Aliens from other planets are one thing, the sort of thing weird low-status UFO cultists believe.

"Aliens" from outside our universe, who happened to have created it, and maybe even want to have a personal relationship with us (otherwise why would they try to send messages encoded in alpha?) are gods under another name.

..., Hinduism ...

Do you know where the word "avatar" comes from?

Aside from the fact that having godly power doesn't necessarily correlate well with an ease of understanding life-forms...

The universe less like a carefully painted mural in which humans and other life forms were mapped out in exquisite and intricate detail, and more like a big empty petri dish set in a warm spot billions of years ago. The underlying specifications for creating the universe seem to be pretty simple mathematically (a few laws and some low-entropy initial conditions). The complex part is just the intricate structures that have arisen over time.

back in uni I was playing around with artificial neural networks and genetic algorithms.

I'd found the AI classes interesting and wanted to play around with some of the methods.

I created some agents, a little 2d environment, a fitness function and a framework for breeding.

I left it running overnight and came back to little agents merrily trundling round my 2d environment and performing extremely well.

I had no idea how they were achieving it, I just knew that they were.

I could see the state of every node in their ANN but that didn't mean I could easily decode the states and weightings to figure out their "thought processes".

And that was just a little ANN with about 100 nodes.

Even if you can create something and see all it's constituent parts doesn't mean you understand everything about it.

Parsimony.

Even if the fine-structure constant can indeed vary (which is something I intuitively find unlikely by anthropic reasoning, as it would pretty much screw up chemistry as we know it), god (or "intelligent designer" or "simulation programmer", if you prefer) isn't the simplest explanation for it.

God or gods aren't necessarily omnipotent in all religions.
Just because you don't believe in textbook Catholicism it doesn't mean that you are an atheist.

Hello and welcome to LessWrong!

I admire your reasons for joining. It is easy to find a group or circle that does not challenge you and then rest on your laurels. Seeking out disagreement and criticism is a hard first step for a lot of people. But don't worry... you will certainly find both here! Not that that is a bad thing.

I see you've already added to the Discussion forum. Good on you for diving in and starting some new conversation. If you have some ideas you want to share and get critiqued but feel they are not fully formed enough for a post of their own, try the Open Thread. Even Open Thread conversations can be quite engaging and constructive (and heated! Don't forget heated).

Also, I don't know if you've read any of the LW literature people tend to reference, but, given your interest in refining your ideas, this) set of posts might interest you.

From your reply, I don't think I was clear enough about what I meant.

I'm a theist, or not, dependent on my attitude to a purported God, not on a purported God's attitude toward me, and not on anything the God does, intends, or wants.

Let the usual All Powerful Celestial Psychopath actually exist. Knows all, sees all, and will judge all in the end. Let me know it, not just believe it. No faith. Overwhelming evidence.

Knowing that still doesn't make me a theist.

I think modern day theism is best characterized as a belief in an unchosen obligation to be an adoring slave.

I saw the best (and most horrifying) example while driving past a church one day. I'm still kicking myself for not taking a picture. If anyone can place the phrase, as I'm guessing it is some quote or allusion, please provide the reference.

"Though I burn in the flames of Hell, I will Love the Lord my God."

Can I still call myself an atheist if I allow the possibility of a creator in this context?

Sure. Theism is best defined in terms of an attitude toward a being, not about it's existence, what it has done, or what it is capable of doing.

You might want to make the signal hard to find. If it's your test for intelligence, the harder it is to find the alpha mail and construct a response, the higher the level of intelligence it would select for.

Maybe no puzzles are seen from our perspective simply because we aren't on the order of magnitude of the level of intelligence that any who have the power to simulate a universe like ours would be looking for.

The thought of being able to communicate with an external intelligence is thought provoking enough for me that I decided to write this as my first post here. Who knows?

Very good post, but I'd suggest you remove Who knows? from your argumentation arsenal. It opens the door to treating your favorite hypotheses with undue weight.