SPIRITUALITY

Religion and the Simulation Theory

Is your God a programmer? What does that make you? What is this world?

Image created by “AI tool Microsoft Bing Image Creator powered by DALL·E” — the author has the provenance and copyright.

Today, I’m going to theorize on how everything related to religion, namely Gods, angels, demons, miracles, superpowers, heaven, hell, other realms, reincarnations, and similar, can only be possible if this reality of ours is not a real, material word, as we like to assume. We’re going to have a little fun on this one. Don’t take it too seriously.

What is a simulation theory?

Simulation theory is a philosophical concept that proposes the idea that reality as we perceive it, including the universe and all its contents, could be a computer-generated simulation. In other words, it suggests that the world we experience is not the physical reality but rather a simulated reality created by an advanced civilization, possibly far more technologically advanced than our own.

I would like to add that I don’t see the simulation theory as the only right possible explanation, but rather one of the possibilities. In fact, you’ll notice I use four terms in my writing to describe the nature of our reality:

• Simulation.
• Dreamworld.
• Illusion.
• Mental projection.

They all speak to the same idea, which is that none of what you see, hear, and feel is actually real. No, not even your body. It’s all an illusion.

“All that is perceived, including the universe itself, is but a dream.” — Yoga Vasistha

Whether we’re all dreaming an interconnected collective dream or are trapped in a Matrix-like simulation (see the movie) is irrelevant and most likely unknowable until we (if we) one day wake up to the real world.

My point is that nothing makes any sense from the standard model of the universe — the material separation model. So, I play with other ideas and write about them. It’s meant to be a fun and mind-opening exploration of ideas, not some ultimate truth!

Is God the programmer or a player himself?

Let’s consider two types of mythical Gods.

• The one mighty, all-powerful, all-encompassing God of Christianity and similar religions. This would be the programmer who created the simulation and everything in it.
• The multiple Gods of Old Greek myths that share in their rain over humanity (Zeus, Cronus, Titans, etc.) and fight amongst themselves, or the Hindu type Gods like Brahma, Vishnu, Shiva, and Devi, with principles that accompany them. These would be players with abilities far beyond ours. Like a leveled-up player in a video game. They could also be being from other worlds playing in ours.

Make your own simulation as a God

“For by him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities — all things were created through him and for him.” — Colossians 1:16

Imagine you were a programmer creating a new video game — a simulation where you’d unleash a bunch of Artificial Intelligence beings into a reality built just for them. You know, something we’ll probably be able to do in about a decade.

What would that look like?

• First, you’d create the world they will inhabit. Design some sort of surface, a home for your new subjects.
• Then, you’d create some sort of rules that govern that world. Like the laws of physics. Since there are no rules when you imagine something, you design them from the bottom up.

Now, you have the world and the rules that govern that whole universe — just like imagining a new story, video game, or movie. The sky’s the limit on your imagination. It’s time to create your characters and their story arcs.

• You’d create all the beings that inhabit this world of yours, including what they look like, who they are, how they survive, and where they belong in the ecosystem.
• You might start small, then work up to more complex beings.
• You might even create a system that would do that for you. A self-learning artificial design, not unlike evolution that would adapt to the world and create an infinite variety of life. You can’t be bothered to do it all yourself. Besides, you enjoy seeing what they come up with.
• You might also use a random number generator to create new worlds, beings, and stories within these new worlds. This would keep things interesting and ensure that they thrive into eternity, even if you’re not there to monitor them.

All right, you’ve now created the world, the rules that govern it, and the beings that inhabit it. You’ve also made sure that things keep evolving and expanding on their own. The code is live, baby!

“By the seventh day God had finished the work he had been doing; so on the seventh day he rested from all his work. Then God blessed the seventh day and made it holy, because on it he rested from all the work of creating that he had done.” Genesis 2:2–3

What do you do next?

You let it play out, don’t you? Perhaps you can set some ground rules for their behavior to help these new beings settle in.

• Maybe you intend to test if the artificial intelligence beings are dangerous. Will they obey your commands?
• Can you ever release them out of their simulation into the real world (heaven?)?
• How would you test their loyalty, character, intentions, and safety?

You’d create additional rules that were voluntary

Something they had to obey but weren’t compelled to. They have free will, after all, and you want to keep it that way. It’s what makes this experiment of yours interesting. Here are some religious examples:

• Don’t eat from that tree.
• Don’t ask questions about what’s outside this world.
• Don’t sin, and then define what sin is. Let’s start with the Ten Commandments and take it from there.
• Worship me! If you’re an egotistical being in need of attention.

“And the Lord God commanded the man, ‘You are free to eat from any tree in the garden; but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat from it you will certainly die.’“ Genesis 2:16–17

How would you deliver this message?

Maybe you’d experiment with direct communication, but that might complicate things. Either make those new beings overly dependent, confused, or curious. You don’t want that, so you’d create characters in their world that you commanded, like playing a game character or possessing a body, if you will.

This way, you would ensure that the illusion of the completion of their world remains intact but still get to nudge them in your preferred direction. To some, you might give direct commands and test their will. You might guide others by creating religions and a hierarchy system. Either way, you’re having fun and getting to know your new creations.

“The Lord said to Moses, ‘Come up to me on the mountain and stay here, and I will give you the tablets of stone with the law and commandments I have written for their instruction.’” Exodus 24:12, Torah

A system of incentives and rewards and a system of punishments

If your idea for creating these new self-aware beings was to test their intentions and how they would respond before releasing them into the real world, you’d have to come up with some way of defining what you want. If you do this and that, you’ll receive rewards and get to heaven, for example. Defy my will, and you’ll end up in hell.

Maybe you’ll do good on your word and bring them into the real world, or just a better — nicer simulation, and maybe you won’t. They’ll never know. Now you have a way of controlling them, or so you think.

“And just as it is appointed for man to die once, and after that comes judgment.” — Hebrews 9:27

Snap! Your friends found out about the simulation

Now, they all want to play in this game world. They’re bored out of their minds, and this is a perfect escape for them. Some of them behave well in there, but others abuse it. Some end up being good guys. Others, not so much. Everything they do has consequences, though.

“When human beings began to increase in number on the earth and daughters were born to them, the sons of God saw that the daughters of humans were beautiful, and they married any of them they chose… The Nephilim were on the earth in those days — and also afterward — when the sons of God went to the daughters of humans and had children by them.” Genesis 6:1–4

Maybe they’re not your friends but your other creations

Other, more powerful artificial beings (angels, Gods, demons) start interfering with your new world, which unpredictably messes things up. Maybe it’s a virus or a malfunction. There are infinite possibilities of things going wrong in there.

Perhaps you created multiple worlds in this simulation, and they are now interacting, with or without your approval. It’s a messy business, this being a creator thing.

Those pesky creations just won’t listen to me

Your new creations disappoint you. They’re not to be trusted — they end up being violent, greedy, parasitic little creatures. You can’t risk releasing them into the real world.

• Maybe not all, but most?
• What do you do with them?
• Do you destroy the whole world?
• Do you make a hard reset?
• Do you somehow determine who is worth saving and who needs to go in a giant flood of a memory purge, for example?

“The Lord saw how great the wickedness of the human race had become on the earth, and that every inclination of the thoughts of the human heart was only evil all the time. The Lord regretted that he had made human beings on the earth, and his heart was deeply troubled. So the Lord said, ‘I will wipe from the face of the earth the human race I have created — and with them the animals, the birds and the creatures that move along the ground — for I regret that I have made them.” Genesis 6:5–7

Decisions, decisions, decisions

Perhaps you tried a few times, but you’re now tired of it. You can spare the resources, so you decide to leave them on their own. Let them eat the sinful soup they cooked up!

Maybe you set up some rules for the good few to progress in the game of life you’ve designed. Perhaps you call it reincarnation or Karma. I don’t know. I’m just making things up now, so I’ll stop here with the speculation.

I am the Alpha and the Omega thing

I play with this phrase a lot in my daily rants, but not in the same sense as it is interpreted in the Biblical sense. It describes a God that is somehow external, yet it encompasses everything and everyone.

This is an oxymoron. Either God is all, and that includes you and me, or he is some individual being, separate from us, living in some other realm.

• If God is some separate being but is also in control of the universe, then a simulation theory makes that easy on us. We live in a simulation of his creation, and since he’s the programmer with an overinflated ego, he does, in fact, control everything and likes to tell us what to do and how to live. He can create anything and destroy it. He can feed everyone or starve them. He, then, is the good and the evil. There is no way around it. Nothing happens without his approval in this simulation.
• If God is a force, a protocol, energy, love, a unifying mind that connects us all, then we are all a part of it. We can interpret or imagine such a force to exist in infinite ways. One of them is that we are all in his mind, dreaming with him, and therefore are him. Him being us. Therefore, we are God, the dreamer, and this is the dream world in which we all play. We control everything — we are everything. But we don’t do it consciously.

For this essay, I won’t bug you with the whole dream world interpretation, but you’re welcome to read about it here: What if This So-Called Reality is Just a Dream?

“For by him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things have been created through him and for him.” — Colossians 1:16

Let’s talk about miracles

In a material reality with fixed rules, miracles are not possible. They’re just not. Neither is prayers being answered, and your mind can have no power in such a world over material reality. If one is true, the other cannot be.

If we live in a material universe, nothing immaterial can influence it in the slightest

Nothing can manipulate the laws and make something out of nothing.

• A man can’t walk on water. It’s against the laws of physics.
• Healing miracles, such as restoring sight to the blind, curing leprosy, and raising the dead, also aren’t physically possible in a material universe.
• You also can’t feed thousands and have leftovers with five loaves of bread and two fish by blessing them. Nothing is created out of nothing, and the whole preservation of mass thing.
• Magic, either by prayer, words, or concoction, cannot exist in such a world.

“Jesus looked at them and said, ‘With man this is impossible, but with God all things are possible.’” Matthew 19:26

If, however, we live in a simulation, rules can be changed and altered

It’s all programmable. Nothing really matters, and someone with administrative access (access, knowledge, power) can play with the rules to his heart’s desires.

If you believe in miracles and superpowers, you believe in an alternate idea of this reality. It is not material and independent, as we perceive it, but a simulation, an illusion, a mental projection, or a dream world. You just didn’t know it. Well, now you do.

Then, there is the option of technology fooling people. Something about how advanced enough technology is indistinguishable from magic. This would insinuate another possibility, but you won’t like it any more than this one. Psst — it’s aliens!

Reincarnation and Karma work in a simulation

Have you ever played a video game?

You start with a character, and as you play, you progress through stages or levels, as they’re usually called. The game provides a system of progression, whether by acquiring enough points, leveling up your character, or completing all the tasks.

Once you level up and enter a new level, everything changes

There are new characters, challenges, and sometimes even storylines. Everything you encounter, from obstacles to creatures, NPCs, and other players, will react differently to your character as you level up.

Some games were made so that you would have a finite number of lives or tries before you had to start over. Now, we save games and progress more easily, as we simply reload the game from an earlier point upon failure or death.

• Reincarnation could be a safe game point from which you restart playing the game every time you die or a fresh start.
• It could also be choosing to play the same game as a different character or being or just choosing to experience a different storyline with its unique challenges.
• It’s entirely possible that reincarnation would just be leveling up, wiping the memory, and replaying the same game in the same world with new properties. Options are endless.
• Karma could be a simple system of points with various properties that determine your progression in this life or game or to the next level/game/life.
• This system could also determine how the world reacts to you, how much things cost, what is and what is not available, and the toughness and type of your challenges.

“As a person puts on new garments, giving up old ones, similarly, the soul accepts new material bodies, giving up the old and useless ones.” — Bhagavad Gita 2.22

It all sounds a bit familiar, doesn’t it?

Again, no such system makes any sense in a strictly material reality on this planet, where we are dust and to dust we return, with nothing crossing over.

They make perfect sense in a simulation, though, and we have been designing similar systems from the beginning.

Am I a soul or this body?

“The soul is immortal, and its future is the future of a thing whose growth and splendor have no limit.” — Plato

Now, we’ve come to the ultimate boss — the question of WHO ARE WE?

• Are we this meat sack with newtons firing in our brains, or are we something more?
• If we’re something more, what could that be?

If this reality is anything like a simulation of a video game, as we’ve been discussing, then we face two possibilities:

• We are a form of self-aware artificial intelligence (created, remember?) living in a simulated world who think they’re real boys and girls or
• We are real beings from some other reality, playing a game in this simulated world, not unlike how we play video games or dream at night.

If the first is true, then sorry, no soul can be found here

Computational error. We are only ones and zeros, just some data in a program. In our case made of blood, water, and flesh. We feel real, but we cease to exist if someone turns off the simulation. We’re just randomness and luck combined in a mixture of neurons and flesh.

If the second option is true, I’ve got good news

If this simulation is indeed just a play world, a game where other beings come to play, relax, and challenge themselves, then a soul would essentially represent our consciousness.

That consciousness transcends the game world or simulation and returns to the real world upon completing what it set out to do. Much like we “lose ourselves in a game,” we play and immerse ourselves in that world and character. Only infinite levels more convincing and all-encompassing while also forgetting who we are and that we are playing a game.

We then wake up in the real world and either choose to play again or find something else to do.

“For we know that if the earthly tent we live in is destroyed, we have a building from God, an eternal house in heaven, not built by human hands.” — 2 Corinthians 5:1

I wrote a fictional short series on the afterlife. Check it out if you’re interested:

Am I Dead? — My Afterlife Experience (Chapter 1)
A short, fictional story of my death and my experience of the afterlife. Did I go to heaven or hell? What, if anything, awaits us after we die? Follow along and find out.

It’s a trap!

Ultimately, this is not for us to know as long as we reside within the simulation. We’ll know soon enough. Perhaps it’s best this way. Waking up to the very likely fact that we’re not real boys and girls and this is not a real world is daunting enough. Living within the simulation, things sort of make sense. We know what to do and why we do it.

Things get complicated when we wake up and realize that nothing really makes sense and things can’t possibly be how we perceive them. Waking up is not a pleasant experience, nor is the so-called enlightenment, which essentially means the same thing.

• If this is not a real word, and this body and identity you’ve assimilated aren’t who you really are — well then, who are we, and what is real?
• What is the point of living, worrying, striving, and suffering in this world if it’s just a game, a simulation, an illusion, a mental projection, or a dream?
• How does one live with this knowledge (or belief) while stuck here?

I can’t answer these questions for you. From my perspective, when I play a game, I play with three goals in mind:

• To learn all I can about the game, progress, level up, and ultimately win the game.
• To explore and experience all the game offers, fully immersing myself in the world and the story.
• To challenge myself and have fun doing it, despite the difficulty I often raise to challenge myself further.

“In the end, only three things matter: how much you loved, how gently you lived, and how gracefully you let go of things not meant for you.” Buddha

Does it matter, then, if this world is real or not?

We enjoy movies, books, and games even though we know they aren’t real, don’t we? I would argue that the realization of a high probability that we are living in a simulation or some other form of alternate reality is a good thing. Instead of resisting the idea, I welcome it.

If life is just a game, I might as well have fun exploring it and enjoying the game while it lasts. I don’t have to take everything so seriously. What comes beyond is of no concern to me.

Adopting a belief, and this can only ever be a belief that there is some form of existence after this life, is comforting. It releases the fear of dying and frees us to have more fun living this life. Real or not!

“The world is illusory, O Rama, abandon it. The truth is not in it. Truth is beyond the perishable body; therefore, do not be subject to illusion.” — Yoga Vasishta

But what does that mean for your faith in God and your religion?

I’ve made my choice regarding religion and the existence of a God, as they describe it a long time ago. I wouldn’t dream of influencing your mind on such matters. I just play with ideas and invite you along on this wild ride. What you do with it is up to you, free will and all.

Want to read more related posts?

You’ll find them here. Below are a few recent posts.

Why does it matter if we live in a simulation or not?

What difference does it make? Is it worth exploring this idea? I argue the answer is YES.

There is No Spoon — Nothing is Real in a Simulation

If you’re struggling with manifesting your dreams, it may be that you don’t understand the nature of reality.

What if This So-Called Reality is Just a Dream?

Let’s explore this idea and see if we can find some indications this may be the case.

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