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My personal opinion is that DM/DE are God’s hacks to make the universe work right.

I use ‘hack’ in this sense: Not an error or a mistake, but a necessary special modification to make it all work properly. For example, the kludgy van der Waals force is a hack to support life: to make proteins fold right and ice float in water. (Water is really *weird* at the atomic level.)

To further clarify, as a Christian I believe that Christ is also one of God’s hacks: that Jesus is a unique modification, that He is a special exception, in order to fulfill God’s plan for us, to reconcile us with Him.

There’s nothing wrong with any these hacks. It doesn’t impugn anything negative on His character at all. If anything, it just makes it all the more wonderful.

1. God definitely exists. Exhibit A: The Hubble Ultra Deep Field. The UDF is impossible without a super-finely tuned matter density gradient and alpha opacity function that is absolutely perfect. The UDF does not require the Anthropic Principle. (AP is the last, desperate, refuge of the cornered atheist.) The UDF is basically God showing off. I think He likes to do that a lot.

2. We are living in a universe created by Him. Our universe has basic minimal rules and structure (a closed simulation, like a video game.) Ask a physicist how elegant and minimalist it all is. Gravity is the ugly duckling of the four forces, seemingly a standalone force, with weird behavior at cosmological distances. I believe that was needed to make it all work. (Dark matter is a design hack.) Meanwhile, dark energy gives us the Big Rip, which is a totally cool way to end the story. It will be visible. You will literally see the galaxies dissolving one by one, then the stars, then the planets, then the Earth itself. Again this is God showing off. (See a pattern?)

3. Item 2 implies that a higher level of reality exists somewhere (running the video game). Call this Heaven, or whatever.

4. Item 3 implies there is no way for you to reach Heaven on your own. It would be like a video game character trying to step out of the screen. (Secular Humanists and Gene Roddenberry think this way.)

5. Item 4 implies you must be pulled up. No way to get there on your own. Instead, God shoved His own hand inside the screen, over 2000 years ago, to grab us and pull us up. Why? Dunno. Grace. (Aside: The difference between Christianity and Buddhism is that I think God wants friends to chat with. The Buddhist wants to merge with the Godhead and lose self-identity.)

6. I strongly suspect there is a chain of these higher realities, possibly transfinite. God lives up at the top, the apex of this infinite ladder. (The Continuum Hypothesis is true.) Why? Because the math is elegant, and it is the only way for Georg Cantor to defeat Kurt Goedel. But it requires CH for it to work. The atheist denies CH. That is an unsupported and unprovable assumption. (It is really fascinating how the atheist/deist divide strongly correlates to each mathematician’s position on CH. See the Wikipedia article.)

7. God is definitely watching you. Why? The video game analogy. But there is an even better way to prove it: Observation is the key to Quantum Mechanics. We are living inside a closed QM system with a collapsible wave function. So who collapsed it? Answer: Whoever observed us from outside the box. So, like Schroedinger’s cat, we are alive and not dead. We are literally alive because of Him. (That’s a pun.) Yeah, I’m oversimplifying a bit. Observation is the key to everything. I say ‘I think, therefore I am,’ and since I am aware of myself right at this moment, therefore somebody must be observing me doing it. QED.

8. God wants a relationship with you. Why? Because you are hardwired for it. You feel it. You are an instinctive seeker. No other animal thinks this way.

That’s basically it.

You can work out the rest for yourself. God gave you eyes and a brain. It’s all obvious. You can work out all the deep philosophical questions of life from the above: the question of free will, the two-way communication backchannel called prayer, the problem of evil, how salvation really works, pretty much everything.

It’s all pretty simple, really.