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[mainiac]

With no evidence we should be agnostic (in the logical, rather then theological sense).

[Cthulhu]

Unrelated to all previous knowledge.

A:  All Glorbips are Frinblo

B:  Snirbs are Plart

C:  All Glorbips are not Frinblo

QED:  Who cares?

[SirQuiamus]

You are still employing previously-known quantifiers and connectives like All, Is, and Not.

Let me modify that a little bit:

A:  Ycx Glorbips blö Frinblo

B:  Snirbs yit Plart

C:  Ycx Glorbips sif blö Frinblo

QÖX:  Whisg Yueeerh%

[Reelya]

I think the point in my edit was the most appropriate. With no evidence for or against a set of propositions, and needing to act, you apply game theory instead of Boolean logic, and weigh costs/benefit to decide what to do. On the surface, that might seem like we say anything is worth 50% and it's opposite is worth 50%, but that's still flawed.

Say we say "God exists, you have no evidence against God, I have no evidence for God. Therefore we call the God hypothesis a 50/50 possibility, and via Game Theory, a 50% chance of avoiding hell is much more valuable than a 50% chance of being right if you're an atheist. Therefore you should read the bible and accept Jesus as your personal savior!" But this is missing the point that by the same logic, each other possible deity with a conflicting set of demands to get into the afterlife/avoid hell are also equally likely. Zeno, Zeeno, Zeeeno, Zeenoob are all equally-likely deities by this argument, and I propose they are in fact super-picky about how you spell their name. In fact, there are infinitely-many such deities you can concoct, so each deity (and an infinite number of disaparite atheistic theories) each have 1/infinity chance of being the right one, thus nearly zero chance of any theory you just come up with being correct.

So we need to be on the lookout for these false-dichotomy arguments too.

[NJW2000]

I think confusion between a statement and a piece of evidence is really the issue here.


Ssoi, Ooosd? Joij's iuhui aodle, g*bjhsa. Hhuo"-ailds.

Hhoadsui.

[Jimmy]

Let's drill down to a perfect example of the original statement from real life.

A. God exists.
B. God will punish you if you don't believe he exists.
C. God doesn't exist.

Pretty much sums it up. And every person responds differently to the results. People will weigh the immediate consequences in comparison to the potential outcome in the future against the possibility the original statement is false.

[scrdest]

Let's drill down to a perfect example of the original statement from real life.

A. God exists.
B. God will punish you if you don't believe he exists.
C. God doesn't exist.

Pretty much sums it up. And every person responds differently to the results. People will weigh the immediate consequences in comparison to the potential outcome in the future against the possibility the original statement is false.

Except it's bullshit. People who use that argument make a leap from 'There's a 50% chance a god exists' to 'There's a 50% chance THE God exists'.

So, from that logical analysis's standpoint, there's a 50% chance that a God exists, but that 50% chance is further divided into an infinite possibilities of which God it is, and any combination of possible gods existing simultaneously, plus a contingent of gods which are potentially real but which are assholish enough to make themselves unknown to humans in general; thus making the effective chance of winning the wager on random chance infinitesimally small - let's say, a 0.0001% chance of not wasting your infinity nor life, 49.9999% chance of wasting both your infinity and life, and a 50% chance of wasting infinity but not life.

Furthermore, 'what people do' is not a qualifier of the logically sound course of action. People are *awful* at some kinds of decisions because the heuristics developed in response to different conditions - classical example is choice between a 100% chance of losing a finger vs. a 10% chance of being decapitated.

[TripJack]

you can accept statements without 'proof', indeed most of the statements you've accepted in your life you probably accepted without proof and you simply took them on authority or they were intangible unproveable things and you accepted them anyway...

whether you should accept some hypothetical statements or not is a silly question, it all depends on what the statements are

[NJW2000]

Let's drill down to a perfect example of the original statement from real life.

A. God exists.
B. God will punish you if you don't believe he exists.
C. God doesn't exist.

Pretty much sums it up. And every person responds differently to the results. People will weigh the immediate consequences in comparison to the potential outcome in the future against the possibility the original statement is false.

Except it's bullshit. People who use that argument make a leap from 'There's a 50% chance a god exists' to 'There's a 50% chance THE God exists'.

So, from that logical analysis's standpoint, there's a 50% chance that a God exists, but that 50% chance is further divided into an infinite possibilities of which God it is, and any combination of possible gods existing simultaneously, plus a contingent of gods which are potentially real but which are assholish enough to make themselves unknown to humans in general; thus making the effective chance of winning the wager on random chance infinitesimally small - let's say, a 0.0001% chance of not wasting your infinity nor life, 49.9999% chance of wasting both your infinity and life,

This is exactly the argument I use to explain my Shrine of Armok and Pastafarian prayer space to the neighbours.

[Cthulhu]

You are still employing previously-known quantifiers and connectives like All, Is, and Not.

Let me modify that a little bit:

A:  Ycx Glorbips blö Frinblo

B:  Snirbs yit Plart

C:  Ycx Glorbips sif blö Frinblo

QÖX:  Whisg Yueeerh%

Now that you mention it, I think it's a little presumptuous to assume this epistemology includes distinct statements that can be covered by A. B. and C.  He said Statement A in the OP but he also said independent of any prior real world knowledge. 

Or that these statements, if that's what you can even call them, can be expressed with letters arrayed from left to right, or in any direction.

You can read my treatment on the subject here

[Graknorke]

Now you've got me thinking, just how would you give someone a statement without there being any surrounding information during them hearing it?

[NJW2000]

You couldn't. That where the confusion arises, between given and possible statements, in the OP, I think.

But such a statement could exist of course, if in a meaningless-seeming way. But if I give it, that would give it surrounding information, as you will have an opinion, however neutral, on my veracity, and veracity in general.

[Cthulhu]

Now you've got me thinking, just how would you give someone a statement without there being any surrounding information during them hearing it?

A priori logic exists but thinking is always grounded in basic principles, even if they're so simple you wouldn't think of them (P can't be NP, if A = B = C then C = B, physical laws are not violated, etc.) and we usually assume that logical elements like is, and, not, etc. mean something.

Because without those things all inquiry is impossible and we may as well be writing gibberish.  Science doesn't work if you can just say "well that or maybe a wizard did it" to every hypothesis (See Ancient Aliens for this in action), math doesn't work if numbers don't equal themselves, etc.

[i2amroy]

Warning: Big Post.

Except it's bullshit. People who use that argument make a leap from 'There's a 50% chance a god exists' to 'There's a 50% chance THE God exists'.

It also makes absolutely no sense to go from the original statements even to a 50/50 split. Just because there are two "options" says absolutely nothing bout their percentage chances of being true. For example if I had a perfect random number generator that generated a single random number from 1-10. I could then hypothetically give these two statements:
A. The number will be greater than 9.
B. The number will be less than or equal to 9.

No where does it say that just because I have divided the outcomes into two groups that those groups have anything near the same possibility of being true, and in fact this example is a perfect showcase of how that can not be true. In that example B is 9x more likely to be true than A is.

So it isn't just a division amongst many different gods or possibilities, it's also a total unknown just on what the base chances are in the first place. For all I know the statement "C. God Doesn't exist" is infinitely times more likely to be true than "A. God Exists", or maybe it's the other way around. The original statements show absolutely nothing about their relative probabilities of being true.

Because without those things all inquiry is impossible and we may as well be writing gibberish.  Science doesn't work if you can just say "well that or maybe a wizard did it" to every hypothesis (See Ancient Aliens for this in action), math doesn't work if numbers don't equal themselves, etc.

It might be slightly more correct to say "math wouldn't be as commonly useful if numbers didn't equal themselves". You can actually rewrite pretty much any basic principle of any field and still have it "work" as long as the new laws are consistent (since all of our labels and symbols are really just arbitrary codified conventions anyways); it just often wouldn't be near as useful for actual purposes. For example I could redefine "=" to mean "the first digit of the number to the left is the same as the last digit of the number on the right" and still be able to perform potentially useful calculations despite the fact that this: 31 = 31 would no longer be true. (31 = 43 would be though). As such "Logic" actually can be rewritten in that way and still count as logic (albeit with a different system of basic axioms and operators).

The word "Science", on the other hand, is an excellent example of imprecise language. Science as a particular bit of knowledge such as the "science of math" or even the "science of physics" can have it's base axioms rewritten and still function as a working system. We could, for example, redefine all negative charges as positive and vice versa, and weigh things in units of "wizards" with a logarithmic scaled number system and you could still use said system to calculate valid scientific knowledge (though many things might not be quite as easy to calculate as in the current system ). And even if we take "Science" to mean "the scientific method" it can still "work" if I'm allowed to say "well that or maybe a wizard did it" to every hypothesis, it just wouldn't work near as well (and even if the laws said that "a wizard did it, period", that still wouldn't mean they were totally nonfunctional, because they would be a valid method in the extremely unlikely case that a wizard did do it!).

As long as the rules that underwrite any system are consistent, then it doesn't matter how close to gibberish anything looks, because it has actual laws that it follows, and thus allows for inquiry. So you could give someone a statement that was founded on totally new basic principles, it would just be all but impossible to understand until the person was able to figure out said basic principles (at which point it would be functionally equivalent to giving them the translated statement in an already known system).

[Bohandas]

Has anybody mentioned the principle of parsimony ("occam's razor") or the principle of mediocrity yet?