/sci/ - Science & Math

>>4204389
While Einstein frequently referenced God as a rhetorical device, he complained in private correspondence about people calling him a Christian. Perhaps not the wisest thing on his part.

More importantly, I don't see why people try to turn factual questions into popularity contests. Aumann's Agreement Theorem is all well and good, but if you sacrifice your rationality in an attempt to satisfy it explicitly, you're no longer bound to it.

In other words: everyone who is right about a particular thing will have the same answer. (If it looks different, then either they are talking about different things, or just saying the same thing differently.)

But people can agree on wrong answers, too. And if you're just looking for someone to agree with, rather than trying to find the truth...well, the only way you can succeed that way is if you're targeting people who *do* care about the truth.

In this case, there are pretty intelligent people on each side. Freeman Dyson versus Neil DeGrasse Tyson, sort of thing. But then you look at their epistemological methods.

You have Plantinga claiming we have a special God sense. You have William Lane Craig saying that he'll keep believing regardless of any evidence. You have people struggling desperately to come up with a theory of historicity that will accept Jesus' miracles and not those chronicled by Herotodus.

In short, people arguing for the existence of God, by and large, do not start out as skeptics and eventually, due to a preponderance of evidence, change their minds. They start out with a conclusion and do whatever they can to make it seem like a reasonable belief.

That just isn't something I can get behind.

>>3314574 Eliezer is too many inferential steps away to comprehend your stupidity.

How the hell does this guy have such a large following? He is the maker of the site lesswrong.com

How is he allowed to speak at some major conferences, when he has done so little for actual computer science AI. I have tried to look for real accomplishments besides writing essays(which did not inspire real scientific research), and I couldn't find any.

yes