Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
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Notes -
Not as such, no.
The cosmological and teleological arguments for the existence of God are pretty compelling to me, especially when paired with arguments about living in a simulation. Why does anything exist? Why does reality follow orderly laws? Occasionally a physicist or astronomer will make a bunch of noise about how it isn't mysterious, here have some equations about quantum vacuums or some shit, case closed, but from a philosophical perspective that's no answer at all. If the laws of the universe are themselves responsible for the existence of the universe, you still haven't explained why there are laws. The answer "well we have to stop somewhere" is an admission that they haven't accomplished the god-killing mathematics they've been using to sell their book after all.
On balance these arguments get you a lot less than most theists appear to think, since it seems like an intentional being capable of creating at least one universe is probably so alien that treating it like a loving father figure who wants to help you find your car keys is a stretch, and more than a stretch. And maybe there are just "fundamental laws" that are how everything is and how everything always will be--how could I possibly know? I can't even begin to check. But in my experience, nothing comes from nothing, and infinities exist only in the realm of mathematics, so the fact that I nevertheless find myself existing in a finite universe is pretty damn surprising.
Arguably, then, the most supernatural thing I have any experience with is me and my conscious existence, which for some reason goes away for a while every night. Emergent properties are kind of spooky!
So, closer to home--leaps of intuition and the generation of new knowledge are often kind of spooky. Occasionally--not more than two or three times a year, sometimes every couple of years--I will realize something and at the same time know it is true. (Trivial things, usually--so-and-so is pregnant even though she's not showing yet, they fired that guy because next month the board of directors wants to do this other thing, etc.) Sometimes this involves the prediction of future events. These realizations are almost never mistaken, and they are always arguably discernible based on facts that I actually know, but that I hadn't specifically put together in context. This seems like good evidence that there is a part of my brain that is making connections or processing information without my conscious effort. But I can understand why some people might treat that "aha!" feeling as a revelation from God or something.
But that's not the spooky part. The spooky part is how this sometimes leads to weird coincidences like Leibniz and Newton inventing calculus at the same time. The obvious hypothesis is that there was enough overlapping knowledge accumulated in a particular place at a particular time to generate these ideas, so multiple people arrive at the conclusion simultaneously. But then I read about, like, Anaximander realizing the rudiments of evolution (but not natural selection) in ancient Greece and notice that it took thousands of years for anyone to really do something with that idea, and I find myself re-puzzled by where it is we actually get "new" knowledge.
Would it be antagonistic or obnoxious if I jumped in to argue with some of this?
It would not!
Well, I suppose you could probably find a way to argue that is antagonistic or obnoxious, but just the fact of arguing by itself wouldn't reach that level automatically. This is a discussion website, so generally argument is not only permitted, but encouraged!
I hope it's not encouraged for third parties to jump into survey/top-level-question threads to tell responders how wrong they are. That would be a major deterrent from posting in those threads.
I don't remember exactly what I was originally going to say; but I hope that some of the following is relevant.
"Why does anything exist" seems like an obvious dead end. Something that doesn't exist can't be the cause of something that does, so if everything that exists (or existed in the past) needs a causal explanation, you just have an infinite regress. Figuring out what exactly one means by "exist" can be useful, but I can't see how that would point to anything like "the existence of God", rather than something like "the word means different things in different contexts, and in other contexts it doesn't mean anything".
Does reality follow orderly laws, or do we develop laws to model regularities in reality? A reality has to have some kind of consistent behavior for anything to inhabit and observe it, but ours is also full of disorderly and unexplained phenomena. From one perspective, we should expect to find ourselves in an orderly reality because it's a simpler hypothesis, and we should assign simpler hypotheses higher priority than more complicated ones. From another, we assume that our reality is orderly because it's a simpler hypothesis, and simpler hypotheses are easier to work with.
You say "nothing comes from nothing", but we generally don't think of math as "coming from" or "going" anywhere. It's just inherently, timelessly true, independently of any particular material reality. Iterative functions and sequences have initial values or states. The universal dovetailer function, after a sufficiently large finite number of steps, inevitably produces a finite universe containing you.
Are you not sure that other people have supernatural conscious existences? What would you consider evidence for or against it?
"Conscious" is also another word that seems to mean different things in different contexts, but that seems like a tangent. I don't know why creatures sleep or why we experience it the way we do.
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