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Comment by tom_ilsinszki | Hacker News Reader

If you start a computer program, that runs evolutionary algorithms, you become their god, and you will be omnipotent (to them, at least). It's easy to write the story off as fiction, but in fact, it would explain a lot, I think.

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I will be omnipotent? Huh, that's a stretch. I can barely understand the relatively simple programs I write. If there is a human being who understands his own code completely, in a large system, I'd like to meet him.

Well, you don't need to understand your code fully to effect changes in the simulation. The point is that it is a simulation, and you control the code. So you'd be omnipotent, just not omniscient. You know, that scenario would actually explain a lot about this world. The reason why evil exists is because God did create a rock too heavy for Him to lift, and that rock is us. Be patient, he may be in the process of debugging the system. :p

Let's say you believe that our existence can be attributed to a 'divine engineer' who developed said program and our physical laws are a by product of his engineering. How do atheists respond to such an statement? I am just having a hard time defining myself spiritually (not that I feel the need to).

Atheists seem to say "there is no God", but the 'divine engineer' theory would say there is a God, just not one in the traditional sense.

Such a theory is useless because it does not explain where the divine engineer comes from, or what is his nature. So it is just dodging the relevant questions.

Please explain yourself, because no atheist argument that "there is no god" has ever convinced me that the lonely, yet repeatable physical laws we observe weren't created by something higher than ourselves.

I'm sure if there is a God he wouldn't have resorted to anything as crude as 'creating' the laws. It's more beautiful that they weren't sledgehammered into existence. It gives them some substance, instead of just a proxy for something we couldn't possibly understand.

Besides, we're been explaining anything inexplicable as the work of the gods for thousands of years. This conversation could have happened in Greek times and you would still have been convinced at the existence of Apollo at the end of it.

I'm sorry, but as sure as atheists are that there is no god, you have convincede to belive it

The problem is that explaining something by invoking a "god" is not an explanation at all. There is no piece of evidence which points to a god and excludes other hypotheses.

I think it is the wrong question. The interesting question would be, what is the nature of god? If it is just some entity that create a universe (like maybe we could simulate a universe in a computer), then you have to ask where does god come from? You have not answered the question at all, you have only pushed it up one meta-level.

Imagine we were beings in an artifical life simulation, created by droodlewhoops. Maybe one day we would figure out that that's the case. Then we still don't know what droodlewhoops are, hence we don't know anything.

You are right that atheism is also a kind of belief, that is way these day it is more common for rational people to be agnostic.

Thanks for the reply, it's interesting to think about recursive creation. I do agree that atheism is a belief system just as much as classical religion is, they just beleive very different things.

I still think there is difference. At least atheism encourages you to look for other explanations, whereas religion simply is the end of the story ("things are what they are because god made them so - that's it").

Nick Bostrom has written a paper about just that, arguing that we may be living inside a computer simulation. It's an interesting read. See http://www.simulation-argument.com/

to any program you write you are god. You are expecting the result of that program to behave in a specific way, the program never ran but at any point of the program you can predict what will happen to the logic of the program. But to the program you are an omnipotent god, yet in reality you may have made some mistakes, gota kill and restart see if it works better after a bug fix.

The only question is: to the program, does it matter that you are god? Does it make any bit of a difference if it believes in you or not? Will the outcome change depending on that fact? Do you care if the program worships you? (unless you wrote a program to worship you)

That's exactly my point. I will never understand God's plans (because there is no feedback from him, or I can't sense them), so I should be focusing on the problems that face me everyday.

Thus, I don't think God (if he exists) wants us to believe in him. (The same way, I don't care if a program or and ant worships or believes in me).

"The only question is: to the program, does it matter that you are god?"

Well, if you program it to worry about that stuff then yes. If you don't, then no. My current program couldn't care less about me. I'm okay with that.

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