God is a teen-age hacker

This is just an idea of mine from several years ago, not some kind of personal theology. After all, I'm a nontheist, which means I am not seriously concerned with the concept of God.

Nevertheless, it appears to me that our reality was probably constructed by some kind of intelligence, so it seems reasonable that there is someone, or a group of someones, that may be responsible for pasting this reality up.

The world we live in certainly follows rules, or a set of natural laws, such as the law of gravity, or the law of action and reaction. This is probably not a coincidence. It is my opinion that these rules are few and simple, though it does not seem that way. The reason it does not seem that way probably is simply because we do not know all the rules. We often specialize in a certain branch of knowledge, and do not see how it all ties together.

Anyway, despite the rules that have made the Universe run for God knows how long (no pun intended), not everything happens smoothly. For example, our bodies are designed to evolve from a single cell to a mature body over a period of time, then slowly deteriorate. But it does not always work right. Some people are born blind, or otherwise disabled. Other people get disabled sometimes during their life.

Why? I personally believe it has something to do with the law of action and reaction. But it may also indicate that the author of the Universe (assuming there is an author) either did not quite design it right, or had a weird sense of humor. Or both.

This brings me to the idea (not belief, and certainly not dogma!) that the Universe we know is a computer game in virtual reality programmed by a teen-age hacker.

My own take is that the root universe has no creator but within that there are many radically different sub-universes. I'm confident this is not an original idea but it's still pretty novel, even compared to The Matrix.

The reasoning goes like this:

I can sit in front of a computer and play God, i.e. I can create a mini-universe which is configured and ruled solely according to my design. It could be something as simple as Conway's game of life or something more complex. It depends on the limit of my resources. Conceivably, my simulated universe may generate sub-universes of it's own. The process may repeat until a particular sub-universe is too simple to spawn a sub-universe of it's own. The sub-universes are not physically detached from their parent universes - a computer simulation still obeys physical laws - but work within those constraints to produce a universe that follows whatever operation is specified. It need bear no relation whatever with it's parent universe. The only clause that I can see is that the child is necessarily simpler than the parent.

The upshot of this is that given all the probable simulations nested in the root universe the chances of you living at the root level are very small. More likely is that you are living at a simulated level that has been deliberately created by some intelligent entity at a higher level. According to your attitude you could call this entity God or Spod.