Monday, 3 December 2012

An overly simplified view of religion

Before I begin, just a note that its a ridiculously over simplified thinking and quite possibly very off the mark as well. Nonetheless, should be interesting to think through.

Claim 1: God does not exist.
Claim 2: A particular religion X is correct.

Lets assume that there is absolutely no reason to believe in or deny the existence of God. And that the arguments for and against the existence of God are equally strong. This leads to:

Assumption 1: There is a 50% chance that God exist. (Equivalently there is a 50% chance that God does not exist).

Hence Claim 1 has a 50% chance of being right.

Now let's assume that there are only 10 different religions that exist at the moment. And let's further assume that there is no solid reason (other than just "faith") to be in one of them but not the other. This leads to:

Assumption 2: Each religion has an equal probability of being true. 

This means that a particular religion (religion X)  has the following probability of being true: 0.5 * 0.1 = 0.05 = 5%.

This translates into Claim 2 having only a 5% chance of being right.

This means that person with Claim 1 is ten times more likely to be true than person with Claim 2! Ten times is a significant ratio.

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