Here is a link to a test that will tell you what you think (or what your beliefs imply) the probability of God is. It uses Bayesian probability to compute this.
Enjoy!
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Any topic I feel like covering but primarily focusing on ethics, religion, economics, and politics.
About Me
- Andy
- I am a Christian who is a former atheist. I have researched religion and ethics extensively in my journey towards God.
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- Louis Pojman: Ethics: Discovering Right and Wrong
- Peter Byrne: The Moral Interpretation of Religion
- Peter Byrne: The Philosophical and Theological Foundations of Ethics
- Richard Swinburne: Faith and Reason
- Richard Swinburne: Is there a God?
- Richard Swinburne: The Existence of God
- Richard Swinburne: Was Jesus God?
4 comments:
G'day Andy. Thanks for linking to my "probability of god" test. I have actually written a second, shorter, and perhaps better test, which is linked on the page you link to. Since you are a statistician, have you any comments from that perspective please?
I looked at the test and I like it better. Thanks.
I don't really have any comments from the math side. It all seems sound and I'm glad someone put something like this together.
Also, I had one comment on your test. On question 7, I would prefer using the phrase that morality is objective rather than some things are 'really wrong.' It's as if evolutionary ethics (not a good theory, imo) doesn't assert that acts are wrong. Kind of a weird thing to say.
My main comment though would be to distinguish between two different facts. One is that some things are really right or wrong. The second is that we have a belief that some things are really right or wrong.
Some theists think that without God, nothing would really be right or wrong. Some theists say, without God some things may be right or wrong, but humans would never be able to tell which is which. Or, humans would not be able to sense this wrongness without God designing us.
Swinburne distinguishes between the two different moral arguments for God in Ch. 9 of 'The Existence of God.' He distinguishes between the argument from moral truth versus the argument from moral awareness. He finds the first one unsound and the second one sound. (In 'Is there a God?', he only discusses the argument from moral truth on p.13)
In other words, he believes that some things are right or wrong independent of God's will. However, he thinks it is mysterious that we would be aware of moral facts without God designing us to sense them. So our moral awareness gives evidence of God while the existence of moral truths does not.
So, I would split up the moral argument into two different questions. One that asks about moral truth and another about moral awareness.
Other than that, it looks great. Thanks for the test!
Andy,
I just discovered your blog and like what I see.
I think think that the question of moral epistemology is a good one and can be a good moral argument for theism but I don't think that we should abandon the moral truth or moral ontology argument. It is very hard for me to see how there could be objective morality without God. Are things like Honesty, Honor, and Justice, just abstract Platonic forms in absence of God? Atheistic Moral Platonism doesn't make much sense because you just have these brute moral facts out there that have no real relationship to us. It appears to me that talk of morality makes the most sense when one speaks of the relationship between people, i.e. morality is objective because we are in eternal relation to other people and ultimately to God.
I've got to read Swinburne someday. My position on this descends mostly from C.S. Lewis and William Lane Craig.
Why does Swinburne disagree with the moral truth argument? What do you think of it?
Hi Ron,
Check out this post for why I don't agree with the argument from moral truth. Swinburne disagrees for pretty similar reasons related to the Euthyphro dilemma. I'm not a big Platonist and I'd say most atheists aren't (I'm also not an atheist but just saying).
Most atheists answer the moral truth argument using some form of relativism/subjectivism or they begin talking about evolution. Both views make little sense (as most ethicists would agree) but I don't think atheists have no way of explaining morality in an objective way either. See the post above and the comments for the discussion.
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