Wednesday, 13 August 2014

Which gods are the most improbable?

I find the various claims for the existence of a god or gods to be unconvincing, at least so far. It's possible there's a convincing case which I've yet to hear of course.  

My position is that I don't know for certain, but I think the existence of a god or gods is very improbable, and I live my life on the assumption that they are not there.  But of course, it is possible that a god or gods exist. I am not claiming that there is no God and if anyone makes that claim, they have the burden of proof.

There are a whole range of gods being proposed by various religions.  Maybe some of these gods are more probable than others. But how to measure this subjective idea? 

I've devised a methodology which shows that in my opinion, the most improbable god hypotheses are Jehovah's Witness, Mormonism and Christianity (96% to 98% improbable) and the least improbable are Taoism, Jainism, Deism at about 71%. 

In other words, pantheism and deism explain the facts of reality much more convincingly than monotheism.  Interestingly, Unitarian Universalism which I consider to be a category of Christianity, scores almost as highly as pantheism. 

This is the complete table - the methodology is described underneath the table. But note! This is essentially subjective. All I'm providing is some structure to the thinking - not proof!




METHOD

Step 1: Provide a list of facts about reality which can be used as a basis of measurement. I've identified 15 facts (listed in column 1 of the table)

Step 2: identify the major religions and their attributes. I've used the table provided here as the definitive snapshot of each religion.

Step 3: Assess each religion against each fact with a score from 0 to 2 where 0 contradicts the facts, 1 neither contradicts or explains, and 2 provides some kind of explanation.

Step 4: Calculate the total for each religion, then subtract from 100 to get a percentage.


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