[evincarofautumn]

Whereas I grew up in an agnostic household, and I’m still pretty strongly agnostic, especially as I’ve gotten into constructive mathematics (where we talk about provability, not truth). Maybe unlike you two, I just didn’t have anything to reject, so there was no need to look into the “other side”?

I like to say “if a god made me, it made me unable to believe in it”, which is certainly an interesting thought exercise, but not exactly inspiring.

[PaulAJ]

You might like to read "The Minds I", a collection of philosopy edited by Hofstadter & Dennett. It has a number of pieces that address this issue pretty directly, including "Non Serviam" by Stanislaw Lem. In it the writer describes the fictional field of "personics" (we would say "artificial life") and considers the role of a human experimenter in creating artificially intelligent beings that inhabit a virtual world in a computer. From there it considers the question of what rights and obligations creator and creation have to each other. For instance, what would we think of a human who created such a virtual world and then demanded that the inhabitants worship their creator?