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Comment by JohnMakin | Hacker News Reader

As a former non-atheist, with plenty of people I know in the church that stubbornly refuse to acknowledge accepted science - I've long experimented with theologies in my head to fit the concept of God as they understand it into a cosmological model. Stuff like this is fun for me to point to. Maybe a watchmaker (set it in motion and then stepped away) "god" tipped the scales ever so slightly here (to be clear, I don't believe this, but communicating science to religious people can help to frame things in this way). To me this creates a much more powerful deity than some guy who somehow only created the universe 6,000 years ago but also for some insane reason made it look billions of years old.

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Fitting the concept of god into a cosmological model is rather easy.

If we agree that everything we see is described by physics, then everything including us is simply a computation. And in principle someone can build a machine to carry out such a computation.

People in such a machine will be more or less like us, and the creator of that machine will be exactly like god, outside of space and time, omnipotent, omniscient but having to run the simulation to see what everyone does.

From this point of view creating universe 6000 years ago and making it look billions of years old does not look that insane, just a workaround for finite machine time.

So the main disagreement is not about existence of god, or materialism vs idealism, but whether a human is equivalent to a computation or not.

Alternately, an individual set things in motion that they couldn’t control or stop, and thus the universe was born. God could just be a random entity that got in over their proverbial head. We think creating a universe requires thought or intention but it could be a big mistake.

But was it a mistake born out of a mistake?

The main idea of what I am saying is that some entity could have kicked things off, for whatever reason, and not be able to stop or control it. Perhaps they were just like you or I, and they released some tech which formed the universe as we know it today. Perhaps they are outside of this universe and cannot see into it or control it, perhaps they were inside and were obliterated, perhaps they are still here somewhere sitting around waiting for the universe to end, who knows! Everyone expects a god to be all-powerful or something, but they could be some mortal being who only had a lot of power for a moment when they knocked over the first domino. We probably can't know how the universe started, in any case, so this is all just brainstorming for new sci-fi and fantasy novels at this point.

Fitting the concept of god into any scheme is easy, because the existence of god isn't falsifiable.

Why did that almighty watchmaker create anti matter in the first place that anihilates the normal matter? They could have just created the normal matter and zero anti matter. Why carefully fine tune these number?

All of these situations are quite convoluted if you want to fit a designer in there.

Maybe it “looked away” to give its creation a bit of free will unconstrained by its own awesome deterministic power.

As a fun aside, have you heard of Nominative Determinism? From a purely rational standpoint, it is mere coincidence that I know a dentist with the last name “Pullum” and an electrician with the last name “Cable”. My confirmation bias doesn’t account for the 99.9% of other people with unremarkable names.

But then I realized… whenever I create fake people for unit tests I give them names that correspond to what they do. Could this be a sign that the universe is a simulation? And, that God is just a QA running some tests on it?

So maybe we’re living in an edge case!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nominative_determinism

Overarching intellectual models exist for the sake of the problems they solve, rather than to stake claims of supremacy over all other models. Religious-style thinking has important meaning in certain contexts, especially crises and periods of apparent helplessness. Scientific rationalism is useful for solving certain classes of problems in certain ways. To posit universality to either betrays a medieval relationship to thought, not that the person, whether religious or scientific, may be close to succeeding at their position’s impossible sense of their own centrality.

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