[willie24]

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essentially, everyone below the level of "complete logic" has a 50-50 chance. if there is a chance your logic is complete, then yes, you have a better than 50-50 shot. (if your logic is definitely complete, then you have a 100% shot) everyone who is definitely below that plateau is 50-50, regardless of how much more logical they are than the people below them.

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So given an infinite number of possible religons then anyone who believes there's is right has a 50:50 chance of being correct.

Surely that cannot be what you're saying

chez

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the question must be a yes or no question.
as thinkers' logical ability increases, there must be shifting back and forth and back again between the answers yes and no.

"is my religion correct?" doesnt really work - because its hard to imagine any intelligent logical debate about the subject - at least any that goes beyond 2 levels. (back and forth and back again)

but let's try. the question is : is everything taught in the Catholic church 100% correct? my dog says no, because he's never heard of church. my mom says yes, because God is the only way she can explain her own existence, and her parents told her that Catholicism is right. my lawyer says no, because he can point out inconsistencies in Catholic teachings. for simplicity's sake - lets assume that we, as outside observers, can agree that the lawyer has reached the highest known level of logic on the subject- by that i mean: no one can think of reasonable a way to counter the lawyer's argument with a superior argument which says "yes."

the lawyer, having reached the highest known level of logic, might be right - therefor his answer might be right for the right reason (X). even if this is not true, his answer also might be right for the wrong reason. (50% because there are 2 possible answers and he picked one. ill try to better explain why its exactly 50% later) his chance of being right is (X+.5)/1.

now, take my mom. since we know that her logic is flawed, we know that she is never right for the right reason. because we know that the lawyer is better than 50% to be right, and because we know that my mom has the opposite answer, we know that she must be worse than 50%...but if we didn't know her answer relative to the highest level answer, we would have to assume she was 50%.

for example: my dog and my mom are both logically inferior to the lawyer. We will call them Group I, and the lawyer Group S.

what is the chance that a random member of group I has the right answer?

i think this argument about 50% is a matter of communication about what the % actually refers to, rather than actual disagreement.