God Became Flesh, Not an Angel

It feels strange and mildly embarrassing to admit this, but my entire life has been indelibly affected by video games. And I think it’s for the best.

When I was three years old, I made my first friend with the neighbor boy two houses down. He was walking by along the sidewalk with his mother and when I saw him I sprayed my mom with the garden hose, making them both laugh.

When I got a little older, we played together all the time, and at his house he had a Sega Genesis. This is where I first experienced video games and they completely blew my mind. I was obsessed to say the least.

My dad bought old computers from the government surplus outlet and stripped them for parts to build better machines. We had computers laying all over our basement, and I was constantly poking at them, trying to figure out how they worked.

When my tiny mind made the connection that some form of effort on a computer produced a video game, that was when I decided that I needed to learn how to code. But the disparity between the code and the video game that I played on the screen was massive and I was shocked that something so boring like numbers and letters could produce a speedy blue hedgehog that captivated me for hours.

It seemed to me that if you cracked open a game cartridge you would see a little blue hedgehog inside with all of his friends and levels that he would run through; I thought it was all tucked away in there. It didn’t really make sense to me that the things that I saw on the screen were not the fundamental quanta of what I was experiencing. As I grew older, I realized that all of these experiences were formed by more fundamental things. Things that were completely alien to the experience that I was used to. Bytes and sprite maps and logical statements produced what I enjoyed.

It was in spite of these things that I learned to code. These mechanics were necessary, but still only an obstacle to produce the experiences that I longed for.

In the many years since, I’ve learned to enjoy programming quite a bit. Creating an experience from what appears to be nothing but math and logic is an extremely satisfying creative endeavor. You write the framework. You write the rules. You draw the sprites. You add functionality. The moment that the game comes alive in front of your eyes is always sublime, because you knew that before that point, it was only an idea. And after that point, your idea became encoded in such a way that it could actually exist.

As I grew older, I began to encounter philosophical ideas that wrestled with the nature of reality. Being that video games and digital things were so much a part of my life, I began to wonder: between the code and the simulation it produced, what was actually real?

I knew that the characters that I rendered on screen were wholly manufactured. They could not exist without bytes and arrays and functions and loops. But I also knew that nobody would ever fall in love with bytes and arrays. Nobody would ever make great memories with loops and functions. Nobody would remember a single sprite map or a sound effect in isolation.

When I encountered simulation theory, I had already developed a strong faith rooted in cradle Catholicism. And I didn’t immediately recognize the undercurrent of Gnostic heresy implied in the theory itself. What I did recognize is that for all of its flaws, simulation theory does touch on an important truth: the experience in reality is not base reality. Somehow we all know this deep down. God is base reality. He is the uncreated creator on which all things depend and without Whom nothing could exist. In so much as humans have a desire for base reality, God is what we actually desire. But does that mean our desire for God is opposed to our state of existence in a created reality?

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