Atheism & Probabilities
Genuine Fun For Highly Confident Atheists
About the Author
Bryan Frances is the world’s only intellectual wisdom coach. He’s a former professor of philosophy & logic, doing research & teaching at universities in the US, UK, Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. He teaches you how to become the wisest thinker in the room—which is different from being the most knowledgeable or having the highest IQ. Contact for a free session.
Let me be perfectly clear: I do NOT endorse the arguments below, although I did come up with them myself a few years ago. They are fun curiosities, probably telling us something important about how to think in probabilistic terms. I’m posting this as a cool example of how to combine philosophy and very simple probability.
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Suppose you are an atheist who is highly confident that there is no God—but you’re wise enough to not be perfectly confident. If forced to give a number, you would say you’re 99% confident.
You say that millions of people are wildly deluded in thinking they have actually perceived God. Fair enough. Any educated theist will admit that. But as an educated atheist, you also admit that there have been people who:
Were very much isolated from the social factors that pressure people to think they’ve perceived God.
Were as sincere, intelligent, sane, and no more gullible than intellectually upstanding and even wise atheists or agnostics.
Had experiences over many months or even years that they insisted, after extended intelligent reflection, included communication with God.
They came to this opinion about their religious perceptions in mutual independence from other theists (like our birth dates are mutually independent), since they were cut off from religious upbringing or education.
The number of people who satisfy 1-4 is absolutely miniscule compared to the number of people who claim to have perceived God. True enough! Even so, you know that throughout history—which is a long time—a significant number of people have met those criteria. If you are like me, you might know some.
Suppose you guess that there must have been, worldwide, at least 10,000 people over the last few thousand years who meet the 1-4 criteria. (If you think that number is too high, fine! I will deal with your position below.) Surely, you might say to yourself, 10,000 is a reasonable number, given the literally billions of people, throughout history, who have believed in God! If a billion people have claimed to have perceived God, then your guess that only 10,000 of them meet the 1-4 criteria means that you are saying that only one out of 100,000 meet the criteria.