Theistic arguments per se, however, are generally bad.
Why would we expect there to be good arguments for the wrong answer?
We here at Less Wrong have seen many arguments for the existence of God...All of those arguments are wrong.
Thank you for being unambiguous, this is exactly the sort of thing I wanted to see if this community actually believed. Personally I think it reflects poorly on anyone’s intellectual openness for them to believe the other side literally has no decent arguments.
Then you must believe the same with respect to homeopathic remedies, the flat earth society, and those who believe they can use their spiritual energy in the martial arts. Give us some good arguments for those.
There’s a lot of stuff out there for which it seems to me there is no good argument. I mean really, let’s try to maintain some sense of perspective here. The belief that everyone has a decent argument is, I think, pretty much demonstrably false. You presumably want us to believe that you’re in the same category as people who ought to be taken seriously, but I don’t really see how a belief in God is any more worthy of that than a belief in homeopathic remedies. At least, not based on your argument that all positions ought to be considered to have good arguments. If you’re trying to make a general argument, you’re going to get lumped in with them.
An argument can be “decent” without being right. If you want an example, and can follow it Kurt Godel’s ontological argument looks pretty decent. Consider that:
A) It is a logically valid argument
B) The premises sound fairly plausible (we can on the face of it imagine some sense of a “positive property” which would satisfy the premises)
C) It is not immediately obvious what is wrong with the premises
The wrongness can eventually be seen by carefully inspecting the premises, and checking which would go wrong in a null world (a possible world with no entities at all). Axiom 1 implies that if an impossible property is positive, then so is its negation (since an impossible property logically entails its negation). Axiom 2 says that can’t be true—a property and its negation can’t both be positive. So together these are a coded way of saying that all positive properties are possible properties. And then Axiom 5 (Neccessary existence is a positive property) goes wrong, because necessary existence is not a possible property in the null world. So it is not a positive property. Axiom 5 is inconsistent with Axioms 1 and 2.
There are arguments for the existence of God that are good in the sense that they raise my estimate of the likelihood of the existence of God by a substantial factor.
They aren’t sufficient to raise the odds to an overall appreciable level.
Sometimes, the issues really are cut-and-dried, though. To use a rather trivial example, consider the debate about the shape of the Earth. There are still some people who believe it’s flat. They don’t have any good arguments. We’ve been to space, we know the Earth is round, it’s going to be next to impossible to beat that.
Why would we expect there to be good arguments for the wrong answer?
I meant this as the rhetorical “we”, not “we, Less Wrong”.
And in general, you shouldn’t take me, or any other commenter in particular (even Eliezer), to represent all of Less Wrong. This is a community blog, after all.
Personally I think it reflects poorly on anyone’s intellectual openness for them to believe the other side literally has no decent arguments.
Edit: Sorry, I see that you quoted from that comment, so presumably you did read it. That said, I’m not sure that what I said was clear, given your subsequent comments...
Thank you for being unambiguous, this is exactly the sort of thing I wanted to see if this community actually believed. Personally I think it reflects poorly on anyone’s intellectual openness for them to believe the other side literally has no decent arguments.
Then you must believe the same with respect to homeopathic remedies, the flat earth society, and those who believe they can use their spiritual energy in the martial arts. Give us some good arguments for those.
There’s a lot of stuff out there for which it seems to me there is no good argument. I mean really, let’s try to maintain some sense of perspective here. The belief that everyone has a decent argument is, I think, pretty much demonstrably false. You presumably want us to believe that you’re in the same category as people who ought to be taken seriously, but I don’t really see how a belief in God is any more worthy of that than a belief in homeopathic remedies. At least, not based on your argument that all positions ought to be considered to have good arguments. If you’re trying to make a general argument, you’re going to get lumped in with them.
An argument can be “decent” without being right. If you want an example, and can follow it Kurt Godel’s ontological argument looks pretty decent. Consider that:
A) It is a logically valid argument
B) The premises sound fairly plausible (we can on the face of it imagine some sense of a “positive property” which would satisfy the premises)
C) It is not immediately obvious what is wrong with the premises
The wrongness can eventually be seen by carefully inspecting the premises, and checking which would go wrong in a null world (a possible world with no entities at all). Axiom 1 implies that if an impossible property is positive, then so is its negation (since an impossible property logically entails its negation). Axiom 2 says that can’t be true—a property and its negation can’t both be positive. So together these are a coded way of saying that all positive properties are possible properties. And then Axiom 5 (Neccessary existence is a positive property) goes wrong, because necessary existence is not a possible property in the null world. So it is not a positive property. Axiom 5 is inconsistent with Axioms 1 and 2.
There are arguments for the existence of God that are good in the sense that they raise my estimate of the likelihood of the existence of God by a substantial factor.
They aren’t sufficient to raise the odds to an overall appreciable level.
Sometimes, the issues really are cut-and-dried, though. To use a rather trivial example, consider the debate about the shape of the Earth. There are still some people who believe it’s flat. They don’t have any good arguments. We’ve been to space, we know the Earth is round, it’s going to be next to impossible to beat that.
I should clarify that when I said:
I meant this as the rhetorical “we”, not “we, Less Wrong”.
And in general, you shouldn’t take me, or any other commenter in particular (even Eliezer), to represent all of Less Wrong. This is a community blog, after all.
Did you read what I wrote about what makes arguments good or bad...?
Edit: Sorry, I see that you quoted from that comment, so presumably you did read it. That said, I’m not sure that what I said was clear, given your subsequent comments...