Comment by mbfg | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mbfg | Hacker News Reader

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One should proportion belief to

1) The amount of evidence for a claim. 2) The grandiosity of the claim.

If you tell me you have a pet dog named "Spike" I probably would be willing to accept that with as little evidence as a picture of you holding a dog, found in your wallet [i might even take your word for it, if i knew you to be an otherwise mostly honest person]. Because, dogs exist and are plentiful, billions of people own dogs, and "Spike" is a common name. you may be fooling me (it may be the neighbors dog) but i'm still justified in the believe because the evidence rises to the claim.

If on the other hand you claim that you have a pink polka dotted flying dragon as as a pet named "Chester". I would be a fool to believe you. I have no evidence such a thing exists, or that people have them as pets. I would have to see it in person, and even then, i would need to get a report from teams of biologists/zoologists to be willing to accept the claim. It would require tons more evidence.

And yet, the claim STILL isn't _that_ preposterous. The dragon would be an animal, and i know animals exist. I know there are animals with scales, i know some animals fly. I even now there are some with wild coat patterns.

Now if you tell me you believe in an all powerful all knowing god who is responsible for why there is life? I have zero evidence, i have no experience like what you are describing. I've never been given evidence of a being outside of time and space. I don't know that that is even a thing. I don't know what all powerful is, or if that could exist? or all knowing? is that possible? I have no correlary to compare to. It's not like we know King Neptune exists, and while not infinitely powerful, is still pretty boss. Why would i believe that was the explanation for why there are creatures on this planet?

Evolution, on the other hand, has mounds of evidence. We have a powerful fossil record, We went thru a pandemic that shows the power of mutation. Even our own ability to drink milk. And yet even evolution isn't making all that fanciful of predictions. It doesn't claim to know your thoughts, or how you will die. So the evidence rises to claim. Do we know everything there is to know about evolution? Could we be wrong in some areas? Sure. But we are justified in accepting it.

I might agree in principle on what you're saying, although not on the conclusions or consequences.

However, I think you either have too high an opinion of how people go about their ideas and beliefs, or you trust too much in the power and protagonism of reasoning.

I'd bet a lot, if not most of the people, don't go as far as you described. They believe in evolution because that's what's believed right now, and they got taught that in school. Try having a critical conversation about evolution with the average Joe, see what you find out.

Truth is everyone has faith in something. I have faith in God, so I believe certain things that might not seem rational to someone. Other people have faith in science and scientists and teachers, so they believe certain things which definitely don't seem rational to me. They don't have proof, they don't understand the reasonings, they haven't seen evidence. They just have faith in "the experts". And so they believe.

Anyway, why is the idea of God being real _that_ preposterous?

it is preposterous because a) we have no known comps b) we have no evidence of the claims c) we have no reason to believe the claims are even possible.

as for trusting in experts, there's no question that that is problematic in the extreme. However, it comes back to how the evidence rises to the claim. Can a group of people be experts in a subject? How can we validate that? Can we verify that their are experts in how electrical wiring works? To a large degree we can. We have lots of evidence. Do they know everything, probably not, but i can have confidence that they are mostly correct. Can we verify there are experts in evolution? Again, i think we can. They have produced mountains of evidence. Do they know everything? No. But they are likely largely correct. Can we verify there are experts in God? What are the tests? How do we verify these experts?

You mention faith, and i have to ask, what good is faith? Is there anything you could _not_ believe, based on faith? If faith has no mechanism to filter out anything, does it tell you anything about what is true or likely true?

Again, I agree with several things you're saying, and because of that I insist in the presence of faith within what you're presenting.

There's usually low risk in trusting that a contractor is an expert in electrical wiring if they say so, and I usually trust plumbers or tradesmen to know their stuff and do their work. And how many times I've been wrong.

But my point is that most people don't go through this verification process, examining the credentials of scientists, taking a look at the evidencie, studies, papers, reasoning, etc. that backs up evolution. So it's not a rational belief. It's faith in other people, or a system.

If people did that, they would get to the conclusion that a lot of evidence points at the possibility of evolution being true. But by no means it's proven beyond doubt.

I don't know about your education or professional background, but from my side as a software engineer I very well understand that you can pile up evidence that will point you in a certain direction, and afterwards you might get that small 0.1% that will turn things completely around.

Regarding your questions about faith, I would not say that's how faith works. I have reasons behind what I have faith in. Right now I would not be able to switch my faith to something else just because.

Hebrews 11:1 - Now faith is confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see.

That something is not visible does not mean it doesn't make sense.

Could I be wrong? I guess I could, by definition, and I would be rejecting a scientific theory. Could you be wrong? What's the consequence of that?

One doesn't need to personally run experiments to reproduce science in order for the reproducibility of science to be effective at explaining the world. The fact that one can reproduce and observe is itself evidence. The great thing about the natural world is that we aren't required have to have faith in it, it exists as it is and if we want, we can pick it up and examine it. People don't have "faith" in science because science doesn't require it.

Unlike the natural world, the supernatural cannot be observed nor reproduced so it necessarily requires faith in order to function.

In more concrete terms: I don't know how my microwave oven works. I've never built one and don't have a degree in microwave oven technology. But I still don't need to have faith that it works--I can observe it working and if I wanted to, I could take it apart and observe its subcomponents working. I don't do this, but just the fact that I could means that I don't have to blindly believe in it or conjure up explanations about how it works.

>>I don't know about your education or professional background, but from my side as a software engineer I very well understand that you can pile up evidence that will point you in a certain direction, and afterwards you might get that small 0.1% that will turn things completely around.

you can still be justified in a belief if the prevailing evidence rises to the claim. We can be wrong about anything, and certainly in the mid 1800's people probably thought they knew how physics worked pretty well. They were wrong, of course, However, until evidence was produced that discounted their existing evidence, they were justified in that belief, and, it mostly worked for all intents and purposes for the tests they proposed/attempted, even tho quantum physics says something quite surprisingly different.

>> I would not be able to switch my faith to something else just because.

i don't doubt you. However, 9 billion people can use the process of faith to believe things, including things you think are horrendous. How do you discount their beliefs, while being confident in yours, if all you have is faith to discern the difference? If you are discerning a difference, that difference is coming from somewhere else, likely evidence and rationality. So the process of faith, itself, is not trustworthy, as i'm guessing you feel that at least half the planet is using faith and coming to the wrong conclusions.

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