Pope Francis has died

Jokes aside, he seemed like a genuinely decent human being and enough of a humanist to cast aside some of the drier absurdities surrounding the bureaucracy of Catholic Church administration, and ideology.

Even as someone who's deep in the skeptically agnostic camp on any questions about supreme creators (after all even a firm atheist can't be absolutely sure there is no genuine God) I had more respect for the apparent practical concern for humanity of this pope, particularly compared to the more typical nature of historical pontiffs.

Why so? There is no reason for one to exist so not having one is the obvious case.

We could of course assume anything, that we are av stylization, that the world is a large ice cream, that what we see is not the reality, whatever

If we go for that, sure, we cannot be sure of anything. But we then must also believe that we may live in a large ice cream.

It's a usable supposition, sure, and I agree that being asked to prove a negative is silly, but you can't actually be sure that one doesn't exist. It's not the obvious case at all, it's not even all that obvious as a supposition.

What's more, superficially at least, it makes more sense to believe in a supreme, essentially divine creator than it does to believe visibly enormous complexity deriving from a mostly unknown nothing.

I'd say that this more than anything has been responsible for virtually all cultures in history believing in supreme, divine creators of one kind or another vs no historical cultures that I know of believing in the universe springing from random chance and hand-wavey nothingness behind it.

We could also of course be living in a large ice cream, you can't be absolutely sure that's not the case either.

Though, the idea of being the creations of a tremendously powerful and conscious being that created a universe hospitable to our use and for our potential given by all our evident cognitive and material tools seems to me a lot more plausible than being subject to an accidental existence in a gargantuan ice cream environment.