From: simon@dcs.warwick.ac.uk (Simon Clippingdale)
Subject: Re: Monitored by islam (repost)
Organization: Department of Computer Science, Warwick University, England
Date: Tue, 22 Dec 1992 15:17:05 GMT

In article <1992Dec21.041507.8630@monu6.cc.monash.edu.au> darice@yoyo.cc.monash.edu.au (Fred Rice) writes:
>In <1992Dec11.050237.25167@jcnpc.cmhnet.org> mam@jcnpc.cmhnet.org (Mike A. McAngus) writes:
>> To paraphrase a certain prince regent, you must think I'm as thick as a whale
>> omelette.  To be an atheist I require that god continue to not reveal hirself
>> to me.  My atheism stems from a total lack of empirical evidence for the
>> existence of god.  This is no more a "_belief_" than is the ever popular
>> aipuism that so many on this newsgroup espouse.

> Just because you have no evidence that God exists does not mean that God
> then necessarily *does not* exist.  Of course, this is the argument
> agaist strong atheism rather than weak atheism (against which I have no
> argument).
>
> If any sort of theism is an unjustified belief, then so is strong
> atheism.  That was what my point was originally, though expressed
> perhaps in a less clear way.


I've tried to condense the words and add some pictures, since much of this
will be familiar to those who waded through the Agnosticism Response thread
recently.

The strong atheist position *is* supported by objective evidence, unlike the
theistic position/s. That evidence is the continuing objective non-appearance
of gods. So how come this is evidence *for* atheism rather than just a lack of
evidence for any theism? Because a specific prediction of the atheist
hypothesis is that events will continue to fall only within a delineated
region of `event space', namely no gods will appear. Continued non-appearance
`events' fall in the region specifically predicted by atheism, and Bayesian
statistics indicate that this must cause estimates of the correctness of
atheism to increase relative to those hypotheses which less tightly constrain
the event space, including those theisms which do not constrain it at all
and are thus unfalsifiable (every point in event space, divine non-appearance
included, is consistent with such theisms).

Rather than take a thousand words:

 ...-----------------------------------------------------------...    C

         |-----------------------------------------------|            B

                         |---------------|                            A

Here are the regions of a 1-D event space consistent respectively with each
of three hypotheses A, B and C. C is unfalsifiable (but see `Aside' below)
because an event anywhere on the space is consistent with it. Now here come
the observations:

                          ... .... ... ..
                          . ..  ... . ..
                          ... .. .   ....
                           ...  ... ... .
                          ... .... ... ..
                          .. .  .. ..  ..
                           ..... .. .  ..
                          ... .. .   ....
                          . .. .. ... ...
                          ... .... . .. .
                          . ... .... ....
                           ..    ..... ..
                          ... .... ... ..
                          . .. .. ... ...
                          ... .. .   ....
                          ... .... ... ..
                          . ... ...  .. .
                          .. ... ... ....
                          . .. .. ... ...
                          ... .. .   ....

                              etcetera

While these observations are consistent with all three hypotheses, and thus
do not falsify any of them, nevertheless they better support hypothesis B than
C, and in turn they better support hypothesis A than B. After a large number
of observations in the same region and none outside, the probability that
hypothesis A in this example is correct approaches unity. [Aside: B and C
are thus falsified in the limit, even though C is unfalsifiable in a finite
number of observations.]

But it's up to the individual to make such estimates (although perhaps not
in quite the mechanistic numerical fashion of Bayesian analysis) and to draw
conclusions. If s/he decides that it's close enough to label as an empirical
certainty, much as the existence of gravitational attraction is an empirical
certainty for most of us, and if hypothesis A represents atheism, then the
individual is a strong atheist as opposed to weak. I fall into this category
and for those reasons.

The *evidence* for atheism is just that, and is evidence for neither the
strong nor the weak version per se, these being merely descriptions of the
individual's level of confidence in empirical conclusions.

> Fred Rice
> darice@yoyo.cc.monash.edu.au   

Cheers

Simon

The Truth is still the Truth even if you choose to ignore it. Discuss.

-- 
Simon Clippingdale                simon@dcs.warwick.ac.uk
Department of Computer Science    Tel (+44) 203 523296
University of Warwick             FAX (+44) 203 525714
Coventry CV4 7AL, U.K.
Newsgroups: alt.atheism,talk.religion.misc