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Comment by Stefan-H | Hacker News Reader

"Okay, you can have a hypothesis, you have to have some evidence against or for that."

I view atheism as the null hypothesis, for which you don't need any evidence. It is the de-facto stance for when there is no evidence to suggest another hypothesis.

edit: "And so an agnostic would say, look, I have no evidence for God or any kind of god (What god, first of all? The Maori gods, or the Jewish or Christian or Muslim God? Which god is that?) But on the other hand, an agnostic would acknowledge no right to make a final statement about something he or she doesn’t know about."

Is this person also agnostic when it comes to Russell's teapot? I'm pretty sure that they would make the statement that there is not in fact a teapot circling the earth, just like there is not a god in heaven. His argument about the agnostic person not being able to make a final decision is a slide into solipsism.

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I see it a bit differently, it's basically an undecidable problem (at least for now). Intelligent design == simulation hypothesis vs. pure accident and the anthropological principle. Which one of these is the null hypothesis is a matter of perspective / cultural background. What clearly does not hold are idiotic things like biblical literalism. But the big bang theory opens more questions than it answers.

Not to repeat the the entire previous thread about this (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19445855) but this is just a semantic wordplay: on any other similar existence questions (is there a teapot orbiting the sun?) we'd gladly conflate "undecidable" with "false" as the difference between those cases is a negligible probability. But when you mix in such a culturally sensitive topic like religion, suddenly we have to carefully distinguish these two cases. It's an unfair inconsistency that is used to propagate religious thinking.

How do you assign probability to those two hypothesis? I'm genuinely curious.

This gets philosophical, but roughly I think of it as:

Something that is truly false has a 0% chance of being true, by definition.

Something that has we have proven false has an effectively 0% probability of being true -- but more specifically, it is whatever probability you assign to Descartes' evil demon being true (ie the probability of _everything_ else you know, even rules of logic and math, being false). Every non-solipsist assumes that this probability is negligibly different from 0, therefore in practice we consider "proven false" to be the same as "truly false".

If something is "undecidable", I take that to mean that we don't yet have (and may never be able to acquire) any supporting evidence to meaningfully separate it from the "proven false" case. This is just the standard behavior of assuming the null hypothesis... or colloquially: not believing something for no reason.

(there's probably some much more standard set of terminology for these ideas)

Exactly. Not believing something for no reason. I see postulating that there is no hierarchically higher intelligence just as much as a believe system as postulating that there is. So far I couldn't find evidence pro or contrary either of these. Penrose, as I've written elsewhere, is IMO the closest to producing such evidence and I'll gladly revise my stance if/when that happens.

In my experience, most people don't actually claim there is no higher intelligence or god. They just don't accept the claim that there is (because there is no evidence). The nuance of this tends to get lost through imperfect language.

That's the point of the teapot. Technically there is equal probability of it existing or not, but that is meaningless.

Anything without evidence is equally likely to exist or not, but for some reason people only tend to take this seriously in regards to religion.

Imagine for a moment that our telescopes show mostly black except a ring of light from one direction. The light scattering has furthermore been used to indicate that the universe is mostly water, with some complex carbon based molecules in diluted form. Newer religions are thus calling our universe the holy teapot, waiting for the great beings above to open it up. Of course that's nonsense say the atheists who have a perfect theory for how the ring of light and water universe has come to existence, it only relies on the assumption that from nothing there was suddenly something.

This is essentially the teapot equivalent of the big bang theory. Atheists also dispell the idea of the teapot with a hypothetical teaspoon orbiting Saturn - as we can't see it it's ridiculous to just postulate it's there, with handle and cover and stove - we have no way of proving its existence from what we observe only.

Re: Russell's teapot - this is just the classic Red Hering. If you argue for a bearded man in the sky you can put it as absurdum this way, but it has nothing to do with the intelligent design hypothesis, also called simulation hypothesis. Are we special because of the anthropological principle or is there some deeper underlying cause? Even finding intelligent alien life wouldn't fully answer the question - you can also apply it to the physical constants of our universe that are remarkably well chosen.

That's not to say that assuming natural processes as a principle doesn't have legs - so far Dr. Penrose's hypothesis of arbitrary scaled time convinces me most, which avoids any requirement of intelligent design, but so far there is not sufficient evidence to prove it, or any other origin theory, and as long as that is the case I think it is too quick to dispell intelligent design.

"Intelligent design" is silly because it doesn't answer the question of creation at all. Ok, it wasn't a bearded man in the sky but a bunch of lifeforms who created a simulation for people to live in. So, these lifeforms, and the world they live in - where did they come from? We know they're more advanced than humans because humans don't currently have the ability to simulate worlds of this scale. Now instead of the question of how relatively simple creatures like humans came to life, we have a question of how much more advanced lifeforms came to life. You just made the question more complicated for no reason whatsoever.

all we can do is observe our universe and try figuring it out. so far what we can observe matches a coherent scientific model up to a point, but there are severe issues left to explain:

* so the universe was at one point pure energy at a scale smaller than an atom core? how did this happen?

* why did it first inflate so fast so it wouldn't fall back immediately? what happened to this inflation force after it was done?

* what is that force that accelerates expansion?

* why can't we observe most of the mass required to hold galaxies together?

* how does gravity effect the quantum world?

I'm hopeful that these can still be answered, especially since gravity may actually allow us to observe what's behind the CMB. But with such severe gaps I find intelligent design still as good an answer as any - intuitively it looks to me like a lab experiment that has been tuned to produce interesting results. If we do find answers to the above, intelligent design can probably be ruled out, but otherwise a valid hypothesis is that our universe does not make sense internally because there are external forces acting on it that come from an outside universe, potentially steered in an intelligent way.

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