Nobody Has Ever Seen Nothing
Every piece of knowledge we possess is knowledge about something that exists. We observe things, measure them, model them, and argue about them. All of this occurs on the side of existence.
We have nothing from the other side. The situation is not one of weak evidence regarding non-existence. There is no evidence at all. No observation of a state of nothingness exists, because no observer is positioned to make one and no object is present to be observed.
This asymmetry is conventionally raised as a problem for the non-believer. One cannot prove that a god does not exist, and the honest position is therefore agnosticism. The argument is reasonable as far as it goes. However, the same gap runs in the other direction, and it runs considerably harder there.
The claim under consideration is that a god created the entire cosmos out of nothing. This claim requires a state of non-existence, which is precisely the state about which we have no evidence, no observation, and no means of forming one. Furthermore, it requires that state to contain a god who exists within it. Consequently, it was never a state of nothingness to begin with.
The position I encounter, then, holds that we can say nothing about non-existence and should therefore remain humble regarding god. It holds this while simultaneously advancing the most specific possible claim about what non-existence was like and who was standing in it.
Gods change shape because they belong to us
Nobody born today grows up and adopts a god who throws lightning when he is angry. This is not because that god was disproven in any formal sense. It is because we know how lightning forms, and no intention is present that requires explaining.
The need did not disappear. The object simply stopped clearing the threshold.
This pattern holds across the whole domain. Gods keep changing shape, and they change in step with what people know. We happen to occupy a monotheistic era, with Christianity, Islam, and Judaism holding the ground. Every arrangement before this one appeared equally permanent, and every one of them ended.
A belief survives only if it remains believable given the current state of knowledge. It follows that the god who gets believed is always bounded by the people believing it. This is not an attack on anyone. It is simply what it means to say that gods are products of the societies that hold them: the cumulative state of what we know about the cosmos, wearing a face.
The absence of a live picture of ourselves
This is the part I find most interesting, and I do not think it is said often.
As an individual, you possess real-time perception. Your processor runs continuously. You take in the present moment, update, and iterate, all day, without pause.
As a species, we have nothing of the kind. We examine history. We examine fossils, archives, and data. Everything we know about the whole is retrospective, because it comes from a record that has already aged. No real-time data generation machinery exists at the scale of humanity. We are always reading yesterday's report about ourselves.
The situation is the same as that of a language model with a knowledge cutoff. The model can be enormous and still be reasoning about a world it last observed some time ago.
Meanwhile the actual world runs trillions of parameters, each shifting simultaneously, and each with its own trillions shifting underneath. No human can process this. No computer available today can process it either. Quantum computing moves toward the problem, but it constitutes a baby step, and even that step appears far off from where we currently stand.
We are therefore permanently uncertain about the present state of the thing we are inside of. We cannot sit in that uncertainty comfortably, because feeling right and safe about our own beliefs is a survival instinct, and cognitive dissonance about our own lives is close to unbearable. Consequently, we build boundary conditions. We build systems that give us peace of mind and reduce the stress of not knowing.
God is one of the outputs of that machinery. It is probably the most successful one.
A preference for explanations we can follow
The brain attaches purpose to what it observes. The wave hit the shore, and someone must therefore be angry. This is an efficient way to survive a knowledge gap, and it is a poor way to be correct.
The habit was never dropped. It merely changed its clothes.
Decision science demonstrates this plainly. Decision makers prefer the options they can reason through. We still predict stock prices and project outcomes with linear formulations, not because reality is linear but because a straight line is interpretable to a human brain. The approach is inefficient and far from the truth, and we continue to use it, because a model you can follow feels safer than a model you cannot.
The instinct is the same as the one behind the thunder god. Only the suit is different.
Why I stay in the chaos
Nothing about my life improves if I hold a picture of reality that is not accurate. The comfort is real, and I do not deny it. However, it is comfort purchased by describing the world as something other than what it is, and I cannot locate the value in that.
I would rather inhabit a chaotic and uncertain world as it actually is. If safety is available anywhere, it is in exploring the realm, rather than in a story that closes the gap by decree.
The god I actually object to
I have no problem with individual belief. If it makes someone's life better, that belief is theirs, and I have no interest in arguing anyone out of it. I am not attempting to win anything.
What I object to is the sociological version: the god that stops being a private matter and becomes infrastructure, in the form of law, morality, and governance.
Historically, this is precisely where god has been most functional. Societies needed shared rules in order to exist as societies. Law emerged out of belief. The people who shared the same belief stayed together, and the books that carry the belief carry mostly moral codes. That is the real work god has been doing, more so than explaining the weather.
However, in a scenario where our collective consciousness develops far enough, that need disappears. We have not reached that point yet. I think we will.
There is also a specific reason I would want the human-made version. A secular framework is entirely our product. When it fails, and when someone abuses it, a person can be held responsible. When a religious framework fails, the responsibility sits with a god, and nobody has ever held a god to account. This is not a side effect. This is the problem itself.
Secular humanism is also the more democratic arrangement. Anyone can be a prophet. It elevates the human being, rather than something placed permanently above the human being.
The part I have not solved
If morality does not come from above, the question does not disappear. It becomes harder. Why be moral at all?
The golden rule is the conventional answer, and it is not sufficient. Morality is condition-dependent. The same action is moral in one situation and immoral in another. Furthermore, behaving immorally genuinely does maximize your interest on occasion, which is exactly why the question has teeth.
I do not have a finished answer. I would rather say so than borrow one.
Notes, not conclusions
These thoughts place me outside most of the rooms I am in. I used to regard that as a curse. It is more accurate to call it the price of the position, and I chose the position.
I am not writing this in order to be right. I write things out because that is how the machinery runs: thoughts generated in real time, from whatever information happened to accumulate in me up to today. If any of it sparks a different angle for someone reading, that is the entire point. Nothing here needs to be won.