How confident is your atheism?

If I were to consider the arguments of 20 other groups similar to Christian theologians, I would probably misunderstand them at least 1 time in 20.

Not all arguments which you misunderstand-and-disbelieve are actually sound.

Today I would give myself a 1 in 20 chance of being wrong. [...] I would probably misunderstand them at least 1 time in 20.

So far so good.

If I convert that into "There is a 5% probability that the God of the Bible exists and will send me to hell"

Don't. That's a mistake. There's a 5% chance (say) that you've seriously misunderstood some of the things that Christian theologians think and why they think them. That's not the same thing -- it's not anything like the same thing -- as a 5% chance that they are right about Christianity and you're going to burn in hell for getting it wrong. It's perfectly possible that both they and you are wrong, and unless your reasons for being an atheist are much worse than I expect that's the most likely state of affairs conditional on your being wrong.

I bet there are a lot more than 20 groups of people with mutually inconsistent beliefs, whose beliefs you have at least a 5% chance of having seriously misunderstood or otherwise failed to refute perfectly.

I am thiiiiiiiiis confident!

(Holds arms wide, then accepts any well-specified bet as if the actual probability of Christianity were zero, i.e., with betting prices corresponding to the probability of the specified evidence being observed, given the fixed assumption that Christianity is false.)

So, first off, I would agree that you're doing something seriously wrong, and what you're doing wrong is you're privileging the hypothesis.

Consider P1: "The God of the Bible exists and will send me to Hell."
Now consider P2: "There is a God, but the Bible is systematically wrong about God's plan. Everything the Bible says God wants, God actually wants the opposite of, and if I follow the Bible God will send me to Hell."

Regardless of how small or large a value I assign to p(P1), what really matters for my decision-making is p(P1)/p(p2). If that ratio is close to 1, then I ought not treat the Bible as my guide to how to act, regardless of either value. P1 could have a 50% chance of being true, and it still wouldn't matter.

That having been said, OK.
First off, like Emile, I have trouble unambiguously interpreting "Christianity is true."

Call C1 the set of all statements asserted by any Christian-identified theologian.

My confidence that the conjunction of C1 is false is roughly equal to my confidence that (a) I can in fact recognize logical contradictions and (b) two propositions that contradict one another are not both true. I don't know how to attach a number to these sorts of claims. I literally cannot imagine a scenario that would cause me to update my belief in that conjunction by a noticable amount. If the stars in the sky arranged themselves in a pattern that spelled out "C1 is all true, Dave!" I would still consider it vanishingly unlikely that C1 was all true. If I woke up tomorrow morning convinced that C1 was all true, I would still consider it vanishingly unlikely that C1 was all true. If I have to put a number on this, the number I put on it is zero. (Yes, I've read that article, and I'm saying this advisedly.)

At the other extreme, my confidence that the disjunction of C1 is true is, in the same way, one.

Call C2 the set of assertions about the actions of God described in the Old Testament as it has come down to us, starting with "In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth" and going on from there, including all the "and the Lord said to Moses" verses, etc. My confidence that there exists an entity of whom the conjunction of C2 is true is not quite as brainbreaking as the C1 equivalent; I can imagine events that would cause me to update that confidence by some noticeable degree. I still don't know how to calibrate it, though.

Call C3 the set of assertions about the actions of Jesus described in the New Testament. My confidence that there existed an entity of whom the conjunction of C3 is true is a lot higher than the other two conjunctions... but I still don't know how to calibrate it. Basically, we're still in the realm of "too small for me to conceive of".

My problems with "a god of some sort exists" are of a different sort... I can't quite figure out what that proposition even means. How is it different from "something exists", for example? (My confidence in that statement is very high.)

How is this one chance out of twenty specific of Christianity? This doesn't seem to have any good predictive power. You can misunderstand the arguments of one out of twenty groups for any topic. Why not worry about all these other topics as well?

While ordinarily, I might upvote something that is asking for help calibrating a belief, I think this has far too much potential to turn into an "I'm more atheist than you" fest. Especially when the title is "How confident is your atheism?" After reading a couple of the comments, I had that urge until I realized what was happening.

So I will be explicitly ignoring your request for numbers. But if you're really dead set on coming up with a number for yourself (I don't think the discussion is productive enough beyond estimation to, say, three or four orders of magnitude accuracy, but your call) I would suggest trying to think of other beliefs that you find as plausible as Christianity, ie., all of the other religions. You've got to necessarily have room for them in your estimation. Also, you should take into account reasons that creatures evolving in the ancestral environment would become religious.

(I upvoted this post because I saw that its score was at -1. I normally avoid doing this, but here I make an exception because, while this is not a quality article, I think this sort of thing should be encouraged here on Less Wrong, the sort of "I have a doubt and I want to know about to do about it" posts that this is an example of.

Saying,

This back-and-forth from certainty to uncertainty makes me feel like I'm doing something seriously wrong.

took at least some courage. Let us not punish that. On the other hand I do feel like this is more appropriate for the open threads, but nobody checks them the week before a new one anyway.)

Do you really think there's a 40% chance that one out of the Bahá'í, Christians, Jews, Mandaeans, Muslims, Sikhs, theistic Hindus, or Zoroastrians are right?

Or do you think maybe there's a 5% chance that some form of religion is right, and that there might be a sub-chance of that that theism is right, and then there's a sub-sub-chance of any of the particular living theisms I just listed is right?

Depends on what you mean by "Christianity being true". If you mean "The miracles described in the Bible actually happened in the real world, and there is a supernatural God that cares about our actions and occasionally interferes in the world", then the chances are vanishingly small, less than one in a million.

On the other hand, if you mean "Following religious practice and giving priests a respectable position in society is good for individual well-being, as well as maintaining a harmonious and prosperous society; religious teachings are moral fables that help foster group coordination", then yeah, I'd put a much higher probability to that, though the exact value would depend of the religion being considered, etc.

How has nobody yet mentioned Confidence Levels Inside and Outside an Argument? Anyway, I take gjm's line on this: I should assign at least 5% probability that my reasoning for rejecting Christianity is invalid in some way that I'm unaware of, but that's different from a 5% probability that Christianity is true.

For one thing, my reasoning that Christianity is very likely false is essentially the same as my reasoning that other theisms are false, so at the very least a whole bunch of other religions get lumped into that same 5%. (That is, if Zeus exists, then my reasoning was just as wrong as if Yahweh exists.) Furthermore, there are other possibilities—such as that I'm mentally unbalanced and hallucinating my high intelligence, or that I'm a brain in a vat whose reasoning is being systematically tweaked for a mad scientific experiment—which don't seem all that correlated with whether Christianity is true or not.

Since in my case as well as yours, Christianity plays a unique role vis-a-vis other theisms, there is some justification for promoting it a bit within the space of "things that might actually be the case if my reasoning is bad" (in the same sense that a lottery winner might well consider it more likely than average that they're in a simulation). But my estimate still comes out more like 0.1% than like 5%.

After all, the God of the Bible is CLEARLY just a big, mean alpha-monkey and...

Is a mean God that much less likely than a benevolent God?

What chance do you place on some variant of Christianity turning up to be true, and what chance do you think a god of some sort exists?

Not-quite-numbers: specifically Christianity: at a noise level (i.e. same as pastafarianism). Some kind of omniscience/omnipotence, including being in a matrix-like simulation: somewhat above the noise level, but not high enough to change anything I do or worry about.

You seem to be reasoning as if Christianity has a prior high enough to make it worth considering, then basing your atheism on having heard and invalidated the Christians' arguments. Instead, consider that Christianity is a huge, complex hypothesis with a very low prior, and then update down based on seeing the arguments for it and finding them bad. You can do that because if Christianity were true you'd be more likely to see good arguments, and if it's false you're more likely to see bad arguments.

Each individual religion starts off with a prior low enough not to be worth investigating--that's why you don't see me finding and engaging Zoroastrians in theological debate. As an upper bound on that probability, there are at least 200 or so religions, at most one of which can be true: 0.5% probability right there, not counting "atheism is true" and "some religion not yet invented is true". When you investigate a religion and find its arguments bad, the probability goes down from there.

Given what we know about the ways that religions start and spread, we know that they are not generally truth-tracking. The fact that we observe a particular religious belief in the populace (or that we happen to have been born to a family that teaches it) is not a good indicator of that belief being true. Religious beliefs — unlike practical (how-to) knowledge or scientific theories — are not selected for their accuracy.

Further, the various religions contradict one another on pretty much everything (except baseline tribal morality): if Christian theology is true, then Vaishnava theology is false; if Muslim theology is true, then Mormon theology is false; and so on. And there are a lot of them; and many of them mutually forbid acting on the recommendations of the others, so you can't generally hedge your Pascal's Wager between them.

I'm thinking there is a false dichotomy here. If Christianity is false it doesn't mean that atheism is true. Both Christianity and atheism could be false. Christianity being true only depends on the resurrection of Jesus, and that depends on how regularly dead bodies come back from the dead, how many stories we have about dead bodies coming back from the dead, and how many times we have had verified stories of dead bodies coming back from the dead.

There are certainly Jews who think that the events in the NT generally happened (e.g. Toledot Yeshu), Muslims who think that the events in the NT generally happened, but still think that Christianity is false. I mean, Christianity could be false and yet you might still end up in hell because Islam was the "true religion".

I watched the Ten Commandments the other day to revisit some classic cinema, and in the scene where god appears as a burning bush, I couldn't help but think, "Wow, that's all he could muster?" And then picture some outer-universe aliens tinkering with gigantic equipment with immense power inputs to try and interfere in some other world, only able to project tiny amounts of fire into a bush and a disembodied voice, the best efforts of all their minds at cross-dimensional communication resulting in nothing much at all, and the translator broken at that.

5%

The feelings you get about this number are feelings that most any belief system would produce - you'd say the same thing with the same 5% if we replaced Christianity with Catholicism, for example.

So I take all beliefs systems as the reference class for that feeling. Smear that 5% over all belief systems - not just the ones that exist, but the possible ones that are as coherent and likely to arise as Christianity - and you should stop worrying somewhat.

After talking with 20 groups that have a very different worldview, I might think they are all are mistaken, but once in a while, maybe 5% of the time, it would actually be me.

As others have pointed out, probably 5% of the time you are mistaken, but that says nothing about the chance they are mistaken; unless you and them are mutually exclusive truth-tracking belief systems with all the evidence. Better assume you're perfectly spherical and updating takes place in a vacuum...

My numbers? The measure of worlds where a belief system like Christianity meaningfully alters my behaviour (how I choose to act in lots of situations, not just situations involving Christians) is something like one in ten thousand. As you make more specific claims (e.g. Bible says I'm going to Hell, I should act in accordance with {subset of Bible} ) I penalise by one in ten thousand, times one in the complexity of the statement you made.

Christianity isn't a single proposition though. There is a lot of content there. A lot of unverified content.

The probability that you should believe Christianity because of some fear of hell (act on your worry) is something less than the probability that there is a God times the probability that God had a son given that there is a God times the probability that Jesus was the one and only son of God given that God had a son times the probability that there are souls given all of the above times the probability that God sends these souls somewhere GAOTA times the probability that God sends people who don't believe in him to Hell GAOTA.

Some of those things are pretty likely given the prior statement, but several of them are non-obvious.

And if you are going to act on a belief in a general diety... well, what policy do you take? He may only punish believers. He may only punish people who wear shoes. He may only grant souls to pillows and only send red pillows to heaven, blue pillows to hell, and all others (including mixes) to purgatory. Diety-space is HUGE and complex propositions without strong evidence are almost always wrong.

I am not even sure "Lots of humans believe it" counts as evidence. Is it more likely that something is true, given that lots of people believe it? I think the inverse is true: if something is true it is more likely that lots of people will believe it. But P(B|A)!=P(A|B)

For me, there are the odds that "God" exists and there are the odds that I can ever fully shake the conditioning and indoctrination of my childhood, such that a charismatic, confident, person could ever get me to hesitate or win some sort of personal "victory" in a fact to face confrontation.

The former is zero, the latter is somewhat higher.

What chance do you place on some variant of Christianity turning up to be true, and what chance do you think a god of some sort exists?"

Both a bit vague - but maybe 0.1% and 5%, respectively.

"There is a part of me that wants to say the chance is far less than 1 percent. But when I consider what 1% must mean about my ability to follow complex arguments and base my judgement on the right premises, it seems absurd to say that.

This argument is clearly fallacious, given that we all have things we assign a chace of <<<1% to, regardless of our ability to evaluate arguments. See: story of Joseph Smith and the golden plates, fairies, Xenu, Flying Spaghetti Monster, etc.

And if you go on the omni- definiton of God, my confidence in atheism is higher than my confidence in no-fairies because of the problem of evil.

That some variant of Christianity turns up to be true ? Very, very, very low. Considering the size of the hypothesis space that includes Christianity (it includes about all other religions that ever existed, and most of the fictional ones, and many more you could think about), and the very low amount of evidence, it has to be counted in power of ten. If you consider the core of Christianity to be about 100 bits of information (and that's a very low estimate), and that you have, what, 10 bits of evidence you're left with a probability of 2^-90 of Christianity being true. Those numbers are very imprecise, but if anything, they give a probability higher of what it really is.

That some variant of "theism" is true, including the fact that the universe may be a simulation and the programmers/administrators of the simulation have "godlike" powers in it ? That I would give a much more reasonable chance of being true, but still no real evidence for it, so maybe a 10-20% probability.

That said, I find it really hard to give numbers for my those kind of believes which means... I need to become stronger !

99%

If I were to consider the arguments of 20 other groups similar to Christian theologians, I would probably misunderstand them at least 1 time in 20.

Just because you misunderstand them, it does not mean they are right. If someone tried to convince me that 2+2=5, and I would have trouble following their complex explanations (but I also wouldn't be able to find an obvious error), I would not accept it as an evidence that 2+2=5. (More precisely, it would be just an epsilon evidence.)

My atheism toward Christian God (or any other) is very like my skepticism toward the Little Red Riding Hood adventure.

The same thing.

10^-50.

Today I would give myself a 1 in 20 chance of being wrong. If I were to consider the arguments of 20 other groups similar to Christian theologians, I would probably misunderstand them at least 1 time in 20. After talking with 20 groups that have a very different worldview, I might think they are all are mistaken, but once in a while, maybe 5% of the time, it would actually be me.

Wow, 5%!?! If I convert that into "There is a 5% probability that the God of the Bible exists and will send me to hell", I feel scared. But I know how to cheer myself up: I just say, "No way, the chance I'll end up in hell MUST be less than 5%. After all, the God of the Bible is CLEARLY just a big, mean alpha-monkey and... [rehearse all the atheistic arguments here]

5% chance that some Christian theologians have it right is not a 5% chance you go to Hell if you disagree. As with everything else, the Bible contradicts itself on this. (Rob Bell has a great collection of conflicting things the Bible says about this in his book "Love Wins."

Jaynes discusses Hempel's Paradox on pages 143 to 144 of Probability Theory: the Logic of Science. I take away a broad lesson: one must always know what alternative hypotheses are available. Failing to be clear about your alternative hypotheses is my first candidate for what you are doing wrong.

My second candidate comes from rule IIIb for plausible reasoning (page 9).

... always take into account all the evidence relevant to the question ...

One conspicuous feature of the world is the presence of rival faiths, each well attested by miracles about which the faithful will admit no doubts. This occurs both between religions (Muslim, Christian, Jew) and within religions (Orthodox, Catholic, Protestant).

It is tempting at this point to rush ahead down a well-worn path to atheism. "Since the rivals are mutually exclusive and the situation symmetrical they must all be wrong." I've put the argument in quotes because I'm suggesting that we hold off and pause for reflection. Since we can see what is coming, we face a choice. We can either leave out the existence of rival religions because, for many people, it settles the issue, and we feel that including them therefore prejudges the issue. Or we can include the existence of rival religions and wonder whether the situation really is symmetrical.

Rule IIIb requires us to ask whether the existence of rival religions (with well attested miracles ...) is relevant. We know that it is highly relevant. We even feel an itch to leave it out to avoid it over powering other considerations.

Rule IIIb then instructs us to take them into account. Ouch! The probability calculation has already gone badly wrong, just because it left out the rival religions and before we ever get to thinking about what the existence of rival religions implies for the issue we are considering.

I suppose that the existence of something resembling a god is possible if we are actually living in a simulation. Even the christian god would be somewhere in that space of possibilities, though given the space of possibilities, that one specific possibility would still have to have extraordinarily low probability.

But let's say the christian god shows up on our world one day and says "hey all, yup, I'm totally real, now get on your knees and praise me or suffer eternal torment!"

I don't know about anybody else, but my atheism wouldn't so much as wobble. Why? Because I don't see atheism as disbelief in any specific entities. To me, it is the dismissal of the concept of divinity--that you can't have a fundamental authority or something fundamentally moral any more than you can have something that is fundamentally complicated--it is disbelief in the obligation to worship.

This post belongs in Discussion.

The bible is not internally consistent, therefore it is impossible for it to accurately describe a coherent deity. The question is nonsensical on its face. You have to instead start picking and choosing which parts of the bible to believe and which parts to ignore (or trust someone else do to that for you), which is why we have tens of thousands of varieties of christianity.

So you must return to the fundamental question of rationality: what do I think I know, and how do I think I know it? Or more specifically - what is your criteria for deciding that part X of the bible is accurate, and part Y is not? Or alternatively, what is your criteria for deciding to trust Priest A over Theologian B?

Seeing as there is no good physical evidence to make these distinctions, it is appropriate to weigh them as strongly as you'd weigh any other bedtime story. The only remaining question is "How confident am I that my senses are entangled with reality as it actually is, and not the product of hallucination/dark lords of the matrix/other reality-shattering plot twist?" Which really has nothing to do with christianity.

To answer your question: I'd be willing to bet $10 vs my immediate termination that any particular sect of christianity (as defined by the Center for the Study of Global Christianity ) you presented to me is inaccurate. I'd fully anticipate having several hundred thousand dollars afterwards and still be breathing if this was repeated to exhaustion.

Today I would give myself a 1 in 20 chance of being wrong. If I were to consider the arguments of 20 other groups similar to Christian theologians

There actually are more than 20 religious groups out there. Do you think you are wrong about one of them being the true religion?

There are a lot of different gods. If you have 5% for any single God existing, I don't think you are an atheist.

For me P(A god punishes people for not believing in the Bible with eternal hell | A god exists) is less than 5%.

The ridiculousness of an eternal loving god who punishes nonbelievers with eternal torments for not following his edicts is just too great. It's ridiculous even when I would assume for the sake of the argument that a god exists.

r_claypool retooled the question as: "the chance that Jesus of Nazareth is a resurrected God". Like most on this thread, I can't come up with a number aside from "exceedingly improbable".

Kudos to TheOtherDave for an excellent comment.

IMHO, Kierkegaard nailed it when he observed that faith in Christianity is imcompatible with reason. While the latest flavour du jour for Christian apologists in support of the truth of the resurrection is the minimalist three facts approach (i.e. death of the cross, empty tomb and reports of post-resurrection appreances), most will back peddle when asked whether they accept all of the other miraculous reports contained in the New Testament.

Other people have pointed out the problems with singling out Christianity and ignoring a lot of disjoint possibilities. As to your question, someone on another site named a level of evidence that feels like it would make me consider deities as explanations. Representatives of a deity (or the deity itself) would need to publicly create specimens of a species believed extinct. They would need skeptical observers, well-versed in stage magic, to declare themselves baffled. And then they'd have to hand the specimens over to skeptical biologists for another kind of confirmation. This level of evidence feels like it would bring my belief in some deity's existence to more than 1%. (ETA: but see the dream thread.)

Now for "the chance that Jesus of Nazareth is a resurrected God", it would take all that plus additional evidence on the level of the following: Christians moving mountains through faith alone, plus a persuasive-sounding explanation of why I haven't observed this happening before. That seems like it would bring my credence above 1%. Though now that I've written this, .01 feels possibly too high to be internally consistent.

I'll try to assign probabilities to 5 propositions:

(A) I'm deluded, insane and unaware of this

0.03% of the population (that's 3 people in every 10,000) have Delusional Disorder. If I did have that (or various other disorders) I would be as certain as I am now that I was sane, so that puts an upper limit on how confident anyone can rationally be about their own sanity.

(B) I'm sane, but some form of supernatural exists (whether that's ghosts, an afterlife, supernatural karma, magic spells, or a sentient Gaia)

Given how hard science has looked for such things, for decades, this is the Black Swan problem. Were evidence of souls to become detectable to science, it would be an immense paradigm shift, easily comparable to the overthrow of the Geocentric worldview, a 1 in 1,000 year occurrence in science. None the less, it has to be possible to put a number on the chances of science itself being systematically wrong on a conceptual level. Let's say we can, at most, reduce the chance of this down to 1 in 1,000,000 because we don't have a long enough baseline to estimate the ways in which such things can be incorrect.

(C) Some form of deistic religion, whether that's Pastafarianism, Christianity or Hinduism, is correct in that an intelligent individual supernatural creator of the universe does exist (and some humans have attained at least partial knowledge of this Truth)

Rather than estimate this directly, I'd like to say that the chances of it being correct IF (B) is correct, are about 50:50, since it is one of the most common supernatural beliefs.

(D) Some form of deistic Christianity is essentially correct (an intelligent individual supernatural creator of the universe exists and picked a Jewish carpenter on just one planet in just one galaxy as his supreme messenger of Love and Truth)

Either astronomy is wrong, the Drake Equation (predicting other sentient species) is wrong, OR we're talking a 1 in 10^22 coincidence that I happens to be a member of the chosen species (and chronologically rather near to the key event: Jesus' presence on Earth). We've already factors in the changes of science being drastically wrong in (B). The sentient species on other planets is harder because of the Fermi Paradox but, even given that, based purely upon how near we are to the event compared to how long the genus Homo has been around (remember, even Neanderthals laid flowers on graves), you have to add in at least a 1 in 100,000 improbability factor for going from step (C) to step (D).

(E) The specific type of Christianity believed by a majority of Catholics (eg there is a Hell, and you will burn it in for an eternity if not 'saved', Adam&Eve, Noah, etc are real events not allegories) is essentially correct in most details

Talking animals? Unicorns? Global flood genocide by a loving God? Kill men who sleep with men? Get real. Let's throw in a further 1 in 1,000,000,000 for this step, and that's generous.

(A) is by far the most significant factor. If I'm sane, then odds of (D) or (E) being correct are astronomically low. And while from my own perspective I can only narrow down the odds of my own insanity to 3 in 10,000 someone reading this post or meeting me in the street has the benefit of an external view on that. And it is important to note that, even if I am insane, that doesn't mean that (E) is necessarily correct, just that I can no longer rely upon the accuracy of my estimates as to how unlikely it is.

Note: It mangled my footnote symbols. Simply go in order of appearance if you wish to find them.

As a strong agnostic, I must say I find the numbers given here amusing. Simply put, there is very little evidence either way, and it is highly likely that it is IMPOSSIBLE to have decent evidence either way about an omnipotent god. I believe that there is an infinitesimal possibility that there is any significant way to tell which way you should lean.* Therefore, I find these probabilities meaningless (but not uninteresting).

Now, probabilities on whether or not Zeus exists are much more doable. Within reason, the less powerful the god, the easier it should be to get evidence. At the extreme low end, a sufficiently advanced alien could truly be Prometheus. We could prove he exists just by finding him.* Though that level of technology advantage would mean we might need to doubt the evidence anyway.

There are certain theologies that rule themselves out, but this is hardly a convincing argument against the remainder of them. It is true you should not unduly elevate religious beliefs out of the possibility that a particular one is true, but there is actual evidence in favor of them, such that people are not necessarily crazy to come to the exact opposite conclusion than the readers of this blog favor. The weighting of scant evidence can drastically skew the results, and the weighting is probably not rational on either side. Additionally, it is clear that Christianity as a whole is not logically contradictory, because they have direct postulates that contradict the postulates used to show they are logically contradictory, which means you cannot add those postulates in if you want a deductive proof.

*Honestly, I believe that the idea of having any sufficient evidence of whether or not an omnipotent being exists is a logical contradiction. There is no state of the universe which an omnipotent being would be unable to implement, and thus no state of the universe is evidence that an omnipotent being does not exist. (Technically, evidence for an omnipotent being could be gathered due to an extremely unlikely configuration of things, but similar evidence could be created by any sufficiently advanced being).

**That means he gave humans the advancement that was control over fire, and got punished over it by other sufficiently advanced beings. The punishment described in the legends could simply occur in VR, or in some grizzly fashion.

*Evidence against him would be much harder, but perhaps sufficiently advanced aliens have been recording all of humanity the entire time, and have proof we discovered fire independently.

**This may be a slightly self serving way of seeing things, but you can always include me in that statement if you think agnostics incorrectly weight the evidence.

*Their postulate: P Your Postulate: ~P The contradiction therefore only means one of the postulates is wrong, not that the conclusion is wrong. One such postulate would be that an omnibenevolent being would not allow such suffering if they could help it, but theirs is that they would. There is no proof either way; suffering might sometimes be beneficial. We cannot even eliminate certain forms of suffering as possibly being beneficial overall. This is usually where the free will arguments start being brought up, but chaos theory can explain it as well.

"Probability of Christianity" is way too vague, so I can't answer that. I'm 50% confident in my philosophical (meta-ethical, decision theoretic, cosmological) theism, 92.5% confident in my phenomenal-belief-in-decisions-relevant-transhumanly-intelligent-entities. My confidence in atheism is some weird mixture of the inverse of those two because those two variants of theism strike me as pretty disjunctive, and either would falsify atheism. These are impression-belief mixtures: not entirely Aumann-adjusted, but a little. My impressions are more confident of theism, but my betting odds are less confident.

I think pinning a probability number on this (outside of context of being forced to gamble or otherwise forced into making a decision dependent on probability of this) is simply innumerate. Suppose you attach a number to it. Then there's a situation where it is too high (Pascal's wager) and possible situations where it is too low (we discover that incredibly simple laws, simpler than laws of physics, lead to emergence of singleton intelligence that proceeds to simulate universes with life, and then you start rejecting Occam's razor because you were too atheist)

If we do not count the tiny possibility of simulated universe run by some "God", then I say my atheism is 99,99999% and Christian God atheism: 100%