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> I've started in the last year or so to turn to the church (Roman Catholic) and theism, both to find answers to some of life's mysteries, such as the origin of the Universe...

Accepting God created the universe just moves the big questions one level of indirection upward: Why does God exist? Why does God exist with the characteristics that he does (e.g. why is God X instead of Y)?

It's unclear how this is more satisfying on an intellectual level. It's only more satisfying on an emotional level, as it usually comes with the belief of a personal God that loves and wants the best for you, not to mention an afterlife.

Humans are fundamentally emotional, not intellectual.

> It's unclear how this is more satisfying on an intellectual level. It's only more satisfying on an emotional level, as it usually comes with the belief of a personal God that loves and wants the best for you, not to mention an afterlife.

This idea of treating intellect and emotions as a dichotomy rather than as two inseparable parts of a harmonious whole has a history – it goes back to the ancient Greeks. Maybe we should question that idea, rather than just assuming it must be true?

And, is an afterlife really that implausible? Putting "supernatural" accounts of it to one side, how sure can you be that the quantum immortality hypothesis is false? Or: in an infinite future, any event with non-zero probability, no matter how remote its chance, will almost certainly eventually happen. Since the probability of our spontaneous resurrection from the dead (through thermal and/or quantum fluctuations) is unimaginably tiny yet strictly speaking non-zero, in a spatiotemporally infinite universe (as in eternal inflation), almost surely it will eventually happen. If the universe is infinite, an afterlife is almost certain; we don't really know whether the universe is infinite, so let's say that's 50-50, which makes an afterlife 50-50 – even if just as a Boltzmann brain. Of course, you can argue against this if you make certain assumptions about the criterion of personal identity, but we really don't know if those assumptions are true – which brings the probability of an afterlife back to 50-50. And then, if the simulation hypothesis is true (another 50-50), it would be very easy for our simulators to give us an afterlife if they wanted, and they might even feel ethically obliged to do so.

If the probability of an afterlife is actually 50-50, why do some people insist its probability is close to zero? Emotional reasons, perhaps? If you don't accept the religious claim that an afterlife is going to be fundamentally just–eternity suddenly becomes terrifying. What if our eternal fate is to spend aeons as a Boltzmann brain perpetually slipping in and out of existence in the cold darkness of space, a mind whose experiences have the bare minimum of coherence to count as experiences of a mind? What if our simulators are mischievous rather than benevolent, and have designed for us an afterlife in which they have fun at our expense?

Just wanted to commend you for sharing your experience. It's not something that's popular on HN and, as expected, was immediately followed with "you probably have a brain tumor for doing it" comments. So wanted to counter-balance that and let you know that not everyone is as hostile and mean-spirited.

I'd say this kind of thing is not popular on HN because it had very little useful information content, and if he knew it was not going to be popular here because of religion, well he posted it anyway didn't he…

> was immediately followed with "you probably have a brain tumor for doing it" comments

Actually most comments weren't of this nature, but you climbed over those to find the one you could plant your flag of martyrdom on.

To be fair, the brain tumour thing used to be much higher up (i guess it got downvoted), and i agree that it is an incredibly condescending and offensive thing to say.

Like sheesh, imagine saying that in any other context. e.g. someone likes emacs, must be a brain tumour.

I hear you: I've got a STEM background as well, and for many years I was a Catholic-raised agnostic, having bailed from belief at age 12 (and having been skeptical starting at age 5). In later life I worked my way back around to sort of a general agnosto-monotheism, to coin a phrase, and am now at least nominally an Episcopalian (I married one).

I did a lot of thinking and writing on the subject and concluded that we're part of what could be called "The Great Project"; see https://www.questioningchristian.org/2006/06/metanarratives_... and the other "Favorites" links in the right-hand column.

Thanks, I'll check it out.

Supplement to the above: "Why I Still Call Myself a Christian and an Episcopalian" — https://www.questioningchristian.com/2005/05/why_i_call_myse...

As an atheist, I have no problem with "God created the universe", as in "something/somebody" that has no interactions with us. It would have no effect on me (Epicureanism).

The big jump is between "god created the universe" and "that god is the <human religion> one". And I'm not talking about all the contradictions and terrible things in <sacred book> or the absurdity of things like "the son of god saved humankind from offending god (sin)" but there's no (good) answer to a simple fact: "children's cancer", since the official religious answer is "we cannot understand (god's plan)".

Do you think satisfaction is a good measure of what we should believe to be true?

Don't you think that question presupposes a materialist world view?

As an atheist, what other measure should we use?

Like when it comes down to it we are all looking for answers that "satisfy" us. What else is there? Logic is just a complex way of verifying that the answers are convincing enough and thus satisfying.

> what other measure should we use?

The truth, meaning accepting our best accordance of theory to observable reality, then acting on that? That means not just in physics but in ethics as well and any other area.

> The truth, meaning accepting our best accordance of theory to observable reality, then acting on that?

That sounds like satisfaction to me. You looked for the answer that made sense and satisfied your notions of reality. But its not like you have access to divine revelation or Truth. You are working on what you think is like based on your observations and throwing ideas that aren't in accordance with what you know away because they don't satisfy you as an explanation.

> That means not just in physics but in ethics as well and any other area.

Oh boy. This makes even less sense for ethics. There is no emperical basis for ethics. Its entirely around what people feel is "right". You can't get to even simple things like murder is wrong just by observing the universe.

> You looked for the answer that made sense and satisfied your notions of reality

I've no doubt you have as much experience as I have people who will reject things that are clearly true, or even arguably true, rejecting evidence, to maintain a position that doesn't stand up. So what I'm saying is, some people don't "accept our best accordance is… to observable reality…". I mean, it amazes me the number of people on HN who will take and hold a position regardless.

> There is no emperical basis for ethics

Do you think I'm unaware of this. But suppose you see a small child in a street crying because they're lost. Assuming we have an inner life, you can deduce the child is unhappy. What is the right thing to do in this circumstance, to help them or walk on by?(I'm assuming the circumstances are as they appear, this is not intended as a trick question).

Morality isn't physics but it's not something too complex to tackle, and the religious don't have a monopoly on ethics (I mention this because you said you are an atheist, like me, and we don't need a book to tell us how to do the right thing Edit: I have been asked online by a Christian what the basis of my ethics is if I'm not religious. Cheeky sod)

> But suppose you see a small child in a street crying because they're lost. Assuming we have an inner life, you can deduce the child is unhappy. What is the right thing to do in this circumstance, to help them or walk on by?

Right. However the part you can't deduce emperically is if its a good thing to reduce the suffering of the child.

Sounds simple enough because mainstream morality demands a specific answer. But consider the vegan version of this question - animals clearly are suffering in slaughterhouses, how can you justify just walking by? This is a lot less compelling to a lot of people and yet the argument seems pretty much identical to the child case in terms of pure logic.

All this is to say, i think at the very bottom it always comes down to: i believe what i believe because i believe it. Or to phrase it a certain way, i found an answer that satisfies me. I help the child because it gives me satisfication to reduce the amount of human suffering in the world.

In the context of ethics "i found an answer that satisfies me", I believe you're right. Thanks.

Perhaps one can examine and question why the need for satisfaction.

Is it actually necessary to buy into a theory? To belong to an opinion? Is it beneficial?

I am sure a lot of HN do it in private. In modern world (>90s) to be non-religious due to stereotyping people.

I myself am partial to the Latter-day Saint teaching that matter/energy has always existed (and forever will exist) and that the creation of the world involved "organizing" existing matter in an iterative process. That matches the pattern of creation I've experienced myself where I take something that already exists and iterate on it until it is in a refined state that I desire.

I find it hard to believe that the mindboggling complexity of protein machinery was purely accidental/probabilistic. I understand how evolution works, and it makes sense, but... to me at least, it seems more likely that there was a creative iterative process that "guided" matter towards the evolutionary system we have on earth vs lightning striking an ocean full of amino acids and DNA/cells/proteins coincidentally arranging in the right configuration to jump start evolution.

Uh, what man?

That “guide” was natural selection over millions of years.

It’s literally random chance, and if a change is beneficial, it sticks. If we were really “designed” then there are so many failures and inefficiencies that deserve scrutiny.

Chief among them, childhood cancers. Fuck a designer that left that bug in the system and shipped it.

> That “guide” was natural selection over millions of years.

Small nitpick: millions of years is how long Hominini brains have been evolving with stone tools. Mammalian brains had already been evolving for at least a hundred million years, animals in general for seven hundred million years, and the basic molecular machinery like genetics and proteomics had been evolving for billions of years.

The scale at which evolution operates at is truly mind boggling.

I understand how natural selection works in the framework of evolution. But how did the evolutionary framework itself emerge? Natural selection can't happen without being contained in a larger self-propagating evolutionary system, correct? And it seems sophisticated enough for me to believe that an intelligent force helped create it. Of course, I could be wrong, but I'd need some pretty compelling proof of abiogenesis, not just isolated examples of self assembling or replicating molecules.

> Chief among them, childhood cancers. Fuck a designer that left that bug in the system and shipped it.

How is it the designer's fault if (for example) humans decide to build and detonate nuclear weapons, the fallout is blown across oceans and/or continents and precipitates into water supplies which then manifests as childhood cancers 25 years later (unbeknownst to the citizens)? That's not a "bug", that's just a natural consequence of physics and physical interactions of matter. Rinse and repeat with lead and other compounds which unknowingly are contaminating our environment and causing childhood cancers to happen in the aggregate?

How is an infinite universe that's been painstakingly engineered by an infinitely omnipotent being less mindboggling than evolutionary biology?

Agreed. From the late Rev. Dr. John Polkinghorne KBE FRS — a noted Cambridge particle physicist, turned late-call Church of England priest [0]: "Early on, an Anglican clergyman, Charles Kingsley, stated powerfully the right way to think theologically about evolution. He said that God could no doubt have brought into being a ready-made world, but in fact the Creator had done something cleverer than that in making ‘a creation that could make itself’." [1]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Polkinghorne

[1] https://www.questioningchristian.org/2006/03/the_continuing_... (Emphasis added.)

Conway's game of life is a good example of how complex behavior can evolve from systems with a simple set of rules. Molecular dynamics follow a more complex set of rules at a much more rapid rate. This combined with the fact those interactions have been happening for billions of years in parallel at such a massive scale does not make it surprising that persistent and self replicating patterns emerge. On a large enough scale, even improbable events become likely.

> This combined with the fact those interactions have been happening for billions of years in parallel at such a massive scale does not make it surprising that persistent and self replicating patterns emerge. On a large enough scale, even improbable events become likely.

I don't think anyone has proven the scales necessary for life to happen by chance. What you have done is worked off the base assumption that abiogenesis happened accidentally and therefore the time and scale needed to do so is the age and scale of the observable universe. Under the infinite monkeys theorem the works of Shakespeare will eventually be produced, but we are not working with infinite time and resources here. We are working with "just" 9 billion years and "just" 100 billion galaxies, which, for abiogenesis seems pretty short especially considering what % of planets have zero chance for life due to their composition and star proximity.

How many billions of years of compute time across how many parallel computers do you think it would take Conway's game of life with random RNG seeds to simulate itself (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xP5-iIeKXE8)? Regardless of your answer, I still find it more likely Conway's game of life simulating itself points to an intelligent force of some sort having iteratively created it.

Hate seems to be such a strong word. I mean, as a man of faith myself, I have encountered HN posts that are compel me to consider "how can anyone, God-fearing or not, not see the disappointing hubris in this claim (that summarily and dogmatically counters the mystery of God)?" For one to express the pursuit and fruits of a relationship with the Creator, on the other hand, is quite the opposite and most admirable and NOT delusional, IMHO. @GallenErso: I celebrate your positive (sans skepticism, that is) investment in the mystery of Life! In the final analysis, I trust that you'll find more than just satisfaction in this supernatural pursuit--myself, I have found an alarming and disarming hope, beauty & suffering in charity and meaning & purpose in every single endeavor. Lasty... I'd encourage you to check out the Magis Center. God bless!

It's perfectly fine to believe in higher powers. For instance I think it's possible (or probable) we may be living in a simulated reality within a higher dimensional universe. If that's the case, a 4 dimensional (or higher) being would certainly satisfy the Judeo-Christian description of God, since it would be able to manipulate our world in any way it wants. We're basically sprites on a computer screen and God is the programmer.

However, I fail to see how you settled on Catholicism to give you the answers you're looking for. Do you really believe all the stories in the bible actually happened? And if not, why pick Catholicism over any other major religion? And if this God does exist and wants us to worship him, why doesn't he make that more obvious, and why does he allow children to be raped and worshippers to be gunned down in his own Church?

I think religion is great for a large majority of people that don't want to put in the painful existential work necessary to arrive at some more profound understanding of life. It feels like a shortcut, and you can certainly find your own spiritual beliefs without the aid of the Catholic Church.

Most of the other teachings of the church, however, are.

This. While there are benefits to most religions (community being the biggest) it comes along with insane and very often deadly noise, be it ignorant, purposely wrong or errors in translations or lost information through time, editors, gatekeepers.

The closest path to god is reality, from personal observation ad questions.

Back when they taught me catholicism, the doctrine on science vs. religion was “truth cannot contradict truth”. They’d still say God created everything, but that science was a good way to understand God’s creation, from a certain perspective. (Things like Genesis were not considered literal.)

So I’m surprised to see the Catholicism presented as an alternative to science.

Maybe they’ve reverted since I was a follower?

Catholicism, despite their attempts, is not just one set of teachings. At the end of the day, each catholic only knows what their local church teaches. If your state's cardinal is aggressively homophobic, you can bet local teachings about the evils of homosexuality and pleadings to the flock to save their wandering fellows despite the literal Pope basically saying "maybe we should leave them alone a bit"

Keep working through the process. Talent is wasted without knowledge. HN doesn't hate religion, it's simply ignorant of it.

I went to a catholic high school pre 2000s and have nothing but respect for their teachings which was entirely opened to science, questioning religion itself, learning of other religions and using a metaphor interpretation of the bible. That was a change from young earth creationism that I was brought up in.

hey - thanks for this; it takes some bravery to say this stuff in public.

I'll share that I've been slowly turning into a buddhist, which is not the religion I was born into. I think there's a few things in common, including a sort of universal love and a perspective that could be phrased "it's not about me", but that there's something bigger/higher/more-powerful going on and my specific life experience isn't the most important thing in the universe. Those two things - love, and humility (maybe that's the best single word?) go a long way towards reducing inter-personal frictions large and small.

If it is more satisfying to you so be it, it is a personal choice to believe in this and that.

As long as these are non overlapping magisteria.

Not sure what your stem credentials have to do with anything here.

Out of curiosity, what would you say to a person who shared the same story as you, but instead of Catholicism they turned to Scientology?

I don't understand what you expect me to take from this by your sharing of it.

the problem is epistemology, not aesthetics. why are you comfortable believing in things that are nonfalsifiable? that you find them comforting is not much of an argument.

Scientific theories about the origins of the Universe, such as the one that this post is about, are equally nonfalsifiable.

A scientist theorizing is not the same as a scientific theory. Nonfalsifiable surely ought to mean end of wits or preferably being content with simply not being able to truly know, not "anything goes".

Making stuff up to ponder the possibilities is all fine, don't get me wrong. But it shouldn't be given too much weight.

- humans have value

- life is worth living

- doing the right thing matters

All are unfalsifiable. I am deeply skeptical of anyone who claims to not believe unfalsifiable things.

I don't believe those things are objectively true. Outside of other humans nobody cares about those things. And you don't need to search far to find people who clearly don't believe the first one when the humans are their out-group. Or to see the second belief being applied very differently on both sides of an abortion debate.

I do think society works better if we assume these things to be rules (to a degree) and as a member of society I act (and benefit) accordingly, but objectively it doesn't matter at all. The beliefs you mention are a lot like belief in 'free will' in that regard, a convenient fiction.

And who created that higher level construct

God, as creator of time, is outside of time. Since therefore He has no beginning in time, He has always existed, so doesn't need a cause. I long wrestled with the idea that the Universe could have existed forever, as a way to solve the first cause paradox, but I was never comfortable with the idea. So I've made a leap of faith and applied the same mental framework to an immaterial construct (God), and for the sake of my sanity I don't try to go further than that :-]

I believe there are questions that aren't meant to be answered, and knowing the truth would break our collective minds.

That sounds very hand wavy and not at all convincing. You could just as easily say that time is an emergent property of the universe, so the universe has always existed and needs no cause. The problem in doing that with God is you have something intelligent and complex enough that it was capable of creating the universe with the metaphorical snap of its fingers. This is a harder pill to swallow than the universe just existing, because the universe is not intelligent, is less complex, and can't create things whole cloth.

Intelligent design makes sense to me.

The idea of a Christian god is self contradictory and logically impossible. If you want a god it can't be an Abramistic one.

Does the child abuse bother you?

Yes. It's not going to erode my faith, since I'm loyal to Christian values and principles more than any individuals, but the things some of these people in power have done are unacceptable, immoral, and fundamentally un-Christian, and they should be held accountable.

As a non-religious person, it is hard to grasp the mindset where one can denounce the abuse in words, but in actions support the institution which perpetrated the abuse and protected the abusers. But I understand faith is not rational.

The universe, for me, without any doubt, is a simulation, I even believe that the the algorithms that would explain how the universe reached this level of complexity would be the same that explain intelligence, I think that we got all wrong believing that matter come before consciousness when, in reality, it is the other way around. And languages are a big part of all the equation, physics and space are all languages.