I’m still not sure that your idea is true even in when it is limited to “everyone who doesn’t belong to such a religion.” It might be true about LWers but they are not a representative sample. Americans seem to be pretty consistently more likely to identify as agnostic as atheist, for example. Now of course that might be because American doesn’t like atheists and they want to avoid the social consequences. And it might be different (as far as I know) in other countries, since I just checked the statistics for the US according to various polls. But prima facie, it suggests that “most people who don’t believe in any god at all are not extremely convinced by any argument against the existence of a god.” I am not asserting that this is definitely the case, but it is plausible to me, and supported at least by this fact. It’s possible you could establish your claim with better data, but so far I’m not convinced.
There is still the problem that if you limit it to people who “don’t belong to such a religion,” then you appear to be saying “everyone who thinks that God doesn’t exist thinks that there is a convincing argument against the existence of God,” and even if that were one particular argument, it would be similar to saying, “everyone who accepts the error theory of morality finds such and such an argument convincing.” Even if there is one such argument in the case of error theory (which might not actually be the case), that hardly establishes that it is easy to prove that error theory is true, or that it is true at all, for that matter.
I personally think the argument from evil (and various similar arguments) is evidence against the existence of a personal God, but I don’t find it extremely convincing. A large part of the reason for that is when I did believe in Christianity, I had an answer to that argument which I found reasonable, and which still seems reasonable to me, not in the sense of “this is the case”, but in the sense of a reasonable possibility. Now you could say that this is an “artifact of religious commitments” in a historical sense, but I don’t think this is actually the case, given the fact that there are plenty of other issues where I never thought I had a good response in the first place. There is also Scott Alexander’s “Answer to Job.” Now I think that if you consider such responses carefully (my previous personal answer which I haven’t gone into here, or Scott’s answer, or almost any other reasonable response) they actually fit better with an impersonal principle than with a personal God, but they are not inconsistent with a personal one. So that prevents me from considering the argument extremely persuasive.
“Evidence that each person’s unconvincedness is an artefact of their own religious commitments.” You can certainly provide such evidence for many or most people. But theists can also provide evidence that atheistic convictions are often the result of non-evidential commitments as well. And in any case this is not going to apply to every single individual, and especially the case of converts to religion like Leah Libresco or Edward Feser. That doesn’t mean that all sorts of non-rational influences aren’t present in the case of converts. But it isn’t true that e.g. “they aren’t convinced by the argument from evil because they accept religion,” given the fact that the argument from evil did not prevent them from going from not accepting religion to accepting religion in the first place.
Of course, if I disagree with someone’s conclusion, I am almost certainly going to end up explaining how he went wrong. This isn’t Bulverism in a bad sense, given that I don’t assume he is wrong in the first place, but argue for it. And if I am right, it does mean there are better and more reasonable arguments for my position than for their position. But that isn’t the same as calling my conclusion something easily seen to be true.
I also would not say that just because some people disagree who are generally reasonable people, it follows that the matter cannot be an easy one. So for example I would say that young earth creationism is easily seen to be false, even though there are some people who both think it is true, and are generally reasonable people. But note that there are relatively few people like this, compared to the number of generally reasonable people who admit that evolution is true but still think some kind of religion is true.
One difference is this: it does not require anything like philosophical argument to establish that evolution is true. It just requires looking at actually existing plants, animals, and rocks and discussing how they could have got that way. In contrast, philosophy is actually hard for human beings. And I think you cannot prove or disprove something like theism without philosophical argument. This suggests that it is not easy to do so.
It’s true that a lot of people call themselves agnostics, which seems to indicate (1) not being completely convinced by any argument against theism while also (2) not having a commitment to any particular religion. However, I think the great majority of people who call themselves agnostics fall into one of these categories:
People who prefer to avoid too-committal terms like “atheist”, either because there’s a stigma attached to overt atheism where they are or because they think “atheist” implies absolute certainty.
People who haven’t really thought the matter through very much.
People who are agnostic about the existence of some sort of deity but strongly convinced that e.g. there is almost certainly no supremely good and powerful being who takes a personal interest in human affairs.
I would expect people in the first and third groups to share my opinion about arguments from evil, though the third lot would rightly observe that e.g. such arguments tell us nothing about superbeings who just don’t care about our affairs.
People in the second group might well not be very convinced by arguments from evil, but I would expect that if they gave serious consideration to such arguments they would typically see them as very strong.
“Everyone thinks there is a convincing argument”
That’s not quite what I’m saying. I’m saying that there are, in fact, arguments that I would expect to be very convincing if looked at seriously by a sizable majority of people not committed to the religions in question. Of course those who haven’t seriously considered such arguments will not yet be convinced.
Your own epistemic situation
I find it very interesting that you aren’t very convinced by arguments from evil despite having rejected Christianity, but I don’t think there’s anything further I can say without having any idea why it is that you aren’t convinced. You say it’s because there’s a particular answer you find reasonable, but I’ve no idea what that answer is :-).
You do mention Scott’s “Answer to Job”, which is very ingenious. It’s a good answer to arguments-from-evil that end “and therefore it is absolutely impossible that there is a benevolent god”, but I would consider such arguments overreaching even without that particular answer. Is it any good as an answer to “evidential” arguments that take the quantity and distribution of Bad Stuff in our world merely as evidence? Well, I guess that depends on (1) how likely Scott’s scenario is a priori and (2) how credible it is that our world is, so to speak, a random pick from all possible worlds where good outweighs bad, weighted by number of intelligent agents or something of the kind. To #1, I say: not terribly likely, because I am not convinced that good outweighs bad in our world. (Which is not at all the same thing as saying that many people in our world would rather die than live.) To #2, I say: not credible at all; I would expect a random observer from a multiverse containing all possible more-good-than-bad worlds to see something very very very different from what I see. (I suspect the great majority of observers in such worlds are something like Boltzmann brains.)
“Atheistic convictions are often the result of non-evidential commitments”
Oh, absolutely. I wasn’t meaning to make any comment on the relative merits of theists and atheists. I was just addressing an obvious argument against any claim that there’s good evidence against theism, namely that lots of apparently sensible people are theists. (I firmly agree that you likewise can’t reject the claim that there’s good evidence against atheism just because lots of apparently sensible people are atheists.)
(Highly intelligent converts like Leah Libresco and Ed Feser would be evidence against any claim that the only reason for not being convinced by atheistic arguments is prior religious commitment. But I have not been making that claim, at least not deliberately.)
Regarding the argument from evil:
I’m still not sure that your idea is true even in when it is limited to “everyone who doesn’t belong to such a religion.” It might be true about LWers but they are not a representative sample. Americans seem to be pretty consistently more likely to identify as agnostic as atheist, for example. Now of course that might be because American doesn’t like atheists and they want to avoid the social consequences. And it might be different (as far as I know) in other countries, since I just checked the statistics for the US according to various polls. But prima facie, it suggests that “most people who don’t believe in any god at all are not extremely convinced by any argument against the existence of a god.” I am not asserting that this is definitely the case, but it is plausible to me, and supported at least by this fact. It’s possible you could establish your claim with better data, but so far I’m not convinced.
There is still the problem that if you limit it to people who “don’t belong to such a religion,” then you appear to be saying “everyone who thinks that God doesn’t exist thinks that there is a convincing argument against the existence of God,” and even if that were one particular argument, it would be similar to saying, “everyone who accepts the error theory of morality finds such and such an argument convincing.” Even if there is one such argument in the case of error theory (which might not actually be the case), that hardly establishes that it is easy to prove that error theory is true, or that it is true at all, for that matter.
I personally think the argument from evil (and various similar arguments) is evidence against the existence of a personal God, but I don’t find it extremely convincing. A large part of the reason for that is when I did believe in Christianity, I had an answer to that argument which I found reasonable, and which still seems reasonable to me, not in the sense of “this is the case”, but in the sense of a reasonable possibility. Now you could say that this is an “artifact of religious commitments” in a historical sense, but I don’t think this is actually the case, given the fact that there are plenty of other issues where I never thought I had a good response in the first place. There is also Scott Alexander’s “Answer to Job.” Now I think that if you consider such responses carefully (my previous personal answer which I haven’t gone into here, or Scott’s answer, or almost any other reasonable response) they actually fit better with an impersonal principle than with a personal God, but they are not inconsistent with a personal one. So that prevents me from considering the argument extremely persuasive.
“Evidence that each person’s unconvincedness is an artefact of their own religious commitments.” You can certainly provide such evidence for many or most people. But theists can also provide evidence that atheistic convictions are often the result of non-evidential commitments as well. And in any case this is not going to apply to every single individual, and especially the case of converts to religion like Leah Libresco or Edward Feser. That doesn’t mean that all sorts of non-rational influences aren’t present in the case of converts. But it isn’t true that e.g. “they aren’t convinced by the argument from evil because they accept religion,” given the fact that the argument from evil did not prevent them from going from not accepting religion to accepting religion in the first place.
Of course, if I disagree with someone’s conclusion, I am almost certainly going to end up explaining how he went wrong. This isn’t Bulverism in a bad sense, given that I don’t assume he is wrong in the first place, but argue for it. And if I am right, it does mean there are better and more reasonable arguments for my position than for their position. But that isn’t the same as calling my conclusion something easily seen to be true.
I also would not say that just because some people disagree who are generally reasonable people, it follows that the matter cannot be an easy one. So for example I would say that young earth creationism is easily seen to be false, even though there are some people who both think it is true, and are generally reasonable people. But note that there are relatively few people like this, compared to the number of generally reasonable people who admit that evolution is true but still think some kind of religion is true.
One difference is this: it does not require anything like philosophical argument to establish that evolution is true. It just requires looking at actually existing plants, animals, and rocks and discussing how they could have got that way. In contrast, philosophy is actually hard for human beings. And I think you cannot prove or disprove something like theism without philosophical argument. This suggests that it is not easy to do so.
Agnostics
It’s true that a lot of people call themselves agnostics, which seems to indicate (1) not being completely convinced by any argument against theism while also (2) not having a commitment to any particular religion. However, I think the great majority of people who call themselves agnostics fall into one of these categories:
People who prefer to avoid too-committal terms like “atheist”, either because there’s a stigma attached to overt atheism where they are or because they think “atheist” implies absolute certainty.
People who haven’t really thought the matter through very much.
People who are agnostic about the existence of some sort of deity but strongly convinced that e.g. there is almost certainly no supremely good and powerful being who takes a personal interest in human affairs.
I would expect people in the first and third groups to share my opinion about arguments from evil, though the third lot would rightly observe that e.g. such arguments tell us nothing about superbeings who just don’t care about our affairs.
People in the second group might well not be very convinced by arguments from evil, but I would expect that if they gave serious consideration to such arguments they would typically see them as very strong.
“Everyone thinks there is a convincing argument”
That’s not quite what I’m saying. I’m saying that there are, in fact, arguments that I would expect to be very convincing if looked at seriously by a sizable majority of people not committed to the religions in question. Of course those who haven’t seriously considered such arguments will not yet be convinced.
Your own epistemic situation
I find it very interesting that you aren’t very convinced by arguments from evil despite having rejected Christianity, but I don’t think there’s anything further I can say without having any idea why it is that you aren’t convinced. You say it’s because there’s a particular answer you find reasonable, but I’ve no idea what that answer is :-).
You do mention Scott’s “Answer to Job”, which is very ingenious. It’s a good answer to arguments-from-evil that end “and therefore it is absolutely impossible that there is a benevolent god”, but I would consider such arguments overreaching even without that particular answer. Is it any good as an answer to “evidential” arguments that take the quantity and distribution of Bad Stuff in our world merely as evidence? Well, I guess that depends on (1) how likely Scott’s scenario is a priori and (2) how credible it is that our world is, so to speak, a random pick from all possible worlds where good outweighs bad, weighted by number of intelligent agents or something of the kind. To #1, I say: not terribly likely, because I am not convinced that good outweighs bad in our world. (Which is not at all the same thing as saying that many people in our world would rather die than live.) To #2, I say: not credible at all; I would expect a random observer from a multiverse containing all possible more-good-than-bad worlds to see something very very very different from what I see. (I suspect the great majority of observers in such worlds are something like Boltzmann brains.)
“Atheistic convictions are often the result of non-evidential commitments”
Oh, absolutely. I wasn’t meaning to make any comment on the relative merits of theists and atheists. I was just addressing an obvious argument against any claim that there’s good evidence against theism, namely that lots of apparently sensible people are theists. (I firmly agree that you likewise can’t reject the claim that there’s good evidence against atheism just because lots of apparently sensible people are atheists.)
(Highly intelligent converts like Leah Libresco and Ed Feser would be evidence against any claim that the only reason for not being convinced by atheistic arguments is prior religious commitment. But I have not been making that claim, at least not deliberately.)