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Author | Topic: Probability of It Being Their Own Particular God | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
dwise1 Member Posts: 5952 Joined: Member Rating: 5.2 |
Believers tend to play rather fast and loose with the word, "God". Basically, whenever they hear or use it they think that it refers only to their own particular ideas of "God". When we ask them which god they're talking about, they'll always say something like "There's only one God" even though every "Judeo-Christian-Islamic" religion have an official policy of it being the same god, believers do not conduct themselves according to that policy. "God" is as much to do with the accompanying religion and theology, if not much more so. So, given about 45,000 different Christian denominations and sects, there are effectively 45,000 different versions of "God" in Christianity alone.
This also shows up in a common argument they use and which was what I was thinking about at first. They'll argue with an atheist over the existence of "God" and, working from their misunderstanding that atheists claim to know for certain that "God does not exist", try to maneuver the atheist to admitting that he cannot prove conclusively that "some god, any god" cannot exist and hence must admit that there's a possibility. At that point, the believer makes the intercontinental leap to declaring that that proves his own particular version of "God" including every aspect of his own particular religion. Completely unjustified; he has an enormous amount of work yet to do in order to make that kind of a point. They try something similar with Pascal's wager in which Pascal tried to argue that, regardless of whether God exists or not, the "safe bet" is to choose to believe in God. I discussed part of the problem with this wager in my page about Pascal's Wager:
quote But that begs the question of what are the odds? Rather than just take the creationist approach of doing a lot of hand-waving, I decided to calculate the probability of it being their particular god and religion. Or at least come up with an estimate. That would require several different things, each with its own probability, to all be true. Hence, the probability of it being their particular god and religion would be the product of all those probabilities. Since some of those probabilities cannot be determined empirically, I'll just be generous and call the odds 50/50 on them. Of course, that means that the resultant probability figure will be very highly biased towards being too high (ie, likely).
So the probability of a god existing, PA, would be:
PA = P1 × P2 × P3 × P4 PA = (1/2)4 = 1/16 Out of the multitude of gods that we have created, which one would correspond to that "a god" that might possibly exist? A quick Google yielded anthropologists' estimate of 288,000 possible gods, so the probability of a given believer's god being that "a god", PB, would be:
PB = 1/288,000
Of course, that's also assuming that any one group of humans had ever guessed right, which is a really huge assumption. But, as analysis of Pascal's Wager shows, just getting the god right doesn't save you, but rather you must also get the religion and theology absolutely right too. So if you were correct in identifying YHWH (AKA "God") as that "a god" that exists, you still need to choose the right version of that god (ie, the right religion and sect or denomination within that religion. For example, YHWH is identified as the god for at least three major religions: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. We all know what Christians think of Jews and Muslims. So giving those three religions equal odds, the probabiliby, PC, of the believer's own religion (usually Christianity in our encounters) being the correct one would be:
PC = 1/3
Since it's a Christian in question, we need to determine the probability of choosing the correct denomination or sect. Again a quick Google yields the figure of there being 45,000 Christian denominations. I'm sure that there many of those break down further into sects and individual congregations, but I'll use that Google figure for this evolution. So then, the probability PD of the believer's own denomination being the correct one would be:
PD = 1/45,000
Therefore, the probability PΩ of a Christian's own god and religion being the correct one would be the product of those four probabilities:
PΩ = PA × PB × PC × PD PΩ = 1/16 × 1/288,000 × 1/3 × 1/45,000 PΩ = 1/622,080,000,000 = 1.6×10(-12) And bear in mind that that is with very generous values being assigned to the probabilities surrounding the supernatural (ie, 1/2). Assigning more pessimistic (AKA "realistic") values would have these effects:
So the odds are very much against a particular believer's own particular god being the right one. That means that believers have a lot more work and heavy lifting to do if they are to ever hope to build a convincing case for their god.
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dwise1 Member Posts: 5952 Joined: Member Rating: 5.2
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I was just responding indirectly to dwise1s attempt to calculate the probability of one God of choice mathematically. Not what I was doing. Believers are so cock-sure that if a god exists then it must inevitably be their own particular god replete with their entire version of religion and theology. IOW, Probability of 1.0 (AKA 100%, AKA "dead certainty"). I was just conducting a quick reality check on them, demonstrating that even granting them the extreme generosity of ridiculously high probabilities that the final probability that they are right is still extremely low. And when we then start to adjust some of those unwarranted ridiculously high probabilities downwards to something more realistic (albeit still ridiculously high) then the outcome for them only gets far worse. It's the same kind of response to some idiot presenting an unrealistic "plan" consisting of nothing more than wishful thinking and lots of hand-waving in which we just start listing some of the necessary steps of that plan and what it would actually take. Or a creationist claim like this flagrantly false one that I actually received in an email:
quoteIn reality, half the sun's mass is in its core which is where fusion occurs and in its nearly 5 billion (American billions; 109) years of fusion the sun has lost only a few hundredths of one percent of its total mass. So I developed a reality check for that claim and took that creationist through it step by step in order to demonstrate how utterly ridiculous it was just on its face, plus to impress upon him the importance of conducting his own reality checks, especially on creationist claims. In actuality, the probability of any human being able to detect and determine the identity and complete nature of any supernatural entity, including its full intentions and wishes, is so small as to be approaching zero (AKA, impossibility). Which is why agnosticism is the only truly valid option (ie, we don't know about such things because we cannot know anything about the supernatural, just make a lot of unfounded guesses). You can choose to make up stuff to believe about the supernatural, but you should have no expectations for anybody else to take you seriously -- especially when the religion biz results in all kinds of pogroms, inquisitions, and killings as has happened far too often and regularly and continues to happen.Edited by dwise1, : changed subtitle
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dwise1 Member Posts: 5952 Joined: Member Rating: 5.2
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On the one hand, God is relatively unique to each individual. On the other hand, of the 45,000 Christian denominations, most have shared beliefs within the larger frame of Christian orthodoxy. Perhaps the devil is in the details, and some branches (or clubs, as jar likes to call them) of Christianity claim exclusivity. It has always been this way. You actually touch on an important point. One which reveals how insufficiently small that figure of 45,000 is. And even how insufficiently small the figure of 188,000 gods that we have created is, since we have actually created billions of gods (again, that's the American -- and now since 1974 also the British -- billion, 109). Because since all believers create their own "God" and there have been an estimated 107 billion people who have ever lived 1, then the total number of gods would be about the same, 107 billion, not too much greater than Arthur C. Clarke's The Nine Billion Names of God (which, having been written in 1953 before the UK adapted the American billion, should be 9×1012, which we would call "nine trillion").
FOOTNOTE 1
BBC News, Do the dead outnumber the living? , 4 February 2012 References an article by the Population Reference Bureau (PRB -- link in the article is broken, but Google locates that article at How Many People Have Ever Lived on Earth? ). Based on the publishing date of the BBC article and its reference to a current population of "seven billion", that leads me to assume that it is using the new British billion, so the estimate would be 107×109. That is corroborated by the PRB article which, being based in Washington, DC, would use the American billion, so their estimate is 117 billion (117×109). For discussion of the different values for "billion" and beyond, watch the Numberphile YouTube video, How big is a billion? - Numberphile . HINT: on the Continent a billion is a million millions, 1012.
So the problem is one of inherent human limitations. For a believer, a central part of the practice of religion would be to know God. But all Christian descriptions I've seen casts God as being omni-everything, infinite, and always moving in "mysterious ways" with a "Plan" that no clergyman is ever able to discern in practical situations even though they can tell you exactly what God thinks and feels when they preach. Basically, an infinite god would be quite beyond the severely limited human mind's ability to understand it. So what every believer must do -- and usually deny it -- is to create a surrogate for God. A kind of symbol to represent God without having to completely understand it. Basically his own personal version of God, a god of his own creation. Such a personal god is necessary for believers and can even be of great use, just so long as one does not confuse his symbol of God with the real thing (assuming some such exists. And that would be true even if an actual existing god bears absolutely no resemblance to any version of the Christian God. Basically, knowing God is an impossible task which no human could possibly accomplish within thousands of lifetimes. So for the earnest believer with that goal striving for that goal will take his entire life, a lifelong process. Which is good and proper as long as he does not pervert the process (which has far too often proven to be the result). And in such a process, even a crude symbol for "God" could serve a purpose, if properly done. Random thought: perhaps it would be a good thing to require all religionists to solemnly swear to something like the Hippocratic Oath -- "First, do no harm!" And arguably, every single Christian in all the 45,000 different versions of the religion each misunderstands their denomination's doctrine in their own unique individual way, so then that would mean that every Christian who has ever lived had their own particular version of Christianity. Again gracias a Google I found an estimate for the total number of Christians who have ever existed: "A comprehensive demographic study finds that there are 2.18 billion Christians of all ages around the world". Since that was from Pew Research, I would assume the American billion, so then 2.18×109. Support for this idea comes from the testimonial of Dan Barker, named "America's Leading Atheist." He was raised a fundamentalist Christian, was called to the ministry personally by God at the age of 11, and served as a traveling minister. In that last capacity, he had the opportunity to visit and observe a large number of individual fundamentalist Christian congregations. Each and every one had the same stark black/white/(absolutely no gray allowed) view on, well, everything. Each and every congregation drew a sharp and stark line between what was allowed and what was not. And yet that same stark dividing line was not the same as other congregations'. These things were forbidden and these other things were allowed in one congregation, but not in the next congregation, and the next one was also different as were the dozens after that. Aggregating all their positions into one produced a huge gray zone between what was allowed and what was not. That is what led Dan Barker to commit fundamental Christianity's Cardinal Sin of thinking, which in turn led to his deconversion. I will save the story of his saving of his parents for later. So then the point for sake of this message is that every individual within a particular religion will have his own personal theology based on his own unique individual misunderstanding of the doctrine taught to him. And what believer ever actually believes his religion's doctrine, but instead his own personal internalized misunderstanding of that doctrine? So then, returning to the thought experiment (Gedankenexperiment) of my probability calculation, we would need to replace the 1/288,000 term with 1/(107×109. And the 1/45,000 term to 1/(2.18×109):
PΞ 0 = 1/288,000 × 1/45,000 = 1/12,960,000,000 = 7.716×(-11) PΞ 1 = 1/(107×109) × 1/(2.18×109) = 1/(4.7524×1018 = 2.1042×(-19)
Now plug that back into the previous calculations. As we can plainly see here, that lowers the probability by an order of 10(-8) = 1/100,000,000 ("one hundred millionth"). In college, we learned Sophocles' quote: quote And there's the cartoon from C magazine in early 70's Germany. A man with a big nose asked God why he had cursed him with this huge nose. Why? Why? Why? So the heavens part and God appears with this gigantic schnoz saying, "Because I created you in My image!"
Pardon! was a West German satirical magazine from 1962 to 1982 that I encountered when I was there in 1973 and 1974. I would describe it to Americans as being like National Lampoon though it was more political and much edgier. I suspected that they got some material from other countries, such as from France. I've never seen Charlie (French satirical magazine named after Charles de Gaulle), neither as a monthly (Charlie Mensuel) nor as a weekly (Charlie Hebdo) -- bet you didn't know that that is what "Hebdo" means; it's short for "hebdomadaire" which in English is "hebdomadal", "weekly", which I think is based on the Greek word for 7, επτα). My favorite pin-up fold-out from Pardon (printed in black on red, so it's impossible to Xerox) is "The Marx Brothers, or why Marxism is so popular" and there they are, Groucho, Chico, Harpo, and Karl. My second (or tenth) favorite is a photo of a Citroën 2CV, the ultimate cheapest French student car (it's featured prominently in a chase scene early in the 1981 Roger Moore Bond film, For Your Eyes Only), very much like the VW Beetle in the USA and equally underpowered, its name, "2CV", was interpreted to mean "two horsepower". It is usually referred to as a "Deux Chevaux", "Two Horses". The Pardon photo in question showed someone having opened the hood and two horse heads are sticking out. Back to topic. So if "God" is just a figment of your individual imagination, what good it is? As Albert Einstein was working on his theory of general relatively, there was something that needed to be included but which he knew nothing about except that it was needed. So he called it the cosmological constant and assigned it the symbol, Λ. We do somewhat the same with other things we don't understand yet, like "dark matter" and "dark energy", using those names and symbols to keep track of their effects in order to start to understand their importance. Basically, you work with what you have and what you can work with. And you try to keep track of everything you can.
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dwise1 Member Posts: 5952 Joined: Member Rating: 5.2
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This is by a former fundamentalist, David John Wellman, who had attended a Christian college that taught apologetics. He recounts his experience of having learned about Pascal's Wager and then trying to use it in the wild (actually, in a Christian game preserve, but against an actual "pesky" atheist who had "wandered" into the Christian chat room). First, a bit of insight that is new to me. The application of Pascal's Wager against atheists is planned out in two steps:
Part of Wellman's discussion of the above was his disappointment as a believer was that the apologists thought that the Christian evidences (as listed above: the Resurrection, Bible, yadda-yadda-yadda) would be considered too weak to lead with against atheists, but rather that they'd have to first overcome a huge obstacle: getting them to accept the possibility of the supernatural. If Wellman's college was teaching him that those evidences were so strong and powerful, why then wouldn't they be enough to convince atheists in the first assault? Anyway, in his Christian apologist hubris on a Christian chatroom (he describes it as being "back in the day", which for him I assume would be the late 90's) he tells the tale. Start watching around the 0:20 timemark (or from the beginning, which will get you there in about 20 seconds). After describing the Christian text-based chat rooms, he mentions one day when, as would often happen, a "pesky atheist" showed up to be ... "pesky". Wellman decides to shut him down with a sure-fire irrefutable argument he had just learned about in apologetics class. "Hey, have you heard of something called 'Pascal's Wager'?" "Yes I have and here's what's wrong with it ... " Wellman describes the next 20 minutes of his life as being a blur. Anyway, yet another treatment of Pascal's Wager done in a somewhat mathematical manner. Share and enjoy!
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