"Evidence" You Say?

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I once knew this fella from work who seemed to value rational thought. He also believed in God. So I thought that if I asked him a simple question regarding the soundness of his belief, he wouldn’t lash out on me. I asked him, “What’s the strongest evidence for God’s existence?”, and he suddenly felt a little uneasy and quickly retaliated with “Too many galaxies.” Which I interpreted as: the universe is too large and impressive to have arisen any other way than by God. 10^80 atoms manifesting themselves as billions of galaxies that are billions of light years apart are a sure sign of an omnipotent being.

Really? That’s the best “evidence” this guy had? What he offered me was not even bad evidence; it was counterevidence. If the universe consisted of less galaxies he would’ve been more iffy about his belief? What if it was just the Milky Way? What if there was no such thing as a galaxy, but only our solar system?

If our entire universe was just our solar system, then I’d seriously consider two possibilities, one of which is God. Reason being, of course, is that in a large universe the probability of life arising and evolving on one of the quintillions of planets is not that low. Whereas in the aforementioned tiny universe, it would be too unlikely for it to even organize into our solar system, and life arising would be at an infinitesimal probability.

So, if our universe were small, that would be good evidence for a god. But I’d still probably adopt the other possibility: that we’re living in a simulation.

So the lesson to draw from this is that whatever you think constitutes evidence for a belief you might have, it could very well turn out to be counterevidence. I don’t actually want this to be another debate about the soundness of God; I only wrote this post to illustrate a real-life great example of evidence misuse. It just so happened to fall into that domain. Which is not surprising.

It doesn't seem like most people are used to having their beliefs examined or frier's club roasted the way they are in here. Give them a little time with that and I think they'd do better.

@MrDiamondMind

Actually, according to most theories about the universe; smaller universes than ours are far more likely than our own. Roger Penrose of Oxford University has calculated that the odds of our universe’s low entropy condition obtaining by chance alone are on the order of 1:10^10(123), an inconceivable number. If our universe were but one member of a multiverse of randomly ordered worlds, then it is vastly more probable that we should be observing a much smaller universe. For example, the odds of our solar system’s being formed instantly by the random collision of particles is about 1:10^10(60), a vast number, but inconceivably smaller than 10^10(123). (Penrose calls it “utter chicken feed” by comparison [The Road to Reality (Knopf, 2005), pg, 762-5]).