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MBlume comments on Maybe Theism Is OK - Less Wrong
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the only plausible version of theism is one in which intelligence came into the universe in a lawful way -- ie, not intelligence first. Even if intelligence did not originate from natural selection here on earth, it must've originated roughly that way somewhere. Maybe that lead to a singularity, to superintelligences, to beings capable of understanding the physics of their universe at the deepest most fundamental level, who decided to create their own universes for fun. Not parsimonious, not constrained by evidence, but at least not as wildly, screamingly absurd as "intelligence came from nowhere and decided to start a universe"
But the "fun" for which the simulated universes are optimized must be of variety likely to arise from the same natural selection. Which doesn't seem to apply at all to what we see. The universe created for its fun value is not at all the same as the ancestral universe, natural selection is an enemy.
I'm not talking about playing cops and robbers or going on a roller-coaster, I'm talking about a kid playing with a chemistry set. When I was 12, I had an a-life simulator called Prokaryote that I used to play with for hours, setting up some interesting initial condition and then seeing what would happen. Having been a theist at the time, I promptly decided that God was playing with us in the same way. Why else start three contradictory religions on the same spot? Why else temporarily give humans the ability to explore a continent, then isolate them for millennia?
In retrospect, I'm not sure how I squared this away with the idea of a benevolent deity I was supposed to be praying to.
Consider the required power. At the point where you can create a universe as your plaything, you should also be able to choose the universe that meets your preferences very closely, not a random universe like our own.