I really do appreciate your comment and I spent a long time trying to word this in a digestible way (even tried gpt but I just went back to my original text because gpt made it so much more unapproachable). I do think I understand where our presumptions misaligned though. I should say I agree with your comment on faith more than my presentation. My definition of practical faith, for instance, is more of a prepared calmness by relinquishing material bonds and worries to an immaterial power. Sufficient and deliberate practice can really help one's resolve in the most dire situations and I find that uniquely powerful.

Anyways... lmk if this makes sense.

Using both examples to start; the realization of Santa, and the conflict you highlighted at the end of your comment:

In the absolute reality, humans in aggregate don't have omniscience, let alone one human having omniscience (or a god. Bonus philosophy below if you want it). This is where our shared knowledge is composed of half-truths because we cannot qualify things in totality.

Our universally shared reality (experience, in my words) is necessarily the same to its absolutely weird limits but our individual perception and cognitive windows can only ever reveal a summary truth here, often by condensing knowledge into symbols.

The abstractions of the same root belief system then spawn divergent perceptions of a god with infinite variability as they decohere into greater philosophical quandries beyond what symbols can reliably communicate and may in fact translate differently depending on culture, time, place, etc.

In the purest sense, a belief in a god and verifiable reality don't have to be incompatible or be incorrect, just incomplete as of our current understanding. The alignment of truths is also known as edification, but you can drop the spiritual implications if you would like. Edification begins with material foundation (observable reality) and builds into the abstract (intuitive reality or whatever you want to call it). Science is a map, and philosophy is the compass. True north should always align.

But you gave some really good examples of fictional concepts whose belief measurably does not reflect reality.

The caveat for me is this: Santa is real in many forms including the symbols (traditional, corporate), the legend of St. Nick, and the dude at the mall. These are all realized representations of a fictional model (excluding any possibly real historical St. Nicks), but like you say it doesn't mean that the model is a supernatural guy you can catch breaking and entering. In totality, the "real" Santa is a cosmic projection of our shared idea of Santa that occasionally materializes (through our actions) as a real physical presence if only in approximation of the myth. To completely "know" Santa is to understand the total accumulation of all existing and possibly imaginable lore. At that point faith in the magnitude of possibility transcends belief because the experiential Santa is inconceivably larger than the possibly of a simple, palpable jolly fat man avoiding international sanctions. Total immersion in a pool (immersion in nothing but Santa lore) doesn't mean you now breathe water (Santa myths, symbols), but you have the experience necessary to understand the reality of the water in the larger pool house (reality) and it's the immersion itself that "realizes" a single vast and profound truth in the grander scheme.

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Maybe a little more useful is the delusional half-truths in which many maintain a fiction of a frisbee-like earth. Within this delusion f-earthers misrepresent reality as an idea that contributes to the same canon as heathenous scientists do, simply (not so simply) at odds in modeling. While the idea* of f-earth is true, it does not materialize in any way we can measure.

To rephrase this: the belief itself is a held truth, founded from our shared perceptive reality, that maaayyy mostly contain component truths, but the assemblage does not reflect the absolute truth of the universe, so we distinguish it as categorically false. It's somewhere on the map, but it's not a navigable path in this reality. Of course we can perform the same exercise we did with Santa to fully understand it, but the point is that fiction can be composed entirely of truths. It largely falls apart when a large enough representation of the fiction does not match observable reality and is only stable within itself. That self-stability is the reality we accept while acknowledging that it's a fiction from any grander perspective.

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Now, obviously those two cases have implications for the fiction of any arbitrary belief system, especially theistic systems. But lacking omniscience we are left with precipitate simulacrums of our collective understanding of a (or any) god. Atheists may also contribute to this philosophy and theists likewise as they are typically not forming ideas in a cultural vacuum and so the simulacra overlap, inconclusive. In any such case, the capabilities of humans fall short in realizing the totality of what a god represents which falls back into the faith argument; leave it or take it, you're not wrong. It becomes real in as many parts that align with your map and compass. For agnostics it may simply stop at a shrug. For zealots it may be an unshakeable confidence in the afterlife.

The ground truth of the belief is that belief itself projects a kaleidoscope of incomplete *experiences* (used it well this time) that, given enough turns, unify into absolute truth about the nature of reality.

So to model a god is not to detract or subtract regardless of whether it's a model that portraits your reality window or is just a decorative accent or even has no place at all. It's always going to be a presentation of discourse on the perceived nature of the whole.

*I believe that omniscience communicates a sort of intelligence that implies anthropomorphic designer God so I don't like the term. I take omniscience as total knowledge of all information in the sense that every subatomic particle to its macro structures and every exchange of energy is felt and known across all space and time without any cognitive distinction or focus on any one part. Simply witnessing all distinctions and their manifolds in totality.