Pope Francis, Bayes, & the Probability of God's Exisence

[Lawrence Crocker]

Does the election of Pope Francis require the liberal atheist to revise upward her (very low) estimate of the probability of God's existing? Does it require the conservative Catholic to revise his downward? Yes. Assuming that she thinks that if there were a Holy Spirit to intervene that would have increased the chances of Francis's election, that he thinks the opposite, that both thought the election of Francis antecedently unlikely, and that neither was absolutely certain on the existence question before the election, then Bayesian probabilities will force his rational credence down, and hers up.

The details are in LawrenceCrocker.blogspot.com, as is a discussion of why no one should have a Bayesian probability of 1 or 0 and why both our atheist and theist may nonetheless deny that their rational credence levels have changed at all.