Bayesian Counter-Apologetics: Ten Arguments for God Destroyed
Bayesian counter-apologetics is the method of using
Bayesian logic to turn every argument for God into an argument against
God, simply by understanding how the logic of evidence works, and then
reintroducing all the evidence theists always leave out when they
attempt to make an argument for God. Which reveals the fact that all
arguments for God, are really just exercises in hiding evidence.
I’ll illustrate this here with a brief application to
ten of the most common arguments for God; after a brief survey of the
applicable principles of Bayesian logic. All of which will serve as a
handy guide in general. But it will also prepare you for a critical
review of a leading apologetics book I’m planning for later this month. I
noticed, as I read through that book, that two common tricks are being
pulled, over and over again, to scam their readers: leaving evidence
out; and ignoring how the debate is actually about what best explains
the evidence, reframing the debate instead as about something
else. Just so much hand-waving to distract the reader from not noticing
everything that’s been hidden from them. A pernicious form of lying.
- Basic Framework
- Bayesian Logic
- The Cost of Making Excuses
- Lambasting the Cherry Pickers
- Ten Arguments for God
- Conclusion
-:-
Basic Framework
All arguments for and against God reduce to
hypothesis testing: We have a body of evidence, and need merely ask,
which hypothesis is made more probable by that evidence? And how much more probable? (See The Improbability of God.)
Even arguments for the logical impossibility of a God
always end up there, since all that those arguments really do is
demonstrate that certain definitions of God are logically impossible.
And that leaves us with the logically possible definitions, the
remaining “God hypotheses,” that don’t run into those problems of
logical contradiction. Like a God we posit not as literally omnipotent
(a claim that entails logical contradictions) but as only omnipotent in
the sense of having all powers it is logically possible simultaneously
to have. (See The Impossibility of God.)
Likewise, all arguments for the logical necessity of God. The ontological argument, for example, only really demonstrates that if an omni-God exists, then
he is the greatest thing conceivable; but that cannot resolve the
question of whether in fact the greatest thing we can think of actually exists. That remains an empirical hypothesis. Similarly, presuppositionalism
really doesn’t get you to God by any non-circular route; in the end it
just reduces to comparing empirical hypotheses for why the universe
obeys logic and mathematics reliably enough for us to use logic and
mathematics to understand it (hence, see my analysis of the Arguments from Reason and Mathematical Universe).
And arguments like “you can’t say the universe is unjust or evil
without a cosmic standard of justice or evil” always just collapse into
comparing hypotheses for why the universe doesn’t behave the way we
desire, and why we have that desire instead of some other—since
justice and goodness are simply descriptions of things we like and want,
nothing more; to argue they are more, is an empirical hypotheses that
again has to be tested out against the evidence.
Skeptical theism is similarly taken down the moment you frame the question as a probability.
Yet one must always frame questions of fact in terms of probability.
You can’t just say God “might” have an excuse for all the evils he
permits, and it “might” be the case that we can’t know what it is or
even conceive of what it is, “therefore” he does have such an excuse.
You have to ask if that’s probable, and how probable it is. And that always gets you back to hypothesis testing.
For example, why do you think the probability of there being an excuse is even as high as 50%, when you can’t even think
of any possible excuse, and the entity claiming the excuse could have
told you their excuse but refuses to do so when asked? You wouldn’t buy
that defense from a criminal in a trial. If a common murderer just said,
“you can’t claim to know I didn’t have a fully justified reason
to kill them, therefore you cannot find me guilty,” you’d laugh in their
face. Not because the premise is false—in fact it’s totally true: they may indeed have a totally justified excuse that you can’t think of and they may indeed also have some other totally justified excuse for not telling you what that excuse is, an excuse for not telling you that you also can’t think of and that they also can’t tell you. You laugh not because that’s not true. You laugh because that’s extraordinarily, indeed absurdly improbable.
And yet a God has infinitely more ability to effect
his wishes without adverse consequence than any common criminal, and
infinitely more ability to tell us why he can’t. So that a God would have such an excuse must necessarily be infinitely less likely than that any common criminal has such an excuse. And if you intend to gainsay that
conclusion, you are back to hypothesis testing: you are stuck proposing
some hypothesis, that we now have to test against the available
evidence, before we can assert it likely. And if it’s not likely, neither is God. Right back where we started. (See Stephen Law’s Pandora’s Box.)
So after you dance pointlessly around the logical
maypole, you will always end up comparing hypotheses against the
evidence for them. And that necessarily throws you onto the horns of
Bayesian logic.
Bayesian Logic
Bayes’ Theorem is a mathematical model of all correct empirical reasoning (see Proving History,
Chapters 4 and 6). As such, you can use it to analyze the validity and
soundness of any argument for matters of fact. You can learn more about
Bayesian reasoning from my blog: in the resources I’ve provided under Bayes’ Theorem: Lust for Glory and in many other articles under the tag Bayes’ Theorem. But the simplest way to put it is this:
The Odds a Claim Is True = The Prior Odds on the Claim Being True x The Odds of the Evidence on the Claim Being True Rather Than False
The odds of a thing happening means the probability
of a thing happening divided by the probability of it not happening. If
something is 80% likely to be true, for example, then the odds are
80/20, or 4 to 1 odds that it’s true (and thus 4 to 1 against it being
false). Odds are thus always some ratio of probabilities.
So what Bayes’ Theorem says is that the odds
that some claim is true are always the product of two other
probability ratios: the “prior odds” (the “prior probability” the claim
is true, divided by the “prior probability” the claim is false); and
what is called the likelihood ratio or “the Bayes Factor,”
which is the probability of the evidence if the claim is true, divided
by the probability of that same evidence if the claim is false.
Multiplied together, these two ratios give us the odds of a claim being
true, which you can translate
into a probability that the claim is true. There are other ways to
formulate and work Bayes’ Theorem. I discuss them and work through
examples in the subject of history in my book Proving History.
We are already doing this every time we reason or
argue about any matter of fact. We are always reaching conclusions by
assuming we know the prior odds of a claim, and assuming we know how
much more likely the evidence is if the claim is true than if it’s false
(or vice versa), and assuming we know what the logical consequences are
of each of these assumptions. We just don’t realize this is the logic
we are applying to the case.
Consequently, we are highly prone to unsound
reasoning. We might be making unwarranted assumptions about the prior
odds or the odds of the evidence; and we might be affirming an invalid
probability even if our assumptions on both are correct. We might
incorrectly conclude something is “very likely,” when in fact even on our own assumptions
we should conclude it’s not. And we might incorrectly act as though the
prior odds are respectably high when in fact they aren’t; or as though
the evidence is just as we should expect when in fact it isn’t.
So we really should get good at understanding and
checking our logic when we reason about facts, and recognize we are
making assumptions about probabilities; take seriously the need to
justify those assumptions; and make sure our conclusions actually follow
from them.
Overall, the things we should learn from understanding this mathematical model for empirical reasoning are these:
Prior Probability: What has
typically been the case before? In other words, is the claim being
defended typical, or unusual, or even highly unusual, or indeed
otherwise unprecedented? The more unusual, the lower its prior
probability. And the lower its prior probability, the more evidence you
need to believe it—according to the Rule of Evidence…
Rule of Evidence: How likely is all
the evidence if the claim is true? How likely is all that same evidence
if the claim is false? The difference between those two probabilities is
the strength of the evidence for or against the claim—its strength for the claim, if the evidence is more likely if the claim is true than if it’s false; or against the claim, if the evidence is more likely if the claim is false than if it’s true.
For instance, if some evidence e is 1% expected on theism and 100% expected on atheism, then e
entails a Bayes Factor favoring atheism of 100 to 1. In other words,
that evidence then makes atheism one hundred times more likely than
theism. And that’s if atheism and theism start out equally likely. It’s
even more than that if atheism was already more likely. For instance, if
atheism starts out twice as likely as theism, adding this e then makes atheism two hundred times more likely than theism (since 2/1 x 100/1 = 200/1).
Occam’s Razor: Occam’s Razor, simply stated, is “entities must not be multiplied beyond necessity” (entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem).
In terms of the logic of evidence, this translates to: if you must add
an element to a claim in order to make that claim fit the evidence
better (in other words, to make the evidence more likely on that claim than the evidence would be on that claim without that added element), then the prior probability of the claim is reduced by the probability of that element being true. And if you must add many elements, then all their probabilities multiply to reduce the prior probability of the claim.
There is no logically valid way to avoid this.
For example, if the evidence is
unlikely on claim A, but becomes likely again if we add element X to A
(so our claim now becomes X+A), and we have no reason to believe X is
likely or unlikely, then the probability of X is 50% (or 0.50), and the
prior probability of A is then reduced by 50%. In other words, P(A)
becomes P(A) x P(X) = P(A) x 0.50. The prior probability is thus halved, just by claiming X.
This means that adding excuses for
why a claim doesn’t fit the evidence usually does not rescue that claim,
but makes that claim less probable, not more probable.
If, however, X is demonstrably true
(if, for instance, we have plenty of reason to believe it is indeed
true), then adding it to A does not significantly reduce the prior
probability of A. For example, if P(X) = 99.99% (or 0.9999), then P(A)
becomes P(A) x 0.9999, which is pretty well close to the original probability of A. On the other hand, if X is demonstrably very unlikely (if, for instance, we have plenty of reason to believe it is not true—or if in fact it almost never is, and no good reason can be adduced to think it would be), then adding it to A renders A very unlikely as well. For example, if P(X) = 1% (or 0.01), then P(A) becomes P(A) x 0.01, which is effectively reducing the probability of A by a factor of a hundred, making A a hundred times less likely than if we didn’t add excuse X.
The Cost of Making Excuses
Anytime someone (and that includes you) tries to
“make excuses” for why the evidence does not come out as expected on
what they are claiming, don’t let them get away with doing this at no
cost (and that means also don’t let yourself get away with this,
either). To be logically consistent, they must multiply the probability
of what they were claiming by the probability of what they are now
claiming. So, now, the prior probability of the claim itself (e.g.,
“God exists”) must be multiplied by the probability of each new excuse
being true (e.g., “God has a reason, consistent with everything else we
are claiming about him, for being completely silent in our current
conversation”).
For example, when
God, as merely defined, entails far more obvious evidence of his
existence—such as a far different looking universe, a far better
governed universe, far more (and far more consistent and universal)
communications from God, and so on—such that the actual universe we find
ourselves in is actually improbable if God exists, then even if
we were to say the prior probability of such a God is 50%, the posterior
probability (the final probability) that God exists will be less
than 50%. Because all that evidence is then less probable than it would
be if there is no God—since the absence of God perfectly predicts all
the appearance of an absent God. (Which is the real reason atheism is justified.)
A believer cannot have this, of course. So they will try to make excuses
for why God causes all the evidence to look exactly like the evidence
would look if God didn’t exist. But those excuses are not known to be
true. There is no evidence they are true. So at best they are only 50%
likely to be true or false. And some might not even be that likely; if,
for example, the excuses make no sense for an invincible superhero, then
they make no sense for a god, either, and are therefore much less likely to be true than 50%.
And if they need more than one such excuse, these excuses multiply:
for instance, if the believer needs to make three different assertions
to get the evidence to be likely if God exists, and the believer can
adduce no real evidence any of those assertions is true (nor can you
adduce any evidence they are false), then they are each 50% likely to be
true, but their conjunction (all of them being true at the same time)
is far less than that. It is, in fact, 0.5 x 0.5 x 0.5 = 0.125 or 12.5%
likely. This must now be multiplied by God’s original prior probability without
these excuses, so we end up starting with a God whose prior probability
of existing is, let’s say, 50%, but end up with a God whose prior
probability of existing is 6.25% (0.125 x 0.50 = 0.0625). Even if that
gets the evidence to be 100% expected if God exists, it doesn’t help.
Because that same evidence is already 100% expected if he doesn’t
exist, so the evidence causes no change to the probability that God
exists. He simply then remains 6% likely. Which means likely not. So
adding those excuses just ended up making God less likely, not more.
And
of course assuming a 50% prior probability for just a basic god is
already grossly illogical, since “supernatural beings” are not typical
but extremely rare—in fact unprecedented so far, and therefore, at the
start of any honest calculation, they are the least likely explanation of anything. That which you’ve never confirmed before ever to be causing or explaining anything, is the last
thing likely to explain anything else you encounter. Honestly, that
should be the first thing you ever learn from Bayesian logic.
Lambasting the Cherry Pickers
A believer will then try to cherry pick evidence they claim is unlikely unless there is a “God.” Don’t let them cheat like that. They have to account for all
the evidence, not their own biased selection of evidence. They want to
focus on fine tuning, for example, and ignore this universe’s
extraordinary hostility to life. They want to focus on a single instance
of someone being miraculously cured, and ignore the millions more who
died horribly of that or other ailments. They want to focus on an
unsourced legend about Jesus curing a single leper, and ignore the tens
of thousands of children around him in Judea who died of cholera and
other diseases during his ministry (indeed, horrifically, 50% of all children born then died
of some illness before reaching the age of 5). They want to focus on
unsourced legends that Jesus could turn people into disciples with a
single sentence, while ignoring the fact that in the same legend
he didn’t know about germs, and consequently advised people that they
didn’t have to wash their hands and dishes before eating (Mark 7).
And so on.
Always remember to look at what all the evidence is, and then ask how likely that
evidence is if there is a God…and how likely it is if there isn’t. The
ratio between those two probabilities is how much the evidence counts
for or against the existence of God. If the evidence is less than 1%
expected with God, and essentially 100% without, then that evidence
makes the existence of God a hundred times less likely (as that makes
100/1).
Not only point this out, but make an issue of it: call specific attention to the fact that they are doing this.
Point out to them explicitly that they have illogically cherry picked the evidence and had to ignore evidence to get the result they wanted, and that when we stop
ignoring that evidence, we get the opposite result. They will then of
course resort to the tactic of excuse-making. In which case, see my
point above about the costs of making excuses. And again call specific attention to the fact that they are adding more improbable claims in order to rescue an already-improbable claim—and that this cannot logically succeed, but in fact makes their God even less likely.
Ten Arguments for God
Applying these principles to the ten most common arguments for God gets you these results:
(1) The Cosmological Argument: “Everything
that begins has a cause” and “all existence began” and “only
disembodied minds can precede the beginning of time” are all hypotheses.
Not one of them ever proven likely. We don’t know if time is the sort
of thing that can even have a cause; the notion is not even
intelligible. If it began, time in fact seems necessarily causeless,
since a cause is by definition what precedes an effect in time.
Many other things may well be causeless, too. We only know how things
we’ve seen in this universe, within time behave. We cannot infer from
that how things behave outside this universe, or outside time.
Similarly, we only know this universe began. But we have no evidence that this universe is everything that exists (and theism already presupposes that it is not), or that time itself began with our universe. And we don’t even have any evidence that disembodied minds can exist, much less that they could exist before time began, any more than anything else could. And if we suppose God created time simultaneously with the beginning of time rather than ever existing before time began, then anything could do that, even something embodied, or mindless.
In other words, reduced to hypotheses, cosmological
arguments get us nowhere, other than up the ass of random guessers
pretending to be scientists, without a single iota of relevant data.
Except that the only causes we’ve ever confirmed for anything for
hundreds of years now have been godless physics. Which leaves us with
extremely high prior odds that that’s what it is all the way down the line. Only evidence can change that conclusion.
(2) (3) Arguments from Design (Fine Tuning & Biogenesis): I show how to turn these arguments on their head as arguments against the existence of God in my chapter on design arguments in The End of Christianity. In short, if (a) we exist and (b) God did not
design the universe, then (c) we should expect to observe several
things, and lo and behold, those are exactly the things we observe; yet
we do not expect to observe those things if God did design the universe. By definition that which is expected on x is probable on x; that which is unexpected on x is improbable on x. So if the evidence is probable if God does not exist and improbable if God exists, then that evidence argues against God, not for God.
As I explain in Merry Chrismas, God is Still a Delusion and 20 Questions,
the only way we could exist without a God is by an extremely improbable
chemical accident, and the only way an extremely improbable
chemical accident is likely to occur is in a universe that’s vastly old
and vastly large; so atheism predicts a vastly old and large universe;
theism does not (without fabricating excuses—a bankrupt procedure, as I
already explained above).
Similarly, the only way we could exist without a God
is by an extremely long process of evolution by natural selection,
beginning from a single molecule, through hundreds of millions of years
of single cells, through hundreds of millions of years of cooperating
cells, to hundreds of millions of years of multicellular organisms; so
atheism predicts essentially that; theism does not (without, again,
piling on excuses).
Likewise, if chance produced this universe, we should
expect it to be only barely conducive to life, not almost entirely
lethal to it (as in fact it is), since there are vastly more ways to get
those universes by chance selection, than to get a universe
perfectly suited to life throughout (indeed, among all possible
universes that can be chosen at random, barely conducive universes
exceed perfectly suited universes by countlessly many trillions to one).
Design predicts exactly the opposite (again, without a parade of
convenient excuses).
Even if we grant fine tuning exists, there are two
ways it can happen: chance accident, or intelligent design. And what
theists don’t want to admit, is that all the evidence actually points to
chance accident. Quite simply, the universe and the history we observe
is 100% expected to look that way if chance accident caused it; but its
looking that way is not at all probable on design. So here we find that
not only do the prior odds strongly support atheism (since, as I just
mentioned previously and will further explain in a moment, all the way
up to now we’ve only ever found natural and chance causes of anything),
but from the evidence of life and the cosmos, the Bayes Factor also strongly establishes atheism. (In fact, all this is far better evidence for multiverse theory than for monotheism.)
(4) Argument from Consciousness: I also dispatch this in Bayesian terms in TEC
(pp. 298-302). Theists try to focus just on the fact that conscious
phenomena are weird and not yet scientifically explained, “therefore”
God is the best explanation of it. But that’s a non sequitur. When we
don’t know an explanation, the most likely explanation will be the one
that has most commonly succeeded before when we thought something
couldn’t be explained. And that’s always turned out to be physics, not
God. Prior odds thus strongly favor physics, not theism, for anything as
yet unexplained. We need evidence to conclude otherwise. And
that’s where theists try to ignore all the pertinent evidence. When we
bring all that ignored evidence back in, atheism, not theism, ends up
most likely.
For
example, that we need brains to generate conscious phenomena is
quite unexpected if God exists. Because if God exists, disembodied minds
can exist, and are the best minds to have, therefore we should also
have disembodied minds. Indeed, there is no inherent reason it would
even occur to a god to make our minds out of brains at all (without,
again, a pile of convenient excuses). Whereas if God does not exist, the
only way minds could exist is as the output of a complex
physical machine that evolved slowly by natural selection over hundreds
of millions of years from ultra-simple worm-brains to fish-brains,
lizard-brains, mammal-brains, monkey-brains, ape-brains, hominid-brains,
and eventually human brains. Just as we observe.
Therefore,
the fact that thought is dependent on complex evolved brains, which are
physical machines, and which also inefficiently exhaust oxygen and
energy, and place us in needless risk of injury and death, and
intellectual malfunction, due to their delicate vulnerability and badly
organized structure, is exactly what we expect if there is no God, but
not at all what we expect if there is. The Bayes Factor once again
supports atheism, not theism. (For a formalization of this point, see AMBD. I also discuss six points in its favor in Sense and Goodness without God.)
(5) Argument from Reason: I also cover this in TEC (ibid.), and elsewhere I have exhaustively refuted every
version of it. But it all reduces to a simple Bayesian case against
God: if God did not design us, our innate reasoning abilities should be
shoddy and ad hoc and only ever improved upon by what are in
essence culturally (not biologically) installed software patches (like
the scientific method, logic and mathematics, and so on), which
corrected our reasoning abilities only after thousands of years of
humans trying out different fixes, fixes that were only discovered
through human trial and error, and not communicated in any divine
revelation or scripture. But if God did design us, our brains should
have worked properly from the start and required no software patches,
much less software patches that took thousands of years to figure out,
and are completely missing from all supposed communications from God.
Thus, observation confirms that the actual evidence of human reason is far more probable if God did not
exist than if he does. Thus, even the Christian’s own Argument from
Reason argues that God does not exist, rather than that he does. Because
once again, when we bring in all the evidence, the Bayes Factor strongly supports atheism.
(6) Argument from Religious Experience: This goes the same way. By falsely selecting and ignoring evidence, the believer tries to turn their
religious experience into evidence for (their own) God, while ignoring
everyone else’s religious experience that contradicts theirs. Hence when
we actually bring back in all the evidence, the conclusion goes the
other way. (This is superbly argued from every angle and against nearly
every possible excuse by John Loftus in The Outsider Test for Faith, with an excellent response to his remaining critics in The Christian Delusion, Chapter 4.)
We
have evidence of divine communications going back tens of thousands of
years (in shamanic cave art, the crafting of religious icons, ritual
burials, and eventually shrines, temples, and actual writing, on stone
and clay, then parchment, papyrus and paper). Theism without
added excuses predicts that all communications from the divine would be
consistently the same at all times in history and across all
geographical regions, and presciently in line with the true facts of the
world and human existence, right from the start. Atheism predicts,
instead, that these communications will be pervasively inconsistent
across time and space, and full of factual errors about the world and
human existence, exactly matching the ignorance of the culture
“experiencing the divine” at that time. And guess what? We observe
exactly what atheism predicts; not at all what theism predicts. And again, adding excuses for that, only makes theism even more improbable.
Thus, the actual
evidence of religious experience is highly probable on atheism, and
highly improbable on theism. This disparity in probabilities entails the
evidence of religious experience argues God does not exist, not that he does.
(7) Argument from Miracles: This
works the same way, too. Atheism predicts random good luck and bad luck
will be observed, and therefore anything we can confirm happened that
seems miraculous will be physically explicable (because, not really
miraculous) and rare (because, random). Without a parade of excuses,
theism predicts miracles will be commonplace and physically inexplicable
(e.g. Christian healing wings in hospitals would exist where amputees
have their limbs restored by prayer, or anything like that; yet we
observe not a single thing like that). Likewise, atheism predicts the
only miracle claims that will “survive scrutiny,” are claims that are
never reliably investigated; and that every time a miracle claim gets
proper scrutiny, it dissolves. And lo and behold, that is also what we
see. Thus, again, what we observe is exactly what is expected on
atheism, not at all what we expect on theism. So even the evidence of
miracles refutes theism and confirms atheism.
(8) The Moral Argument: If
atheism is true, it is still true that: (a) we all want to live in a
just and kind and honest world, which desire is sufficient reason for us
to try and create one (basically, if you don’t want the world to be
amoral, then you already have sufficient reason to be moral); (b) we are
social animals, and social animals need to be just and kind and honest
to work together well, and they need to work together well to optimize
survival and realize their goals (indeed, one need only compare moral
societies with immoral societies to see the difference, which
observation is more than sufficient reason to be moral); and (c) more
and deeper joy and satisfaction comes from feeling compassion with
others (and thus sharing their joys) and loving truth (loving falsity
and falsehood, by contrast, will always result in embracing
self-defeating or self-frustrating behaviors; while compassion is necessary to vicariously experience the joy and happiness of others).
Thus,
atheism predicts three motivating reasons for people to develop a
common morality centered around compassion, honesty, justice, and
cooperation. But more importantly, atheism predicts that moral rules
will only come from human beings, and thus will begin deeply flawed, and
will be improved by experiment (after empirically observing the social
discomfort and dissatisfaction and waste that comes from flawed moral
systems), and consequently that will happen only slowly over thousands
of years. And that is exactly what we observe. Just look at the examples
of slavery and the subordination of women in Bible.
By
contrast, theism predicts a universe directly governed by justice-laws,
or a kind and just stewardship, or the enacting and teaching of divine
justice and mercy, everywhere, from the start. But we observe no such
laws built into the universe, and no stewards or law enforcers but us,
and no perfect moral code has existed anywhere throughout history; the
best moralities have always just slowly evolved from human trial and
error (see Pinker’s Better Angels of Our Nature and Shermer’s The Moral Arc).
Thus, the evidence of human morality (it’s starting abysmal and being
slowly improved by humans over thousands of years in the direction that
would make their societies better for them) is evidence against God, not evidence for God.
(9) Argument from Meaning of Life: “It
would be better if I had a million dollars; therefore I have a million
dollars” is not even a logically valid argument to start with. So the
only way to get from “life must have some meaning” to “therefore God
exists” is with two hypotheses: that life does have some meaning; and
that only a god could provide it. But there is no evidence
that second hypothesis is true—we readily and easily assign meaning to
things all the time, by ourselves, with no help from anyone. And if you
define “meaning” as “cosmic external meaning,” and not “what we as
individuals value about our lives and the lives of others,” in an
attempt to get that second hypothesis to be true, there is then no
evidence the first hypothesis is true. Either way, you can’t get to the conclusion.
All the evidence of history and science
weighs heavily for the conclusion that we are mortal, and that we
actually value our lives because of that, and not because we are
immortal—which would actually render this life cheap as dirt (since
death would cost us nothing, and life is better and vastly longer on the
other side of it). Life would still be valuable if we are immortal, but
not because we are immortal. It only has value because it can be lived.
Which even a mortal can do.
In fact, the Prior Odds and all Bayes Factors render
only one conclusion probable for those who want to live forever: only
future human-made technology is likely to get you that outcome. In the
meantime, life only has meaning because you value it, and because of the
things you value about it. It’s meaning comes from you. That being so,
does not increase the probability of a god one whit. To the contrary, that we are mortal,
and throughout history have always invented our own meaning for life,
and always different people have valued different things about it, is
exactly what we expect if there is no god. Whereas, excuses aside, it’s
not all all what we expect if there is a god.
(10) Argument from Superman: Every
religion has its own Superman argument. Moroni, Jesus, Mohammed, Moses,
Buddha, even Lao Tzu, are all claimed to have proved their religious
teachings supernaturally true by miraculous demonstrations of their
power. “Our Superman exists; therefore our God exists.” All these
arguments collapse the same way: when you put all the evidence back in,
the Bayes Factor and Prior Odds both guarantee they are all just made up
stories. And not being true, they fail as arguments. A real God would
not produce stories that look just like they were made up, and then
present no adequate evidence for them being true. I illustrate the
Bayesian logic of this in detail for Christianity in The Christian Delusion (“Why the Resurrection Is Unbelievable”) and even more so in The End of Christianity (“Christianity’s Success Was Not Incredible”).
Conclusion
You can see by now how any argument for God can be turned around into an argument against
God by (a) including all the evidence the theist is conspicuously
ignoring and then (b) showing how this entails a strong Bayes Factor
against the existence of God (or, or also, a strong Prior Odds against).
Theism is built on hiding evidence. Hiding the evidence of history,
that makes gods the least likely explanation of anything, and then
hiding the specific evidence that refutes each and every reason to
believe in God. Bayesian counter-apologetics exposes and corrects all
this.
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