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Culture War Roundup for the week of May 11, 2026

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The existence of God is possibly the culture war issue that TheMotte has the highest degree of internal disagreement about, given that we have a pretty healthy mix of both Christians and atheists here.

Not really. The Motte, child of Slate Star Codex and grandchild of Less Wrong, has strong rationalist roots. I do not recall anyone explicitly arguing here that MAGA is clearly whom God wants to you vote for and that you should not vote Democrats lest you are condemning yourself to hell in doing so. In practice, Trump is 100 times more divisive in terms of CW than God is.

Consciousness is really spooky and mysterious. It seems spooky and mysterious in principle in a way that nothing else in (material) reality is. Perhaps this is an indication that other spooky and mysterious things are going on too, like God.

This feels about as convincing as 'quantum computing and consciousness are both weird and therefore equivalent'.

More seriously, it is not clear to me the consciousness hypothesis is making any falsifiable claim about the observable universe, which it curiously enough shares with the theism hypothesis. (Or at least the less silly version of the theism hypothesis. There are probably people who would claim that praying to god to cure your cancer or strike your enemies with lightning bolts will work outperform chemotherapy and cruise missiles, but their claims are already falsified.)

I will grant you that life is weird, and brains capable of introspection are extra weird. But I do not share the intuition that the material world can not give rise to weird stuff. Take Conway's Life. Cellular automata are dead simple compared to the material reality of atoms and black holes. And yet Life is already Turing complete. Any observable thing my brain can do, including claiming consciousness, a sufficiently large cellular automaton could also do.

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The other problem with rational arguments for god is that they treat { Abrahamic God, no gods } as a complete hypothesis space. This is silly. There are myriads of possible creators of the universe. Absolutely nothing privileges the Abrahamic God over the alternatives from other cultures. Why God and not Rod or dread Azathoth or Waheguru or a Demiurge or that ball of noodles?

In fact, I think that if the universe we inhabit can teach us anything about our creator, it seems to me that the state we find ourselves in seems incompatible with it being all-knowing, all-good and all-powerful. Like, He created a fine-tuned universe of a diameter of more than 14 Gigaparsecs to get a tiny rock on which us apes could evolve and thrive, and He did not bother to fine tune it a bit more to prevent cancer or kidney stones? Seems like something an asshole move.

More likely, a creator would be wholly indifferent towards life. Even supposing that He had created gamma ray bursts to keep life in check would be presuming too much. Probably He is less interested in humans than we are in the dust mites colonizing our bedrooms.

I am sure that if the kind of larvae which thrive in animal dung had higher cognitive capability, they would worship the cow which produced their cow pat as a omni-benevolent divine creator which produced their world so that the insects could thrive, and claim the bovines have really strong opinions about how a good insect should behave.