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I've been agnostic, rather than atheist, for most of my life. My argument was that life is too complex, especially with how organs work, for there not to be someone planning it. I guess the best word for my beliefs would be deist, but I only learned the term recently.
Anyway, I just read an essay by Yudkowsky and I'm now convinced there is almost certainly no God. This depresses me because I want there to be a God.. which is to say, an unmoved mover at the beginning of time that is sentient. The idea that something at the beginning of time was unaffected by the rules of cause and effect is still plausible to me, but is there any reason left to assume it was sapient? I'd appreciate help with this, because I want to convince myself there may be a God.
Do you really want the unmoved mover at the beginning of time? Are you fine with it existing outside of time? Is it ok if it's galaxy brained beyond human comprehension?
I'm agnostic myself, but I put enough stock in the Mathematical Universe Hypothesis. Would you settle for every possible mind of every size and shape that does not logically contradict loving you- doing so from somewhere in the multiverse and the multiverse containing a mathematically complete set of such things all loving one another?
The unmoved mover at the beginning of time is difficult for us to comprehend conceptually, but (a) our comprehension of the primordial laws of the universe is limited, so all we’re saying is “that doesn’t seem legit” and (b) it certainly doesn’t seem less realistic conceptually than an all-loving, all-knowing God who cares personally about the life of every human, who has a strong personality and who sent himself down to earth to pass down some arbitrary rules for human society at his leisure a couple of thousand years ago.
We can really delineate several categories of claim.
(1) There is ‘something’ that is ‘out there’. Trivially true, it’s very unlikely we’re the most intelligent or advanced beings in the entire universe, sufficiently advanced science is indistinguishable from magic, there are probably lifeforms with a much deeper understanding of the underlying laws of reality than ourselves, yadda yadda.
(2) The simulation hypothesis is plausible; our current primitive computing after a century of development is already capable of extraordinary things, after another thousand or million years of development simulating an entire universe seems completely feasible.
(3) The Abrahamic (or equivalent) omni-x God is real. This is the most radical claim, since even the simulation hypothesis involves, somewhere down the chain, the organic emergence of the intelligence that created the simulation. Knowing everything that has ever happened or will happen, in any multiverse/form of reality, forever, existing outside of time, loving everyone and yet still caring deeply about humans and a specific little planet called earth where he really cares tremendously about whether I eat lobster, this is less believable, aesthetically at least.
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I mean, sure, it can exist outside time. But I thought the multiverse was just a trope in fiction, like time travel.
Science now posits that our space-time continuum is one of many “branes” floating in a pseudospace, and occasionally bumping into each other causing Big Bangs within them.
There are more things in heaven and Earth, Horatio, / Than are dreamt of in your philosophy. - Shakespeare
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