My mother is a devout Catholic. Not unlike Sheldon’s mom. Her faith is quite unshakable.

My father was a staunch rebellious agnostic/atheist who constantly quarreled with his Catholic school teachers about the inconsistencies of the Bible.

“If God is so omnipotent, why did he have to rest on the seventh day?” my pops used to say.

I’m neither rebellious, quarrelsome nor unquestioning.

People tend to be surprised when I tell them I’m a pantheist: Have you ever been mistaken for a different religion or ethnicity?

I don’t believe there’s an anthropomorphic entity in the “sky” that watches over us. I haven’t seen one, and seeing one would make me think I’m schizophrenic instead.

I don’t believe whatever creation myth the Bible has to offer. Those things are better understood through the lens of Science. Going no further than my backyard allowed me to dig up fossils.

I don’t believe that most religions have your best interests at heart. It takes no more than one trip to a history book to stumble upon depraved corrupt Popes such as Rodrigo Borja. Muslims are no better.

I do believe that the Universe is mysterious beyond our primitive comprehension.

I've answered it tangentially before: Why do most humans point to intelligence when they see a design; but some, like atheists, don't point to a creator when they see the universe?

Which I’ll quote out of laziness.

I’m not going to be arrogant bordering stupidity, I can’t say that I have a theory that can prove God. That would be too much for just a mostly hairless chronically in heat hominid stuck on a flying wet rock in a remote corner of the Laniakea Supercluster.

Even if we find the ultimate source code of the Universe, which will very likely be expressed in Mathematics since there’s an Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences, we will be faced with the question: “Who or what wrote it?”

Maybe the transcendental questions we can’t answer are so because our minds are not ready for such thinking, our mental models are heavily slanted towards agent-based reasoning. Hence “Gods/Entities” to cause things such as Lightning, Harvests, Love, etc.

I don’t blame us. Our symbolic processors had to be grown for survival first and understanding later. In fact, too much “understanding” could prove non-selective. For nature it is better to have a zealot that breeds like a rabbit than an isolated hermit philosopher who marvels at the Universe.

The nature of the Universe we can see seems to be computational up to an unknown extent. So much in fact, that I wouldn't be surprised if we’re living in a simulation of sorts.

“But are we the map or the territory?” an illuminated reader may ask, quoting Korzybski.

If the Universe follows specific laws then it is reasonable to say that—knowing those laws—it can be simulated. Not necessarily in a deterministic way.

If the Universe is a computer, then it resembles some sort of ludicrous Planck-level game engine.

If this Universe is a simulation, then it might be computed somewhere else on who knows what hardware.

I’m more or less in line with what physicist David Deutsch posits when he says:

"The universe is not a program running somewhere else. It is a universal computer, and there is nothing outside of it."

Bear in mind that this is not incompatible with the idea of a God. Since the rules seem to be arbitrary, there’s room for some “process” that oversees the Universe.

Think of it as a Celestial Gardener.

Whatever the goal of this Universe is, if there is any, we don’t know.

Whoever or whatever the Gardener is, if there is any, we don’t know.

How-ever this contraption works, if there is any, we somewhat know.

And as always, there’s a relevant XKCD.

If the Universe is indeed a computational process it might have the same limitations and architectural constraints that we have while creating Universes, like the one in EVE Online.

And you thought reddit wasn't able to drop some wisdom

What EVE Online does is slowing down “game” time to have enough “real” time to process all requests—time dilation. One game second might last ten real life seconds.

I’m no physicist but what our “Universe” does is slowing down your “real” time—compared to a frame of reference—when your speed increases. We don’t experience that slow down because our minds seem to work on that “Universal Game Server Tick”. There’s no ten real life seconds, there’s just your “game” second because you live in the game.

If you could picture time as a grid of invisible cubes, this would be like stretching those cubes. Now picture “space” likewise. When a massive body is present, space curves. There’s more “mass” to process in the Universal Machine. Hence stretching again.

Whatever hardware the Universe is running in, it seems to have a maximum processing rate.

Whether the speed of light is that processing rate or not, I don’t know. What I do know is that light is quantized as photons. Which leads us to think that other properties might as well.

“YES, PLANCK LENGTH IS THE SPACE QUANTUM!” the enthusiastic might point.

And they would be totally wrong.

Some time ago in 1973, a lovely Mexican-Jew named Jacob David Bekenstein published a paper named “Black Holes and Entropy”.

In this paper, he quotes some guy named Christodoulou who showed that a Kerr Black Hole (one without electrical charge) can’t acquire a particle—in a non-reversible way—and reduce what he called the “irreducible mass” of the black hole.

Which in layman’s terms would be like saying that even black holes can’t eat most things without getting fat. Proper physicists might provide better analogies. Feel free to indulge.

Bekenstein shows that the amount of “fat” a black hole gains by adding a bit is way less than a Planck length.

Regardless of what the actual size of the “building blocks” of the Universe is, they might be quantized. If all other things like space, time, energy and whatnot are quantized, then our Physical Universe is not that different from our current computers.

So on one end, I have Catholics and other types promoting their tribalist agent-based cosmogonies. On the other end, I have staunch atheist deniers who border nihilism.

On some other dimension I have attempts at comparing the qualities of this physical Universe to digital Universes we understand. Like Brian Whitworth recently did in his paper “The Physical World as a Virtual Reality”.

AKA The Uncanny Resemblance of the Physical Universe to a Virtual Reality

What manner of crazy experiment is this? Is this mortality as entertainment?

Is our thought just a statistical artifact on a computational process too big to understand? Are we just blips on alien kid’s science fair sim? WHAT AM I? How would an author describe me?

What is life? What is physics ultimately? How does it work behind the scenes?

Why are things the way they are? Where do we come from? Where are we going? Am I real? Do you exist? Do we actually decide anything? What is consciousness? Is there free will? Is it just an illusion? Is this a dream?

What? Why? How? Where? When?

Are we just music? Wave-particles colluding into reality harmonically. Walking, talking, transient stardust.

Well, we might as well be. Echoes of the sad, lonely, infinite tunes of a cosmic violinist too present to show up.

In this sense, as in being awe-struck by the depth and unfathomable mystery of Nature, I’m a profoundly religious man.