Theological Implications of the Simulation Argument

Abstract

Nick Bostrom's Simulation Argument (SA) has many intriguing theological implications. We work out some of them here. We show how the SA can be used to develop novel versions of the Cosmological and Design Arguments. We then develop some of the affinities between Bostrom's naturalistic theogony and more traditional theological topics. We look at the resurrection of the body and at theodicy. We conclude with some reflections on the relations between the SA and Neoplatonism (friendly) and between the SA and theism (less friendly).

Your Digital Afterlives

“…If some earthly life satisfies the criteria for higher-level existence, the Engineers will promote it (Hanson, 2001;Steinhart, 2010). At least some earthly lives will be promoted, and perhaps every earthly life will be promoted.…”

Universes and simulations: Civilizational development in nested embedding

“…The previous section demonstrated the most obvious, tree-like topology of the embedding structure; such topology has been considered and studied in the literature so far [10,28,32,68,47,13,62]. Now let us look at realistic, more complex cases that our civilization made possible with the development of computers:…”

“…The possibility of nested simulations has undergone serious consideration by numerous scientists in recent decades; this work will not discuss the validity of the arguments that concern the probability for existence of such a nested structure, such as the simulation argument [17,13,11,68,7,5] or the doomsday argument [47,62]. I will rather review some of the consequences of complex simulations being embedded recursively in other simulations and discuss their basic properties -such as descriptive and computational complexity -which can be evaluated in such a nested structure and potentially used to estimate or define the level of development of simulated universes.…”

“…For our civilization this value would be 1, because we have purposefully, intentionally, and -as one can assume, independently from potentially existing ancestor universes (cf. [68,54]) -created a large number of diversified simulations, but so far none of these simulations did the same.…”

Natural evil: the simulation solution

“…Equally, world-creation might be one of the principal means by which members of a highly advanced civilization amuse themselves. It seems perfectly conceivable that many of the artworks of such civilizations could take this form – see Steinhart (2010) for an interesting take on this. Since (non-divine) beings capable of world-creation are likely to have a good deal of spare time at their disposal, they might very well end up creating worlds in vast numbers.…”