This exchange between Phinehas and HeKS brings it out as succinctly as anything I’ve ever seen:
Phinehas says:
The thing that fascinates me is how atheists are shown to have prodigious faith in something eternal with god-like creative powers [i.e., the multiverse]. It’s almost like they have no issues whatsoever believing in a god, just so long as it doesn’t bear that particular label.
HeKS replies:
I tend to think that it’s because they don’t want that eternal thing with god-like creative powers to also be personal and have the ability to ground and impose moral values and duties on humans.
As the multiverse has demonstrated, atheists have no problem at all with faith in something that is unseen, intangible, outside of the physical universe, eternal, capable of bringing about unlikely effects we can’t fully understand, and that cannot be falsified through any conceivable scientific experiment.
The only thing they insist on stopping short of is something that is intelligent and that can ground moral values and duties … and probably they stop short of the former only because of the latter, as suggested by the willingness of some to accept the idea that we’re living in an intelligently designed simulation created by other contingent physical beings based largely on the same scientific evidence theists point to as suggestive of God’s existence, which they had denied suggested design until the simulation hypothesis came along. Neil deGrasse Tyson is one such example.