Thread by @sarahsalviander

Modern physics is one of the many reasons I will NEVER go back to atheism.

Try this exercise.

(A) Assume your senses and capacity to reason are unreliable. Your thoughts are delusions.

What do you do?

Accept that you're deluded, or reject this idea and proceed to...

(B) Assume your senses and capacity to reason are reliable.

Reason tells you modern physics is a reliable model of reality. However, modern physics also predicts that in a strictly materialist universe it's statistically far more likely that you're a "brain in a vat"...

i.e. a brain that has spontaneously fluctuated into existence and hallucinating a false sense of reality, than that you exist in a complex and highly ordered universe that spontaneously produced and organized itself.

This spawns two possibilities...

(i) Accept that you're far more likely to be in the hallucinating-a-false-reality scenario. However, this means modern physics is false, so there's no basis for the claim that you're likely a product of stochastic processes. You're now at a logical impasse...

You either return to (A) or

(ii) Assume, against the materialist odds, that reality is what you perceive it to be, that you're an embodied being with agency and the capacity to reason, and that modern physics correctly models reality.

The only thing you lack is a firm basis for this assumption. Without it, you're either back to the logical impasse or you have to admit that the basis for your beliefs is just dumb, blind faith.

What do you do?

When I was an atheist, I was deeply disturbed by this exercise. I eventually realized that the existence of a transcendent Rational Mind of some kind that gave form to material existence, to my being, to my capacity for reason, was the most elegant solution to this problem.

The choice came down to:

(a) accepting that my thoughts were probably delusions;

(b) accepting reality, but on a hopelessly irrational foundation; or

(c) accepting the existence of a Rational Mind.

I simply couldn't bring myself to choose (a) or (b). That's why I'm a theist.