You’re playing, I think, the wrong game. If you both believe to have the truth about the existence of God, there is no updating nor justifiable epxlanations to be given: you just become two fundamentalists on the opposite side of the barricade who are trying to outwit each other. Not very effective.
I suggest you to shift to a different game, a more Bayesian game that starts from evidence. Then you don’t need ev-psych, you just need Occam’s razor.
You first put God’s existence at 0 dB, then clear the game field: the fact that God is conceivable doesn’t constitute evidence on his existence (otherwise so would your imagining that the Moon is made of cheese), nor that the fact that you can’t tell the origin of morality (by the same symmetry argument). The game starts when you start adding and subtracting evidence in favor or against the existence of God, and watch the plausibility drop like a sunken ship...
… if you factor in all the scientific knowledge so far accumulated and use the universal prior. I agree with you in principle, a good Bayesian indeed should use all his prior informations and adopt a universal prior, but I think that putting God at 0dB is still beneficial in the context of the OP debate, and wouldn’t change the outcome. I strongly doubt that the OP’s father would accept a starting point where the plausibility of God is already very low, while the probability of God at 1⁄2 is much more palatable, and usually the accepted starting point in traditional rationality. The fact is that the OP can share an uninformative prior and then have the father make God a complex hypothesis, by presenting scientific knowledge directly in opposition with naive opinion on God existence. Then he just can rely on his preference of simple explanations to accept God non-existence. This procedure still make sense from a Bayesian POV but produces much less friction when used within a heated debate.
You’re playing, I think, the wrong game. If you both believe to have the truth about the existence of God, there is no updating nor justifiable epxlanations to be given: you just become two fundamentalists on the opposite side of the barricade who are trying to outwit each other. Not very effective.
I suggest you to shift to a different game, a more Bayesian game that starts from evidence. Then you don’t need ev-psych, you just need Occam’s razor.
You first put God’s existence at 0 dB, then clear the game field: the fact that God is conceivable doesn’t constitute evidence on his existence (otherwise so would your imagining that the Moon is made of cheese), nor that the fact that you can’t tell the origin of morality (by the same symmetry argument). The game starts when you start adding and subtracting evidence in favor or against the existence of God, and watch the plausibility drop like a sunken ship...
God is a complex hypothesis, and so should have a prior lower than 0dB.
… if you factor in all the scientific knowledge so far accumulated and use the universal prior.
I agree with you in principle, a good Bayesian indeed should use all his prior informations and adopt a universal prior, but I think that putting God at 0dB is still beneficial in the context of the OP debate, and wouldn’t change the outcome.
I strongly doubt that the OP’s father would accept a starting point where the plausibility of God is already very low, while the probability of God at 1⁄2 is much more palatable, and usually the accepted starting point in traditional rationality.
The fact is that the OP can share an uninformative prior and then have the father make God a complex hypothesis, by presenting scientific knowledge directly in opposition with naive opinion on God existence. Then he just can rely on his preference of simple explanations to accept God non-existence.
This procedure still make sense from a Bayesian POV but produces much less friction when used within a heated debate.