Reply #180: Religious beliefs and favorite desserts are hardly similar choices. [View All]

[Silent3]

It's also a false equivalence to say that since humans are limited, and therefore can't help having limits of knowledge and understanding, that somehow anything someone decides to believe to fill in the gaps of our ignorance is equally valid or invalid.

Suppose you're looking at a large jar of jelly beans, wondering how many jelly beans are in the jar. Here are three different kinds of responses:

(1) 4328.
(2) Around 5000.
(3) 6,594,700,226,373,058,992,163.
(4) I have no idea.
(5) I like the green ones best.

These are not equivalent or equally valid responses to ignorance.

Choice (1), while possibly being correct, is ridiculously specific and far more likely to be wrong than right. It still might make sense to toss out a guess like this if there's a prize for guessing right and no penalty for guessing wrong, but staunch certainty about the rightness of this response would be unwarranted. Spending the expected prize money (if there was indeed a monetary prize) before a winner was declared would be foolish.

Choice (2) has a better chance of being correct (although when this sort of thing is a contest, not "correct enough" to win). This choice acknowledges the difficulty of obtaining a precise answer, and could at least possibly have arisen through some reasonable technique of approximation.

Choice (3) is simply flat out wrong. This entire history of humanity has not produced that many jelly beans.

Choice (4) is neither correct nor incorrect in regard to the number of jelly beans, and therefore cannot be an error regarding that issue. It it very likely a true statement, however, about the state of mind of the person providing that response. Unless there's an appealing prize being offered for making a correct guess, there's little or no good reason to commit to or even guess at an answer.

Choice (5), while perhaps seeming a quirky non-sequitur, is very much like choice (4). It doesn't answer (possible evades/avoids answering) the issue of the number of jelly beans, but it does provide information about the responder for which the responder is likely fully qualified to provide accurate information.

I should hope the parallels to religious/spiritual beliefs, and lack of such beliefs, are clear.