(As a preamble) I read a philosopher tweet saying something like: the evidence for (belief in?) god is now overwhelming. … What!? But then think: what could such evidence be?
Would a radio-telescope analyst one day announce that, just beyond star KXF-438734, there seemed to be a very large object, which, though they are still working on confirmation, looked very much like it might be god …?
That seems off somehow. Whatever evidence you had, why would you think it was for god? Evidence does not seem to work here.
You do not believe in god like you do a table. So the atheist counter campaign to disprove god-ists is ultimately misguided, because the original claim did not make sense anyway. But there is something more here …
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You cannot have evidence of something there is only one of. Is that not right? Evidence requires a model that it fits, and a model requires multiple instances of what it models. So a unique thing cannot have a model. And without a model, what does the evidence mean?
Yet do we not have a model or models of the universe (puny nonetheless)? No. We only have models of parts of the universe. (The Higgs field? – a field, ie one of a concept; a map of a particular place? – an instance of the type ‘map’.). A single thing just is what it is. It does not represent or mean anything else.
If you had the bit-string that represented the whole universe, it would not be information. But is it not true that if information exists it is findable? (Info is a difference that makes a difference, so unfindable info would have to make no difference to anything, and so be a contradiction.). That must then mean that we could never actually have a bit-string of the universe. Is that right?
We could conceivably make such a huge bit-string, but the problem is this: we could not know what the bits meant, what they mapped to. But can we not make bit-strings of each part of the universe, then concatenate them? Each clutch of bits for the state of each yoctometer cube?
Imagine a 2-bit universe: two squares, black or white, describable by a bit-string of 2. Now, you are given such a bit-string, and read the first bit, a 0. Where is it recorded what it means, what you should do with it? (This illusory picture seemed to be of information, but was not.).