What have feelings got to do with it? Agnosticism is a philosophy for people who think with their brains instewd of their heart and spleen. A hard path, but honest.
You are implying intellectual superiority and uniqueness. How convenient. We can discuss that when you stop beating your wife.
Agnosticism is the only honest stance
for people who don't know. But there's a difference between not knowing because nobody knows, and not knowing because your education isn't sufficient.
The gulf between 'I do not know' and 'it is not known' is enormous and ever widening; It's not been possible for a single individual to know all of the things known to humankind since at least the Neolithic.
It IS known that no gods that intervene in Earthly or human events are possible. If Politesse doesn't know that, that's just a gap in their education. It's OK; We all have those.
If someone asks you what the capital of Burkina Faso is, it's perfectly reasonable to reply "I don't know".
It's NOT reasonable to reply "It is unknowable, and all honest people would admit that". Particularly when people are waving maps of Africa in your face, and you are ignoring them because you don't think mere geographers could possibly answer what you have ignorantly declared to be a purely philosophical question.
That the capital of Burkina Faso is not an unknowable philosophical mystery is obvious to anyone who knows geography. That the existence of gods, ghosts, souls, and a whole bunch of other supernatural phenomena is also not an unknowable philosophical mystery is obvious to anyone who knows physics.
Agnosticism today is the art of ignoring people who tell you it's Ouagadougou, in order to preserve your self image as brave enough to declare all geographers to be pompous fools who claim to have forbidden and impossible knowledge.
I remain, as always, interested in any meaningful, coherent argument for atheism (not in the form of bluster). I have not made any argument against Burkina Faso's capital being Ougadougou. I am aware that a great many people believe as you do.
What is the claim, in fact, that would apply to atheism, but be rationally equivalent to "Ougadougou is the capital of Burkina Faso"? How would you state it, in form "
x is the
y of
z"? What obvious, researchable empirical fact am I overlooking?
There cannot be any unknown forces that can act on matter at scales larger than an atomic nucleus, and smaller than a solar system.
The implications of this are unavoidable, when considered logically. They rule out the gods described by all of the popular religions of human history.
You are neglecting to look at the fact that, if the universe is an operation happening on a piece of "superphysical" hardware, with each particle served by one or more process cores once per frame of time, with messages dispatched to logically "adjacent" process cores, and all represented in their quantum numbers literally by some digital value...
It does not matter what forces and patterns of behavior and physics are operant within the behavior of the system.
To do something all the god has to do is change the numbers on the hardware by whatever means they have, entirely outside the normal rules of the executing process.
There is no rule in the physics of Dwarf Fortress, no visibility from within it's time dimension or possible interactions, that could cause my arrow flying through the air to hit something on the other side of a wall short of it not being a wall but a "fortification". To get around this, just tell the os from an entirely different non-dwarf-physics process to flip a bit on physical memory. Now without apparent, and entirely without physical cause (though retaining superphysical causality), the arrow is on the other side of the wall.
This is, in fact, one of the reasons I isolate "god" to "creator god" or at least to "not specifically bound as a player purely and solely extant in the simulation": only this class of entity gets a side channel past the requirements of physics.
Gods aren't said to merely
be able to do these things though.
They are said to actually do them. And constantly. Every prayer, every death where a soul transfers to the afterlife, every miraculous intervention, would violate the rules - which is perfectly possible for your "god" to do - but which would leave all these unexplained events; A close look at reality would reveal stuff that doesn't conform with the rules as we understand them to be.
We looked; No such stuff occurs.
The god you describe might well be possible, but it's not any of the gods any of the world's religions have ever posited. And it wouldn't be undetectable; It's effects on reality would be inexplicable but not absent.
As I've pointed out, it doesn't matter what gods are said to do. What matters is evidence of what they actually do.
You are in addition making many assumptions about "the rules".
Gods in mythology are said to do things. Gods in the mythology of my world are said to do things, too. I learn a great deal of what they are said to do just watching the denizens build their statuary and carve their reliefs. Sadly, they don't really talk about historical events.
The thing is, generally they don't.
And let's be clear here we are not talking about "my god". Assuming I'm not "The God, capital G nice to meet you," and let's be clear I really hope I'm not because hoooooooo boy would I have some 'splainin to do... Well,
I am personally the god I am talking about. I repeat I am not the god of this universe. Or at least I hope I'm not. It would be a really asshole thing to do to be a god of a whole universe that was any more complex in the thoughts of it's denizens than an ant farm.
I can point at a universe. I created it. It has physics, and denizens, those denizens have states and are hosted into a state machine, and as such make choices on the basis of their personality traits...
If there was complex enough agency code behind the denizens they may even be capable of learning, growing, and so on. They're not; they don't have to be for the sake of this discussion.
The point is, if they were more capable of it, I know that I most certainly would not be an obvious god. I mean history is littered with stories both real and made up and something between of something trying to reveal truth and getting killed for it.
I've written stories where a god spawns in and gets killed a few times for the trouble of being what it is. And let's be clear, when I do spawn in, into the world that I created, it is into the body of a freshly materialized sociopath that nobody questions the arrival of and I promptly wander off into the wilderness to find a shallow pool and pray I don't drown. If I survive that, it's on to mutilating horses, and then eating them when I get tired and hungry.
Then I go on an adventure, kill something big and scary and legendary and really easy to kill and then rob a civilization of priceless treasures it has produced across the span of some 40-60 years and with likely tens or hundreds of lives lost to madness and siege.
And the fact is, assuming we can't see gravity or other such waves caused by the appearance of person-sized masses here even as late as 30 years ago, it's as undetectable as it needs to be.
The bigger tell is seed manipulation, and we can't understand that... So, something just occurred to me.
There was an experiment done on a quantum replay where a particle was shoved back into a prior state comprised of it's original constituent particles following a probability wave collapse. When it destabilized again, it destabilized along the same collapse vector, if I recall properly.
It may be possible to detect such an event perhaps by seeing if it ever does, in fact, start resolving along a different trajectory? Perhaps set up similar switches elsewhere and even trilaterate such events?
It wouldn't test for all circumstances; if the resolution of the event is uncoupled from it's gravitational bindings, for example. It would be fascinating, regardless to see if there are such events as cause shifts in the probability wave collapse patterns of things.
But it's not like you could easily track down someone just materializing one day in the wilderness in 1200bce, mutilating some horses, and then fucking off to join an army. It wouldn't even track on the radar.
