Ross Douthat: belief

Transcript context

…The Christian God is a demiurge. There’s some higher god who created that and maybe many other gods. It seems once you even consider the logic of the simulation hypothesis, you become fairly agnostic about the true nature of the ultimate god. Right. I think the weakness of the simulation hypothesis is that we don’t have any actual evidence for it. It’s incredibly speculative, and it assumes a capacity of what you might call subcreation that is completely speculative and not in evidence. I wouldn’t dismiss the simulation hypothesis any more than I would dismiss the various multiversal hypotheses that have ended up substituting in at least some intelligent people’s minds for what I think of as the rather more obvious likelihood that the old-fashioned religious worldview is correct. I don’t dismiss them out of hand, but I think you are in the position of multiplying hypotheses, multiplying speculations. In the life that we have, a certain parsimony is probably wiser. We have access to one pretty big, complicated, interesting, varied world. That world appears, I would say, to have been fashioned for a reason. That reason appears to include us. There appears, from spiritual experiences, to be intermediate powers and then probably some sort of higher power. I think working with all of that, rather than adding on six levels of speculation about further chains that we can’t see, is probably the better part of valor. But surely, it’s odd to, say, not dismiss the Trinity, not dismiss the intermediate elf beings, and then invoke Occam’s razor, right? You could just be a Muslim. There’s one God indivisible. That’s that. Or be a Unitarian.…

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