"prior beliefs"... there's a nice faulty wording right there!
prior - meaning "before". Before you can tell anything, you assume a certain set of conditions.
Where do such conditions come from? Genetics and Childhood.
Genetics build up your body and your senses, how you interact with the world, how you perceive it, how you interpret direct sensory stimulation.
Childhood fine tunes what genetics began and, in the case of humans, at least, also adds a new layer of learning from your elders.
You learn new ways to interpret the sensory input and learn how to interpret what you have no way to sense through your senses... you learn abstract concepts, such as logic or friendship... and gods.
The main prior, which exists at the time of birth (for the sake of argument), is solely naturalistic.
The supernatural prior will come later on, through teachings... and, when someone attempts to find how anyone ever came across any information about such gods, one finds ancient tales, passed on orally... that is... unreliably. Also, many such stories show clear signs of either faulty interpretation of natural phenomena, or straight out lies/cons, lending further traction to the notion that these teachings are unreliable, to say the least.
That's not to say that they didn't serve their purpose, once, in particular settings. Nowadays, there are places where such teachings may still be required, but on the so-called western world they are mostly useless.... nice for passing the time, but overall they have no applicability as life is regulated by the civil law system, instead of the religious law system.
So, the natural prior appears by default. The supernatural prior appears through untrustworthy means.
If I desire to be intellectually honest, I should then attribute more weight to the natural prior. Actually, the weight of the supernatural prior should be very close to zero and the natural prior close to one.
If there is anyone out there capable of convincing me (or anyone around here) that the supernatural prior should be given more credence than the natural prior, then these are the obstacles that person must overcome: faulty transmission of information regarding the deity, faulty origin of such information. No excuses... no apologetics... no god-of-the-gaps... just reliable origin of any information regarding the god of choice and trustworthy method of transmission of this information.
I wish you the best of luck with that endeavor!
prior - meaning "before". Before you can tell anything, you assume a certain set of conditions.
Where do such conditions come from? Genetics and Childhood.
Genetics build up your body and your senses, how you interact with the world, how you perceive it, how you interpret direct sensory stimulation.
Childhood fine tunes what genetics began and, in the case of humans, at least, also adds a new layer of learning from your elders.
You learn new ways to interpret the sensory input and learn how to interpret what you have no way to sense through your senses... you learn abstract concepts, such as logic or friendship... and gods.
The main prior, which exists at the time of birth (for the sake of argument), is solely naturalistic.
The supernatural prior will come later on, through teachings... and, when someone attempts to find how anyone ever came across any information about such gods, one finds ancient tales, passed on orally... that is... unreliably. Also, many such stories show clear signs of either faulty interpretation of natural phenomena, or straight out lies/cons, lending further traction to the notion that these teachings are unreliable, to say the least.
That's not to say that they didn't serve their purpose, once, in particular settings. Nowadays, there are places where such teachings may still be required, but on the so-called western world they are mostly useless.... nice for passing the time, but overall they have no applicability as life is regulated by the civil law system, instead of the religious law system.
So, the natural prior appears by default. The supernatural prior appears through untrustworthy means.
If I desire to be intellectually honest, I should then attribute more weight to the natural prior. Actually, the weight of the supernatural prior should be very close to zero and the natural prior close to one.
If there is anyone out there capable of convincing me (or anyone around here) that the supernatural prior should be given more credence than the natural prior, then these are the obstacles that person must overcome: faulty transmission of information regarding the deity, faulty origin of such information. No excuses... no apologetics... no god-of-the-gaps... just reliable origin of any information regarding the god of choice and trustworthy method of transmission of this information.
I wish you the best of luck with that endeavor!
