rationalskepticism.org

jlowder wrote:

Paul G wrote:Yeah I hate this shit. Somehow God is more deserving of consideration because the idea deals with a more important subject? Has been around longer? Millions take it seriously? What? No physical evidence is no physical evidence, however much importance you attach to it.

http://secularoutpost.infidels.org/2006/12/sarcasm-how-to-be-atheist-apologist.html?showComment=1323998028603#c4453644275200653874

10. Compare belief in God to belief in Santa Claus, leprechauns, invisible pink unicorns, the flying spaghetti monster, and so forth, as if all supernatural explanatory hypotheses are equally plausible, despite the fact that considerations from inductive logic like scope, simplicity, etc. show that these hypotheses do not have equal intrinsic probability.

Here is what Draper writes about scope:
"Let's start with scope. Roughly speaking, scope is a measure of how much a hypothesis purports to tell us about the contingent features of the world.[7] Relative to certain practical goals, the larger the scope of a hypothesis, the better; but relative to the goal of truth, large scope is a vice rather than a virtue. For the more that a hypothesis says that might be false, the more likely it is to say something that is false, and hence the less likely it is to be true. For example, the statement that there is an animal behind the door says much less than the statement that there is a dog behind the door which in turn says much less than the statement that there is a collie wearing a red scarf behind the door. Thus, the first of these statements is intrinsically much more probable (though perhaps less useful) than the second and the second is intrinsically much more probable than the third. Similarly, the statement that there is no collie wearing a red scarf behind the door says much less than the statement that there is no dog (of any kind) behind the door which in turn says much less than the statement that there is no animal behind the door, not even an ant or a spider. Thus, of these three statements, the statement that there is no collie wearing a red scarf behind the door is the most probable intrinsically, while the statement that there is no animal of any kind behind the door is the least probable intrinsically."

And here is what he writes about simplicity:

"A hypothesis can be simple in more than one way, and simplicity can make a hypothesis better just by making it easier to use and understand. When, however, the simplicity of a hypothesis is understood to be a measure of the degree of (objective) uniformity that the hypothesis attributes to the world, then it is more than a merely pragmatic theoretical virtue. It is a sign of truth. Two examples will, I hope, help to make this point clear. First, compare the hypothesis that emeralds will remain green in the future to the hypothesis that they will sooner or later change from green to blue or from green to some other color. The former hypothesis is more probable than the latter, not because (or not just because) we have evidence that color changes of this sort never occur. Rather, it is intrinsically more probable because it attributes objective uniformity over time to the world while the latter hypothesis attributes objective change.[8] A second example concerns Aristotle's theory that physical objects are of two fundamentally different sorts: terrestrial and celestial. Unlike terrestrial objects, celestial objects are not composed of earth, water, air, or fire; and the laws that govern their behavior are not the same as the laws that govern the behavior of terrestrial objects. Even in the ancient world, it was recognized that attributing such ontological variety to nature was a weakness in Aristotle's physics. Alternative theories that postulated greater uniformity were intrinsically more probable than Aristotle's theory. Of course, Aristotelian physics was widely accepted for centuries, but only because it appeared to have much greater predictive power than its simpler competitors. In the end, of course, it proved to be false."