Before you get excited I write this as a devout atheist. For almost as long as I can remember I have been certain that there is no god however, I was thinking about something tonight that made me reconsider.
This was written during a time of crisis, the COVID19 Pandemic of 2020. There is a lot of uncertainty in the world, and your author has been thinking a lot about all of the people affected in one way or another.
I wanted to let out a primal scream, to tell a higher power how I’m feeling and ask them to look out for us. I instantly rejected this notion out of hand on account me believing that there is no god.
As a thought experiment I wondered who I could complain to instead. Humanity has a strange habit of making up gods when it finds the ones it has lacking. I started to think about Simulation Hypothesis.
If the various philosophers and scientists that have weighed in on the matter are correct, it is very likely that we exist in a simulation. If we do exist in a simulation, it also stands to reason that an entity of some kind has decided to run the simulation. If they have decided to run the simulation that we are in, they expect to get some information from it.
If the creator of the simulation expects to get information out from the simulation, and you offer up a prayer, then how are you treating the creator of the simulation differently from a god?
Think about the powers we attribute to gods. Omniscience, Omnipotence and Omnipresence – let’s break these down and see how they match up with an entity in charge of our own simulation:
Omniscience – There is little point running a simulation if you can’t examine it and extract all the information. We would expect our simulation creator to know everything (or at least be able to look up everything) within the simulation. Outside the simulation isn’t relevant to us as we can’t escape the simulation.
Omnipotence – Our simulation creator is all powerful, having access to a literal “god mode” on our simulation. We assume that our creator would be able to change things about the simulation at will, make code changes wherever they feel like it, perhaps speed up the speed of light or destroy one of your relatives because they are bored. Think of how people play The Sims – Perhaps the God in the story of Job was happily playing the Sims when his mate Satan came over and persuaded God to make Job swim in the pool and delete the ladder. Maybe God and Satan were fucking with Job because his life is as inconsequential as a computer game. Maybe all of our lives are that inconsequential.
Omnipresence – The creator of our simulation isn’t confined by it’s natural laws. They can peer in wherever they like, they can deconstruct your brain virtually to see why you made a decision, they can provide the illusion of randomness. There is nowhere inside the simulation that the creator cannot go.
So anyway – I was wondering, if I believe that we exist inside a simulation, and I believe that this possibility is far more likely than the existence of any of your classic gods, then it must stand to reason that the simulation has a creator, and that creator has all of the attributes of a god, and therefore, there might be a god.
So with this knowledge, I offer my new god information in the form of prayer. Perhaps I will write it down in this blog, or maybe on a scrap of paper, or say it out loud, or think it inside. I don’t think it matters how you do it because of the powers already mentioned, if the creator was sufficiently interested they could certainly get the information from wherever you put it.
Now the next thing to consider is whether the creator would be willing to help you with anything. If the purpose of the simulation is to test historical models or ancestor simulations etc it might be very important that the creator doesn’t intervene so as not to ruin the experiment. However if the purpose of the simulation is more like entertainment (think of your Greek Pantheon perhaps) then we might be in business.
The concept of “pleasing” gods or entertaining gods in various ways might provide what we all need right now – the cheat codes to life – or perhaps answered prayers….
I still consider myself an atheist, but I might follow Pascal’s example and hedge my bets.
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