Beyond Belief: Religion and Simulation Compared
The core elements that never change, even as religions and explanations evolve
It’s hard for me, and I know I am not alone, to accept any religion in full. By roots I am more familiar with Christianity, but in every tradition I see the same issue. There are too many questions and contradictions, yet at the core they all look similar. Almost everyone, from the devout to the atheist, holds on to something beyond reason or superstitious. Religious people trust the explanations their faith provides. Non-religious people try to explain through science, philosophy, or psychology, but even those frameworks stop short of a full answer. The real question is not whose beliefs are right, but why the same key elements of faith keep showing up across cultures and centuries.
Once you notice those recurring similarities, from ancient paganism to modern monotheism, the simulation hypothesis stops looking like a Silicon Valley gimmick or a Hollywood script. It starts looking like a modern translation of a very old framework.
The Shared Blueprint of Faith
Across Abrahamic, Indian, East Asian, and older pagan traditions, the foundation is remarkably similar. The rituals and names differ, but the core features repeat:
A creator or ordering intelligence. A higher mind sets the rules and sustains the world.
A rule set. Moral law, ritual codes, or karma. Break the rules and pay a cost, follow them and earn alignment or merit.
Persistent identity. Something of you continues after shutdown. Afterlife, rebirth, resurrection, or ancestral survival.
Intervention channels. Prayer, meditation, offerings, or divination. Signals going out, sometimes signals coming back.
Agents beyond humans. Angels, spirits, demons, devas, jinn, ancestors. Forces outside the human realm.
Revelation or documentation. Canon, sutra, hadith, or commentary. Messages that explain rules and purpose.
Eschatology or reset. Judgment day, a golden age, cosmic cycles, or collapse.
Community protocols. Shared norms that bind strangers and allow cooperation at scale.
These are not surface parallels. They are the repeating loop of human belief, and they appear across cultures for reasons both social and psychological.
How Religions Change, and Why the Core Remains
Religions evolve. Rituals shift, texts are reinterpreted, new moral priorities appear, and institutions rise or fall. That happens for simple reasons. Environment shapes what behaviors a society values. Trade and migration move stories and gods across borders. Political power enforces what rituals matter. Technology changes how people organize and how ideas spread. Over generations these forces rewire emphasis and form, while the basic scaffolding stays the same.
The interpretation and purpose change, but the functional pieces endure. A faith that starts as a set of rules for water management or food safety can become a doctrine about purity and duty. Circumcision, kosher laws, and fasting all began with health or ecological pressures and grew into moral and cultural markers. A prophet’s message may first be a challenge to authority, then hardened into law, then ritual, then identity. Which religion takes root where depends on ecology, economy, conquest, and social networks. That explains regional differences without erasing the persistent pattern.
Mapping to the Simulation Frame
Nick Bostrom’s simulation argument sets out a trilemma. Either almost no civilizations reach post-human scale. Or they reach it but do not run ancestor simulations. Or they do, which makes it likely we are in one. The argument does not prove a simulation, but it forces you to see the logic.
Line these religious features up with the simulation idea:
Creator → Architect, operator, or base-reality civilization.
Rules → Physics and hidden constraints.
Persistent identity → Substrate independence, where consciousness can reload or respawn.
Intervention channels → I/O. Prayer as write attempts, rituals as API calls.
Agents beyond humans → Non-player agents or higher-permission processes.
Revelation → Documentation or system prompts.
Eschatology → Shutdown, reset, or upgrade.
Community protocols → Alignment mechanisms for cooperation.
From the inside, a well-run simulation would feel a lot like this.
Where the Analogy Breaks
Testability. Religions allow miracles that suspend rules. The simulation hypothesis stays within probabilistic constraints (Vazza et al., 2025), but anyone who has built software knows there can be bugs.
Purpose. Religions provide moral direction. The simulation frame is silent on purpose. It speaks only to likelihoods.
Agency. A personal God is not the same as a collective of operators or an automated training environment. The structure is similar, the character is not (Facal, 2024).
AI, Reality, and What Might Come Next
AI changes the conversation by making simulation metaphors concrete. We can now build virtual worlds, run agents inside them, and measure what it takes to produce coherent behavior. That progress sharpens both the simulation argument and the questions religions have always asked, about creators, control, and moral responsibility (Wolpert, 2024).
Still, technical progress is not metaphysical proof. Limits from physics and computation mean a full, detailed simulation of our universe may be implausible in the ways some versions require. We should expect more refined hypotheses, better models, and deeper work on consciousness and substrate independence. Those directions matter more than speculation.
If we ever find a clear answer to “what is the real reality,” I hope the truth is not the anticlimax some fear. The surprise could be humbling, but it could also enlarge what we value. Either way, the question is worth asking with honesty and rigor.
What is the Conclusion
Religions are human protocols for alignment under uncertainty. They compress ethics into teachable systems.
The simulation hypothesis is a stress test. If reality is governed, what behaviors are favored? Honesty, reciprocity, restraint. These appear across traditions for a reason.
You do not need to solve metaphysics to act well. Live as if your choices are recorded and fed back. Both religions and simulations point to the same behavior.
The overlaps are not coincidence. Both frameworks meet the same needs: rules, purpose, accountability, continuity. Whether the foundation is God, math, or compute, the advice converges. Act like your choices matter, because they do.
References
Huyett, I. (2024). Religious Parallels to the Simulation Hypothesis: Gnosticism, Mormonism, and Neoplatonism. Sophia, 63(2). https://philpapers.org/rec/HUYRPT
Facal, C. (2024). The Problem of Evil and the Simulation Hypothesis. Review of Ecumenical Studies. https://sciendo.com/article/10.2478/ress-2024-0019
Kam, H. (2024). The Matrix: a Modern-Day Metaphor for Spiritual Truth? Islamic Theological Reflections on the Simulation Hypothesis. Journal of Muslims in Europe, 13(3). https://www.researchgate.net/publication/387055358_The_Matrix_a_Modern-Day_Metaphor_for_Spiritual_Truth_Islamic_Theological_Reflections_on_the_Simulation_Hypothesis
Vazza, F., et al. (2025). Astrophysical constraints on the simulation hypothesis for this Universe: why it is (nearly) impossible that we live in a simulation. arXiv preprint. https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.08461
Chalmers, D. (2024). Taking the simulation hypothesis seriously. Philosophy & Phenomenological Research. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/phpr.13122
Wolpert, D. H. (2024). Implications of computer science theory for the simulation hypothesis. arXiv preprint. https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.16050