Looks More Like a Puma

I wrote the dialog and my talented sister drew the comic.

Here’s my answer to the question posed in the last post:

I will answer your question with a question. How would you distinguish between the following two possibilities?

(1) The “real world” exists.

(2) The “real world” is actually a complex computer program created by sentient machines to keep human beings under control. Your Second Life avatar is actually a third life avatar.

Or maybe you’re a brain in a vat. Or maybe you’re just plain insane. You can’t deny that any one of these theories is logically possible. Somehow, though, I don’t think you’re going to wake up tomorrow crushed by uncertainty as to whether or not the real world is real.

It is true that your “Cosmic Trickster” theory is logically possible. I reject it for three reasons:

1) It fails Occam’s Razor. While you can’t prove it false, there’s not any evidence for it either.

2) It is my experience that malicious deceit generally requires some motive. It’s hard to imagine what an omnipotent god would stand to gain by trickery.

3) The theory is, for practical purposes, useless. Even if I knew it was true, I wouldn’t know what to do about it.

From debunkingchristianity.blogspot.com:

One question that I have for religious believers is how they would distinguish between the following:

(1) An all-powerful deity created and guides the universe ultimately towards a good purpose;

and

(2) An all-powerful deity created and guides the universe ultimately towards an evil purpose, but have chosen to maliciously presented himself as benevolent to play a trick on created beings.

I mean, since believers are big on creating conceptual space to make their positions logically POSSIBLE, then it is also possible that God is a Cosmic Trickster who takes pleasure in fooling them.

How could one refuse (2)? Only based upon one’s religious beliefs that (1) must be true. The problem is that one’s beliefs that (1) must be true could be part of the cosmic joke in scenario (2), and thus there is no real way to differentiate between (1) and (2) for a religious believer.

Hmm…

Christians in the audience, what do you think? I have my own ideas on how to answer this question, but first I’d like to open the floor to y’all. Has this fellow (finally after 2000 years) refuted Christianity?