Maybe? It depends somewhat on what sort of a case you want made.
If I accept that beliefs are justified insofar as evidence differentially supports them relative to competing beliefs, and I ask whether a belief that a deity exists that has the properties attributed to it by (for example) Catholics is justified, it follows that I should look for evidence differentially supporting that belief. If I don’t find such evidence, I should conclude that such a belief is not justified; if I do find it, I can go on to ask other more detailed questions about that belief.
If you agree with that, and you’re in the position of having looked for such evidence and found it (or found plausible candidates for it), then sure, I might be interested in working that through with you. Who knows, perhaps you’ll convince me as well.
OTOH, if you don’t agree with that, we probably don’t have enough common ground to even get started.
Shortly after I was introduced to LessWrong, a local philosophy meetup that I sporadically attended held a meeting on the topic, “What would it take to convince you of God’s existence?”. Given my background on the other side of the question, I naturally prepared a lengthy list of the sorts of evidences I would look for to convince me that God doesn’t exist. (Sadly, no one else at the meetup seemed interested in an evidential approach and just answered “absolutely nothing” to the original question or maundered on about supposed past lives, so I didn’t get any critiques there.)
Nevertheless, it’s quite plausible I missed some important possible tests or mistook the data, and that’s where a chavruta would fit in.
I’d actually like to back up a step from there, if it’s OK with you.
It seems likely to me that many of the items you list as evidence of the non-existence of the referent of “God” as understood by your form of Catholicism would also be evidence of the non-existence of the referent of “God” as understood by my form of Judaism. (For convenience, I will hereafter refer to those referents as the Christian God and the Jewish God, respectively.)
If that’s true, it creates something of a problem, since while I would agree that seeking evidence for the nonexistence of X and failing to find it constitutes evidence (not proof, but evidence) for the existence of X, if the evidence you’re seeking and failing to find is also evidence for the nonexistence of Y then failing to find it is equally evidence for the existence of Y. So, if the evidence you identified would demonstrate the nonexistence of both the Christian and the Jewish Gods, then failing to find that evidence would be both evidence for the existence of the Christian God and evidence for the existence of the Jewish God.
And the same goes for many other denominations’ Gods.
Which would be fine, if your goal was to explore the existence of some kind of God, who might not be the Christian God… but it doesn’t sound like that’s where you’re coming from.
And if X and Y are mutually exclusive, then the whole thing becomes rather a muddle.
So it seems it’s important to find, not only evidence that supports the existence of the Christian God (such as failing to find evidence of Godlessness) but also evidence that differentially supports that existence, relative to the existence of other Gods (say, one of the Hindu Gods, or the God of some religion neither of us has ever heard of).
OK. So, I return to my earlier statement: if I want to know whether a belief in the Christian god is justified, I should look for evidence differentially supporting that belief. If I don’t find such evidence, I should conclude that such a belief is not justified; if I do find it, I can go on to ask other more detailed questions about that belief.
The obvious next question, then: what evidence differentially supports that belief?
“What would it take to convince you of God’s existence?”
I suspect that one of two things was going on. They may have not really cared to talk about the supernatural but were intending to use that extreme case as a springboard to talk about evidence and belief in general. Alternatively, if they thought the topic as phrased was apt, likely they were not sufficiently deft at dealing with and unpacking unhelpful terms like “God”.
no one else at the meetup seemed interested in an evidential approach
You should have abandoned sharing your list (hard to do after putting effort into it) and discussed why an evidential approach was better than their approaches at a philosophical level. If you don’t have a separate long mental list of why it is, then even if it is the right approach, you shouldn’t feel too superior over people using the wrong approach who can’t justify their philosophical approach because you can’t justify yours either, you just know how to use it.
You should have abandoned sharing your list (hard to do after putting effort into it) and discussed why an evidential approach was better than their approaches at a philosophical level.
Eh, I’m fine with analytic philosophy. It seems like an essential toolset. The only sense in which an evidential approach seemed superior to me was that it felt less like cheating. I’ve encountered dozens of definitions of “God”, and it’s easy to pick a definition such that the entity necessarily exists or necessarily doesn’t exist. Doing that and stopping there is cheating, I think, because it’s not the sensus fidelium regarding what and who God is. Plainly Catholicism does use (by habit, not dogma) a small set of definitions of necessarily existing entities, but it’s far from obvious that they are (or can be) the same entity, and quite dubious that those entities have much in common with Yahweh.
Maybe? It depends somewhat on what sort of a case you want made.
If I accept that beliefs are justified insofar as evidence differentially supports them relative to competing beliefs, and I ask whether a belief that a deity exists that has the properties attributed to it by (for example) Catholics is justified, it follows that I should look for evidence differentially supporting that belief. If I don’t find such evidence, I should conclude that such a belief is not justified; if I do find it, I can go on to ask other more detailed questions about that belief.
If you agree with that, and you’re in the position of having looked for such evidence and found it (or found plausible candidates for it), then sure, I might be interested in working that through with you. Who knows, perhaps you’ll convince me as well.
OTOH, if you don’t agree with that, we probably don’t have enough common ground to even get started.
Hi TheOtherDave,
Shortly after I was introduced to LessWrong, a local philosophy meetup that I sporadically attended held a meeting on the topic, “What would it take to convince you of God’s existence?”. Given my background on the other side of the question, I naturally prepared a lengthy list of the sorts of evidences I would look for to convince me that God doesn’t exist. (Sadly, no one else at the meetup seemed interested in an evidential approach and just answered “absolutely nothing” to the original question or maundered on about supposed past lives, so I didn’t get any critiques there.)
Nevertheless, it’s quite plausible I missed some important possible tests or mistook the data, and that’s where a chavruta would fit in.
I’d actually like to back up a step from there, if it’s OK with you.
It seems likely to me that many of the items you list as evidence of the non-existence of the referent of “God” as understood by your form of Catholicism would also be evidence of the non-existence of the referent of “God” as understood by my form of Judaism. (For convenience, I will hereafter refer to those referents as the Christian God and the Jewish God, respectively.)
If that’s true, it creates something of a problem, since while I would agree that seeking evidence for the nonexistence of X and failing to find it constitutes evidence (not proof, but evidence) for the existence of X, if the evidence you’re seeking and failing to find is also evidence for the nonexistence of Y then failing to find it is equally evidence for the existence of Y. So, if the evidence you identified would demonstrate the nonexistence of both the Christian and the Jewish Gods, then failing to find that evidence would be both evidence for the existence of the Christian God and evidence for the existence of the Jewish God.
And the same goes for many other denominations’ Gods.
Which would be fine, if your goal was to explore the existence of some kind of God, who might not be the Christian God… but it doesn’t sound like that’s where you’re coming from.
And if X and Y are mutually exclusive, then the whole thing becomes rather a muddle.
So it seems it’s important to find, not only evidence that supports the existence of the Christian God (such as failing to find evidence of Godlessness) but also evidence that differentially supports that existence, relative to the existence of other Gods (say, one of the Hindu Gods, or the God of some religion neither of us has ever heard of).
Would you agree?
With every word.
OK. So, I return to my earlier statement: if I want to know whether a belief in the Christian god is justified, I should look for evidence differentially supporting that belief. If I don’t find such evidence, I should conclude that such a belief is not justified; if I do find it, I can go on to ask other more detailed questions about that belief.
The obvious next question, then: what evidence differentially supports that belief?
I suggest concluding that beliefs are probabilistic, and strengths of belief are justified or unjustified.
Sure, agreed. Read “a certain confidence level in a belief in” for “a belief in” throughout.
I suspect that one of two things was going on. They may have not really cared to talk about the supernatural but were intending to use that extreme case as a springboard to talk about evidence and belief in general. Alternatively, if they thought the topic as phrased was apt, likely they were not sufficiently deft at dealing with and unpacking unhelpful terms like “God”.
You should have abandoned sharing your list (hard to do after putting effort into it) and discussed why an evidential approach was better than their approaches at a philosophical level. If you don’t have a separate long mental list of why it is, then even if it is the right approach, you shouldn’t feel too superior over people using the wrong approach who can’t justify their philosophical approach because you can’t justify yours either, you just know how to use it.
Eh, I’m fine with analytic philosophy. It seems like an essential toolset. The only sense in which an evidential approach seemed superior to me was that it felt less like cheating. I’ve encountered dozens of definitions of “God”, and it’s easy to pick a definition such that the entity necessarily exists or necessarily doesn’t exist. Doing that and stopping there is cheating, I think, because it’s not the sensus fidelium regarding what and who God is. Plainly Catholicism does use (by habit, not dogma) a small set of definitions of necessarily existing entities, but it’s far from obvious that they are (or can be) the same entity, and quite dubious that those entities have much in common with Yahweh.