[unalone]

Curious! I can't say I agree with that – at least, not the way you just phrased it; could just be linguistic ambiguity – but it's interesting nonetheless. I have to say, that's a mindset I don't usually expect on Hacker News; now I'm wondering just how diverse the beliefset of this community is.

[learc83]

My personal belief is that the earth was created as if it were much older than it actually is, although their really wouldn't be much of a difference to us.

For example, if God created the first tree, just snapped his fingers and poof, there it is full sized. Would that tree have tree rings? I think it would.

[unalone]

What would be the point of creating something and then faking its age? Is it a test, for us to ignore empirical evidence and determine that God made it anyway? Or are you suggesting that, perhaps, the world began with us humans, and that the universe pre-humanity was manufactured to seem like it gave rise to is (but it couldn't have, because it started with us)?

I'm interested in where such a belief comes from.

[learc83]

I don't think that is was manufactured to trick us, but that for whatever reason the simulation needed a past. Imagine the world is a recursive algorithm and it start running at n = 1, you need to define n = 0 for it to make any sense.

Tree rings are needed to support the tree and would occur once the simulation started running anyway, so God could either create two classes of tree, or use the more elegant solution (to my mind) of having that tree appear the same as if it had grown.

My reason for believing this is that I think it's a more elegant solution (that is just based on my personal perception of elegance) and that God decided the world should be in a certain state before humans arrived, so either he could run the simulation for billions of years, or he could just fast forward as if it had ran for billions of years. Either one works, but since there were no people around to experience time why bother with actually running it (or the opposite argument, why not actually run it).

Another reason why I think the simulation was needed in the first place, because it moves the limits of our knowledge further away, and gives us more room to explore.

Imagine if God decided humans needed an energy source, so he put a magic black liquid under the ground with no explanation. We'd find it, and that would pretty much be the end of it--we could go no further. However, if he instead ran set up a simulation and ran it(or skipped ahead) to create oil, we can try to figure out where oil came from.

Basically we have a whole rich and complex simulated past to explore before we hit the brick wall of--God did it.