Why religion could be true

[Frosti85]

A good argument can be made that we are living in a computer simulation:

https://www.simulation-argument.com/simulation.html

Now consider this scenario:

In the future some remaining christians are pissed of from all the rational scientific atheists, and to punish
them create a "christian" simulation of the past.

In this simulation, after you die in the simulation, some heuristic will evaluate all of the actions you took, and then
you get placed either in the heaven or the hell simulation.
(or the simulator, let's call him "God", just stops the simulation everytime someone died, and makes the evalution himself... you might
even be allowed to talk to him first)

Now because the number of possible simulations is infinite (almost) times higher than the real world, it's much more
likely that you are in a simulation than in the real world, and following that, it's much more likely you
are in a christian ancestor simulation, than the real world.

Now I really don't know anymore what I should do with that argument

[Riggerjack]

Now I really don't know anymore what I should do with that argument

Why should you need to do anything with it?

Science has nothing to say about religion. Not because they are in opposition, but because science is based on testing. To my knowledge, religion is universally untestable. So science neither proves nor disproves religion. Despite the confused declarations by adherents on each side. Religious beliefs lie entirely outside the scope of science.

Now, there have been some atheists whose work I admire, Douglas Adams comes to mind. And one of his arguments is the quality of thought on each side, atheism vs Christianity. And while I am amused, I am not convinced. There has been some pretty deep thought in Christianity. Simply ignoring the best of the other side's thinking doesn't make anyone any smarter.

For what it's worth, I consider myself agnostic atheist. I doubt there is any invisible skyfather looking down and testing me. If there were, I'm not sure I would want to pass. For that matter, I have no belief in any form of afterlife.

But I am also aware that my beliefs on religion are beliefs, no more rooted in science than those of the westboro Baptist asshats trolling gay funerals. I have simply looked around, and drawn conclusions from the available data.

[chenda]

See - http://www.kdirani.com/dob.htm

[BRUTE]

it's much more
likely that you are in a simulation than in the real world

true

and following that, it's much more likely you
are in a christian ancestor simulation, than the real world.

false.

atheist programmers create an atheist universe in which there is no god. now the chances are 50:50. there are infinite other possibilities, lots of them contradictory, so the chances of "hitting" the universe one hopes for are practically zero. any action that would provide positive benefits in one universe could produce negative effects in another, like a universe in which simulation programmers get punished..

there could be a teapot floating in orbit around jupiter. it might be true. but it's not an interesting enough idea to even debate. same as religion.

[Frosti85]

false.

atheist programmers create an atheist universe in which there is no god. now the chances are 50:50. there are infinite other possibilities, lots of them contradictory, so the chances of "hitting" the universe one hopes for are practically zero. any action that would provide positive benefits in one universe could produce negative effects in another, like a universe in which simulation programmers get punished..

there could be a teapot floating in orbit around jupiter. it might be true. but it's not an interesting enough idea to even debate. same as religion.

you are correct, it's very unlikely we are in a christian simulation. almost epsilon probability.
but it's still much more likely than being in the real world

I didn't mean this post to raise an interest in religion... it's just a weird way in which it could actually be true.

[vexed87]

But I am also aware that my beliefs on religion are beliefs, no more rooted in science than those of the westboro Baptist asshats trolling gay funerals. I have simply looked around, and drawn conclusions from the available data.

Hear, hear!

Nothing makes me chuckle more than the atheist who rejects religion out of hand due to their own belief system, then goes out and successfully transacts a trade of material goods for fiat currency, failing to recognise the significance of the action. Being able to trade actual material goods for digital or paper money, or simply walk down the street without being murdered by a total stranger, or observe how humans can queue in an orderly fashion at the checkout at the shops. Without these complex and varied belief systems, modern civilization simply couldn't exist. Whilst not a participant of any organised religion myself, I'm not naive enough to fail to see how they might foster good community and make an otherwise anarchic society more cohesive.

[chenda]

@vexed87 + 1.

Also see the theory of 'As if' by https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_Vaihinger

'In Die Philosophie des Als Ob, Vaihinger argued that human beings can never really know the underlying reality of the world, and that as a result we construct systems of thought and then assume that these match reality: we behave "as if" the world matches our models'.

[7Wannabe5]

or observe how humans can queue in an orderly fashion at the checkout at the shops.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A4uv27nSaH4

So, are weaver ants theists, deists, pantheists, or atheists? Obviously, each ant must hold some such complex internal metaphysical model in order to be motivated to such heights of altruism towards good of community

[luxagraf]

The west tends to have a very narrow definition of religion, i.e. monotheism based on having faith in something.

Quite a few things group under the term "religion" in other places require no faith at all, being are entirely experiential(*). Whether or not the experience is a simulation, the result of some grand plan of suprahuman beings, or simply something that's entirely beyond human comprehension is more or less irrelevant to the experience.

* The west used to have Gnostics, but haven't met many lately.

[Riggerjack]

Quite a few things group under the term "religion" in other places require no faith at all

Examples, please. I am aware of none of these. Hinduism, and Buddhism don't qualify, nor various pagan traditions. I'm not very familiar with Taoist thought, but having a hard time imagining what you are describing.

A "religion that requires no faith but is purely experiential" sounds like how a fundy would describe atheists. Not so much an accurate description as an accurate self portrait in negative. Not that I'm accusing you if that, just amused by the thought.

[luxagraf]

Quite a few things group under the term "religion" in other places require no faith at all

Examples, please. I am aware of none of these. Hinduism, and Buddhism don't qualify, nor various pagan traditions. I'm not very familiar with Taoist thought, but having a hard time imagining what you are describing.

All the esoteric traditions right up through modern things like the golden dawn, early christian gnostics (see anything referencing the Nag Hammadi texts), pagan gnostics, jewish gnostics, most shamanism, many native american religions, etc. More generally the term gnosticism is the way the west has subcatgorized these religions. Gnosticism is founded on the idea that, to quote a surprisingly pithy line from wikipedia: "the sufficient cause of salvation is this "knowledge of" ("acquaintance with") the divine. It is an inward "knowing"... and differs from Christian proto-orthodox views."

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

All very minor religions currently, but that's not always been the case.

[Scott 2]

Define God as the set of all things, both manifest and un-manifest. Now religion can be true.

Religion is a broad term, too generic to hold a binary true/false.

[Loner]

Instead of thinking about whether religion as true of false, I have recently started thinking about it differently. I see it as a mental tool, just like science. And I judge both of them not on whether they are “true” or not, but on how useful they are.

We usually think about scientific theories in terms of whether they are true or false. But does that even make sense?

To say that F=ma is true could literally mean little else than that we are living in a computer simulation that is generating force/mass/acceleration in our world using the equation F=ma. So what we really do when we do science is not to “find truth”, but rather to “model reality”. And when we say that a theory is “true”, we only mean that it predicts reality pretty well in some respect.

The real reason we use a theory is not because it is “true”, but because it helps us predict the world. It is said that much of Newton’s mechanics was proven “wrong” when Einstein developed his theory of relativity, but that really doesn’t mean anything. Newton’s mechanics didn’t get proven wrong, just like your road map doesn’t get proven wrong when you find a topological map, and just like your topological map doesn’t get proven wrong when you get a topological map with a higher degree of resolution. You might still want the first less-detailed map if it’s water proof or something. In the case of Einstein, he just proposed a model that helps us predict the world a little bit better. And so we still use Newton’s models because they are simple and predict reality well enough in normal situations. It is still useful to us.

As for religion, is it true? False? I’d argue it doesn’t matter. I think it is more useful to think about it in terms of whether it is useful. Whether gods exist or not, we cannot know anyways. We do not know whether we were created by some bearded dude living in the clouds, or by some other bearded dude behind his computer running The Sims 79, and it is unknowable. I personally could not believe in a god even if I tried really hard, but I understand how useful it would be to believe that there exists some loving supernatural entity caring for me.

In the case of you scenario you mentioned, I see it as a bit of mental masturbation. It’s fun, but I find it bit useless.

I do not say this to put you down for bringing it up, but rather to bounce this idea around that it might more productive to think about how religions can be useful (or useless and destructive), rather than wheter they are true or not.

[jacob]

As to why anything could be true, that's the field of metaphysics aka "how much can you, as a thinking being, conclude without actually knowing anything ab initio".

I own this: https://www.amazon.com/Metaphysics-Dime ... 198751400/

Paypal me $4 and I'll mediamail (US only) it to you. Or try to get it from the lib if you can. It's a good intro. However, it's an intellectually tough subject, so you need to expend either a lot of IQ points or a lot of time or a sufficient combination thereof to understand the arguments.

TL;DR - It gets pretty technical when you're not allowed to make personal projections about the universe, but it turns out that it's actually possible to make some conclusions after a 200+ page explanations even if they're rather limited and have little practical use.

[Jason]

Everyone is religious in that they hold to some type of ultimate truth, even if that ultimate truth is that there is no ultimate truth. They may not be cognizant of what their ultimate worldview is, but its governing their life. So it really doesn't matter what "religion" is. It's more important that everyone holds some belief in a "religious" manner.

If you base your understanding of metaphysics on the "data" you fall into the "what my net cannot catch is not fish." No new or undiscovered data will change your metaphysical viewpoint. Either you believe in an uncreated God or you don't. It can't be proven one way or the other. That's why Christians believe it's a moral issue, not an evidentiary issue. The does not mean that they are anti-scientific. That's a false dichotomy.

Metaphysically speaking you have four options: Theism, deism, materialism, pantheism. Until mid-17th century, it was pretty much universally believed that the universe was bifurcated, metaphysically speaking - between an ase (separate) God and the created "world" i.e. a creator/creature distinction as all intellectual systems were ecclesiastically based. That changed with the continent rationalists (Copernican revolution), specifically Spinoza. All modern deism/atheism can be traced back to Spinoza, the father of the radical enlightenment. Spinoza was the first to collapse metaphysics and was the first to promote a one substance universe without getting burnt at the stake. He also was the first to state that motion existed in matter - the precursor of evolution.

You can pretty much determine someone's political party based on their view of metaphysics even if they don't know what the word means.

[chenda]

Panentheism and dualism are also options.

[BlueNote]

Everyone is religious in that they hold to some type of ultimate truth, even if that ultimate truth is that there is no ultimate truth. They may not be cognizant of what their ultimate worldview is, but its governing their life. So it really doesn't matter what "religion" is. It's more important that everyone holds some belief in a "religious" manner.

Couldn't I just sort of invert that argument and say that everyone is atheistic/non-religious to some degree? A person who believes in religion 'A' may be seen as an 'infidel' by a person who believes in religion 'B' and vice versa. Or perhaps it's more subtle like person 'A' believes in a slightly modified version of evolutionary theory than person 'B', however both would be considered atheists by almost anyone. I can reduce the number of categories that people can fall into until we're just talking about the whole population (people with beliefs). So how is that any different than describing humans in general?

[Loner]

@Jacob Thanks for the suggestion. Just checked at the library, they have it. I will get it next time I go. I read Ronald Giere's Scientific Perspectivism and Science Without Laws, and they were quite interesting read.

[Jason]

Everyone is religious in that they hold to some type of ultimate truth, even if that ultimate truth is that there is no ultimate truth. They may not be cognizant of what their ultimate worldview is, but its governing their life. So it really doesn't matter what "religion" is. It's more important that everyone holds some belief in a "religious" manner.

Couldn't I just sort of invert that argument and say that everyone is atheistic/non-religious to some degree? A person who believes in religion 'A' may be seen as an 'infidel' by a person who believes in religion 'B' and vice versa. Or perhaps it's more subtle like person 'A' believes in a slightly modified version of evolutionary theory than person 'B', however both would be considered atheists by almost anyone. I can reduce the number of categories that people can fall into until we're just talking about the whole population (people with beliefs). So how is that any different than describing humans in general?

My use of "religious" is tantamount to "commitment."

I am not an atheist. But if someone is an atheist, and opposes any notion of a heteronomous deity, I consider that they hold said view in a religious manner. It is their principium. They are committed to an atheistic view of the world and defend it. It has nothing to do with how their belief system relates to mine in terms of agreement/disagreement or how much the principal/practice outworking is consistent in their daily lives.

[Jason]

Panentheism and dualism are also options.

Not in a metaphysical sense.

There are only three possible metaphysical constructs:

(1) Two substances distinct form one another i.e. the religion of the books - Judaism, Christianity, Islam and deism. The distinction between theism and deism is discussed in terms of providential interaction between the creator and the creation and moral obligations of humans to the distinct/separate substance. Theism is a personally involved deity, deism is the "watchmaker" who wound up the universe and then retreated. In this construct the creator does not require the creation. Everything in creation including the universe is contingent. Eternity is not infinite time, but distinct from time.

(2) Two Substances interacting - pantheism and its progeny i.e. new age and the like. The deity/heteronomous source requires the creation. Eternity is infinite time.

(3) One Substance - Materialism. No creator or heteronomous source possessing a unique substance. No eternity, just time.