I am most familiar with that particular god, and so can be a lot more confident that the world I live in is utterly inconsistent with that god’s supposed ethos. There may well be religions out there whose gods are far more plausible as the universe’s creator, and there are definitely possible beings not represented in any religion that could be described as gods and could have created the universe.
Well, ‘42’ just has to be a programming error. That, or it’s turtles all the way down.
(Tempted to say it is a [white mouse] race, but they really don’t measure up.)
You can do quite a bit if you can choose the curvature of the space you are working in. Would you rather your pi be closer to 3 or 4?
In such a space, the idea of a ‘flat’ space where pi is the irrational number we all know and love could be deduced, but it would likely remain a curiosity for mathematicians.
Or something like that.
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Dunno, but this agnostic would say, ‘I told you numbers were important.’
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Haven’t read that in twenty-five years or more.
Who says the rest of our universe has any more detail than we can make out?
Maybe it turns out that the only way to go interstellar is by generation ship, and maybe we go ahead and do it, and when the people born on it have forgotten there’s a destination, they turn up next to a polygon.
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That’s not really true. Pi is not a geometric constant; the solutions of eix = -1 won’t change with curvature. It does affect the ratio of circles’ circumference to diameter, but even there you won’t get a different constant; instead you get something that depends on the size of the circle. It only converges to a constant as the circles become smaller and smaller, and that will be the same value as before, except maybe at some non-smooth points.
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just because a God is interpreted one way doesn’t mean should meet that interpretation
This is of course the simplest hypothesis, but unfortunately, appealing as it may be (I’d guess it’s the case myself), I think there’s no legitimate basis for saying it’s the most likely because we know nothing about any exterior context in which the assertion may or may not be judged to be true. Occam’s Razor is meaningful within a world in which induction is possible, and is useless for a singular case where there are no laws, rules, or other examples.
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I agree. But usually when people ask other people if they believe in God, or even in a God, they have in mind a specific tiny subset of equally theoretically possible gods and god-like beings. The universe being or not being a simulation would have essentially zero impact on this atheist’s belief in that subset of possible gods.
One way of seeing this would be to look at the curved space we live on: the surface of the earth. The geometric way of defining pi is to take the ratio of the circumference and the diameter (twice the radius). On a flat plane, you always get pi since all circles are similar. On the surface of the earth however, the ratio depends on the radius. This is particularly visible once the diameter of your circle gets past half of the Earth’s circumference. (Somewhere around 12,450 miles.) If you increase the length of your circle’s diameter beyond that, the circumference actually gets smaller. When your diameter is 24,900 miles, all of the Earth (except the point antipodal to your circle’s center) is covered and the circumference is zero.
Are physicists ok with non-smooth points? It seems like they would violate isotropy of space…
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Are you kidding?
The Zen Buddhists have pretty much nailed it, regardless of the unknowns.
That particular ‘religion’ totally transcends the concept because it’s something an agnostic can subscribe to and remain an agnostic.
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