I’d suggest that you talk about what constitutes proper evidence for a belief. Almost every religious person I know insists that something in their life shows them that God exists. I suggest mentioning (and explaining) belief in belief.
One of the key pieces to this that I find is surprisingly nonobvious to a lot of people is the difference between concluding that event E is evidence for belief B on the one hand, and concluding that if I perceive E then B must be true on the other.
I am reminded of tutoring high-school physics, where an astonishing number of people have trouble with the idea that when you toss a ball in the air, it immediately starts to accelerate downward, even though it is traveling up. The idea that the acceleration vector and the velocity vector can point in opposite directions just seems to be hard for some people to wrap their brains around, and until they get it their thinking about ballistics is deeply confused.
I think something similar happens with people’s understanding of the relationship between evidence and beliefs, and it is perhaps worth addressing explicitly before you get into examples where people have something emotionally at stake.
One way to short-circuit this is to train the habit of thinking in terms of confidence intervals rather than binary beliefs, but I suspect that’s even more inferential steps away for most of your audience.
So I recommend spending some time on this aspect explicitly,
One of the key pieces to this that I find is surprisingly nonobvious to a lot of people is the difference between concluding that event E is evidence for belief B on the one hand, and concluding that if I perceive E then B must be true on the other.
Good point, will keep in mind.
I once told my Dad that his car accident was only proof of God because he was looking to find evidence to support God, when really it was just medical science and his own body’s repair mechanisms that saved him.
One of the key pieces to this that I find is surprisingly nonobvious to a lot of people is the difference between concluding that event E is evidence for belief B on the one hand, and concluding that if I perceive E then B must be true on the other.
I am reminded of tutoring high-school physics, where an astonishing number of people have trouble with the idea that when you toss a ball in the air, it immediately starts to accelerate downward, even though it is traveling up. The idea that the acceleration vector and the velocity vector can point in opposite directions just seems to be hard for some people to wrap their brains around, and until they get it their thinking about ballistics is deeply confused.
I think something similar happens with people’s understanding of the relationship between evidence and beliefs, and it is perhaps worth addressing explicitly before you get into examples where people have something emotionally at stake.
One way to short-circuit this is to train the habit of thinking in terms of confidence intervals rather than binary beliefs, but I suspect that’s even more inferential steps away for most of your audience. So I recommend spending some time on this aspect explicitly,
Good point, will keep in mind.
I once told my Dad that his car accident was only proof of God because he was looking to find evidence to support God, when really it was just medical science and his own body’s repair mechanisms that saved him.
It had no effect.