Belief is not “inherently religious”, religion is one of many kinds of beliefs. Science is centered on a particular epistemology—a belief about what makes a belief justified—rather than opposed to belief.
Isn't that a meaningless distinction? If I've tested my hypothesis, isn't "believe" perfectly fine as a label for how you think about it then? It is, but when people use that word they often have in mind that the source of the knowledge is important -- it isn't. I think that is what's behind most of the "I believe in Science" statements. What's really important is rather how vulnerable to attack an idea is.
Edit: "believe in" also tends to get used with the implication that a time needs to arrive where you make a decision that a hypothesis is true. That also goes against Popperian epistemology, which says rather that all ideas remain subject to correction forever.
Similarly, one could argue that supernatural beings from alternative universes are constantly intervening in local events, but they make sure to do it only when the scientists aren't watching.
Personally I don't really care if we're working out the rules of the simulation or the rules of base reality, as we can't distinguish between the two.
The atheism catechism already has an entry for this, it's the teapot hypotheses. It goes, "nobody can refute my claim that there is a teapot in the asteroid belt, but nobody should believe it either."
That sounds like a good argument to me although I don't know the metaphysical philosophical details of why. (Occam's razor?) No matter our stances in abstract epistemology we must all agree we can't go around believing every irrefutable claim we or anyone else thinks of, at minimum because many are contradictory.
That’s not the hypothesis, afaik - we’re beings generated inside the simulation rather than ‘brains in a vat’ experiencing it. Science could address veracity if (say) whatever was running the simulation chose to make it apparent, either directly (by revelation) or by some quirk of how physics operated, for example if we detected some (reflected) method to control how reality was being generated.
Saying that, I’ve pondered that giving every person their own entire universe where they had free will but everyone else was a simulated non-player character was one way of solving the religious problem of evil - nothing evil actually happens to real humans, it’s just a scripted set of tests to see whether the particular individual chooses to be good or bad.
Or that I'm just a cloud of consciousness dreaming about this entire experience, human, earth, the universe all being my imagination.
I don't see why it would dismay an atheist specifically. It's just an untestifiable statement like many other metaphysical thought experiments. Surely anyone with a basic read of philosophy would have encountered some.
Thus, it is not a hypothesis but a conjecture. (Or, perhaps more accurately, an omphaloskeptic intellectual autoeroticism.)
> much to the apparent dismay of the fundamentalist atheists
Neither a fundamentalist nor an atheist myself, but I’ve never seen any of the latter “dismayed” by the fact that people can string together words to create a proposition outside of the domain of scientific inquiry.
> Similarly, one could argue that supernatural beings from alternative universes are constantly intervening in local events
One could assert that easily, but to argue it one would need first to establish some framework in which something could be offered to support that conclusion.
You could have made your point without being rude to the parent.