The Second Coming? An opportunity to have a chat with the Lord Himself? An analysis of a communion wafer revealing it to, in fact, be living human flesh? It’s seriously not that hard to think of these.
Which is more likely “God exists” or “I just hallucinated that” For the third one, probably that He exists, for the second one, definitely hallucination, for the first, I’m not sure.
I once conducted an experiment in which I threw a die 500 times, and then prayed for an hour every day for a week that that die consistently land on a four, and then threw the die 500 more times. Correlation was next to zero, so I concluded that God does not answer prayers about dice from me.
I wouldn’t expect a deity to answer that sort of prayer. You’re not being sincere, just trying to test them, which many canonically find annoying because it shows mistrust; you don’t need that die to land on a four; it suggests you’d use prayer to lowly ends (e.g. “Let me score a touchdown” rather than “Please solve world hunger”); it gives an easily publishable result, which no deity would characteristically accept—if they didn’t want to be discreet they’d still be doing showy miracles. Studies where you pray to cure cancer or something are much stronger evidence.
I read about a study like that, in which Christians prayed for people to recover from cancer. There was barely any difference between the patients that weren’t prayed for, the patients that were prayed for and knee that they were being prayed for, and the patients that didn’t know that they were being prayed for.
conversely, as a born pedant american christian who has raised countless prayers in the absolute good faith of childhood, god should know that only needlessly statistical tests would ultimately save me, and that any measurable manifestation of the divine would immediately cause me to pledge my life and the highest degree of propaganda / violence I could affect to any awful cause that (s)he could imagine. Unfortunately, YHWH turns away every chance he has at my safely partitioned acolytic fervor.
Old testament lord was not above showy miracles, but so much changes between the two that I have a hard time even seeing it as an allegory or reformation. I can only imagine that it was a pretty steep reform.
Second one: depends. I was kind of assuming that you have some way of verifying it, like you ask Him to create something and someone who wasn’t there later describes some of its previously determined properties accurately without being clued in. First: you’d need a massive global hallucination, and could use a similar verification method.
Given my current mental capacities, I think that any “proof” of God would be more easily attributed to hallucination. However, it should still be possible for God to prove His existence. If He is omnipotent, then he can increase my mental capacity to the extent that I can distinguish between divine intervention and a hallucination of divine intervention.
It may be theoretically possible to increase my mental capacity in some way such that I can distinguish mental capacity from hallucination. I cannot conceive of how that would be done, but it may be possible.
P.S. I love when people reply to comments that are two and a half years old. It feels like we’re talking to the past.
God showing up and granting all humans Wolverine’s healing factor would be evidence he exists. Providing a good explanation of why he permitted disease in the first place might convince me he is not as evil as described in the Bible.
Edit: Aliens playing god would still be far more likely, but the above scenario would be evidence in favour of the god hypothesis.
I’ve always quite liked Scott Alexander’s answer to the problem of evil. It is absolutely useless as a defense of Abrahamic beliefs in the real world, but is relatively satisfying to an atheist wondering how that question might theoretically be answered by a true god.
In case you’re not familiar, the basic idea is that God did create a perfectly good universe full of a near-infinite number of consciousnesses experiencing total bliss at all times—then decided that he wanted more net good to exist, so he made a universe which was almost exactly the same as the first but with one incredibly minor detail changed—making it just slightly less than maximally perfect. So on and so on, because to create an identical universe is not really to create one at all. After some absurd number of universes, we arrive at ours (this explanation requires that you believe that our universe has more net happiness than suffering, which is admittedly just taken on faith). Ours is definitely closer to balanced between perfectly good and perfectly evil than not, but it still is more good and thus worth creating.
He also implies that people who experience more suffering than happiness in their individual lives might be p-zombies, but I find that to be incredibly weird and have always left it out of explanations to people who might possibly feel that they have had a bad life.
There’s no situation which would convince me that Christianity had a 100% probability of being true, because the idea that the entire scenario since I first encountered evidence of Christianity being true was a hallucination or that I was a Brain-in-a-Vat could never be disproved, but I can easily imagine scenarios that could make me raise my estimated probability of Christianity much higher, to 50%, 90%, perhaps higher.
If I were teleported into an alternate world where world history and the like seemed more consistent with Christianity being true, I could easily envision my probability ranking to as high as my current one for Atheism, to the point that I would act based on the assumption that it had a 100% probability.
To apply the same reasoning the other way, if you aren’t a Christian, what would be a situation which would convince you of the truth of Christianity?
The Second Coming? An opportunity to have a chat with the Lord Himself? An analysis of a communion wafer revealing it to, in fact, be living human flesh? It’s seriously not that hard to think of these.
Which is more likely “God exists” or “I just hallucinated that” For the third one, probably that He exists, for the second one, definitely hallucination, for the first, I’m not sure.
I once conducted an experiment in which I threw a die 500 times, and then prayed for an hour every day for a week that that die consistently land on a four, and then threw the die 500 more times. Correlation was next to zero, so I concluded that God does not answer prayers about dice from me.
Haven’t you ever heard the saying, “God does not throw dice games”?
Wasn’t that what Einstein said about QM?
Almost. Eliezer is making a bad wordplay with what Einstein said.
I wouldn’t expect a deity to answer that sort of prayer. You’re not being sincere, just trying to test them, which many canonically find annoying because it shows mistrust; you don’t need that die to land on a four; it suggests you’d use prayer to lowly ends (e.g. “Let me score a touchdown” rather than “Please solve world hunger”); it gives an easily publishable result, which no deity would characteristically accept—if they didn’t want to be discreet they’d still be doing showy miracles. Studies where you pray to cure cancer or something are much stronger evidence.
Actually, if you run the test, you are. Given that you’d have changed your mind if it had gone the other way, of course.
I read about a study like that, in which Christians prayed for people to recover from cancer. There was barely any difference between the patients that weren’t prayed for, the patients that were prayed for and knee that they were being prayed for, and the patients that didn’t know that they were being prayed for.
I recall the same study—and I seem to remember that the patients who knew they were being prayed for did a bit worse.
(Related: Religion’s Claim to be Non-Disprovable)
Do those studies have a placebo group?
conversely, as a born pedant american christian who has raised countless prayers in the absolute good faith of childhood, god should know that only needlessly statistical tests would ultimately save me, and that any measurable manifestation of the divine would immediately cause me to pledge my life and the highest degree of propaganda / violence I could affect to any awful cause that (s)he could imagine. Unfortunately, YHWH turns away every chance he has at my safely partitioned acolytic fervor.
Old testament lord was not above showy miracles, but so much changes between the two that I have a hard time even seeing it as an allegory or reformation. I can only imagine that it was a pretty steep reform.
Second one: depends. I was kind of assuming that you have some way of verifying it, like you ask Him to create something and someone who wasn’t there later describes some of its previously determined properties accurately without being clued in. First: you’d need a massive global hallucination, and could use a similar verification method.
That seems accurate. Remember that a single person can hallucinate that someone else verified something, but this has low prior probability.
Given my current mental capacities, I think that any “proof” of God would be more easily attributed to hallucination. However, it should still be possible for God to prove His existence. If He is omnipotent, then he can increase my mental capacity to the extent that I can distinguish between divine intervention and a hallucination of divine intervention.
But what if you’re hallucinating the increase in mental capacity and resulting discernment?
It may be theoretically possible to increase my mental capacity in some way such that I can distinguish mental capacity from hallucination. I cannot conceive of how that would be done, but it may be possible.
P.S. I love when people reply to comments that are two and a half years old. It feels like we’re talking to the past.
God showing up and granting all humans Wolverine’s healing factor would be evidence he exists. Providing a good explanation of why he permitted disease in the first place might convince me he is not as evil as described in the Bible.
Edit: Aliens playing god would still be far more likely, but the above scenario would be evidence in favour of the god hypothesis.
I’ve always quite liked Scott Alexander’s answer to the problem of evil. It is absolutely useless as a defense of Abrahamic beliefs in the real world, but is relatively satisfying to an atheist wondering how that question might theoretically be answered by a true god.
In case you’re not familiar, the basic idea is that God did create a perfectly good universe full of a near-infinite number of consciousnesses experiencing total bliss at all times—then decided that he wanted more net good to exist, so he made a universe which was almost exactly the same as the first but with one incredibly minor detail changed—making it just slightly less than maximally perfect. So on and so on, because to create an identical universe is not really to create one at all. After some absurd number of universes, we arrive at ours (this explanation requires that you believe that our universe has more net happiness than suffering, which is admittedly just taken on faith). Ours is definitely closer to balanced between perfectly good and perfectly evil than not, but it still is more good and thus worth creating.
He also implies that people who experience more suffering than happiness in their individual lives might be p-zombies, but I find that to be incredibly weird and have always left it out of explanations to people who might possibly feel that they have had a bad life.
There’s no situation which would convince me that Christianity had a 100% probability of being true, because the idea that the entire scenario since I first encountered evidence of Christianity being true was a hallucination or that I was a Brain-in-a-Vat could never be disproved, but I can easily imagine scenarios that could make me raise my estimated probability of Christianity much higher, to 50%, 90%, perhaps higher.
If I were teleported into an alternate world where world history and the like seemed more consistent with Christianity being true, I could easily envision my probability ranking to as high as my current one for Atheism, to the point that I would act based on the assumption that it had a 100% probability.