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Originally Posted by Monkey Banana
I think you are likely right about what he means and wrong about string theorists, some of whom I've definitely seen saying that it doesn't need evidence because it works so well.
Cite?
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Some scientists believe their models have merit the closer they tend to reality; others believe they have merit the more elegant and comprehensive they are. No doubt the latter believe that the better the theories, the closer they will tend to reality coincidentally, because they have the tacit belief that the universe "chooses" the most elegant solutions.
In a way, they are themselves religionists.
It sounds like you are conflating the realism/anti-realism/structuralism/instrumentalism debate and the arguments for simplicity in philosophy of science. I'm not aware of any significant group of scientists claiming that the universe "chooses" elegant solutions in any sort of teleological way. Arguments for favouring elegance are more often using some formal mathematical application of Occams Razor, e.g. Solomonoff induction or Minimum Message Length / Kolmogorov complexity.
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Yes, this is at least partly true, although isn't it also true that (1) is largely motivated by a desire to compete with science on its own terms?
(2) is not on the face of it very sophisticated though.
I think Comfort would likely agree that God does not need to furnish proof of his existence, but that there are things that are evidences of God regardless. I think he'd suggest his position is a synthesis of (1) and (2) since he does not believe in God because of any evidence for him, but purely on faith.
Well, fideism vs evidentialism is an open question in theism. It's also worth pointing out that the idea of a faith as an form of epistemology is not the only version. For example, in
Catholicism faith is "man's obedient response to God's revelation" whereas "Reason can show that that there is a God and can demonstrate his primary attributes such as his power and divinity. Reason lays the foundation for faith and makes revelation 'credible.'" That is not a view that relegates reason/evidence to a non-causal role in belief. We'll move on to the different ways that evidence could play a causal role now...
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I don't think these are at all contradictory positions though. God's unwillingness to furnish proof does not mean there is no evidence. It should go without saying that all Christians believe there to be evidence of God's existence, at least in as much as that god appeared on Earth etc.
The difference between evidence and proof might be making this more complicated than it should be. Think of it in terms of Bayesian updating; let E be some piece of evidence for the existence of god (G).
P(G|E) > P(G|~E)
In a evidentialist framework, if E increases our subjective posterior probability that god exists, then the lack of E must reduce the subjective posterior probability of god. Therefore we should have more confidence that God exists if we have many Es and less confidence that God exists if we lack many Es. However, this can be contrasted with the claim that we should expect G to
entail a lack of E (in order to preserve faith):
P(G|E) < P(G|~E)
A theist could hold either hypothesis to be true, but not both at once. The third option would be to claim that evidence is absolutely irrelevant to their belief in god. This option was not what Lestat was discussing. He was talking about
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Originally Posted by Lestat
religious people love evidence if it can even be remotely construed as confirming a belief they hold
To illustrate the problem further, we can take the example of conspiracy theorists. Let E be some piece of evidence that JFK was killed by Martians and T be that conspiracy theory. The conspiracy theorist will argue that E increases the posterior probability of T (by demonstrating that the event went down as they claim) whereas ~E
also increases the posterior probability of T (because ~E proves they are covering up the evidence zomgconspiracy).
It's not like there is no way out of this for the theist. But if one wants to claim that evidence supports the existence of god then lack of evidence must count against Him. There are plenty of Christians who are not afraid to admit that, say, the existence of suffering is a problem for theism, and that a world without suffering would better support the God hypothesis. That is a rational position that is open to theists. Equally, one can claim that evidence has
no confirming role in belief. I'd take issue with that sort of epistemology, but it can be consistent.
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I think they'd rather say that while there is evidence, that is not why they believe in God, which is neither inconsistent nor contradictory.
No-one has claimed that that position is inconsistent or contradictory.
Last edited by zumby; 05-22-2013 at 08:01 AM.