Comment by cwillu
11 hours ago
> There is always the chance that the "Most powerful" is just not good enough for the task at hand.
And that chance is not 100%, and so any given strength of telescope is in fact excluding some of the hypothesis space. That is the definition of evidence.
Every time I point a telescope that would be able to detect a star of a given brightness and distance somewhere, and it fails to see a star, that limits the remaining space for people who believe in stars to make claims about what stars can be, until they're finally at the point where they can only make the most esoteric claims about “stars” that have no observable effects on the world, at which there's no point even including “stars” in your physics model.
I'm at that point with respect to god: every concrete claim has either been disproven, or isn't actually a claim about the observable world, at which point I shrug and say that this thing you insist on defining has no impact on anything.
> excluding some of the hypothesis space. That is the definition of evidence.
Not really, because in this case the "hypothesis space" is infinite, so your experiment exhausting some finite amount of space is not adding anything to the evidence.
So the point is when this "hypothesis space" is infinite or extremely large, if the best experiments that we can do right now can only explore a tiny fraction of that, then it is ABSURD to claim evidence of absence just because "We put our gold standard test and still didn't find anything".
>at which point I shrug and say that this thing you insist on defining has no impact on anything.
It is possible that this "thing" only interact with our world via events that we observe as truly random. Then you wouldn't go ahead and say random events have no impact on anything, will you?
You've retreated that we're no longer in the realm of “consciousness is supernatural”, and I rest my case. Retreating to an infinite hypothesis space that I can never fully exclude only helps you if there is no mundane explanation, otherwise I reject it for the same reason I can reject the boltzman-brain hypothesis. “But there's still a chance!” is a line from a comedy, not statistics.
That was about the star example, not about the “consciousness is supernatural” and the rest about the evidence for god which you bought up. You seemed to have confused between multiple threads of reasoning. May be, try to stick to one at a time?