We are in a video game. I was raised as a Muslim and still am. But since childhood, I always wondered that we believe that God made us and this world, but who made God? All the religious people will say that God is and will always be but I have not found a satisfying answer yet. If we talk to Atheists, they say that it is all made up and there is no God. This world came into existence because of the Big Bang but how did Big Bang happened? They might answer due to the quantum fluctuations in the time space but how did that happened? So it goes on and on. You must stop somewhere to feel satisfied.
In short, you just stop where you think is right to stop. What do you think of this guy named “Mario” .
Is he an Atheist or a Religious person? The answer is not known but he was programmed by someone and the game world was assembled by a bunch of people. But Mario has no idea about who created him and how did he end up in his world. There is a possibility that we are also created in the same way by a creator who most of us know as “God”.
Let us take another example of an Elephant in a zoo. It is in that zoo since it was born and spends its whole life there and then dies. He never thought of anything outside its zoo and don’t know that there exists a world outside its zoo. It never thought that there is a zoo manager that manages the whole zoo and all the animals in there. Zoo manager is far more intelligent than the Elephant. So, I don’t understand sometimes that why some Atheists are so arrogant and think that there can be no possibility of God. You can not just rule it out. You are just as intelligent as in the world you live in.
In video games, there are Non-Playable Characters (NPC’s) and Playable Characters (PC’s). If we consider this world as a single player game, then only we can control ourselves and all the other things in this world are NPC’s. But can we do something here that can change things in the Computer that simulated us?
If we consider the possibility of a video game like Mario, that character has some address in the computer memory and if it takes too much space it can blow up the computer in the worst case. Therefore, should we strive in this world for power over people or power over nature?
Most of us just keep focusing on the things in this world but what separates religious ideologies is that they focus on the things that can be out of this world. Have you heard of the term Magic? I am sure you did. Most of you might also imagine that if you were in a Harry Potter universe, you would have worked so hard just to get your Magic tricks right. But let me tell you that you probably can do the same in this world too. The alternative term for Magic in our world can be programming. The computer power and accessories that we have today, anyone if they want, can make a lot of cool things. But if we keep on using this magic to just take control over people, we as human species can go distinct much sooner.
There is also a paper named as “Are you living in a Computer Simulation” by Nick Bostrom. He argues that there can be only one of three possibilities that can be true about this world. These three options are:
1. Almost all advanced civilizations go extinct before achieving technological maturity.
2. Technologically mature civilization lose interest in creating ancestor simulation.
3. We are living in a simulation.
If two of these are false, then the third one has to be true. The paper also argues that the fraction that of all the people with our kind of experiences that are living in a simulation is very close to one. Check out the link to this paper, if you want to read it in detail.
References:
1. https://www.simulation-argument.com/simulation.pdf