Anonymous asked: Do you identify yourself as a "typical" agnostic atheist - a person who doesn't believe in anything supernatural (including any kind of deity) and claims that we can't (dis)prove the existence of anything supernatural? I'd love to read more about your exact line of reasoning in this matter.
Not really. I don’t believe in anything supernatural. I think “we can’t disprove it” is somewhere between “technically true” and “meaningless”. In a Bayesian framework, no claim (other than purely logical ones) can ever reach 100% proof, but we can get arbitrarily close with more evidence. I don’t think we can ever be literally 100% sure there’s no God, but at that level the same is true of Bigfoot.
(I think there’s probably more chance of God existing than Bigfoot existing, but I don’t think the philosophy and math we would use to think about the two problems is different)
I think there’s probably more chance of God existing than Bigfoot existing
Seriously? A large undiscovered North American primate would be a stretch sure but it’s consistent with known physics and biology
At this level of extremely low probability, being consistant with known physics and biology might actually be a point against, because it restricts the number of very unlikely things which if true might let it be true*? The majoritu of pissibility-space for bigfoot being real is *not* taken up by “a lot like a gorilla adapted to cold climates”- we’d probably need new biological traits or unknown laws of ecology.
*plus of course the chance of known physics being incomplete is in the “nearly 1” range, although any specific thing not consistant with it is unlikely.
“pissibility-space for bigfoot” is one of the greatest typos I’ve ever seen