> Controlling climate via human actions requires far more than simply postulating that Doppler radar works. Obviously I'm not saying that it doesn't (well it w

> Controlling climate via human actions requires far more than simply postulating that Doppler radar works. Obviously I'm not saying that it doesn't (well it was obvious to me...). It's a stand-in for everything you'd use. The point is, it's beliefs that stuff you see working will continue working, be it radar or temperature gauges, the laws of physics, or mathematical simplifications or approximations. There is presumably some reason why some seemingly totally made up constants aren't actually 10 times the chosen values, or why it doesn't matter, or how likely that's the case. The difference between this and beliefs about God is that if you don't have reasons why you think the CO2 reading are wrong or why physics will change or why certain mathematical simplifications will stop working, you have to give reasons, you're, epistemologically speaking, discarding empiricism from your toolbox. You can't simply go "Laa dee daa I'm picking different priors than you." There has to be some reason (though it might be that they're going laa dee daa). > Admitting the possibility that god (or god-like beings) exists does not require throwing away belief in empirical reality. That's what I said. The difference is that unlike science and measurements of reality, there's no endless stream of evidence to beat your initial priors out of you. Unless you have 100% faith that past events can't be used to predict future outcomes, you'll get dragged over to the empiricist side. But you could have 90% faith in Christianity and maybe that'll only get beaten down to 40%, because there's just no evidence. (Not to mention the more practical way to get people to change their beliefs, no visible consequences for being wrong, either.) > it takes a ridiculously tiny amount of evidence or an infinitesimally different prior to put you back into Pascal's wager territory. Sure. But the same goes for putting you into anti-Christianity territory. The expected displacement a tiny amount of evidence would push you is 0 (if we regard the continued absence of new evidence to be evidence itself (e: and assuming potential "big" evidence is neglible, of course)). The whole argument against Pascal's wager is that it's about what your priors are. And yeah, I don't know what TheEzEzz's 50/50 symmetry is all about.