What would have to be different for you to stop believing in God?

[Chanakya]

An interesting thing about the 'just a simulation' idea is that, if true, then the next-level-up running the simulation must have access to an amount of energy we'd find unfathomable, to be able to run such a complex simulation.

If I were them I'd just 'simulate' it on the cheap by setting up a universe and kicking it off to hopefully settle into stable physics conditions and become something interesting after a dozen billion years.

Sometimes it's easier to just bake a cake than to model one perfectly.

Not sure if entities that actually simulated us --- if that were the case --- would necessarily be as limited by energy constraints as we, at our level of tech, ourselves are. After all we have practically infinitely more energy at our disposal than our ancestors from say 10k years ago.

But sure, that's one way to go, what you suggest. ...And I enjoyed your cake analogy!

 

[Chanakya]

One more thing, thank you for including the word "practically."


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Haha, cool that you caught that! ...Just to clarify, because there's two very different ways to interpret that: What I'd meant is that for some claims that we reject, it is possible to do that directly and without shielding behind qualifications; while for all of the rest, which is practically all claims, if one were to generalize, our rejection is necessarily limited by those qualifications that we'd been discussing.