Quote Originally Posted by mutton View Post
Is your favour for omnibenevolence purely for personal reasons? Imagine God as a scientist-like entity who creates the world as an experiment and merely observes. Is this scenario inconceivable or abhorrent to you? Also sorry if you explained this earlier.
I know this was directed at gwahir, but this possibility seems not inconceivable but rather inconsequential. Why would we treat such a god differently we treat, say, Da Vinci or Einstein? As in, respected, perhaps revered, but not worshiped. To the extent that a God does not expect anything of believers and punish non-believers, I'm not sure there is a difference between God and no-God other than simple curiosity and the quest for knowledge about the nature of reality.

To put it simply: if God is just there, a being floating around, maybe the spiritual energy in the universe, maybe occupying another dimension we can't conceive of (however one defines god, and however god could possibly exist), I would be interested to know that such a God existed, I would find it fascinating, but ultimately it would be like finding out that there was another type of galaxy we didn't know about. Obviously proving the existence of a God would be significantly more profound than that, but it would not change my life at all. I would imagine most atheists are significantly more non-religious than they are atheistic. I can't speak for everybody, it's just the nature of atheism that you are open to and interested in scientific possibilities (if I am generalizing too much about atheism here let me know, I can really only speak for myself and the few atheists have had real conversations with about the subject). That being the case, my life would remain the same in the presence of a God that is not attached to any religion.

Of course, if it were PROVEN to me without a shadow of a doubt that one of the religions actually has it right (let's call that extremely unlikely), then I would willingly follow that religion as closely as I could. But to be blunt, I don't see that happening, so it's not something I have to worry about.