On Celestial Teapots and FSMs

Aaarggh! Gotta be Hansonian here - look people believe this weird costly religious stuff to show they are good tribe members who want to be nice and want you to be nice too. Those other ugly nasty Teapot monkeys over there have never been blessed by His Noodly Appendage! Watch how I libate truffle sauce in my devotion to The All-Seeing Meatball Eyes. Trust me, be my allies, have my kids, and I promise to throw stones at those out-group infidel primates with polluted foreign genes.

Another Ben, your example about the geocentric model actually works the other way.

The vast majority of people haven't examined the skies very closely. They believe the model is false because they've heard from a whole bunch of people that it's been disproven by the methods of science, which they distrust.

*which they trust.

Like most Internet fallacies, the "Argumentum ad populum" isn't a fallacy if it is interpreted in a Bayesian way, rather than in an Aristotlean way. The fact is that all rationally-ignorant people rationally rely on the fact that most people believe X as evidence for X. If you didn't do this, you would starve to death. So Drake's argument, if not glib, is wrong.

I touch on the socio-epistemological issue in both the post update and this comment.

You can rationally appeal to popularity if you know that the populace in question is rational, because then you know their beliefs are rationally-founded. But actually, we know that actual human beings aren't Bayesian updaters, which means that we can't validly appeal to popularity.

The fact that human beings aren't Bayesian updaters (or at least not ideal Bayesian updaters) does not imply that Bayesian updaters would ignore what human beings think. Most of what human beings think is true most of the time, and if all the ideal Bayesian updater knew about p is that most people thought it was true, then she would update in a positive direction.

If, instead, you thought the opinions of everyone around you were of zero or negative significance, then you wouldn't be a smart non-conformist: you'd be someone who could never find the bathroom or lunch.

Doesn't that rely upon not examining the evidence for the existence of the supernatural? It is one thing to say that everyone believes that X causes Y or simply X, but upon examination, if one does not find X, then it is not rational to believe it anymore provided one has robust evidence for it. The geocentric model of the universe seems plausible if one does not examine the skies very closely, but just because people once believed it does not make it true.

You are right that just because everyone believes something doesn't make it true. But that's the way to bet.

On the contrary, that's what to bet against. That's how you get good odds!

Only in the absence of all other data.

"The story of our civilization, in particular, is a story in which an extremely large circle of non-insane human beings have perceived themselves to be experiencing an interaction with a being who seems recognizable as the Judeo-Christian God (here I do feel comfortable using the term), rather than merely being taught about Him in Sunday School. I am unaware of anything similar holding true for orbiting pots or flying noodle beasts. And without the persistence of this perceived interaction (and beneath it, the intuitive belief in some kind of God), it's difficult to imagine religious belief playing anything like the role it does in human affairs, no matter how many ancient scriptures there were propping the whole thing up."

Shorter: The fact that vast numbers of people believe in something makes it true.

Shorter: a less adolescent, less condascending, less facile and just as persuasive argument against the existence of the Christian god is the comparison with e.g. Zeus.

At no point does in his post does Douthat claim a belief in God to be true. The argument he's making is an agnostic one.

It certainly isn't much of an argument though. An argument doesn't cease to be ridiculous solely because some people believe it.

There are a vast number of arguments for and against the existence of god. (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Existence_of_god#A...) I would think the ridiculousness of any or all of them surely would be related to the number of people who accept the conclusion.

I'm not saying I'm persuaded, nor is Douthat saying I should be; but I do think committed atheists ought to take the question a little more seriously, which I think is the only point of Douthat's post.

Argumentum ad populum!

You may laugh, but almost everyone relies on this kind of reasoning. In fact, our democratic political institutions depend on this kind of reasoning for their legitimacy.

Hence their illegitimacy.