Posted: Jan 08, 2015 4:56 pm
Thommo wrote:There's a possibility that a god or gods exist, it doesn't make much sense to talk about the probability of it. There's no framework for reliably estimating an underlying distribution.
Someone might say they are 90% confident of his existence or nonexistence, but it's really quite meaningless without the underlying framework. At some point you're just affirming belief. There are statistical techniques (such as maximum likelihood estimators) that can be used to fit a distribution, but you need data for that, with sample sizes of ~100 (varying with technique). Since we only know of one universe and we don't know what "caused" it (if anything) our current sample size is 0, making any talk of probability, likelihoods and the stuff just fluff, not mathematics.
This whole area of thelogical metaphysics is just guff to be honest, and I absolutely include almost all arguments against gods in with those arguments for gods. You really can't do better than "I have no need for that hypothesis".
I have a mostly similar position but one difference. If you do not have data for a position (and I mean data in a strict information stance) then you have NO POSSIBILITY. A probability can be inferred with a sample size of 1, it just will lack meaningful confidence (variation within a sample of 1 is enough). That's mathematics.
Relating that back to the cause of the universe and maybe back to your coin analogy, I'd say that your analogy does not make sense for the Universe. There is no information (re: data) for God(s) so it is not even possible. There is no data for an agent leaving the coin face up so it's not even possible to compare it to the coin flip. Now we need to know from a zero-energy universe whether it's a coin flip.