But it seems extraordinarily counterintuitive to think that a particular event such as the Big Bang, or a very large physical object such as the cosmos, could have happened/exist of necessity. Indeed, we know of no other events that happened of necessity, and of no other physical things that exist of necessity. (Note that all or almost all non-physical things/things outside of spacetime, like numbers, triangles, properties, etc. exist of necessity. So it is not unnatural or implausible to think that God exists of necessity as well.) Hence, the proposition that it is necessary that if the Big Bang occurred, it was necessary for it to occur has much less going for it than the proposition that if God exists, it is necessary that God exists. This despite the fact that the proposition that the Big Bang occurred has a lot more going for it than the proposition that God exists.

I’m not arguing here that the cosmological argument is compelling. I’m just pointing out that this particular (and common) criticism of it is misguided.

I might be able to assign a probability to a “normal, reasonable concept of ‘God’” if I knew what that meant, but I agree that simulators aren’t part of the common-language concept, and I really don’t know what people mean when they say they believe in a “universal spirit” or “impersonal force”, if they’re even expressing a proposition at all.

While obviously not many people believe that we are literally living in a simulation created by our descendants, sometimes you’ll hear it said that we are dreams in the mind of God, which is not so different from a simulation in the mind of a future AI. See also Tipler’s notion of God as the Omega Point at the end of the universe, when infinite computational resources become possible and all possible pasts are re-created. All these ideas blur together and make it hard IMO to rule out the more general notions of Intelligent Design. I agree however that the more specifics you layer on that general idea, the less probable it becomes.

As for people redefining a normal, reasonable concept of “God” to whatever created a simulation that we may be a part of, it’s hard to call that anything more than intellectual cheating. I don’t think it’s worth my energy to explain why. It seems to me that the odds of the existence of a normal, reasonable concept of “God” would be on the order of smaller than 1 in a trillion, and much, much lower than 1 in a hundred, based on comparing the concept to things that have reliably been calculated to have 1 in a trillion or smaller odds. But I’d like to see this concept more rigorously hashed out (as a general way of being able to reliably give things odds this low in informal mental estimations and sortings).