It’s true that the question of God’s existence is epistemologically fairly trivial and doesn’t require its own category of justifications
It’s really epistemologically difficult to find out what people mean by God in the first case; how then can it be epistemologically trivial to judge the merits of such a hypothesis?
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.
It’s really epistemologically difficult to find out what people mean by God in the first case; how then can it be epistemologically trivial to judge the merits of such a hypothesis?
Difficult to pin down within a range of trivial-to-judge positions.
With, possibly, vanishingly rare exceptions.
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?