[BrandoElFollito]

> who wants to believe in a benevolent God

What would be a benevolent God, in the context of our history and present? (wars, torture, floods, famine, ...)

(I am myself an atheist, curious of what drives people to believe in a deity)

[solarmist]

I'm agnostic but have come to believe in Buddhist beliefs here.

Life is suffering. You can literally only live by causing suffering in other living plants/animals. Therefore to live a happy life, you must come to terms with this and attempt to cause as little unnecessary suffering as possible.

Therefore if there is a God, they are either an impersonal one (think mother nature instead of the Christian god), or their understanding/views are so removed from our own that we have completely misunderstood and guidance they have tried to give us.

I lean toward the first view. Anything capable of creating the universe might be interested in us, but I highly doubt we’re their only (or even primary) interest.

[upwardbound]

Some possibilities include:

Maybe God is not omniscient or thinks in such non-human terms that human suffering didn't catch God's attention. E.g. maybe God operates primarily at the scale of quarks, and God wanted to create a universe full of quarks doing interesting things, and humans are an emergent behavior that God isn't aware of.

Maybe God is near-omniscient but is not omnipotent. E.g. maybe God had the power to create the universe from nothing, but can't affect what goes on in the universe. So maybe God has a hand on the universal/multiversal "off switch" and could choose to end all of everything if suffering outweighs joy, but maybe God is powerless to affect reality beyond this binary effect of enabling or disabling existence.

A third possibility similar to the second one is that maybe God sees all possible timelines, and cannot change events within a timeline, but can adjust the "volume knob" for the intensity of qualia in each timeline. In applied moral philosophy this volume knob is sometimes called "moral weight".

A fourth possibility, and a different way that God might be constrained in powers, is that perhaps God sacrificed their life in order to give life to the multiverse. You could imagine this as God wrestling against the nothingness of non-existence that came before God, and that the only way to win was to die in some way, so that God no longer exists but once did.

We currently know so little about physics that we don't know if we live in a singleton universe, an infinite multiverse (like in the many-worlds hypothesis), or a finite multiverse (like the Marvel movies, where you can assign a finite number to each universe because there are finitely many). And we don't know if we live in a block universe (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternalism_(philosophy_of_time... ) or if there is something else (e.g. a combination of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_presentism and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_return ).

Perhaps in the future we can use reasoning to determine the most likely answers to metaphysical questions, and if God does exist, is benevolent, and is still alive, maybe we can even find a way to communicate with God, perhaps through particle accelerators or whatever other equipment could affect the phenomena which are easiest for God to notice. I figure it doesn't hurt for us to think about what our civilization would ask God if given one chance to do so. If God really does control the "volume knob", we have a lot to be grateful for, such as the spontaneous arising of RNA life through excellent luck in prehistory. More recently, we barely survived the Cold War. I study Cold War history a lot, and many of those of us who do so estimate our odds of having survived up until now as being 1 chance in 3.