I strongly suspect that there is a lot of coherence among many different spiritualists’ and theologians’ conception of God, and I strongly suspect that most atheists have no idea what kind of God the more enlightened spiritualists are talking about, and are instead constructing a straw God made up of secondhand half-remembered Bible passages. In general I think LW is embarrassingly bad at steel-manning.
Coherence isn’t necessary factor for a good theory. In artificial intelligence it’s sometimes preferable to allow incoherence to have higher robustness.
If a given hypothesis is incoherent even to its strongest proponents, then it’s not very meritorious. It’s in “not even wrong” territory.
I strongly suspect that there is a lot of coherence among many different spiritualists’ and theologians’ conception of God, and I strongly suspect that most atheists have no idea what kind of God the more enlightened spiritualists are talking about, and are instead constructing a straw God made up of secondhand half-remembered Bible passages. In general I think LW is embarrassingly bad at steel-manning.
Coherence isn’t necessary factor for a good theory. In artificial intelligence it’s sometimes preferable to allow incoherence to have higher robustness.
Could you expand?