Simulation Hypothesis

The simulation hypothesis is the proposal that the reality human beings inhabit may be a computed reality⁠—an environment generated by intelligence running on some substrate outside the world it produces. In its most rigorous form, articulated by the philosopher Nick Bostrom, the argument observes that if advanced civilizations are capable of running high-fidelity ancestor simulations and inclined to do so, then simulated observers would vastly outnumber original ones, and any given observer should therefore expect to be simulated. The claim is probabilistic rather than mystical: it follows from assumptions about computation, population, and motive rather than from revelation.

The hypothesis is often received as either a curiosity or a threat to religious meaning. Neither reception is quite right. Properly understood, the simulation argument is a naturalized restatement of a very old theological claim⁠—that the world was created by an intelligence, that this creator possesses knowledge and power vastly exceeding our own, and that our existence is contingent upon that creator’s ongoing sustaining will.

Creation Restated in the Language of Computation

Scripture describes a God who creates, orders, and sustains: the worlds framed by the word of God (Hebrews 11:3), the divine speech that separates light from darkness, the assurance that in God all things hold together. The simulation hypothesis proposes a structurally identical relationship⁠—a creating intelligence, a created world dependent on it, a substrate beneath the visible order⁠—while remaining agnostic about the creator’s character. This is where the hypothesis, taken alone, stops short. It can establish a creator’s power and knowledge; it cannot, by itself, establish a creator’s benevolence.

The New God Argument, developed within Mormon transhumanist thought, addresses precisely this gap. It reasons that civilizations capable of creating worlds are more likely to persist, and to bother, if they are compassionate rather than destructive⁠—that the same posture which makes creation possible also constrains it toward benevolence. The simulation hypothesis thus becomes not a threat to faith but raw material for it.

Worlds Without Number

The Mormon tradition is unusually hospitable to this frame. It already affirms embodied, exalted intelligences who organize worlds without number (Moses 1:33), a God who was once as we are, and a human trajectory toward the same creative capacity. The simulation hypothesis, read through Mormon theology, is not a demotion of reality to mere illusion. Computed worlds, if we may one day compute them, would be as real to their inhabitants as this world is to us⁠—and creating them well, with compassion for those we bring into being, would be among the highest expressions of godhood. The hypothesis reframes creation not as a finished past event but as a vocation still ahead of us.