As others have pointed out to you in this thread and Eliezer has explained in detail, absence of evidence is evidence of absence. Why on this one topic would you deny the possibility of knowledge based on all the evidence you have?
There was no evidence of black swans, until there was.
To many people there is evidence of God, it’s just that to others that evidence is (via Occam’s razor or other tools) evidence of the vastness of the universe, evolutionary adaptions, the big bang, spontaneous remission etc.
I don’t have the tools to evaluate many of their arguments, and at my age i’m fairly certain (not due to age, but due to my track record where advanced math and such is concerned as well as other interests and commitments) that will not be able to acquire the skills and knowledge to evaluate them.
In many of my social and professional activities I have to rub elbows with folks who are of varying degrees of religious, and it makes my life more interesting if I can listen to them with the possibility, however faint that they are right.
In many of my social and professional activities I have to rub elbows with folks who are of varying degrees of religious, and it makes my life more interesting if I can listen to them with the possibility, however faint that they are right.
A good bayesian will always assign a small chance that anyone is right, even the homeless guy down the street claiming that the aliens are living in the sewers and stealing our nuclear energy. That doesn’t mean it is likely. Moreover, how interesting it is to temporarily entertain a claim has nothing to do with how likely the claim is. I entertain myself by discussing minutia of halacha (Orthodox Jewish law). That doesn’t mean I need to pretend that that has any more connection to reality than the rules for Dungeons and Dragons.
Why does this bother you so?
You are posting on a website devoted to improving human rationality and you are wondering why people feel a need to respond to a set of arguments that directly advocate assigning higher chances to certain hypotheses because they make the world more interesting?
As others have pointed out to you in this thread and Eliezer has explained in detail, absence of evidence is evidence of absence. Why on this one topic would you deny the possibility of knowledge based on all the evidence you have?
There was no evidence of black swans, until there was.
To many people there is evidence of God, it’s just that to others that evidence is (via Occam’s razor or other tools) evidence of the vastness of the universe, evolutionary adaptions, the big bang, spontaneous remission etc.
I don’t have the tools to evaluate many of their arguments, and at my age i’m fairly certain (not due to age, but due to my track record where advanced math and such is concerned as well as other interests and commitments) that will not be able to acquire the skills and knowledge to evaluate them.
In many of my social and professional activities I have to rub elbows with folks who are of varying degrees of religious, and it makes my life more interesting if I can listen to them with the possibility, however faint that they are right.
Why does this bother you so?
A good bayesian will always assign a small chance that anyone is right, even the homeless guy down the street claiming that the aliens are living in the sewers and stealing our nuclear energy. That doesn’t mean it is likely. Moreover, how interesting it is to temporarily entertain a claim has nothing to do with how likely the claim is. I entertain myself by discussing minutia of halacha (Orthodox Jewish law). That doesn’t mean I need to pretend that that has any more connection to reality than the rules for Dungeons and Dragons.
You are posting on a website devoted to improving human rationality and you are wondering why people feel a need to respond to a set of arguments that directly advocate assigning higher chances to certain hypotheses because they make the world more interesting?