Living microbes, possibly 100M years old, pulled from beneath the sea (2020)

I'm not the expert they need. I'm an expert in debugging. The tricky bit with debugging is, X can't happen, but X did happen. Magic did not cause this. Unless you have 1000 machines, cosmic rays probably didn't cause it either.

"X can't happen" is actually "All of my assumptions say 'X cannot happen'". Therefore, one of your assumptions is wrong. Don't shrug and put it off on someone else. start testing your assumptions.

In this case there's probably a PhD in testing that assumption. My question is, is that a future PhD or an existing one?

The mistake here is to treat both of these equally. One is a set of very specific but unsubstantiated claims about the nature of the universe, and the other is a scientific theory supported by observation and models. Since it is way easier to churn out unsubstantiated claims than viable scientific theories, relying on a mindset that gives equal consideration to everything is a surefire way for science to be simply drowned out.

In this specific case, I'd also like to point out that the big bang model does not claim to yield, or is required to yield, information on what came "before". There are multiple hypotheses around for what could have happened, a fundamental part of which is usually a proper definition of what "before" means in this context. Again, none of these are doctrinal claims, they're just a process of finding out more about the universe. Religious claims on the other hand are a method of asserting you already know something.

> While If I were any denominational god, I'd have created the rule set and frameworks for the entire system and then boot it up.

Consider that most religions want people to behave in very specific ways, mostly because deities and their spokespeople say so. The "god" you are describing does not fit into that. You are being very charitable towards religious claims by allowing them to retreat into this generic fold.

On a scientific level, your hypothesis is not immediately contradicted by observation. But it's also not clear how an unsupervised universe would be different from a curated one. If it doesn't really matter to the outcome whether the universe was created intentionally or not, a good bet is to assume the simpler model.

Any such god would themselves have to exist in order to create a universe. They would presumably also have to have had a creator themselves, or have come into existence by natural means. This pushes the problem of the origin of the universe up the chain without necessarily resolving anything. It's not impossible that the universe is such a stack of simulations, and I'd argue it's worth looking into that, but it's not a solution to the question what the root of existence itself is.

Anyway, the Matrix counterpoint (as explained by the Agent to Morpheus) was that the original Matrix was a perfect world. No famine, no poverty, everything was perfect, but the captive humans minds couldn't cope with such perfection, there had to be disorder for the environment to self-regulate and the original Matrix collapsed.

Since _Humani Generis_ by Pope Pius XII, the accepted view is that evolution, indeed, goes as it does, under divine supervision, and then when bodies reached a form fitting the pinnacle of creation (human), another act of creation occurred - that of human soul. And that miracle of creation keeps happening daily for every human born (or conceived?).

So, definitely not a Darwinian materialist view, but certainly evolution-friendly.

Generally, largest blocker to marrying salvation religions and materialist worldview is with a human. Salvation only concerns humans, and that implies that humans are very special in the Universe. Paganism wasn’t that arrogant, so might be more compatible with scientific method, funnily enough.

I’m an atheist, so this, naturally, this is my interpretation of other interpretations I’ve read and heard here and there.

And imagine changing physics constants and booting a new instance just to try something out. It would be more interesting to freeze the system, change a constant and see how it would've propagated from boot to present, and to apply the patch (not that the operator would care about preserving their sims). I suppose in a different universe, a stronger gravity could've meant an ancestor hit the ground a bit harder when s/he fell off a roof and didn't survive, so I might not even be here.

Note that “before” and “after” are arguably illusions, stemming from your sublight velocity. From the perspective of a photon, no time has passed “since” the Big Bang.

Even humans have created systems that sort of create other shit on their own.

Like the patterns that form when viewing prime numbers in certain ways, the fundamental laws of the universe could be some emergent properties arising from mathematical truths, and require no "god"