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I am religious and believe in free will

71 (27.6%)

I am religious and do not believe in free will

10 (3.9%)

I am not religious and believe in free will

115 (44.7%)

I am not religious and do not believe in free will

61 (23.7%)

Total Members Voted: 252

[MaxTheFox]

An unfalsifiable and, depending on interpretation, highly logically dubious hypothesis about the origin of the world, made to find a modicum of meaning in life by people who simply cannot accept existence for the sake of existence.

Am I describing creationism or the simulation hypothesis?

Spoiler: A tangent about my worldbuild (click to show/hide)

So my sci-fi world has it that FTL only works within an about 170x170x250 light year spheroid called the Oval, thus "boxing in" the human and alien civilizations that exist in it. Not only scientists grapple with it, so do philosophers (and armchair philosophers). Among other wild hypotheses (Heaven and Hell are beyond the barrier, and God doesn't want us to go there!), the simulation hypothesis has seen a bit of a revival, saying that the Oval is just the simulation's boundaries.

The conundrum is that the precursor ruins seem to hint at empires that extended beyond the Oval. Thus there is either a way out of it, or it has moved sometime in the past ~10000 years.

The simulation people, of course, perform feats of mental gymnastics like "oh the creators planted the ruins to make it look like we're not in a simulation!"

Reminds you of anything?

[martinuzz]

But if we live in a simulation, are we NPCs or are we player avatars? Could we be in reality be our creator's equals, or even their superiors?

[Criptfeind]

I more or less don't believe in simulation theory (I do find (specific versions of) it more logically consistent then most religions though) but it does somewhat feel like there's probably some important difference between a god and some pleb that got scammed into running a universe-coin miner.

Righteousness, perhaps? Or something like that? Gods are pretty much always "more" then a person in a lot of key ways. I'd think, maybe even more then just their power over the manipulation of reality. Whereas in simulation theory the person running the simulation is just another person, perhaps vastly different, and maybe we're lesser compared to them in some key areas, but we and they are still fundamentally people, in the way that gods aren't and are above? Not sure.

I don't think I've ever heard of any theory of divinity that includes upper realities where the gods are just normal people, or even themselves simply simulations. Maybe lovecraft mythos, I suppose.

Edit: After giving it some more thought, I think that it might come down to simulation theory being a logical (arguably) extrapolation of our current reality, capabilities, and motivations. We might be a simulation because we can see a future in which we run simulations capable of our current inputs. Supernatural beliefs don't have that logical chain of extrapolation, people have a lot of reasons for believing in various supernatural things but on a wide scale they aren't logical beliefs. I think that's an important distinction. Of course, you can say that from a functional perspective they aren't really very different, but I think that logical chain for building your beliefs is important. Important enough to make a distinction between the two, even if the end result of that belief is the same.

[McTraveller]

Uhh.. you've had no contact with Greek/Roman mythology? Those gods were basically humans with superhero powers.  Basically if you had adolescents "running the simulation."  Seriously, turning yourself into animals to mate with hot human babes?  Killing your parents / siblings / children for petty arguments?  That's like the definition of gods not being "more" than people, other than just having extra powers.

I mean it's basically the Sims, if you could actually enter the Sims as a real avatar.

[Criptfeind]

I'm not saying that zeus was morally superior. Not more in a moral sense or that their actions are "more". I'm saying that the idea of a god is that they are fundamentally a different type of existence then us.

Edit: Perhaps I should ask, what's your definition of a god? It can't just be "someone who can do more then me". A guy with money isn't a god to someone that's poor, a guy with a gun isn't a god to someone without. A guy with legs isn't a god to a handicapped person.

[Frumple]

I don't think I've ever heard of any theory of divinity that includes upper realities where the gods are just normal people, or even themselves simply simulations. Maybe lovecraft mythos, I suppose.

If you're looking into fiction, that kind of metaphysics is pretty common among xianxia/martial arts fantasy. Becoming a godlike figure that steps into the next realm, which itself has beings doing the exact same thing, but on literally another level, is more or less standard world building. Gods made flesh in one realm basically end up peasants in the next, often enough.

Considering where their influences come from, that probably means there's intimations of that in some portion of eastern theology. I could see it coming out of parts of hinduism pretty easily, gods and men both being fragments of the brahman, et al.

[Strongpoint]

It's fairly simple, to be honest. Basically all the verses that say "God doesn't experience time the way mortals do", coupled with what we now know about space-time, meaning that space and time are different aspects of the same thing, and the fact that YHWH is eternal and immortal (not bound by time), mean that omnipresence is a foregone conclusion; there is no place where God can't be in a human-finite time, which is equivalent to omnipresence.

OR, the people of the Bronze age who invented the story meant that the god lives for a looooooong time and millennia are like days for him...

If the Bible itself would describe the concept of spacetime it would be impressive. But it didn't. It has zero cosmology outside the understanding of people of that time.

[lemon10]

A related tangent: all these people who claim to be atheists but think we live in a simulation. If we are in a simulation, then any being or construct which is observing and possibly interacting with said simulation is essentially a god.  So I would argue that "simulationists" are de facto theists.  A construct running a simulation would have all the characteristics of god: knowledge of everything that happens or will happen (from the standpoint of the simulated; if you can read the simulation logs, you are omniscient; if you save state of the simulation at any point, you can stop and re-start, effectively doing time travel, you can observe everywhere at once, etc.), ability to spawn or de-spawn entities in the simulation, passing through walls, granting supernatural powers, not necessarily bound by the rules of the simulation itself, etc. There's no practical distinction between "the spiritual world" and "the host environment of the simulation."

Theism is broadly defined as the belief in the existence of at least one deity.

A deity or god is a supernatural being who is considered divine or sacred.

As with any good theology debate if you are correct depends entirely on how you define your terms.
Under the default definitions wikipedia uses merely constructing the universe isn't enough, you have to be considered "divine or sacred", which makes sense; there are plenty of demons out there in mythology with vast powers who aren't considered gods because they are evil.

A programmer "god" named Joe would not be neither divine nor sacred, and unless the simulationist thought they were they would by definition not be a theist.

Of course its a matter of perspective since if they do think the programmer is divine then they become a theist, I have little doubt there are already simulationist religions where people worship the hypothetical Joe and give thanks daily for him creating the universe and ask for him to intercede and grant their prayers.

[Strongpoint]

Hypothetical runner(s) of the simulation may be considered gods in the polytheistic sense of the word* but such an entity is way too different from the tri-omni God of Abrahamic religions.

*but then any sufficiently advanced aliens can be called gods

[TD1]

Literally no part of my argument relied on faith.  I explained how I reached my conclusion from the facts as presented in the stories.  Perhaps you have faith that Jesus is cis?

Eh? Nope. I do have a strong conviction that Jesus=trans isn't the most likely scenario, but that doesn't really count as faith per se. More an application of Occam's razor - neither Jesus, contemporaries, nor various synods and councils held for centuries following Jesus' life even remotely or in the most tangential sense touched upon your conclusion. If it's not an article of faith, then you are making leaps of logic based on vague pre-scientific and pre-gender revolution texts to suit some broader, modern, and personal teleology. Which, considering my subject (history) I admit to finding unsettling.

"God can do whatever the feck he likes" is a weak argument that could justify any headcanon you want to believe.

Indeed it is. And in saying it I made no claim on what 'feck' in particular He had in mind; I merely used it to counter your assumption that God must follow natural law. The man made burning bushes speak and turned people into salt; he can manage pretty much whatever, and is not constrained by typical rules of engagement.

This did have ramifications for

the fact that Jesus didn't look divine or unusual in any way,

though. Because - yea. He didn't have to. Even within the rules of natural law. To use a hamfisted example, imagine an interracial couple had children. Would you be surprised if the offspring could pass as a phenotypical member of one race?

Plus, to reiterate my previous point, the fella had magic powers. The mechanism of those powers isn't really explained, but one thing's for certain - he didn't get them from his mother.

In a side point, this is a typical narrative for demigods. Zeus has sex with Danae. Begets Perseus. Perseus doesn't have glowing yellow eyes or twenty toes, but he's not a mere clone of his mother. But this point is weak if you consider Biblical accounts as separable from broader cultural traditions/assumptions.

A more natural reading of your quote would be that Jesus is fully holy and is the Son of God, but has no genetic relation to Mary.  But instead you've decided that sex happened and that Jesus is genetically a demigod.  You had to assert an awful lot to make that happen, while dismissing the fact that Jesus didn't look divine or unusual in any way.  "God can do whatever the feck he likes" is a weak argument that could justify any headcanon you want to believe.

Nah, not really. The most natural takeaway from my quote is that it is so vague as to be almost meaningless. What we can derive without bias is this:

Mary was a virgin at time of speaking to the angel.
The Holy Spirit would interact with her in some way.
Either during this, or as a result of it, God's power would overshadow her.
The interaction between Mary, Holy Spirit, and (possibly/probably) God's power would create a holy child.

My point in quoting it was to make a surface-level assertion - that Mary and God/Holy Spirit interacted, and Jesus resulted.
Your other assertions on my stance are hopefully unintentional strawmen. I didn't say this interaction constituted sex, nor really that Jesus had specific/special 'divine' genes.

The meat of my argument was this:

And, as Jesus is a man in every single relevant source, not a 'clone' of Mary - - - it seems likely that some of that was on a genetic level. Needa get that Y chromosome from somewhere, eh?

Meaning that, whatever genes Jesus had, the interaction of divine with mortal had produced a Y chromosome.

I'll not speculate on how that happened. It seems vulgar to envisage God doing the physical deed, but the fact remains - Jesus was not some sort of clone. There is no reason to assert he was except personal bias (or some expression of faith). All concrete evidence suggests he possessed a Y chromosome.

Note that I'm not saying your position is impossible. God is omnipotent, after all. But it's not likely, which was the crux of your argument.

Obviously, the easiest answer is simply to remove God from the equation and with Him Mary's 'Virgin' title. But that's a separate argument.

This isn't an argument, but I take issue with one assertion.  All mankind is in God's image, not only males or men:

Point duly taken! I've been suffering under a misunderstanding of the 'God's image' line. My thanks.

[MaxTheFox]

I think the line between god and super-powerful entity is "wants to be worshiped".

Anyways, I interpret "in God's image" as having free will because I think souls are what give free will. It has little to do with the body per se. That's how I think of it. (Also means I won't be considering sapient aliens inferior, if they exist.)

[Criptfeind]

I'm not sure if I agree with that definition, if I want to be worshiped and convince people to do so, does that make me a god? What if I have super powers? I still don't think I'm a god there, I think that'd just make me an asshole.

[TD1]

Gods frequently are assholes. It's almost in the job description.

[martinuzz]

How else did ever holy shit come to pass

[MaxTheFox]

I'm not sure if I agree with that definition, if I want to be worshiped and convince people to do so, does that make me a god? What if I have super powers? I still don't think I'm a god there, I think that'd just make me an asshole.

If you're on the usual power attributed to even e.g Greek gods... well why not? You'd be a god for all intents and purposes, if most likely a bad one.