doubtingmarcus:

Don’t call it a comeback, call it a comprehensive understanding of the implications of Bayes’ theorem which have added to my seemingly endless list of reasons people should reject the Biblical god. Okay, the name still needs some work but it has been some time since I last explicitly addressed arguments for god. I was sparked out of this pseudo-retirement by the Tom Campbell-Ricketts post on the Bayesian reasoning underlying Occam’s razor which I tried to simplify somewhat yesterday.

The case made by Campbell-Ricketts’ is complex but can be summarized as the observation that increasing the number of free parameters in a theory decreases the prior probability it is correct. Given that the prior probability of each of these parameters is less than 1 (that is less than 100%), then those theories which have models with an infinite amount of parameters, like unfalsifiable claims, combine to have a prior probability of 0 (remember you would be multiplying the prior probabilities of each parameter together, not adding them). And naturally if the prior probability of a theory is 0, the posterior probability, which is the degree of personally warranted belief after seeing the evidence, would also be 0. This clearly eliminates theories which can fit all possible evidence but Campbell-Ricketts was explicitly making the case this also applies to theories of omnipotent beings. He said of omnipotent beings:

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