By dkl9, written 2025-013, revised 2025-013 (0 revisions)
A mechanical or alien scientist looks at the world, guided by Occam's razor and mathematics. If looking naively, they will conclude there to be no god. If looking wisely, they'd likely conclude that just the same, but for me to prove that would need me to prove that I'm wise, in the relevant cosmic sense. Either way, the tendencies of universal logic make atheism a sort of "ground state". If atheism is the ground, generic logic is gravity.
I, you, and many others we know are probably human. Human minds complicate theologic inquiry: our neural firmware prepares us to encounter and simulate minds. Switching to atheism tends to be one-way, like falling to the ground. To start uncertain about God would be to start above the ground, perhaps on a separate surface above. Looking for minds around us leads us to slide off slowly, if at all. The human mind adds friction.
Different humans follow such intuitions at different rates. This maps to different frictions on mind-objects map to different materials. Autistic people tend to have especially slippery minds, in this analogy.
You form your religious starting point as a child, based on the people around you. Beliefs start on the platform shared with family and peers. People sometimes convert away from their family's religions. Gravity and friction only move an object when it's in midair or on a steep-enough slope. Thus these "platforms" of communal belief are variously sloped.
The less compelling the religion, the steeper its slope, and the more often believers slide off, i.e. stop believing. You stay religious when your mind's friction — your intuition for the world to be run by a mind — exceeds the slope of the theology you start with. Otherwise, you fall to atheism, or to another theology that happens to lie below the one you started on.
Gravity acts only down. Friction acts only to reduce movement. Once someone becomes atheist, they'll likely stay that way. An open mind is a light one. With a light enough mind, the winds in abstract-theology-land may pick them back up into believing in a god.