Do you believe in the loch lomond monster

[jack]

The quiz http://www.philosophersnet.com/games/god.php which several people have linked to a while ago, and recently, attempts to measure how consistent is your belief in the existence or non-existence of God and some other philosophical questions. Which is a very interesting idea, although obviously most people find the quiz making incorrect assumptions about them at some point during it.

People pointed out its contrast between questions:

If, despite years of trying, no strong evidence or argument has been presented to show that there is a Loch Ness monster, it is rational to believe that such a monster does not exist.

and

As long as there are no compelling arguments or evidence that show that God does not exist, atheism is a matter of faith, not rationality.

I think the intention is to trip up people who think that in the absence of overt evidence, atheism is a bad assumption but a-loch-ness-monster-ism is a reasonable one, despite their similarities. Or to trip up people who find themselves unable to believe there (or aren't) compelling arguments against (or for) God (or Nessie), even if the question instructs them to do so. Although it undermines it somewhat by describing the absence of evidence in different ways, and by not making it clear if "no evidence after much trying" is supposed to be a hypothetical assumption, or truth, which invites people to have some hidden evidence they forgot to discount (depending if they're supposed to disagree with the assumption, or imagine it.)

However, it occurs to me that possibly a question they COULD have asked after the loch ness one, was, with similar wording, do you think it's rational to believe a loch LOMOND monster doesn't exist? They'd probably have the same answer, but I think people would be more certain about the loch lomond monster.

That is, even if you're instructed to discount the evidence for the loch ness monster, you instinctively put some weight onto the argument that "lots of people believe it might be true", even if you know most of them do so for spurious reasons.

Comments

[simont]

I think I'm also gradually coming round to the view that viewing 'atheism' as some sort of positive or definite belief that there is no god is an unhelpful definition of the word.

The state of mind in which one is almost sure – that is, one considers the existence of a god to be possible in principle but too improbable even to justify Pascalian just-in-case measures – is functionally equivalent to 'positive belief' atheism, in that it inspires basically identical behaviour in its adherents (not counting the fact that they say a different set of things in philosophical debate) so I'm inclined to think that the more important distinction is not the one between 'almost sure' and 'absolutely sure', but rather the one between '50-50 (or thereabouts) undecided' and 'almost sure'.

Thus, all the arguments which address absolutely positive belief in lack of god by claiming it to be just as faith-based, unfounded in evidence and irrational as theism are arguing against what is for many people a straw man. An atheist swayed by such an argument might quite reasonably switch from 'absolutely sure' to 'almost sure' and change nothing substantial about their viewpoint thereby.

Also, having mentioned Pascal already, I think it's worth drawing attention to one particular one of the holes in his wager: that he drew a false dichotomy between the Christian God and no god. A typical property of 'almost sure' atheism is that while an adherent of it might agree in principle that a godlike being could exist, they judge the arguments presented by actual real-world religions to be so unconvincing that those religions' specific descriptions of what a god is like seem no more likely than any other possibility – and therefore any change of behaviour intended to impress one class of possible gods would annoy some opposed class of them, so there's no point adopting any such change. This means in particular that all the apologetics directed at the existence or nonexistence of a being which is universe-creating and/or powerful but otherwise unspecified in nature are also attacking straw men; the important thing theists should be arguing about is less the base probability of some sort of god, but rather the conditional probability of a god having their particular characteristics even granted that one exists in the first place.

[jack]

I think that's definitely so: the distinction between various degrees of belief, and of positive and negative belief (if any) is philosophically interesting, but mainly important to what word you use to describe atheism, not to the actual concept.

Or in other words, regardless of what I say, I _act_ and _think_ as if there is no god, so whatever my mouth says, I am functionally atheist.

I still like the parallel that I don't believe in God the same way I don't believe in the loch ness monster, whatever label you prefer to apply to that state. I prefer atheism because (a) I am biased by having an emotional investment in identifying as an atheist (b) it seems correct historically and in common usage and (c) most people know what you mean. But I know that some people prefer to reserve atheist for an even greater level of certainty, and use "agnostic" for anyone who admits they might EVER change their mind, and those labels work equally well, even if they're not the ones I'd have chosen.

[vyvyan.livejournal.com]

This reminds me indirectly of what I thought was a fairly bizarre claim about belief in this article; specifically that the writer says that no evidence could persuade him to change his mind on the existence of alien craft visiting Earth. Now, I don't believe any specific claims of UFO sightings to date, nor do I find it particularly likely that there are enough alien civilisations currently in existence near our system to actually come and visit. But it's not physically impossible for such aliens to exist, or even visit us, if they were prepared to travel for hundreds or thousands of years. Does he really think that a visit by alien craft, witnessed by millions across the planet, verified by any scientific tests one might want, and containing aliens who would happily provide us with e.g. mathematical proofs or technologies no human has yet come up with, would not convince him of their existence?

[simont]

In cases like that I tend to suspect that what the person actually means is along the lines of "no evidence you could show me right now": it's not that an obvious flying saucer actually landing in front of him in broad daylight in a busy urban area followed by lots of confirming stories in the national news etc would still leave him sceptical, it's more that as long as life superficially appears to be going on as normal you won't be able to convince him of ongoing but mysteriously secret UFO visits by any of the usual kinds of 'evidence' such as disputable and blurry photographs and garbled accounts from dubiously reliable eyewitnesses.

Perhaps there's an element in it of wanting to avoid salesmanship, too. If someone asks you "what evidence would convince you" and you describe a type of evidence, that kind of invites them to carry on talking to you and explaining that they do have that evidence or something close enough or perhaps try to get you to admit that slightly less evidence than that would do; admitting the theoretical possibility of being convinced opens a crack in an otherwise inaccessible mind and they will then try to work that crack wider by any means they can think of. So saying "none" to that question doesn't necessarily mean that "none" is the true answer: it means "go away and stop bothering me" and is an attempt to avoid them getting their dialectical foot in the door.

[jack]

It's like he's using evidence to to mean only BITS of evidence, things that need to mount up, and excluding anything that's clearly and plainly true from the category of evidence.

(Which accords with what sorts of evidence people talk about in this sort of debate, even though it's not literally true.)

[gareth-rees.livejournal.com]

I think I'm also gradually coming round to the view that viewing 'atheism' as some sort of positive or definite belief that there is no god is an unhelpful definition of the word.

Excellent news! The last time we discussed this you were taking the idea of "strong atheism" rather more seriously than I think it deserves.

My opinion then and now is that it is a mistake to talk about beliefs as though they are all-or-nothing, as though the only possible positions on a topic are belief, agnosticism, and disbelief. This is how belief is sometimes modelled in propositional logic, but when models don't match reality you have to throw out the model.