It was recently revealed that Stephen Hawking’s final paper was in support of the hypothesis that the world we live in is one giant computer-generated simulation, built and maintained by highly advanced computers (that we probably created).
Hawking was not alone in this conjecture. Elon Musk, Neil DeGrasse Tyson, Scott Adams and many other Smart People(TM) are forming a growing consensus.
Have we reached a tipping point, where the volume of evidence supporting Intelligent Design is so overwhelming that Smart People are flailing around to explain it all? If you’re too intelligent to believe in God, is this what you believe instead?
I’ve been searching for the non-believers’ perspective on this, and wondering what the response is when asked why they find this plausible, but the existence of God not? It boils down to “It’s more plausible than ‘invisible-bearded-dude-in-the-sky-doing-magic'”. Which reminded me of this quote from Arthur C Clarke:
Any sufficiently-advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
Which makes sense to me.
16 replies on “Are we all in a computer-generated simulation? Stephen Hawking thought so.”
Musk is so dang smart when it comes to technology and entrepreneurship, but as soon as it comes to God he’s a total fool. He decided to believe in the matrix rather than accept that science points to the existence of an omnipotent moral authority. That’s the thing, people don’t want to believe in God. They don’t want to have to obey Him, they want to ignore Him so that they can do their own thing. Because if you accept God, that has serious consequences for how you now have to live your life. You can’t do whatever you want anymore, you are now bound by objective morality. People don’t like that.
I’m reading a book right now by Eric Metaxas called Miracles: What are they, why they happen, and how they can change your life. In it, he points out that according to current science, the chances that even a single planet in our universe meets all of the parameters necessary for life, as Earth does, is 1 in 10 to the 50th power (p. 44)! So mind-bogglingly, insanely unlikely it’s a practical impossibility for Earth to have happened, yet here we are. If I was determined not to believe in God I’d have to start coming up with some other theories too.
First, 1:10^50 isn’t accurate (those types of statistics are notoriously difficult to estimate, but that number is way, way off). Secondly, because a planet doesn’t meet our liking (a bit too cold, a bit to radioactive, a bit dark) doesn’t mean life, including intelligent life, cannot develop. Very likely even just our galaxy is teeming with life, just not the type your digestive system would appreciate. 🙂
And there are more galaxies within visible range than there are stars in our own.
Star Trek did a huge disfavor to their viewers for reasons of cost: pretty much all the life they ran into was a humanoid lizard in a rubber mask. Uh-uh! Ain’t gonna happen. What we’ll eventually run into might even be difficult to understand on our time scale. For instance, what of a system of chemicals that takes a 1000 of our years to form a thought?
If we want to look for non-human intelligent life, we need look no further than porpoises. Flipper has levels of intelligence we are only now beginning to grasp.
You’d be surprised how many factors have to be just right for life to exist (let alone life of the complexity and abundance we have here on Earth). He’s not pulling this stuff out of his rear end, these are requirements that come from mainstream science, not some fringe Christian group.
Indeed, most planets capable of supporting life will experience an extinction-level event, such as a meteor strike, every 26-30m years or so. That’s not enough time for a planet to start life and develop it into a space-faring civilization (life on Earth started 4B years ago, and we’re just now dipping our toes into space). Earth, miraculously, has a moon with a substantial gravity well that has shielded us from many such catastrophes. Most planets, even if they could support life as we know it, don’t have such loyal and stalwart friends. Researching the Fermi Paradox made for interesting reading.
Not only that, Jupiter is essential as well. It sucks up or redirects most of the asteroids hurtling our way from deep space. Our exact moon is so essential for a ton of reason, not just as a shield.
You make a great point, just because something could technically be alive on a planet, doesn’t mean that that planet sustains life.
I read a story in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine decades ago about a world that was just a huge Monopoly game.
It was brilliantly written. And just as plausible as we being in a computer simulation.
The only problem with the hypothesis is that it’s untestable. It’s possible, but so is the Flying Spaghetti Monster and a whole host of other notions.
Well, yes, but that is the intelligentsia’s purported discomfort with God as well. Another corollary. God is *at the very least* as plausible as a computer-generated simulation. But you’d be hard pressed to find the likes of Hawking or Musk admitting as much.
Especially as Hawking is a deceased person.
Indeed.
<?php$Hawking = 0;
do {
echo $Hawking;
} while ($Hawking > 0);
break;
}
?>
Or the equivalent in C:
long Hawking = 0;
do {
printf( “%ld”, Hawking );
} while( Hawking > 0 );
Which results in one output of “0” and then passes through.
Or, in English:
“Ooops. Carry on.”
Kind of like the multiverse theory. Totally untestable and with zero evidence, but they had to come up with something to explain life with the sheer unlikeliness of it happening by chance.
That actually might be testable, but we don’t know enough about quantum mechanics yet. If God thinks we need to learn that, we will.
The whole thing is silly but, ignoring that inconvenience, what if it’s a Well of Souls type situation? The simulators achieved absolute mastery of the physical universe and found that mastery empty. So they’re running a simulation to figure out where they went wrong. If it becomes clear that we’re going down the same dead end, they’ll shut it down and start over.