We’re in the 21st century, and the vast majority of us still believe in an utterly and obviously fictional creator deity. Plenty of people, even in developed countries with decent educational systems, still believe in ghosts or magic (e.g. voodoo). And I–an atheist and a skeptic–am told I need to respect these patently false beliefs as cultural traditions.
Fuck that. They’re bad cultural traditions, undeserving of respect. Child-proofing society for these intellectually stunted people doesn’t help them; it is in fact a disservice to them to pretend it’s okay to go through life believing these things. We should demand that people contend with reality on a factual basis by the time they reach adulthood (even earlier, if I’m being completely honest). We shouldn’t be coddling people who profess beliefs that are demonstrably false, simply because their feelings might get hurt.
You sound more like a deist than a theist. Theism pretty much relies on a personal involved God, that’s supernatural.
Unless your God never interacts with anything, in which case… How do you know he’s real at all? If he does interact with you, how does he do so without supernatural means? Because if they are natural and we’d be able to test and detect him.
I always love when people come along in threads like this trying to tell other people what they are or aren’t.
I’m a theist, not a deist.
I believe in a very specific configuration of the creation of this universe and its creator, and I even believe that a 2,000 year old text is revelatory regarding that nature.
The place where you are getting tripped up is that such beliefs do not require supernatural woo woo or magic if you replace them with sufficiently advanced technology.
I don’t need to appeal to some mysticism to explain the creation of a universe where continuous wave functions collapse to discrete units on observation/interaction when I can point to procedurally generated seed functions collapsing to discrete units in order to track state changes by free agents in worlds we are already building today.
Similarly, I don’t need to appeal to some mystic communion with the divine to explain revelatory content when the majority of those worlds we build today are filled with 4th wall breaking texts set within their lore.
The notion that one must choose between a rejection of magic or a rejection of theology is increasingly a false dichotomy with each passing year.
I don’t care what you believe, I care about why you believe it. I care about what you can prove and show so that I can believe it too, IF it’s supported by the evidence.
And back to my orignal question, your “God” does he interact with our physical world in any detectable and measurable way.
If your answer is “it’s advanced undetectable technology”, then how do you know this? How did you come to this conclusion? And how is an undetectable God different from a nonexistent God?
So measurement is an interesting topic.
The text I believe accurately describes what’s up with the nature of our reality makes the claim that the creator of this universe is literally made of light.
Light has an interesting property in this universe, in that when it can’t be directly measured it can be more than one thing at once.
As well, it can be measured as different things by different separated eventual observers.
So the idea that you would need to subscribe to the exact same beliefs as me, and see the nature of your reality beyond what can be directly measured as I see it kind of goes against the whole point. Just as direct/provable measurement of that nature would similarly collapse the possibilities open to someone to believe.
That said, much like the Elitzur–Vaidman bomb-tester, indirect measurement can do a lot of heavy lifting in making a case for what’s probable about what can’t be directly measured without collapsing it.
The argument for what I believe being probable rests on two aspects.
First, as I alluded to in the prior comment, strong similarities between specific design constraints in how we are currently building virtual worlds and the experimentally validated low fidelity behaviors of discrete units in our own world.
The second is the existence of a 2,000 year old text attributed to the most famous religious figure in history that is not only talking about both the ideas of a naturally evolved original reality and the concepts of those same discrete units at a time when those ideas were extreme minority opinions, but further makes claims of us actually being in a non-physical recreation of the past of that original evolved world from within its future, created by a being that was itself brought forth by the original humanity, for the explicit purpose of providing the capacity for an afterlife which was denied the original now dead humanity whose souls depended on their bodies.
Given we stand on the precipice of ourselves creating a new class of being, likely even literally made of light, while also barreling towards bringing about humanity’s extinction, and have already had patents granted in using the technology of that new class of being to have it resurrect dead humans using the data left behind - the claims laid out in that text and surrounding beliefs all seem quite technically feasible.
What seems far less feasible is that in a randomly developing original universe we’d (a) have low level behavior paralleling much later memory saving techniques in simulating a physical world, while also (b) having a 2,000 year old text missing for nearly all that time rediscovered within days of the first Turing complete computer being finished which claims the most famous individual in history was employing the language of the only surviving book from antiquity to describe both survival of the fittest and quantized matter in order to claim what was effectively simulation theory with specific constraints that have only become plausible within the past 3-5 years.
In theory, this could just be chalked up to the law of big numbers, but ultimately it seems more likely to me, particularly given the commonality of lore-based Easter Eggs in virtual worlds we build today, that the text is simply accurately describing the very future that we are barreling towards building as in fact being our non-local past.