Could (a) god(s) exist? Possibly, it’s hard to rule out the supernatural in natural terms since it’s SUPERnatural
Could the universe be a simulation? Possible too, but also on of those things that’s almost impossible to prove.
At the same time, it could be that your e a Boltzmann brain, and that literally nothing existed before and that your brain just kinda formed together spontaneously with all your memories.
All those are possible options that are over 99% likely to be false, but their cooouuullldd be true.
Point is not to rearrange your life on the off changlce that one of those are true. Especially religion, since religions tend to be “believe our particular god(s) or you go to hell for eternity” followed closely by “if you don’t believe our particular god(s) we will help you go to hell right now”. Nearly all human conflicts in Earth’s history were either based on religion or used religion as a tool to whip up the masses to go kill the others.
There are also hundreds of Gods and over 3000 different religious figures out there and they’re all pretty much exclusive or, they all claim to be the right one and the rest is wrong. Bold claim to make when it’s all based off goat herders texts that were first abused for a completely different god (hello, Christianity!) and constantly conflicts with each other.
Simulation theory and Boltzman brain ideas are fun to entertain and talk and think about, but they’ve never been used to control who can love and have sex with who, they’ve never been a used whereas religion just IS abuse and control in every way possible.
Agree with most of what you said except the “over 99% likely to be false”.
Like you mentioned it’s not possible to prove either way so it isn’t meaningful to describe it as likely or unlikely. We have no way of knowing (at least currently) so the likelihood is simply undefined
I understand your point and I feel like maybe I’m sounding a little argumentative. Sorry let me try to be more clear.
I understand your argument is that genetic evidence disproves existing religious beliefs that people have but that’s a different argument to the point I was making.
Even if all global religions are incorrect, that doesn’t mean that a god or gods couldn’t hypothetically exist and my point is that there is no demonstrative proof of that either way.
If you check the original comment again, the question was about whether “a god(s) exist” and up until they mentioned the 99% that I was disputing, religion didn’t even come into it.
You could disprove every creationist claim, every anti-evolution argument, and you’d be right, but you can’t settle the question of “whether a supernatural being exists” because there simply isn’t a way to do that within the natural realm that we know of.
It isn’t just about God either. The simulation and Boltzmann brain hypotheses are similarly immeasurable
They aren’t immeasurable. The reason you think I’m making a different argument to your point is that you’re asking for every negative proof. This is never going to provide an answer, as it would be a competition to dispel the imagination.
Hypotheses and positive proofs are slowly answering the question of why we’re here. We know that evolution is likely, DNA is irrefutable evidence. We know that it’s likely our known universe began with a singularity because of the background microwave radiation accelerating away from a point of origin. We know the field and corresponding particle that gave matter its properties from the particle acceleration tests by CERN.
It becomes a much different question when one is not only seeking answers that fit their beliefs.
You say it’s not immeasurable but then all of the things you go on to describe are within the known universe, we can’t possibly know or measure what’s outside of it, because it is not known by definition.
I’m not asking for negative proofs in fact I haven’t asked for proof of anything, I’m not sure where you got that from. I’ve simply stated that we can’t draw statistics about things for which we have no evidence - which you now seem to be agreeing with.
I said you were making a different argument because you originally talked about existing religions which isn’t what my comment or the original comment was about, I stand by that - nothing of what you had said was relevant to my response.
You can’t possibly know that it’s over 99% unlikely that the universe isn’t a simulation or that it wasn’t created by some entity since we don’t yet have evidence pertaining to any hypothesis for how it was created. The statistic was pulled out of the air and has no scientific basis.
Do I think the universe is a giant Boltzmann brain or was created by an omniscient God? No, I don’t, but it’s still pointless to pretend it’s something we can have any certainty about.
Not to be rude but this conversation isn’t going anywhere, whether you don’t understand or just don’t agree, whatever I guess…
I think you’re forgetting that the supernatural is but another theory, put forth by humans, to explain our existence. It doesn’t earn bonus points for being unobservable. I’ve seen 0 evidence supporting it, contrary to how many questions particle physics has solved.
I’ve simply stated that we can’t draw statistics about things for which we have no evidence - which you now seem to be agreeing with.
I’ve posited quite the opposite of this. If there are two opposing theories, with one substantiated and one not, then the substantiated one is more likely. For example: you wouldn’t say that a chicken’s offspring being implanted in an egg by cosmic rays is just as likely as the egg being fertilized before it was laid because the latter is substantiated while the former has yet to have any observable truth.
I’d say 99% is a completely fair probability as the ratio of something to nothing approaches infinity.
we don’t yet have evidence pertaining to any hypothesis for how it was created
I just gave you some? I don’t know about you, but humans being able to replicate the exact particle that originated matter is a profound bit of evidence towards the universe not being a product of some higher power to me.
Go learn where the simulation universe and timless holographic universe came from before saying a theory is evidence backed. Both have leap of faith instead direct proven evidence or tested results. Both exist because they’re possible theories that cannot be proven true nor false, and most impoartantly they are not in the same scientific level or field to be compared in first place, and also they both can exist without even contradicting each other. Religon does not only try to explain the arrow of time and current universe like simulation theory tries to do and that’s one reason of many why they are incomparable. First, religon answers why the laws of existences exist which has no matching theory in theoritical physics except for because laws exist otherwise there wouldn’t be ones that create conciousness aka it is what it is otherwise it wouldn’t. Secondly, most of the religon ones hold defined philosophical consequences and requirements for your existance while the simulation one comes with no philosophy, provides you with nothing and asks nothing from you because it’s just theoratical physics that answers nothing more and still needs explanation.
I guess I wasn’t clear enough. Both of those particular theories of the origin of our existence are foolish and not based in reality. There exists Overwhelming evidence we evolved. No evidence of any alternative. You have to actively deny reality and logic to think otherwise. I will not entertain your or anyone else’s response to this, it’s garbage. Theists are a cancer on our society and tools for billionaires. It’s a convenient social hierarchy for which the plebs to police themselves. No thanks.
Agreed however stimulation was put forth as something that would require evidence whereas a God needs faith which requires blind trust and the lack of evidence. You are not allowed to even try to test if a god exists because that itself is a lack of faith.
If you try to prove the existence of a god then you do not have faith so you are not a believer. Having faith in itself means evidence has no value for you.
it’s not a fair comparison, in the sense that the religions people tens to not believe in are those with disputable claims in a book dictated by god.
Caims such as simulation theory or unspecified god without evidence for or against it make way more sense than major deistic religions. And again, that’s not to say it’s true, its just significantly more likely to be accurate.
I saw a theory by some physicists that there is some evidence we may be a hologram but I’m not smart enough to understand exactly what that means. Sounds neat
I’m also not smart enough to understand it completely but I think they meant something strange could be happening with dimensions (think Flatlanders) rather than us being a computer program. anyone with more understanding please elaborate tho
There’s an argument that because some of the physical limits we see around entropy density (due to singularities) are proportional to the area of a sphere around the volume, together with math indicating it’s possible to translate physics in a 3D volume to a 2D surface, the whole universe might be a projection from the 2D surface of a sphere
It’s a hell of coincidence that this is the second time I heard of this, the first being 2 days ago in a video game. Said video game is full of crackpot conspiracies though.
Yeah that doesn’t mean we’re running on an alien projector. Science communication of theoretical physics is horrible.
Anytime you find yourself getting excited about some galaxy brain SciFi stuff just clap out some chalk board erasers and inhale the dust. That’s about how pleasant and exciting theoretical physics is (and how worth doing, fight me you keyboard tapping nerds) and it should help you get in the mood for appreciating findings.
Musk said it in Rogan a few weeks ago, and it became a justified belief overnight. It had huge flaws in logic when he said it, and no one who is parroting the talking point today is thinking beyond “the real life Ironman says we live in the matrix”.
If you take your opinion from either of those sources I really can’t help you they aren’t representative of what the majority or anyone worth their shit thinks
Pretty sure simulation theory has been around since the late 80s. Just got in the main media zeitgeist anymore like when matrix came out so Elon just revived it in mainstream media
Sounds like someone saw the devil in a screen during a brief but short psychosis and then extended this idea into his own depersonalisation/derealization experience of his whole life
Yeah not the first to think something like that, kind of like people once thought their whole lives were a dream lol
I mean, Descartes had brain in a vat theories well before the 1980s, and Plato’s allegory of the cave is fundamentally the same. My position was that “the reason we’re talking about it again all of a sudden is because one idiot got on the podcast of another idiot and poorly explained it to the throngs of their uncritical fans”.
The whole simulation theory stems from observations about how fast technology is advancing as a whole, and kind of plays hand in hand with the fermi paradox. Either we are a special advanced civilisation that will continue to advance until we could in theory simulate an entire species/planet/civilisation or whatever or we are doomed to die out before we can advance enough to achieve either that goal or potentially other goals such as building replicating space exploration technology that might be capable of exploring/consuming/adulterating part of the galaxy or even the galaxy as a whole.
Both theories are basically an extrapolation of our current technological progression with some large assumptions made about the way things in this universe operate as a whole. I don’t think they are particularly far fetched, but I also don’t really see much evidence to support either being a possibility, except maybe the whole we are fucking up our ecosystem and heading towards some type of collapse before we get too advanced parts of the fermi paradox.
Another theory that I’ve heard which is really just a statistics thing is that it’s most likely that we are an average civilisation that lasts an average amount of time in an average part of the galaxy and that it’s likely we are right about in the middle of the total number of humans that has or will ever exist (about 100 billion came before us, probably another 100 billion to go) which could be a couple centuries or millenia left of human reign over planet Earth.
All being said, it’s pretty likely that since the future hasn’t happened yet we just won’t know how it all turns out until it does. We’re all just as uncertain as anybody else, and whoever preaches the gospel of kingdom come is just as ignorant as you and I.
It’s a bit more complex than that, with multiple levels of feedback with DNA (potentially even with the nucleotide) and a damn complicated process while creating descendants (vs. just clones).
Well, he constantly wears what I can only describe as an attempt to make a power armor straight from a 2000s live action sci-fi, constantly screams that everyone is dumb and that "The Great Observer" will free believers from this simulation, believes that if he remains hidden for a couple of minutes, police will simply lose him like this was GTA, and other dumb shit.
To be completely cynical: they’d blame the jews for hiding this knowledge from them and use it, generally, to sow distrust in the institutions we already have for supporting “non-simulation theory”. (see: flat earth)
Its such a philosophical dead end. I know a few people who really want the world to be a simulation but I cant understand why. I think they want an excuse to have nothing matter and be shitty.
But i would not live my life any differently if we found out that this is a simulation. Because its still real to me and there’s no reason to believe I can exist outside the simulation any more than my sims can exist outside the game.
The “belief” we’re in a simulation is more like a interesting idea than something people organize their lives around. Is it possible? Yes. Am I going to praise the great programmer every Sunday? No.
The belief in God in most cases is not just belief in some general higher power but a very specific deity with weird morality, silly mythology and bunch of scam artists behind it.
I think there’s a higher power…
Ok…
that got mad at us for eating fruits but then impregnated a lady with itself and pissed us off so that we murdered him and he could say he’s not mad anymore.
English is an endless deluge of that experience, because our orthography is bullshit. People have tried to fix it. Their clever rules were partly adopted and became even more exceptions and special cases.
I just learned of the Shavian Alphabet yesterday. It’s designed specifically for English and fits it well, except the sounds in it are so specific that when you write in it, you have to write in a specific regional accent. Fortunately it can’t become a new set of special cases because it’s an entirely new script not related to Latin.
This argument conflates belief with religious practice. The core similarity of both beliefs is that the universe is intelligently designed. And you can believe in the idea of a God without participating in any kind of formal religious practice. That “most” religious belief is wrapped up in a particular religious tradition is ancillary.
Religion’s weakest argument is the claim that the world was intelligently designed. When it so clearly isn’t.
Simulation theory doesn’t claim someone designed all this. They built a simulator where all this evolution and history happened, like emergent gameplay on steroids. It’s not the same kind of “design” we’re talking about.
Intelligent design is a broad, vague, and intensely mutable concept. It isn’t helped by the fact that there’s multiple kinds, with the pseudoscientific kind touted by the religious right in America and the more generic, very fucking old “teleological argument” which is also intelligent design at its core. To give a specific example of intelligent design philosophy that isn’t directly tied to a belief in a deity as an active participant, you can look at the deists, who believed that the universe’s fundamental laws were engineered by a kind of “clock maker” deity who left the universe running under its own principles but doesn’t have a direct, guiding hand in individual events. This is still a form of “intelligent design” and closely corresponds to simulation theory. At this point, you are redefining terms to suite your argument. Also, you can’t really say the world is or is not intelligently designed, as you have no evidence for either. The only truly “logical” position to hold for any of this is straight agnosticism.
Could an all powerful, loving God be real? Sure. Why not?
Could a powerful, all loving God be real? Yeah, seems realistic. In many ways, I am a God to an ant.
Could an all powerful all loving God be real?
Hahahahahahahahahahahahahaha no.
God is either inept, indifferent, or a straight up ass. None of those items are something I care to worship, even at the threat of the eternal damnation.
By their own book, the bad guy thought the stupid naked people should have a bit of an education and the good guy punished them for trying to improve their knowledge base. Serpents rule!
I was taught in school that the real battle in the universe is between chaos and order. They gave it a fancy name, Entropy, but that was the gist.
So Chaos is God and Order is Satan. Live all hunter gathering under God or just go to the Supermarket under Satan, and spend the rest of your time doing other things, like making art or scientific theories.
Even now the Church is against progress. Don’t let them Gays get married for fucks sake, the world will explode.
They are similar in that neither are scientific theories, as they are equally non-falsifiable. We may live in a universe where it is impossible to see the face of god or a glitch in the matrix by construction.
Given that impossibility, how then could you perform an experiment or make an observation that contradicts the theory? To be reductive, science isn’t about proving. It’s failing to disprove. If there isn’t a set of circumstances in which a theory can be disproven, it isn’t scientific.
Unless you are a string theorist. Then you just say whatever the hell you want.
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