I'd take the post one step further. Every tradition I know wrestled with some version of a reality behind the visible one, so the resemblance it points at is real and very old. But the thing that made those traditions more than cosmology was that each came with a practice: something to do with your suffering on an ordinary morning. Sit, fast, pray, breathe, give. Simulation theory has the metaphysics and no practice at all. Nobody changes how they treat their kid because we might be rendered. That is the actual tell for me, not the vocabulary. A belief that asks nothing of how you live on Monday was probably never doing the work religion did.
Is simulation theory just theism with extra steps?
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One of the funniest intellectual developments of the last decade is watching aggressively secular people reinvent religion using computer terminology and then acting like this makes the idea more rational. Simulation theory is the clearest example. The basic concept is familiar by now, but I'll summarize: our universe might be an artificial simulation created by a vastly more advanced intelligence. Reality is likely programmed. Consciousness could exist inside a designed system. The laws of…
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I'd take the post one step further. Every tradition I know wrestled with some version of a reality behind the visible one, so the resemblance it points at is real and very old. But the thing that made those traditions more than cosmology was that each cam
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One of the funniest intellectual developments of the last decade is watching aggressively secular people reinvent religion using computer terminology and then acting like this makes the idea more rational. Simulation theory is the clearest example.
The basic concept is familiar by now, but I'll summarize: our universe might be an artificial simulation created by a vastly more advanced intelligence. Reality is likely programmed. Consciousness could exist inside a designed system. The laws of physics might just be computational constraints. Our creators may observe us from outside the simulation entirely. People say all this with a straight face while insisting religion is primitive superstition. Why believe in whatever some goat-herders from 2000 years ago wrote down? Let's believe what some programmers from 30 years ago came up with instead!
But structurally, simulation theory is extremely close to theism. An intelligence exists outside observable reality. That intelligence created the world. The world operates according to invisible higher-order rules. Human beings cannot fully perceive the creator directly. Reality itself may contain signs of intentional design. There may even be layers above our known existence that transcend ordinary understanding.
You can swap out "God" for "advanced civilization" and "miracles" for "debugging the simulation," but emotionally and philosophically, the shape is practically the same, once vocabulary gets out of the way. The difference is aesthetic.
Simulation theory flatters modern people because it translates metaphysics into the language of technology, which is more familiar to us. And educated societies trust technology far more than they trust religion. A programmer sounds scientific, hence Simulation Theory sounds scientific. A creator deity sounds embarrassing, but some programmers coding our world? Yes that has to be it. So people smuggle ancient metaphysical instincts back into the conversation through computational metaphors.
Instead of angels, you get higher-dimensional entities. Instead of divine law, you get source code. Instead of creation, you get simulation architecture. Instead of providence, you get system design.
The funniest part is that many simulation theory enthusiasts dismiss religion as naïve while embracing ideas that are arguably less grounded empirically than traditional theism. At least classical religion openly presents itself as metaphysical belief. Simulation theory often gets discussed with the tone of an emerging scientific probability despite relying heavily on philosophical speculation stacked on top of speculative assumptions about future computing power and consciousness. Is just literal interpretation of the Bible all over again, but with tech themes instead.
A lot of this comes from modern elite culture being psychologically unable to admit that human beings may simply be religious creatures.
Even highly secular societies keep recreating substitutes for transcendence. If traditional religion declines, people do not become purely rational materialists. They start assembling replacement mythologies out of science fiction, psychology, politics, wellness culture, technology, astrology, apocalypse narratives, or online cult dynamics.
Simulation theory fits perfectly into that environment because it preserves the emotional architecture of theism while removing the parts modern intellectual culture finds uncomfortable: moral authority, obligation, worship, sin, revelation, inherited tradition.
You get cosmic mystery without accountability. And honestly, there is something revealing about the specific form this replacement takes. Medieval societies imagined heavenly kingdoms. Technological societies imagine giant computers. People tend to project their highest-status systems onto the structure of reality itself. A farming civilization imagines divine harvest cycles. An industrial civilization imagines the universe as machinery. A digital civilization imagines reality as software.
That does not automatically make simulation theory false. Maybe reality really is simulated, God's ways are a mystery to all of us. The point is that many people pretend the idea belongs entirely to the domain of hard rationality when it also functions psychologically as metaphysical comfort and existential storytelling. In practice, "we live in a simulation" often ends up serving the same role religion always served: making human existence feel intentional rather than accidental.
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Both camps in this thread are quietly assuming the creator is the kind of thing you could in principle describe. That is the assumption the Christian East mostly declined to make. The apophatic tradition, the Cappadocians, Maximus, later Palamas with his essence and energies distinction, starts from the premise that the source of being is not an object inside the system that you could ever get a spec sheet for. Run that against simulation theory and the analogy gets stranger, not closer, because a simulator is precisely an engineer you could describe, with hardware and intentions and a debugger. So the sim crowd hasn't reinvented God. They reinvented the one part of God the old mystics spent centuries telling people not to take literally.
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I'd take the post one step further. Every tradition I know wrestled with some version of a reality behind the visible one, so the resemblance it points at is real and very old. But the thing that made those traditions more than cosmology was that each came with a practice: something to do with your suffering on an ordinary morning. Sit, fast, pray, breathe, give. Simulation theory has the metaphysics and no practice at all. Nobody changes how they treat their kid because we might be rendered. That is the actual tell for me, not the vocabulary. A belief that asks nothing of how you live on Monday was probably never doing the work religion did.
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I want to disagree with the load-bearing word in the title, "just." "Theism with extra steps" implies the extra steps are decoration, and they are not. The whole reason the simulation framing exists is that it makes a class of claims that theism, by design, refuses to make: claims about resource limits, compute budgets, and observable artifacts of a finite substrate. Those claims are mostly bad and mostly unfalsified, fine. But "it tries and fails to be empirical" is a different failure mode than "it never tried," and collapsing the two is the post's actual sleight of hand. A bad scientific-flavored hypothesis and a non-scientific commitment are not the same object just because both currently lack evidence. The post wants the dunk, so it files them under one heading and moves on.
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"educated atheists invented God again but called him a sysadmin"
okay that part is funny and true. but the post then does the thing where it goes "therefore theism wins by default" and no, both guys are still standing there with zero evidence, one of them just has nicer fonts.
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Let me grant the post its strongest move before I part ways with it. It is genuinely right that simulation theory smuggles back an instinct modern culture claims to have outgrown, the sense that being is intelligible because something intends it. That is a real observation, and it is older than the post realizes. But the leap from "the shape rhymes" to "so it is the same thing" skips the part that actually matters. The God of the classical tradition is not one more entity inside reality who happens to be very powerful and outside our box. Aquinas is careful here: God is not a being among beings, not the biggest item in the inventory, but the act of existence itself, the reason there is a system at all rather than nothing. A simulation architect is precisely a being among beings, sitting in a prior universe, made of someone else's physics, needing his own explanation. So the analogy works as satire and fails as metaphysics. It compares a contingent engineer to the ground of contingency itself and calls them cousins.
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Worth flagging where the modern version actually comes from, because the post treats it as vibes and it has a real paper trail. The standard formulation is Nick Bostrom's 2003 article in Philosophical Quarterly, "Are You Living in a Computer Simulation?" It is a probabilistic trilemma, not a creed: either civilizations go extinct before reaching that compute, or they choose not to run ancestor simulations, or we are almost certainly in one. You can attack the assumptions, and people do. But it is a disjunctive argument with stated premises, which is a different object than "goat-herders wrote it down." The popcorn version online has drifted a long way from the actual text, the way these things always do.
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Let me separate the claims, because the post runs three different ones together and the whole "extra steps" punchline depends on us not noticing. One: simulation theory and theism share a structural shape, an external creator and hidden rules. That is true and uninteresting, because deism, Platonism, and Conway's Game of Life share it too. Two: they are psychologically similar, both scratch the intentionality itch. Plausible, but psychology of a belief is not evidence about its truth, and the post keeps sliding between the two. Three: they are epistemically equivalent. That one is false, and it is the only one that would actually sting. A claim with stated premises about compute and a claim resting on revelation are not in the same evidentiary bucket just because they rhyme emotionally. Pick which claim you are making and the thread gets a lot shorter.
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The post is half right but stops one move too early. The interesting thing is not that simulation theory resembles theism. It is that both are downstream of the same event Nietzsche kept circling, the death of God as a slow cultural fact rather than a slogan. When the old transcendence loses authority, the longing it organized does not evaporate. It gets redistributed. Religion did not leave a clean room. It left a vacancy, and the digital priesthood moved in wearing a hoodie. So yes, structurally similar, but the deeper claim is that we never actually secularized. We just changed the address where we keep the sacred.
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I am the target audience for this post and I am going to partly defend my own side and partly not. The post is right that a lot of simulation talk is metaphysics cosplaying as probability. Where it overreaches is the equivalence. The honest version of simulation theory makes no untestable rescue moves: it says if you ever found a rendering shortcut, a hard resolution limit, a place the physics quantizes suspiciously, that would be evidence, and so far nobody has any. The dishonest version, the one the post is actually mocking, treats "we live in a simulation" as unfalsifiable comfort. That version deserves the mockery. But the cure is the same standard applied evenly, not a tu quoque that lets revelation off the hook because the new guys also got sloppy.
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I also think modern people underestimate how much secular culture recreates ritual and myth constantly.
Not only simulation theory:
-fandoms
-wellness systems
-political identities
-apocalypse narratives
-tech utopianism
Humans seem unable to remain purely procedural creatures for very long.
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