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> This is another tool in the Street Epistemology toolbox, one normally done at the start of the conversation: you display a container of tic tacs and ask if there's an even or odd number in there--your conversation partner shouldn't be allowed to closely examine the tic tacs. There is a 'true' answer, but it's impossible to determine from their vantage point: as such, what use is either stance? The only "correct" answer is to acknowledge while there may be a true answer, they're unable to determine it from there and as such they don't know.

So, I should conclude that I don't know if LIGO has ever detected gravitational waves? I am unable to determine that from my vantage point.

[tenacious_tuna]

You could ascribe reasonable certainty that folks using the scientific method have accurately modeled the universe, as determined by their documented and repeatable experiments.

I've previously seen people phrase that as "having faith in the beliefs of others," which usually boils down to semantics on what "faith" means: I believe it is likely those people have observed the things they say they have, because of the nature of the scientific community and how these experiments are structured.

I also think we're getting rather far off the specific, original issue: the existence of a god. In my experience this has been the kind of thing a single individual can experiment with and reason around--at least, in all the ways people tend to give evidence for their belief in god:

(1) hearing him communicate with them in some way

(2) seeing him influence the universe in ways they'd expect a god to

(3) believing a god must have been necessary to create the universe due to its complexity/beauty/etc.

You'd contended (please do correct me if I've misunderstood your argument) that the tools I suggested--the scientific method--were incapable of determining what lies behind the observational curtain, which I agree is certainly true: if you can't observe a thing or its effects in any way, you cannot determine its existence. The thing we seem to get hung up on is what we should believe about what lies behind that curtain.

My stance is to take the null hypothesis and assume nothing exists beyond the curtain; at the very least, not a god that interacts with our world and the people in it as the Christian faith claims. In short, "I have not seen sufficient evidence to conclude a god exists."

Your stance seems to be that it is acceptable to believe facts about things beyond this curtain; that we are not in a simulation, that there is a god, etc, framed as having faith in those facts being true, despite observational tools not functioning in this realm.

The tic-tac example wasn't supposed to be an indictment of extrapolative beliefs from experience ("these people have reliably observed the universe before / predicted things / modeled things for years, it seems reasonable to continue to trust their motivations and methods"), just a demonstration of when "I don't know" is a more correct answer over taking a stance when observational tools have reached their limit.

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> I also think we're getting rather far off the specific, original issue: the existence of a god.

Huh? I picked up that you're kinda evangelical and were drifting there, but that's not where we started and it wasn't actually the conversation I was having.

> My stance is to take the null hypothesis and assume nothing exists beyond the curtain;

Isn't that a little unreasonable? You see a floor, so you assume nothing exists on the other side because it blocks your vision?

[tenacious_tuna]

> Isn't that a little unreasonable? You see a floor, so you assume nothing exists on the other side because it blocks your vision?

You keep taking my statements to strange extremes; I'm going to try to avoid metaphors for clarity.

I use observation and experimentation to determine true things about the world. I extend my belief in these things to other humans in the world who I believe practice observation and experimentation effectively; scientists, mostly.

When we reach the limits of these observation and experimentation based tools, like with the simulation hypothesis, I stop and say "I don't know." By the fact these things and their effects cannot be experimented on or observed, they also cannot affect my life, so why bother making conclusions that I can't verify and won't affect me anyway?

In the case of a god who created the universe, has an interest in my life, has declared certain things to be "right" and certain things to be "wrong," and hypothetically takes action in my life (e.g., the common Christian understanding), this is well within what can be observed and experimented on. As such, I take the null hypothesis like a good scientist: I don't assume there is some god and begin running experiments to determine _which_ one is there, I assume there is _no_ god and begin looking for any evidence that shows there is _any_ god.

In my experience thus far in life, I have not encountered any evidence that makes me suspect there may be any god of any kind, and certainly not the one of the Christian description.

Your original statement was:

> I've got a pretty clear sense that there are regions of truth that our "reliable tools" cannot access. Faith is basically the hope that some of those regions can be accessed in other ways.

The implication I read here is that you believe in things that cannot be demonstrated through observation and experimentation, and that it is reasonable for people to use faith to support these beliefs.

My frustration is with people who make claims about things in those regions without any way of actually demonstrating them, and then making life- and policy-based decisions around those beliefs that affect me and others in the world.

I've tried to convey why this seems unreasonable to me, and you keep taking my points to strange extremes that seem disconnected from our original discussion.

To return to your floor metaphor (which may be a poor choice on my part): I see a floor, and I assume there is no dragon in the basement that I must not aggravate because I've never seen any sign of any dragon, why would I worry about that?

[Mertax]

Hopefully my tone isn't misinterpreted because I genuinely appreciate the openness in your approach and thoughtfulness throughout this thread. I'm just curious to get your thoughts, admittedly some of these questions are rhetorical.

What experiments have you performed to prove the "null hypothesis"? How do you respond to those who claim they've experimented on their faith and found sufficient evidence to assert their belief?

Isn't "taking the null hypothesis" at some level still making a choice of belief? Doesn't that assumption introduce some amount of skepticism and bias into the measurement? What if the proof requires some amount of willful credulity? What if it's designed to be bestowed 'line upon line' and 'precept upon precept' after 'asking in faith' 'believing that' you will 'receive'.

I've found that starting this particular hypothesis under the premise that there is a God who has crafted a plan that requires the use of your agency to regain His spirit and influence in your life tends to yield better results.

[tenacious_tuna]

> Hopefully my tone isn't misinterpreted

No worries :) I love these kinds of conversations.

I'll give a personal anecdote before I start slingin' scientific/philosophical language: My de-conversion started when, as a teenager, I asked myself if I only believed in Christianity (instead of, say, Islam or Buddhism or Hinduism) because I was raised in the church--and that if I'd been raised in some other religion, I would instead believe that. (I'll use this example to better frame the null hypothesis question later, but it's useful to keep in mind as I explain.)

> What experiments have you performed to prove the "null hypothesis"?

This is a minor misunderstanding of what a "null hypothesis" is and how we interact with it. A null hypothesis is basically the assumed-default of the world, based on the fewest assumptions. Any theory you may be investigating may be an alternative hypothesis, but the way you go about collecting data is less about proving an alternative and more about disproving the null.

To be maximally pedantic, science is about constructing models that most accurately model the real world. If the data contradicts a model, then it clearly isn't reliable, and we make adjustments to the model--so we would never "prove" any hypothesis, null or otherwise, we would just find that the data more and more supports a specific hypothesis (over some others).

This philosophical block of text from Wikipedia explains why we frame the null in this way pretty well:

  A negative claim is the opposite of an affirmative or positive claim.
  It asserts the non-existence or exclusion of something.
  The difference with a positive claim is that it takes only a single
  example to demonstrate such a positive assertion ("there is a chair
  in this room," requires pointing to a single chair), while the inability
  to give examples demonstrates that the speaker has not yet found or
  noticed examples rather than demonstrates that no examples exist

[from 1]

So when applied to our god claim, it looks something like this: I see people making saying things like

  (a) god has had influence on our past (in dictating his laws to people, performing miracles, the resurrection etc)

  (b) god has influence in the present (he can communicate with people, either directly into their mind or by influencing the world around us; enabling certain outcomes to occur, like getting a specific job or having a good surgery outcome)

While (a) is a little hard to test 'cuz I don't have a time machine and the historical record is opaque at best, (b) is a series of positive claims that can be observed and tested against the null of god not existing or not having any influence over our reality.

Were I to invert the null, and assume that there is a god, it's possible I could construct my experiments poorly: suppose I pray that I'll get a raise at my job, and the next week my manager tells me I'm getting a raise. Is this evidence that god exists and is influencing my life? Perhaps my boss was just motivated out of my work performance over the past few months. If I'm assuming that god exists, I could easily count this as evidence without that being the case.

Suppose the opposite happens, and I don't get my raise: What does this have to say about our god question? It might be that my raise "doesn't fit god's plan", and he had his own reasons not to grant my request--the typical explanation I hear from believers. It could also be simply that I did not meet my boss's expectations for deserving a raise and it was unreasonable for me to expect one, godly influence or no.

If you loop this over a lifetime of experiences, it's very probable that you'll run into a series of events where god seems to be at work, i.e. you pray for things and they happen, or you have some fortunate luck occur, or whatnot, that you're happy to attribute as evidence to god existing--even if there's perfectly mundane explanations for each of these occurrences. You could be wrong that there is a god, yet merrily believing such because of this poor logic chain. Broadly this is "confirmation bias," [2] or "only counting the hits." You see this with things like when you buy a new car: suddenly you start seeing that car everywhere. In reality, nothing has changed in terms of the percentage-distribution of cars in your local area: you're just now more predisposed to notice the kind of car you have than you were before, so it "feels" like there are now more of them.

You may ask (and apologies if I'm straw-manning), "What if God's actions are simply indistinguishable from the mundane chance?" In science we would say that said effect would be "statistically insignificant"--if you cannot reasonable separate the effect of some thing from random chance, then it's unreasonable to conclude that the "some thing" has influence on what you're observing.

You see this in medical trials with what's called "the placebo effect" [3], where doctors will run a study where some group of people get actual (new) medicine and some group get sugar pills, and yet another group will get nothing; there are many, many cases where the sugar-pill group (the "placebo" group) display effects _different_ than the "control" group who got nothing. If the results of the group who got real medicine are similar in magnitude to those who got the sugar pills, then it'd be unreasonable to conclude that the medicine is having a real effect, since that effect can also be demonstrated by not-real-medicine.

To your questions:

> Doesn't that assumption introduce some amount of skepticism and bias into the measurement?

You're absolutely correct :) Some atheists also use the 'skeptic' label, as it more widely describes their approach to life beyond just their religious beliefs. Bias I would question--would a similar bias not be introduced by assuming there were a god? (I'd argue I've demonstrated quite a significant bias would be introduced.)

If you remember my anecdote from the beginning, I had the question of if I only believed Christianity because I was raised in it, vs these other religions. One way to frame the experiment would be to assume Christianity was correct, and begin collecting evidence: but this would leave me open to the "confirmation bias" of attributing events to a god who may not actually exist. Defaulting to the null hypothesis of there not being any god, and requiring myself to be convinced otherwise, allows me to be much more sure that *were* such an existence to be demonstrated, that it would indeed be true with regard to reality.

> How do you respond to those who claim they've experimented on their faith and found sufficient evidence to assert their belief?

Generally I ask them to walk me through their beliefs and their experiments, in the vein of Street Epistemology. I highly, highly, highly recommend watching a few of Anthony Magnabosco's videos [4] on the subject. He does an amazing job of taking a calm, reasoned, conversational approach and demonstrates many of the techniques and tools I've cited and talked about, with a variety of people on a variety of claims--though typically claims about God. In the interest of full disclosure, Anthony is an atheist, but these conversations are much more of a Socratic dialogue exploring beliefs than they are a debate.

Returning to your question, I have not yet had a conversation with a believer whose evidence I found convincing, typically due to flaws in their reasoning akin to the above. A few months ago I even read several books one such believer recommended to me ("Mere Christianity," "The Problem of Pain," and "Should We Fire God?") on the basis that those books were part of what helped build their faith, and I only came out the other side even more disillusioned about their ability to rationally engage with the subject.

> I've found that starting this particular hypothesis under the premise that there is a God who has crafted a plan that requires the use of your agency to regain His spirit...

This is a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy, with regard to confirmation bias: If I begin looking for signs that there is the Christian god, and I allow myself to count what would otherwise be mere coincidences (or possibly very likely outcomes that I mistakenly though unlikely), I would merrily begin finding this evidence: not because it's good evidence, but because my premise is flawed. Suppose alternatively there is a god, but it's the god of Islam, or of Judaism? A lot of that evidence could support the Christian premise, but still not lead me to the correct conclusion if I'm starting from the Christian default.

I currently see no reason to believe that there is any god with such a plan requiring me to suspend my reasoning--and I would charge that any god that required me to suspend my reasoning in order to be led to believing in him (especially if that belief is demanded, lest I be punished eternally) is a god of poor moral standing.

> What if the proof requires some amount of willful credulity?

Then it's a remarkably ineffective proof :)

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burden_of_proof_(philosophy)#P...

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias

[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Placebo

[4]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T2EgJjQRsYE&list=PLh10RgQgGu...

[hi75u]

Thanks for laying all of this out. I'll say up front that I believe in God (member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints) so you know where I'm coming from. You obviously understand this stuff at a high level, and I won't claim to. I had a question about experimenting with proving (personally, at least) God's existence based on what you've explained.

>(b) god has influence in the present (he can communicate with people, either directly into their mind or by influencing the world around us; enabling certain outcomes to occur, like getting a specific job or having a good surgery outcome)

Your example experiments after this point talk about proving God exists through outcomes. I agree that experiments in this realm based on outcomes are bad. As you said, outcomes can have many different, non-divine causes; and it is impossible to observe the actual source. But what about the first point "he can communicate with people, either directly into their mind..."? What if you designed an experiment that tested whether God exists by testing if He can communicate with you? What about something like Clayton Christensen's experiment[1]? His experiment is more about a religious text than God Himself, but could something like that provide a framework for disproving the null at least?

[1] https://claytonchristensen.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/Wh...; page 3 starting at paragraph 2

[Mertax]

Thanks for the response. With that explanation I better understand the “null hypothesis” and how you would attempt to “disprove the null”. This makes me believe it could be done in a way where an omniscient and merciful God would knowingly discern such efforts as earnest and sincere. Perhaps answers could be found this way. I think this is an acceptable methodology that could be applied by a sincere truth seeker and still achieve the same outcome I experience, with admittedly a less biased premise.

A conversion in this way would certainly come with an increased accountability and is perhaps why it’s more difficult to come by. Being convinced absolutely and not willing to adhere comes with more dire consequences if one is to believe scriptural record—which admittedly sounds a bit foreboding but may be more merciful than one might assume at first glance. There are even scriptural accounts of similar things being done successfully (see Paul’s experience on his road to Damascus, or if you’re willing to venture into my brand of Christianity see Alma’s experience in chapter 36 of the Book of Mormon).

However, I do think the premise of God helps me understand and open new avenues of thought. Personally, I started from the assumption that an Omniscient being, capable of designing the very reality we perceive and live in, can probably come up with a way to “test” and “prove” us in a way that protects our ability to make our own choices yet extends enough grace to satisfy the demands of justice. If I were obligated to believe because I could not refute the evidence, I don’t know how effective that would be of a test to prove I’ve become what I’m supposed to be. Personally I think this Plan works whether you get behind a belief system or not.

I have very much appreciated the insights you’ve shared. You are right, I could be wrong, and have become heavily indoctrinated with a healthy dose of confirmation bias. But for me at least, I’ve found something that I receive great benefit and perspective from. I recognize it won't be that for everyone.

[fock]

while I think this is a sensible stance for most highly educated people, for most this just is something they can not cope very well with. And I think that these "simple" minds are then prone to all the other cults out there (like QAnon - what is it else than replacing things people can't know about with faith.) - and from their teachings these are _much_ worse.