Why Would God Hide?

[StealthySkeptic]

The people who make a claim, especially one that purports to have inside knowledge of the universe that others don't, are the ones who have to bring extraordinary evidence to bear to prove it.

Or, in science, we sometimes use a different framework, a Bayesian framework. In the Bayesian framework the strength of the evidence required depends on how strongly a 'prior' position is held. So those positions initially held most strongly require the stronger evidence to overturn them. The insight Bayes had over the 'probabilists' (who viewed all scientific experiments from a neutral view) was that even in science we do not approach new data from a naive perspective, but we bring 'prior' presuppositions to the table. In Bayesian thought we don't just use data to test hypothesis, we use current paradigms to test (and accept or reject) new data. We might choose to reject the new data as being likely to be untrustworthy if it conflicts with a confidently held presupposition (we saw that in the recent example of a team who thought they may have measured faster-than-light travel). Both methods are valid, and both are used in science. It disturbs some to find that each method may reach a different conclusion based on the same experiment (it certainly made me shake my head when I first came across it, being brought up in a traditional probabilistic scientific paradigm). The discipline is to decide which method to use before doing the experiment.

But I find Bayesian thought works well not only in science, but it seems to describe well what I see around me in lay discussions: those with strongly held views require greater evidence to overturn those views. What Bayesian thought also predicts is that positions can become self-sustaining: they may be held so strongly that they will almost always reject contrary evidence as untrustworthy. A sign of this is when someone is honest and says "nothing will convince me of ......x".

So I find Bayesian thought aligns with what I see around me, and it has a good scientific pedigree. Bayes predicts that you might not agree, not based on what I've just said, but based on your 'prior' position before you read what I just wrote :-)

Just another way of looking at things.

A scientific position that has been previously held is very, very different from a personal presupposition. True, it can make sense that both would require a lot of evidence to the contrary to overturn them, but it seems like you're blending the two a bit unnecessarily since scientists do in fact go into experiments neutrally- they have an hypothesis, but are not attached to it as say, a Republican might be attached to a party position, and so are more likely to have their conclusions reflect the evidence.

But anyway, in terms of what you're saying, it actually seems to me that you are describing a theist's more than an atheist's position- that is to say that a theist generally comes in believing in God since childhood and only the most extraordinary evidence can overturn that, which they often reject. For most of us, including myself, we came out of theism, and now (except for maybe some diehards) only take the position (really just a lack of belief, so you can't really say it's a "position" but whatever) that it's on the theists who make the claim to present the evidence. We often reject the evidence that they do present, not out of some stubborn holding on to a position, but because the evidence is usually inadequate to someone who already a priori accepted that the evidence- the Bible, the teaching of the Catholic Church- is good.