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comment by Finarfin
Finarfin  ·  4348 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Do physicists believe in God?

I think there might be some conflation between the questions "Do you believe in a vast, superior, nigh-omniscient form of consciousness beyond the range of our observation" and "Do you believe in the Judeo-Christian god." To the latter question, I have to agree with their vehement and derisive "NO." It's just too ridiculous. But if you consider how little we know about the scope of the universe, as well as the realms beyond what we naively call the universe, there really is no limit to the “weirdness” that can be discovered. After all, weirdness is just the incompatibility of one hypothetical with the observed state of things. But when you’re talking about observations beyond the universe, there’s nothing to compare that to, so nothing can be dismissed as “too weird to exist.” So when I think of this, I am filled with an incredible sense of wonder and hope. Consider how difficult it would be for a phantom observer on some distant moon to discover life on Earth—this utterly amazing and unpredictable derivative phenomenon of the laws of physics. An “observer” who knew nothing about life could never predict it based on his tabletop experiments among the rocks and careful astronomical measurements. So what sort of fantastic, bafflingly rare (by universal standards), unpredictable phenomena are we missing? Some analogue to life? A consciousness as big as the sun? A network of interconnected organisms, like a Great Barrier Reef as wide as a galaxy? These sorts of thoughts aren’t scientific, of course, but what you might call rational dreaming.