The funny thing is this, let's say that an entity is outside of time, an entity that maps 1:1 in every practical way to the theists God.

Putting aside the bidirectional issues of non-interaction, what if mankind, or the universes collection of agents (if there are others and we interact with them) at some future point manages to create a supercomputer or entity in a substrate that exists outside of our time in the causal sense.

As long as we don't apocalypse ourselves or self destruct or get distracted from self preservation and miss the asteroid that ends us - we end up bringing this thing in our imagination to reality, just like all the other stuff we imagined and subsequently made.

Maybe God is real we just haven't made it yet.

This is all imagination of course, a fun thought about possibilities, humans tend to make the things they imagine and desire if it's actually possible.

How does this fit with those of us who found one, then later on decided it was silly and gave up the whole idea?

Good question. Perhaps you found the wrong one?

I mean there’s such a wide selection you can even believe in simulations these days.

Or if that’s still too much there’s always the Pascal’s wager God. Still better than nothing.

I find Pascal's wager is of the same nature as Aquinas' Five Ways to prove God, or accelerationists about the inevitability of a Singularity: believing that your own rational argument can be the basis to prove a fact about reality merely because it feels internally consistent.

Needless to say, I don’t find them at all convincing. This 'nothing' is much better than catching unconvincing unneeded supernatural entities.

The Wager doesn't attempt to prove God, it merely states that you might as well worship, because the cost is small and the potential payoff is huge.

It falls apart because, based on what's actually known, there's no reason to think worshipping might be the thing that condemns you to hell, and not doing so gets you into heaven, rather than the other way around.

Not to mention that "the cost is small" is in the eye of the beholder. I've known people who spend a significant part of their week on religious activities, and that's a huge opportunity cost.

Granted, if your belief is based on Pascal's Wager, and is only to hedge your bets, presumably you wouldn't spend much time on religion. But that also raises the question of whether that style of "belief" would be good enough for whatever god might exist.

Granted^2, spending half of your life devoted to a religion could be deemed a small cost when weighed against the eternity afterward. But then you have to think about the idea that you'll have wasted half of your one and only life if the afterlife turns out not to be real.

At any rate, Pascal seems to have failed to consider that there are thousands of religions to choose from, and that a hypothetical god(s) might punish you for choosing to believe in the wrong one. And might even prefer that you believe in nothing, rather than the wrong one!

That’s the fun thing about the Wager. If the reward is infinite then any finite cost is worth it for any finite probability of obtaining it.

Pascal did actually consider other religions. He just concluded that they were definitely wrong. In his view, either (his brand of) Christianity was correct, or god doesn’t exist.

Yes, my point is that those three arguments may be compelling but they assume that reality is correlated to the shape of their thoughts. What they have in common is that they all miss the insight that you need to actually test your assumptions to improve your certainties, and that's not feasible for theoretical all powerful entities that can bend reality.

Why bother, though? What does trying to believe in this ill-defined entity do for me?