On Arguments for God

In fact, it'd actually be suspicious if all forty of these arguments came out against God. Surely we should expect the advantage to belong to the deists in at least one or two?

Good strong arguments are exactly the arguments you shouldn't expect to see for a position that is false. 

You can construct arguments that would technically be large baysian updates, if you ignored the cherry picking. You pray for heads and toss a coin 200 times. If you just focus on the 100 times it lands heads, you have an evidence factor of nearly 2^100:1  in favour of a god that grants prayers about coin-flips over randomness. Of course, you aren't allowed to select a subset of the evidence to update on, and ignore the rest. 

Once you realize why these sort of arguments fail, the only arguments left for god are ones that make some sort of mistake. 

Reality is very different from notions of god. There are good reasons not to expect any fully decent arguments for god to exist, and no reason half decent arguments must exist.

If we are in a simulation, it has a creator(s), who is almost god-like. But simulation hypothesis is more popular than idea of God in rationalist circles, which looks like a contradiction: P(simulation) = P(creator of simulation exists).

No, not everyone knows! https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/BNfL58ijGawgpkh9b/everybody-knows [LW · GW]

I’m all for discussions about god, but I think you have to at least try to narrow down your definition somewhat. Although maybe that’s not what this post is about, but rather general uncertainty about things?

If you do not use 0 as a probablity you should always have doubts.

If we know a proof arrives at an erroreneous position then we know there must be a mistake in it. Reductio ad absurdum is a valid form of argumentation as is modus tollens.

A proof about being likely needs to be relative to a state of evidence. That is you can prove that someone is framed without thinking that he did the crime.

Proofs for god don't come from a neutral source, there is no inclination to think it must be balanced outcomes. Dice don't care about you, they dole out all outcomes. However getting rock in rock,paper, scissors when the opponent has seen first that you are playing scissors is not suprising and there is less reason to ever expect paper.

That is if you have 99 invalid forms of reasoning and 1 valid form of reasoning it doesn't make the remaining standing reasoning less valid. You need to take into account the clever arguers stamp claim.

If one were to be very hardcore it would be a good policy to be evenhanded about proof-lengths. However at the point that the claim checks out to the cut-off length one needs to remain in "plausible undecided" stance. Then claims like "nobody has ever put forth a proof for X" become claims like "It has never been practical for me to follow throught a proof of X". It has flipsides of "open until explained but unconvinced until explained" and that you need to track shadows of doubts for "good" results. Good scientists wait for replication and don't jump on first postive indicator and retain uncertainties even in textbook-printed numbers.

I'm confused by the point of this post. What do you want to say in the end? Is it a post with no overarching point, just here to start a conversation (but then, about what)?

The pattern you're talking about reminds me of Jaynes' explanation of reasoning about supernatural phenomenon (which is probably just the standard Bayesian explanation), where your prior against such a thing is so high that you put more probability on almost any alternative. Similarly, an argument for why you can't convince a Bayesian (which believes somewhat that simplicity matters) of the existence of God is that most proposals of God are hypothesis of infinite, or at least maximal complexity, and by Occam's Razor these are the last one that will be considered.

But in your post, you cast that reasoning as... wrong? I'm not even sure of that. I want to read the word "error" in your last sentence as the error made by "us" (the reasoners that don't believe in God) , but grammatically it makes more sense as the the error of the argument for the existence of God.

But since we have very good reasons to believe God doesn’t exist and someone presents us with those arguments, surely we’ll assume that they have to be wrong. And so we’ll search very hard, until we find something that is plausibly an error or at least more plausible than God and talk ourselves into believing it.

Any valid argument can easily be rejected by doubting its premises. But that works both ways. You can nitpick the theists' arguments by pointing out that their premises aren't necessarily true, but they can do the same to you. For instance, atheists often assume that God must be highly complex (which is essentially the assumption that God must be natural) or that God must be visible to the senses, and so on. Theologians don't define God that way, so they see those arguments as irrelevant.

I can't agree with arguments for God using Bayesian updates, e.g. the universe is fine-tuned for life. Why is the argument focused on life in the first place? Why not focus on something that doesn't exist and conclude the universe is not designed?

This argument only seems right because it looks like a self-analysis. We, humans, are life. So paying attention to it seems natural. But wouldn't the existence of oneself be a prerequisite of self-analysis? From our perspective, finding the universe compatible with our existence is guaranteed. Just like I am guaranteed to find myself exist. The fact that any tiny fluctuation in history would be causing me not to be born does not mean my existence is chosen by god.