threshold of belief, I have to have a level of belief. It doesn’t much matter where I got it - I could have just lazily dismissed the claims gods exist and arbitrarily decided the notion has 0% credibility, or I could have considered everything carefully and concluded it has an 0.001 chance of being real, or I could have credulously swallowed what my preacher told my and believe it 100% (or close to it, if my faith wavers). Regardless, I have a level of belief - if I’ve considerd the question, my brain has come up with a level of credulousity. And if it reported back, “Not certain either way”, that doesn’t mean I don’t have a level of belief, it just means that it hasn’t met my personal threshold of certainty sufficient to declare my belief on the subject in certain terms.
Of course, whether a person admits it or not, they’re going to subconsiously act on the level of belief they actually have, not the one they’ve declared. So even if you’ve convinced yourself that your 0.01 credulousity about the existence of gods doesn’t put you 99.99% of the way to being an atheist, it doesn’t change the fact that you’re as atheist as the rest of us, in all but name.
And as noted, I think that most agnostics are in this camp - I think that philosophical agnosticism is something that people claim but don’t really internalize. We learn in logic class that you can’t prove a negative, and we learn in philosophy class that nothing is certain except cogito ergo sum, and we see agnostics talking down to everybody else and nobody seems to be able to refute their point that you can’t really prove it. So, agnosticism is cool. There are no downsides! And it seems plausible enough. So we convince ourselves that those silly atheists are all declaring things that can’t be known and we’re much smarter than them.
Of course, none of this gives us much more information about whether gods actually exist - all it can do to our actual internal belief is nudge us off of 0% or 100% by half a tenth of a hundredth of a thousandth of a millionth of a percent, because all we can actually know for certain is cogito ergo sum and math and logic and the like. But beyond that, despite our new agnostic hat, we’re still pretty much as atheist or theist as we ever were. And we continue to act like it, revealing our true beliefs, despite what claims we make about withholding judgement.
So yeah. 50% belief? I don’t think so. When I see a 50%-belief-“agnostic” I’ll recognize him by the way he has perfect attendance at church, trying desperately to firm the foundations of his faith.
How odd that you would use this as an example of something to be incredulous about; there is precisely as much evidence for the world being an illusion caused by an evil hypnotist as there is evidence for there being any (other) gods. I would call the probabilties exactly identical, since they presume exactly the same thing (that there are powerful sentient entities beyond our perception controlling and defining our world). Do you believe there isn’t an evil hypnotist? Why not?
I’m not really getting this idea of percentages-of-belief.
I believe the sun will come up. I have no information to suggest it won’t, or might not. I believe astronomers know enough about how it works that we can be sure it won’t burn out or blow up before the morning.
To me, theism and atheism are (equally) definitive statements of belief. A theist, or “believer,” knows God is real, or thinks he does, which is the same thing from his point of view. An atheist knows the opposite, etcetera.
I never thought of agnosticism as being a spectrum “between” theism and atheism, but rather the reserving of judgment due to lack of information. One might have hypotheses, but absent a way to test them, there can be no statement of belief. It seems as meaningless to me to assert a “99%” belief (or disbelief) in God as a “50%” belief. If you are identifying, to yourself, the possibility that either of two or more alternatives could be correct (whatever the odds), that is a statement that you don’t “believe” any of them. As I said about the coin.
Granted, plenty of people say they “believe” this or that without having anywhere near the certainty I am ascribing to the statement. I would say they are expressing guesses, which are not beliefs.
I’m “agnostic” about lots of things that I don’t know enough about. That’s what the word means: not-knowing.
What’s going on here, succinctly, is that I don’t see a difference the mental processes you run through to think about the coin, the gods, or the sun. I don’t see the functional differences between guesses and statistics and beliefs. You guess that the coin is fair because you have a belief that the coin is fair because statistically most coins are fair. You believe that the fair coin has a 50% chance of coming up heads because you believe that the statistics support that belief. It’s all part of the same sort of thought processess; you only have one head to think with.
What does it mean to, as you say, “not know enough about it”? Not know enough to do what? Why, not know enough come to a reasonably certain conclusion. But how do you become certain of something? By having a high level belief in it. Which means to become uncertain of something you need to have an insufficient belief in it to achieve certainty. Which requires you to have come to a conclusion about how much belief you have - or else you wouldn’t even know you didn’t know.
Referring to it in terms of percentages is merely to help visualize the continuum we’re dealing with it, from no belief to full belief, and how your level of credulity and your standard of belief required to claim certianty either way react with each other. In actuality people mostly don’t bother to codify their speculative thought processes down to probabilities, unless they have numbers for it to start with, or are statistics majors (who take confidence intervals literally.)
One of the problems with the percentages approach is that it’s not really the way the human brain operates (IMHO).
But, let’s pretend it is the way the human brain operates and, like C3PO or Spock, we respond with an exact percentage of our certainty one way or the other. Why lump the 50%'ers in with the groups on either side? In what way does that make conversations about our positions better? To me it’s a loss of info.
I know you keep insisting that nobody really is a 50%er, but that is a pretty difficult position to support, it’s a big world and people think all kinds of things.
No, I meant the 2/3 heads coin that was posited earlier. I said I didn’t “believe” it would come up heads, because I had the information that there was a 1/3 chance of tails. It seems nonsensical to me to say that I “believe” something when I have reason to think that the opposite could turn out to be the case. On the other hand, if compelled to guess, of course I’ll guess heads.
You seem to be using “belief” here to mean what I would call “knowledge,” or “information,” and perhaps what some people would call “faith,” in certain contexts. Whereas I use the word “belief” to mean something like what you’re calling “certainty.”
If that translation is correct, I follow you, except that I don’t perceive it in terms of a continuum, where maybe some uncertain concepts are closer to certainty than other. That would suggest that I knew how much I didn’t know, which of course I don’t.
If I’m uncertain–agnostic–that means I haven’t established any “belief.” Eventually, I may find myself convinced one way or the other, but it’s more of a gestalt tipping point than an accumulative creep toward certainty.
When I was growing up, my father was a church-going agnostic. I’d say he put the probability at something far above 1%, quite possibly above 50%.
a) Accepting your probabilistic model for the moment (for after all, it’s not given that it is the best conceptual framework) it’s not unreasonable to apply different thresholds to different topics. Say I doubt that Venezuela will change Presidents before July 2010: I don’t know for sure whether there’s an election between now and then prior to a google search. For a topic like that, I might be comfortable saying “I believe” or “I don’t believe,” primarily because it doesn’t affect me.
b) Pascal’s Wager lacks the force that it once did due to competing metaphysical theories: religious possibilities for a modern westerner are wider both in terms of institutions and imagination. I’m not sure what a Pascal-approved Safety Prayer might look like, but if anybody has any ideas, I’d take it into consideration. Then again, some theologians seem to think that prayers are for humanity’s benefit and not God’s, which muddles the argument further.
Puzzling. As an agnostic, I am told by atheists that I am a soft atheist as I ~B G (which is distinguished from B ~G). As a matter of logic, I can’t disagree. As a matter of communication, I find the label misleading.
Perhaps I should clarify something. I’ve stated in certain contexts that atheists can’t handle uncertainty – but that has always been in response to accusations of intellectual cowardice and the like. Imputing motivations to your opponent is typically a wholly bogus argument (strictly speaking) but as a matter of rhetoric – well two can play at that game, can’t they? It is true that uncertainty makes mammals uncomfortable, but this is a separate issue from the existence or non existence of a supreme deity.
Separately, are you saying that there are a lot of proselytizing agnostics? Agnostic/atheist debates aren’t that common, are they, at least relative to theist/atheist discussions? Personally, I find them rather diverting.
Surely you’ve seen people say they subscribe to no religion, but believe in a higher power. It is a belief in god, just a weak one.
Which is more or less what I meant. Threshold not being a level of belief, but the point somewhere else which drives you from not believing to believing - or vice versa.
Agree so far, given the definition of threshold I am using.
First, I agree that the threshold of belief may be based on irrational things. For most people it depends on what their parents tell them. And past this, the level of belief may be stronger or weaker - but you have to have a belief to give it a strength. I’d also say that the strength of belief is tied to the strength of whatever got one over the threshold.
Agree. There are some atheists who won’t admit it to others, and some who won’t admit it to themselves. But crossing that threshold can be done noisily or silently, as we wake up one day and find we no longer believe. I suspect it, like so much else, gets decided in the subconscious and presented to us.
I don’t think all, or even most, agnostics are extreme skeptics, though I agree that perhaps they should be. I think some learned the mistaken notion that atheism is about claims of knowledge that there is no god, correctly reject this notion, and find themselves with no other position. Some might also use a term that gets a lot less hate from the general public than atheism.
Nope, and for similar reasons why I don’t believe in any gods. Unless the evil hypnotist is god, with unlimited resources, I’d expect our fake world to be a lot simpler than the one we see. I’ve written simulators, and you keep them as simple as possible to do the job. In a similar way, if God made the universe for us it might be a simpler one - just like the one the ancients believed in. In neither case can I say I know I am right, but I have plenty of good reasons to believe I am.
Zelazny had a humourous go at an agnostic’s prayer
Whooop! Sorry I’m late on this one. No, I haven’t read it all, but I could’ve answered first and put an end to it:
Agnostics = believers. Plain and simple. It is a wasted term. To even toy with the idea of one omnipotent, omniscient being, even though you hate church, collection plates, hymns and the stale smell of ancient nuns in churches, you believe in the possibility??? You’re an agnostic?? Nope, you believe.
I am atheist/anti-theist. You ask me the questions, there is absolutely no possibility of a sky fairy. No, I am not wrong. (Send the sky daddy to my house, and I’ll apologize.) My computer doesn’t love me and rainbows are not a gift from a deluded genie.
I am so sick and tired of the varied definitions of these words. Holding on to the weakest idea that if you worship-- even if you think it’s all bunk, but it turns out to be true and the rapture happens-- call yourself a believer, never an agnostic. (Don’t start me on “deist”.)
Atheist is not a confusing term-- no gods. It appears that all these varied definitions come from where was that again??
Oh, yeah. Believers who enjoy to segregate, categorize and cast judgment on others using only a book, faith and no evidence.
Grinding my teeth, which were clearly not intelligently designed. If you saw my dental records, you’d agree. 