Why Would God Hide?

[Michael]

StealthySkeptic. You can try to insist on a neutral position but this has two major difficulties. 1) Who defines 'neutral'? (Bayesian thought side-steps this very significant problem), and 2) This requires you to abandon all previous knowledge and experience no matter how carefully gained. Few people are able to abandon all their previous learning before examining any new proposition, and many scientists would say that it would be foolish to do so. In practice I see people bringing their knowledge and experience to the table, and I think that's a sensible thing to do. One can then reflect on whether new evidence agrees with a high quality and trustworthy data set you already have, for example. Indeed to decide what is an extraordinary claim or not would seem to presuppose a particular starting position. Bayesian thought simply acknowledges that position transparently and works from any given starting point. I think that's neat and very realistic.

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Hey, Michael, just something I've been wondering, who is the guy in your avatar? I know almost nothing of devotional art and it's had me curious.

Oh, he's just a Benedictine scribe, copying books - somebody who today we would say worked in 'knowledge transfer' or 'information science' :-) The Benedictines were great collectors and preservers of knowledge through the 'dark ages', and they were happy to collect knowledge from all sorts of traditions which seems, to me, a much better way to pass the time than going on crusades against the 'enemy'. Benedictines, for the most part, just quietly built communities and libraries in a world of chaos and war around them.