MIT scientist Rizwan Virk has written a disturbing book called The Simulation Hypothesis, in which he suggests that the physical world is likely an artificial intelligence simulation created by programmers from an advanced civilization. You and I and all that we experience – physical sensations, spiritual intimations and emotional tugs – are the creation of programmers from another reality. This is not a new idea, as fans of The Matrix are aware. Virk’s hypothesis is the latest reboot of a dangerous, dualistic, disembodied worldview that purports a separation of the divine from man and man from nature. This worldview has disastrous effects on the human soul and on the natural world.
Virk’s virtual worldview differs sharply from those of us who maintain an incarnational worldview. Incarnational reality is one in which the divine pours into, animates and enlivens the natural world. We treasure this Spirit-infused world, and we wish to enjoy it and protect it from the violent, disembodied technocracy of the modern and postmodern age.
In calling the physical world into question, Virk perpetuates a nihilism that robs people of meaning. My concern is not that Virk’s simulation hypothesis is remotely accurate but that millions of gamers, techno nerds and young people untethered to the reality of a Spirit-infused Nature will believe this dangerous hypothesis. Even worse, I fear they will enact the implications of this dualistic reality in anti-social, violent, ecologically destructive ways.
Dualistic theologies and ideologies are prone to rip the divine from the natural and leave a trail of pain and sorrow in their path. The Christ Church shooting by a fanatic in New Zealand, for example, looked eerily similar to scenes from Doom or Mortal Combat. The iconoclastic measures taken by ISIS fighters, who destroyed entire cities, including their museums of art, to secure an earthly caliphate, demonstrated the confusion of an ideology that insists the divine is separate and apart from the profane world. Christianity has often been blind to the Spirit-infused reality right before our noses in Nature. As Nietzsche was keen to point out, Christianity is full of world-denying priests and parishioners. What is lacking in all of these cases is a realization of the incarnation. When a theology or ideology lacks an incarnational understanding of reality, the result is nihilism and destruction.
Ralph Waldo Emerson expresses the essence of incarnational spirituality in his essay Nature, where he describes all Nature as fed by a nurturing river of divinity. As such, Emerson, who experienced great tragedy in life, says:
…I feel that nothing can befall me in life, — no disgrace, no calamity, (leaving me my eyes,) which nature cannot repair. Standing on the bare ground, — my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite spaces, — all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eye-ball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or parcel of God
With Emerson there is no eternal score-keeping of a maniacal god, no masterful control of slaves and simulants. Living in an incarnational reality, I do not grovel and bow before a tyrannical deity or jump, run or unload gun magazines to the bend of a supreme gamer’s joy stick. I bathe in the presence of the divine as the “current of the Universal Being circulates through me.” While I am not the whole, I swim in the whole. While I am not God, “I am part or parcel of God.”
This incarnational reality of God in man/man in God is reflected in the Christian tradition, where the Christ is presented as Spirit’s incarnational encounter with Nature. The Catholic cathechism proclaims Athanasius’s bold assertion that “God became the Son of man, so that man might become a son of God.” Greek Orthodox Christians speak of theosis, a partaking of the divine nature, in which divinity is not intrinsic to man, but we become united with God by grace in the Christ, who is God in the flesh. In Wesleyan circles, sanctification is a moving onto perfection in the divine. These theological statements reflect the Johannine assertion that we are not slaves of God but friends of God (John 15:15), that we are branches connected to the Vine, recipients of its divine, life-giving sap (John 15:5), and the Lukean claim that in the divine we live, move and have our being (Acts 17:28).
The further people remove themselves from Nature, the more apt they are to entertain quackeries such as the “simulation hypothesis.” Incarnational theology ensures that Spirit and Nature, divine and human, heaven and earth are never torn asunder. When we bathe in the blithe air as did Emerson, “Nature never wears a mean appearance.” The blithe air is the pneuma, divine breath, Spirit, the Christ breathed into man. With several generations of westerners raised on the artificial plane of television, social media and, now, virtual worlds of gaming, fewer and fewer people are learning to truly see Nature with the transparent eyeball that is soaked in the inflow of Universal Being. For this reason, we who hold dear to the reality of the incarnation must continue to push back against the dangerous, dualistic, disembodied theology of simulation that has separated man from nature and wounded his soul. When we no longer see what is real as real, we are inclined to have no moral relationship to the world. We will trash it, destroy it or try to escape it, opioids or suicide being the most prominent escape routes in our time.
In a recent interview in Digitaltrends.com, Virk describes an experience that gave rise to his simulation hypothesis, which demonstrates to me how in recent decades he and others in our society have fallen into the abyss of nihilism and fantasy when they no longer can discern what is real:
I had an experience playing virtual reality ping pong and the responsiveness was very real to the point where I forgot that I was in a room with VR glasses on. When the game ended, I put the paddle on the table but, of course, there was no paddle and there was no table, so the controller fell to the floor. I even leaned over onto the table and almost fell over. That experience really got me thinking about how video game technology is evolving and how it could end up being so fully immersive that we would be unable to distinguish it from reality.
Virk makes Emersons’ point. The more we enter into VR, whether it be a sophisticated video game, a 1970s sitcom, or mindlessly chasing the endless thoughts that appear as videos in our minds, the less we will experience and know Realty. Emerson argued that most people fail to experience the unity of the divine and nature – the incarnational reality – because we wear spiritual blinders, or in Virk’s case, literal goggles.
Even as early as 1832 when he published Nature, Emerson recognized that most people are separated from reality because of their inability to see Nature:
To speak truly, few adult persons can see nature. Most persons do not see the sun. At least they have a very superficial seeing. The sun illuminates only the eye of the man, but shines into the eye and the heart of the child. The lover of nature is he whose inward and outward senses are still truly adjusted to each other; who has retained the spirit of infancy even into the era of manhood. His intercourse with heaven and earth, becomes part of his daily food.
Our work is to facilitate an “intercourse with heaven and earth” that becomes our daily bread, a perpetual awareness before the table of Holy Communion. This experience of the intercourse of heaven and earth is the essence of incarnational Christianity. We are not slaves of God working the fields to earn a meager existence or to avoid our master’s wrath. We are not simulants of a computer programmer, living out his creepy, power-hungry fantasies. We are part and parcel of God, pensioners of an endless inflowing of the divine. The sooner we real-ize this, the happier and healthier we will be.
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