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

[lavendersparkle]

I got annoyed by that question when I saw it in a book for a number of reasons:

1) The question seems to want to push you into thinking that only one position in each case is rational. I think if you think that both belief and non-belief are rational responses to the evidence in both cases, the way they're worded pushes you into a contradiction in the eyes of the questioner.

2) I don't think that you can just compare any two things which people believe in despite a lack of evidence. It shows a misunderstanding of the nature of uncertainty on the part of the questioner.

3) I think that belief or non-belief in G@d is a matter of faith and rationality so I found it all a bit tricky.

[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.