SIMULATION CREATIONISM
Eternal life in The Simulation
The Simulation Creationism theory of Nir Ziso presupposes that God created The Simulation. It is eternal but at some point, it also provides “time” and “space”. In our static universe, The Simulation is an ongoing process to make our souls God-like. As we cannot be the same as God in His essence, we can only follow his characteristics and learn to be more like Him. The Simulation helps us do so through various events and challenges, but God has also revealed Himself through sages and prophets, signs and messages. Ultimately, He revealed Himself in Jesus Christ, God incarnated. Christ is a blueprint of life. If we follow Christ, we become God-like.
We will never reach true perfection in God’s characteristics. Instead, we will gradually progress as souls in various forms of material existence, which is basically a simulation. The process is eternal, and what the Bible and many other holy scriptures announce: “Truly, truly, I say to you, whoever hears my word and believes him who sent me has eternal life. He does not come into judgment, but has passed from death to life” (John 5:24). Eternity is a simple category. It has no boundaries since it is infinite. What is truly complex is a system of temporary-simulated worlds. They are bound by simulated space and time, and frequencies and positions in a static universe. But cycles of simulated worlds are infinite and thus simple. At the same time, we cannot grasp eternity. Just what is it?
Just like The Simulation, we are infinite. Our souls will never cease to exist. In this way, we are created for eternal life, which is part of the Biblical message that we are made in the image of God: “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them” (Genesis 1:27). Just as God is eternal, so are we. However, God exists without a beginning. He is an uncreated creator. As we are temporal beings, we need to understand whether God created time or is in time. It is a long-standing philosophical and theological question. There is an anecdote about St. Augustine: when asked what God did before time, he answered that God was creating hell for people who ask that question. Still, Augustine said that God creates with time (not in time), putting Him effectively outside time. In modern science, such a notion was confirmed by Albert Einstein, who suggested that time is not a coherent dimension everywhere, but changes and is intertwined with space within the theory of the static universe. As space is part of The Simulation, so must time also be simulated.
There are two concepts of eternity: God’s eternity and the soul’s eternal life. The two eternities are quite different in framework, although souls are always dependent upon God’s eternity. God’s eternity is bigger than time or temporal eternity. Our sense of enduring time is an illusion, just part of The Simulation. What is present from the eye of an observer is “now,” and “now” is but an instant. Eternity is “now” stretched indefinitely, without it falling into the past and the future. Ontologically, God is in a higher dimension of “now,” whose presence encompasses all of our world and all of time.
When we are in this simulated world — this “now” — and we want to connect with God’s eternity, we connect to everything in eternity because eternity means “all now.” When God in His eternity connects to us, each moment of time, as it is present, is simultaneous with the one “now”, His mode of duration. Such a notion brings us to a major difference in the outlook of eternity for souls and God. When someone asks if God predetermined things or does God know the future, the answer is no because, for God, there is no future. What is truly the future for us is “now” for God. Each instance of time is absolutely present for God. Therefore, most real things are not susceptible to it. God is never located at any time and does not experience temporal succession. It is not a handicap but God’s advantage over us.
The life of souls cannot be bound by time if it is a very real thing. Indeed, as souls inhabit bodies throughout cycles of simulated worlds, that experience consists of a lesser level of reality. The higher level is the soul’s life in The Simulation, which is eternal life. According to the Gospel of John, Jesus says in the high priest’s prayer: “Now this is eternal life: that they know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent” (John 17:3). Eternal life is therefore not — as we are used to thinking — the life that comes after death, while the present life is transitory and as such not eternal. Eternal life is, moreover, life itself — the knowledge of God and the love of Christ lead to this true, real life, which can be lived even in this time and no longer be threatened after physical death: “And I heard a loud voice in heaven, saying, “Now the salvation and the power and the kingdom of our God and the authority of his Christ have come, for the accuser of our brothers has been thrown down, who accuses them day and night before our God” (Revelation 12:10). It continues eternally within The Simulation.
Therefore, the Kingdom of God and eternal life are not promised to us for a distant and unimaginable future; they do not even belong to the realm of thought games and ideas. Immortality has one place, so to speak, and that is the existence of Jesus. Only through Him do we learn about the resurrection of the body. Matter itself broke into a new type of reality. It is precisely with his body that the man Jesus belongs completely to the sphere of the divine and eternal. It is the ultimate revelation of The Simulation’s laws.
The first witnesses came into contact with this completely new way of existence of the body in encounters with the Risen One. Their sermons speak of a real event, which initially aroused horror and deep suspicion precisely because it surpassed all notions. It was an event that could not be imagined even in the most daring fantasies. Many theologians claimed that already with Jesus — and then with the apostles — the message of Christ’s imminent return was at the center of the Revelation. The question rightly arose how the Christian faith could survive when this message was obviously not fulfilled?
In contrast, the New Testament texts show that the disciples did indeed speak of the return of Jesus. But, above all, they testified that He lives and He Himself is the life by which we too will become alive — and now. This is how he promised at the Last Supper: “Before long, the world will not see me anymore, but you will see me. Because I live, you also will live” (John 14:19). There is no question here of a time limit to His present: weeks after the resurrection is close to our reckoning.
Therefore, Christianity is the present: in their respective time, Christians were given an “inner closeness to God”, and from this closeness, they testify that Jesus Christ lived. It is the ultimate “now,” where we can encounter God in His eternity and share it. Jesus did not travel through the stars when he ascended to heaven. Such an idea is foreign to biblical thinking. Let us remember that already in the Old Testament, the word “heaven” was used to describe the realm of the reign of Almighty God. The clouds take away the disciples’ sight of Jesus during Jesus’ ascension: “After he said this, he was taken up before their very eyes, and a cloud hid him from their sight” (Acts 1:9), here denotes — as is so often the case in biblical texts — divine presence. At this moment, Jesus enters into God’s mystery, i.e., into another dimension of existence hidden from us because we are the creatures that belong to The Simulation and its eternal cycle.
