Even If We’re in a Simulation, Someone Still Had to Write the Code
Imagine stumbling across an intricate Lego city sprawled across a table—thousands of bricks forming skyscrapers, roads, streetlights, even tiny minifigures going about their plastic lives. No reasonable person would conclude, “Wow, look what random chance accomplished!” We instantly recognize the unmistakable fingerprint of intelligence: planning, purpose, and intentional assembly. Yet when atheists survey the far more complex “city” of the universe—galaxies precisely tuned, DNA sequences carrying petabytes of information, conscious minds pondering their own existence—many insist it all exploded into being by blind, unguided processes. The same people who would laugh at the idea of a Lego city self-assembling are perfectly comfortable believing the cosmos did exactly that, only on a grander scale.
The argument is straightforward: complexity that exhibits specified information virtually always traces back to a mind. A pile of Lego bricks shaken in a box for a trillion years will never produce a functioning city. Shake a biochemistry lab for a trillion years and you will not get a living cell, let alone the 8.7 million distinct species we observe on Earth, all sharing the same hyper-complex digital code in their DNA. The probability calculations are sobering. Sir Fred Hoyle, the astrophysicist who coined “Big Bang” (originally as a term of ridicule), calculated that the odds of even one functional protein arising by chance are roughly 1 in 10^40,000—an incomprehensibly small number. To put that in perspective, there are only about 10^80 atoms in the observable universe. Random processes simply do not have the probabilistic resources to build specified complexity at the scale we see in biology.
Some atheists retreat to the multiverse: perhaps there are 10^500 universes, and we just happen to live in one where the constants are life-permitting. But this is not an explanation; it is special pleading. Postulating an infinite regression of unobservable universes to avoid a single intelligent cause is like saying the Lego city appeared because there are infinite tables somewhere, and one of them just happened to shake the bricks into perfect order. It does nothing to remove the need for intentional design; it merely pushes the problem back a step.
Even the popular “we’re living in a simulation” hypothesis, often touted as a secular escape hatch, backfires spectacularly. Nick Bostrom’s simulation argument, if true, actually strengthens the case for an intelligent creator. A simulation requires a programmer. The base reality that runs our simulation must itself be staggeringly complex—capable of computing 10^80 particles interacting according to exact laws at Planck time resolution. That base reality either had its own programmer, or it too is a simulation, leading to an infinite regress of simulations. Eventually, to avoid turtles-all-the-way-down absurdity, you must arrive at a base reality that was intentionally brought into being. In other words, even if we are code running on alien hardware, the ultimate origin of reality still traces back to a purposeful intelligence—an uncaused First Coder.
Consider self-replicating plants or von Neumann machines. Yes, once the original template exists, copies can propagate with variation. But the first self-replicator—the original strain—had to contain the full machinery for metabolism, error-correcting replication, and information storage. The simplest known life form, Mycoplasma genitalium, has 580,000 base pairs and over 400 proteins working in orchestrated harmony. Claiming this arose by chemical accident is like claiming the first 3D printer printed itself from a junkyard of parts that also accidentally invented electricity, plastics, and computer code. The replication argument explains inheritance, not origins.
So the real question is not “Is there a creator?” but “How far up the chain are we?” Are we in base reality, lovingly crafted by a transcendent Mind? Or are we several layers deep in a simulation built by post-human teenagers in a higher universe—who themselves may be in a simulation built by even more advanced beings? Every layer, no matter how many, ultimately terminates in an un-simulated, necessarily existent reality whose fine-tuning and complexity scream intentionality rather than randomness.
The Lego city on the table didn’t build itself. The cell in your body didn’t build itself. And whether our universe is base reality or the trillionth nested simulation, the chain of causation ends in purposeful intelligence, not blind chance. The evidence has always pointed the same direction; modern atheists simply refuse to follow it to its logical conclusion.
The better question isn’t whether there is an intentional Creator. It’s whether we have the honesty to admit the obvious when we see it.