Girl Genius has visited that border between magic and science. Note also the first two frames, in which the spark rational mind is put to use in pursuit of spark emotional needs. "Look. I'm a girl with needs. Okay?"

Raymond Smullyan is a gold mine for different cached thoughts. Maybe I should start finding quotes on random pages for these threads.

all arguments online seem to follow that format. It's like a giant straw man ate a radioactive non sequitor and began rampaging through downtown Tokyo.

-- jman3030

This is probably the piece you meant.

That seems like an easy case to test, provided you have some way to re-light the candle.

Would it be correct to say you mean "should" in the wishful thinking sense of "we really want this outcome," rather than something normative or probabilistic?

Almost all relationships end in unhappiness or death. Or unhappiness leading to death.

I could be wrong, but I'd like to see some evidence.

--- Mark Liberman

Example of teachers not getting past Guessing the Teacher's Password: debating teachers on the value of pi. Via Gelman.

Is "a supreme force" the kind of thing you can add up like troop movements? A main point of the original argument is that the supreme forces claimed are mutually exclusive, whereas troop counts are not.

If the counter-claim is to be as vague as, "There is something real about spirituality," we can all agree on some level. Some people will go with the level of common problems in human psychology that lead to the delusion of spirituality. Others will go with the existence of a supreme being. Taking these points together and adding them up to "something real" is not solid conceptualization. (Similar problems with adding together the belief in a supreme being and those who explicitly believe in a non-personal supreme force.)

Alternate approach: taking the Simulation Hypothesis seriously means having a significant prior for the existence of some kind of creator. I doubt that theists or people accepting the Simulation Hypothesis would say that their beliefs mostly overlap on the important points.