[lastofus]

> I've started in the last year or so to turn to the church (Roman Catholic) and theism, both to find answers to some of life's mysteries, such as the origin of the Universe...

Accepting God created the universe just moves the big questions one level of indirection upward: Why does God exist? Why does God exist with the characteristics that he does (e.g. why is God X instead of Y)?

It's unclear how this is more satisfying on an intellectual level. It's only more satisfying on an emotional level, as it usually comes with the belief of a personal God that loves and wants the best for you, not to mention an afterlife.

[skissane]

> It's unclear how this is more satisfying on an intellectual level. It's only more satisfying on an emotional level, as it usually comes with the belief of a personal God that loves and wants the best for you, not to mention an afterlife.

This idea of treating intellect and emotions as a dichotomy rather than as two inseparable parts of a harmonious whole has a history – it goes back to the ancient Greeks. Maybe we should question that idea, rather than just assuming it must be true?

And, is an afterlife really that implausible? Putting "supernatural" accounts of it to one side, how sure can you be that the quantum immortality hypothesis is false? Or: in an infinite future, any event with non-zero probability, no matter how remote its chance, will almost certainly eventually happen. Since the probability of our spontaneous resurrection from the dead (through thermal and/or quantum fluctuations) is unimaginably tiny yet strictly speaking non-zero, in a spatiotemporally infinite universe (as in eternal inflation), almost surely it will eventually happen. If the universe is infinite, an afterlife is almost certain; we don't really know whether the universe is infinite, so let's say that's 50-50, which makes an afterlife 50-50 – even if just as a Boltzmann brain. Of course, you can argue against this if you make certain assumptions about the criterion of personal identity, but we really don't know if those assumptions are true – which brings the probability of an afterlife back to 50-50. And then, if the simulation hypothesis is true (another 50-50), it would be very easy for our simulators to give us an afterlife if they wanted, and they might even feel ethically obliged to do so.

If the probability of an afterlife is actually 50-50, why do some people insist its probability is close to zero? Emotional reasons, perhaps? If you don't accept the religious claim that an afterlife is going to be fundamentally just–eternity suddenly becomes terrifying. What if our eternal fate is to spend aeons as a Boltzmann brain perpetually slipping in and out of existence in the cold darkness of space, a mind whose experiences have the bare minimum of coherence to count as experiences of a mind? What if our simulators are mischievous rather than benevolent, and have designed for us an afterlife in which they have fun at our expense?

[SoftTalker]

Humans are fundamentally emotional, not intellectual.