Digital Simulation

'I and God have been making a paradox', Trevor told me on the phone, a sign that we were into science-fiction mode this morning. One of his abiding delusions is that screens of all kinds, whether TVs, computers or phones, can create portals to other dimensions or in fact generate other realities wholesale. This wouldn't matter, as Trevor sitting in his flat playing multiple copies of old movies like The Robe in the belief that he's multiplying God in order to sort his problems out doesn't harm anyone; were it not for the fact that it stops him doing anything that actually would improve his life. Rituals like this are also part of his anxiety structure, his belief that God needs him to carry out certain acts in order to combat evil, especially evil as it relates to himself: 'I have to repair God's throne, God's cross has been condemned.' It doesn't do him any good.

I try to reassure him that God's power is eternal and can't be added to or reduced, and that playing videos doesn't affect it one way or the other. 'We live in a digital simulation, Dr Chuck Missler says so,' Trevor insists, 'it's in the Bible.' I say that I can't think of anywhere the Bible talks along those lines. 'It is, there's a hidden code. You don't know, you haven't studied it. You only know the replacement theology of the Church of England.' There have been occasions when Trevor has declared that 'When I am on my throne in heaven I will condemn the replacement theology,' but we don't get that far this time.

The late Chuck Missler is one of Trevor's favourite evangelists. I suspect he wasn't quite the nutcase he may appear to have been, despite having written a book arguing that alien encounters are in fact meetings with demons. In fact a lot of what Dr Missler wrote was intended to be quite speculative rather than a presentation of hard fact. I suspect his articles and statements about the illusory nature of reality fall into that category: he's taking a set of deductions about the indeterminacy of subatomic physics and using it to argue the utter dependence of the world on God, and incidentally to undermine human beings' confidence about what they think they know: attacking science with a few bits of science. It's a bit a of cheap trick, I think, but even Chuck Missler can't have imagined that a schizophrenic man in a flat in Hornington would have used his ideas to justify playing videos to create alternate universes. I suppose it would be churlish to blame him.