"I have no respect for this. I disagree with HC's thinking and how invalid it is, but to think that anybody who is religious does not deserve respect is just plain fucking arrogant. You really need to study history of science and its development. Beyond that, it's common decency."
First of all, you're twisting my words. I didn't say I don't respect them as a person. In fact, I quite intentionally avoided saying that. I don't respect their *skill as a rationalist*.
And I stand by that. Atheism is so open and shut a case of being true I don't really respect the rationality of someone who doesn't agree with it. And for the record, that describes a number of people I consider close friends. And it describes most of my family. And would describe me if you had asked me that question, say, a year and a half ago. So it's not nearly as much of an insult as you think I mean it as. Religion is uniquely adapted to take advantage of every cognitive bias we have, and it's understandable that people so easily go wrong. But that's an entirely different discussion.
In the interest of intellectual property, a number of the arguments I'm about to make are based largely on the writings of Eliezer Yudkowsky on LessWrong. I may reference these occasionally with hyperlinks for anyone who would like to read more, but it's certainly not required reading.
Firstly, it's important to agree that beliefs are not black and white. A lot of people object to this when I argue it with them. Most people would say that they believe that the sun will rise tomorrow. This is perfectly sane. But regardless, there is always some probability that it wouldn't. Perhaps some cataclysmic event will destroy the sun. Perhaps the matrix-gods will end our simulation. These are miniscule probabilities, to be sure, but it's better to use a *probability* to describe a belief, not a binary "I believe this, or I don't believe this". It's a reductionist (http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Reductionism_%28sequence%29) description to say that, and it more accurately maps from wordspace to thingspace.
So my first question to anyone who describes themselves as religious is always, "What probability do you assign to the existence of God?"
But even that's really kind of a wrong question. Because the formulation of God by religious types is just so damn convenient. Carl Sagan once made this point (http://www.godlessgeeks.com/LINKS/Dragon.htm) by making the following argument: A man claims to have a dragon in his garage. Fascinating! "I'd love to see the dragon," you reply. "Oh, it's an invisible dragon." "Let's spread flour on the floor and we will see the dragon's footprints." "Oh, it hovers all the time." "Hmmm," you say, "Perhaps we could use a thermal sensor to detect the heat." "The invisible flame is also heatless."
You get where this is going. Religious people's belief in God isn't actually a belief in God! It offers no testable consequences, because if it did, it would open itself up to falsification. It's just a belief in a belief. (http://lesswrong.com/lw/i4/belief_in_belief/)
Unfortunately, without any testable consequences (and if you have some examples of these for religion that we could test, or that other people have, PLEASE provide them, I would love to see them.) there is and must be no actual evidence for the existence of a God.
I will assume, for a moment, that any religious readers are, demographically, Christian, or some permutation thereof. Let's go back to the question I mentioned earlier: What's your estimate of the probability that God exists? Whatever that number is, it, by the laws of probability that God exists AND he sent his son to Earth. Conditioning on the second probability ipso facto decreases the overall probability. (If this isn't intuitively obvious to you, I can explain, but I don't want to insult you. Think of it this way: The probability of flipping a coin twice and getting heads twice must be less than the probability of flipping it once and getting just one head.) So what's the probability that God exists AND he sent his son to Earth AND that son was born to a virgin mother? You can keep adding on all of the fantastic claims that religion makes - each time you make another estimate the probability must definitionally go down.
This can be done with any religion, it's not specific to Christianity. All religions make so many claims like this, as soon as you condition on all of them, and look at it in terms of probability, it starts to go down and down. So what's your estimate that any of the myriad of revealed religions on Earth is true? Or better yet, in more specific terms, what's your probability estimate that greater than 95% of the claims made by any one revealed religion on Earth is true? And if this probability is different from that for any other religion (well, we have to assume here that they all make the same number of claims outright) what evidence do you have that makes this probability higher and the others lower?
Public humiliation
. Please let me know if you're interested, and if this pot is too expensive.
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