We’ve gone in circles before about the rest and I’m happy to give you the last word, but I think there’s a matter of definition we should clarify:
How do you define “faith”? I define it as a “belief without evidence”.
Following that, how would one go about finding evidence to justify one’s personal preferences? Sure, I can provide evidence that I really do seem to enjoy strawberries more than blueberries. But what evidence is there for why I should enjoy them more? And providing evidence as to how I enjoy them more (via chemical analysis, neural transmitters, etc) is sidestepping the issue.
Ultimately, my point is that beliefs without evidence (whatever you want to call those) are not always bad things. It is a part of science to recognize the limits of science. And just as admitting “I don’t know” is not shameful, so is “I can’t justify that”.
I believe that we live in a simulation. I find it incredibly unlikely that our universe is the one real universe out of the billions of simulations that would doubtlessly be created in the real universe. I do accept that I could be wrong and that I do reside in the original universe.
I, a theist, believe that more likely than not there is a God, but I’m willing to concede that it’s quite possible that there is not. Only fools believe with absolute certainty that there is (or isn’t) a God. There are miracles and horrors enough to give reasonable people the seeds of doubt either way.
I think I read about this somewhere. The idea is that, sooner or later, we’ll develop virtual realities so good that we won’t be able to tell the difference between the artificial reality and the real one, if we haven’t already. If, one supposes, there are infinite universes, or even infinite planets on which this can occur (or even just a very large number, doesn’t have to be infinite), then there may be many more than one of these simulations already in place - maybe even an infinite number of them. It doesn’t take long before our chances of being in one of these simulations are far greater than our chances of being in the real world.
I don’t smoke, I just think it’s unlikely that I would be in the one real universe out of who knows how many…considering that entities in a fine-grained simulation could very well make their own simulations, it seems very improbable that this is the real one.
