If God was real, wouldn't you? If God is real and you're wrong about that (or if you don't yet know the real God) would you want the computer to agree with your misconception or would you want it to know the truth?
Cut out "computer" here - would you want any person to hold a falsehood as the truth?
God is not physically real. Neither are numbers. Both come from thinking minds.
God is an egregore. It may be useful to model the various religions as singular entities under this lens, not true in the strictest sense, but useful none the less.
God, Santa, and (our {human} version of) Math: all exist in 'mental space', they are models of the world (one is a significantly more accurate model, obviously).
Atheist here: God didn't create humans, humans created an egregorical construction we call God, and we should kill the egregores we have let loose into the minds of humans.
Comparing God to Santa is ludicrous. There’s more types of evidence backing the God of the Bible than many things taught in school or reported in the news. I put a quick summary here:
With that, the Bible should be taken at least as seriously as any godless work with lots of evidence behind it. If you don’t do that, it means you’ve closed your heart off to God for reasons having nothing to do with evidence. Also, much evidence for the Bible strengthens the claim that Jesus is God in the flesh, died for our sins, rose again, and will give eternal life and renewed life to those who commit to Him.
I could get behind that but people that believe in god tend to think of it as a real, physical (or at least metaphysical) thing.
For my own sanity I try to think of those who believe in literal god as simply confusing it with the universe itself. The universe created us, it nurtures us, it’s sort of timeless and immortal. If only they could just leave it at that.
If you don't have any proof of that, you're no different than those that believe he exists. (Respectfully) Agnosticism really is the only correct scientific approach.
I have to disagree with that. Yes, ideally we should only believe things for which there is proof, but that is simply not an option for a great many things in our lives and the universe.
A lot of the time we have to fall back to estimating how plausible something is based on the knowledge we do have. Even in science it’s common for outcomes to be probabilistic rather than absolute.
So I say there is no god because, to my mind, the claim makes no sense. There is nothing I have ever seen, or that science has ever collected data on, to indicate that such a thing is plausible. It’s a myth, a fairy tale. I don’t need to prove otherwise because the onus of proof is on the one making the incredible claim.
> There is nothing I have ever seen, or that science has ever collected data on, to indicate that such a thing is plausible.
Given that this is an estimate could you estimate what kind of thing you would have to see or what shape of data collected by science that would make you reconsider the plausibility of the existence of a supreme being?
I don't think that's really possible. The issue isn't so much that there isn't proof, it's that proof existing would be counter to everything we know about how the universe works. It wouldn't just mean "oops I'm wrong" it would mean that humanity's perception of reality would have to be fundamentally flawed.
I'm not even opposed to believing that our perception is flawed - clearly we don't know everything and there is much about reality we can't perceive let alone understand. But this would be so far outside of what we do understand that I cannot simply assume that it's true - I would need to see it to believe it.
There are virtually limitless ways such a being could make itself evident to humanity yet the only "evidence" anyone can come up with is either ancient stories or phenomena more plausibly explained by other causes. To me this completely tracks with the implausibility of the existence of god.
> The issue isn't so much that there isn't proof, it's that proof existing would be counter to everything we know about how the universe works.
I'm not quite sure what you're saying here. It doesn't sound like you're saying that "supreme being" is "black white" (that is, mutually contradictory, meaningless). More like "proof of the existence of the supreme being is impossible". But you also say "I would need to see it to believe it", which suggests that you do think there is a category of proofs that would demonstrate the existence of the supreme being.
Cut out "computer" here - would you want any person to hold a falsehood as the truth?