If our reality is a video game, does that solve the problem of evil?
Barry Dainton
Barry Dainton
Quote:As for why we should take seriously the idea that there can be makers of worlds who are less than divine, there is no shortage of relevant scenarios to be found in science, science fiction and philosophy.
Among the obstacles that Cern had to overcome when constructing the Large Hadron Collider (the very large and powerful machine which discovered the Higgs boson in 2012) was persuading a worried public that running the collider would not create a mini-black hole that would escape the confines of the lab and go on to consume the entire planet. Although there was no real danger of this happening, such worries were by no means entirely groundless.
As long ago as the 1980s and 1990s, Alan Guth and Andrei Linde (respected physicists and pioneers of the now widely accepted inflationary cosmology) raised the possibility that scientists might soon be able to create "bubble" or "pocket" universes in a laboratory. Initially sub-microscopic, the newly created bubble universe rapidly expands and soon constitutes a full-scale cosmos in its own right. These new universes create their own space and time as they grow, so they take up no room at all in our world and pose no threat to us.
'Historically, we may regard materialism as a system of dogma set up to combat orthodox dogma...Accordingly we find that, as ancient orthodoxies disintegrate, materialism more and more gives way to scepticism.'
- Bertrand Russell
- Bertrand Russell