Tuesday, February 11, 2014

Three out of 5 philosophers are atheist or is it if there are an uneven number of stars you're agnostic?



Is Atheism Irrational? article  an excerpt ...

"In the British newspaper The Independent, the scientist Richard Dawkins was recently asked the following question: “If you died and arrived at the gates of heaven, what would you say to God to justify your lifelong atheism?” His response: “I’d quote Bertrand Russell: ‘Not enough evidence, God! Not enough evidence!’” But lack of evidence, if indeed evidence is lacking, is no grounds for atheism. No one thinks there is good evidence for the proposition that there are an even number of stars; but also, no one thinks the right conclusion to draw is that there are an uneven number of stars. The right conclusion would instead be agnosticism."

 I raise my hand -- I think I'd quote Bertrand Russell too ...

Or to paraphrase Shakespeare -- an atheist by any other name would smell like an agnostic ...

Or does anti-theist rhyme with antithesis?

"GG: So your claim is that if materialism is true, evolution doesn’t lead to most of our beliefs being true.


AP: Right. In fact, given materialism and evolution, it follows that our belief-producing faculties are not reliable.
Here’s why. If a belief is as likely to be false as to be true, we’d have to say the probability that any particular belief is true is about 50 percent. Now suppose we had a total of 100 independent beliefs (of course, we have many more). Remember that the probability that all of a group of beliefs are true is the multiplication of all their individual probabilities. Even if we set a fairly low bar for reliability — say, that at least two-thirds (67 percent) of our beliefs are true — our overall reliability, given materialism and evolution, is exceedingly low: something like .0004. So if you accept both materialism and evolution, you have good reason to believe that your belief-producing faculties are not reliable."

I believe that the above logic is very flawed.  Or if not flawed that the same can be said of theism.  By this logic of probabilities we are all agnostics with varying degrees of faith in something.

interesting.

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