> What's more, superficially at least, it makes more sense to believe in a supreme, essentially divine creator than it does to believe visibly enormous complexity deriving from a mostly unknown nothing.
It can't make more sense to believe in one entirely made up thing vs another since they're both made up.
> I'd say that this more than anything has been responsible for virtually all cultures in history believing in supreme, divine creators of one kind or another vs no historical cultures that I know of believing in the universe springing from random chance and hand-wavey nothingness behind it.
Ascribing rationality to faith is an interesting supposition. It's all based on emotions, such as fear of death, on the side of the believers and greed on the side of belief-providers.
> Though, the idea of being the creations of a tremendously powerful and conscious being that created a universe hospitable to our use and for our potential given by all our evident cognitive and material tools seems to me a lot more plausible than being subject to an accidental existence in a gargantuan ice cream environment.
No, it just seems more comforting to you. That doesn't make it any more plausible.
>It can't make more sense to believe in one entirely made up thing vs another since they're both made up.
It makes sense to believe in Newton's laws, which he made up, even though we know the study of kinematics flowing from them is wrong. We have observed them being wrong. Someone else made up a complicated explanation of why and when Newton's laws are wrong. That guy's theories formed the basis for some incredible stuff that works really well, and he's probably wrong too... but I'll believe them both.
For anyone curious, this is an example of the Continuum Fallacy [1]. Interestingly, that wiki page happens to use Newton's laws as an example:
"For example, Newton's gravitational theories are "wrong" (they're a rough approximation) and Einstein's gravitation is almost certainly "wrong" too (it doesn't easily blend with quantum mechanics), but it would be a spectacular fallacy to suggest that they are equally wrong because there is such a continuous shading between "makes rough predictions" and "makes more accurate predictions" when it comes to scientific theories. Saying that the Earth is flat is wrong, and saying that it's spherical is also wrong — it's an oblate spheroid, roughly — but both statements do not have the same degree of "wrongness" on a continuum."
This is not an example of the 'Continuum fallacy', but you believe it so because you are thoroughly convinced that religious thinking is vacuous.
Unless you are denying Newton's agency or participation, he made those laws up. That's how articulation of reality works.
When you make a strong binary conjecture, you invite counterproof. You object to the wording because you find it beneath the dignity of those laws to label it so; on that point, we agree.
It can't make more sense to believe in one entirely made up thing vs another since they're both made up.
> I'd say that this more than anything has been responsible for virtually all cultures in history believing in supreme, divine creators of one kind or another vs no historical cultures that I know of believing in the universe springing from random chance and hand-wavey nothingness behind it.
Ascribing rationality to faith is an interesting supposition. It's all based on emotions, such as fear of death, on the side of the believers and greed on the side of belief-providers.
> Though, the idea of being the creations of a tremendously powerful and conscious being that created a universe hospitable to our use and for our potential given by all our evident cognitive and material tools seems to me a lot more plausible than being subject to an accidental existence in a gargantuan ice cream environment.
No, it just seems more comforting to you. That doesn't make it any more plausible.