In one account of human affairs, an all-pow­er­­ful deity rules over every­thing. Noth­ing can occur with­out the knowl­edge and sanc­tion of the omnipo­tent cre­ator god. In a much more recent iter­a­tion, we inhab­it an unimag­in­ably com­plex com­put­er sim­u­la­tion, in which every thing—ourselves included—has been cre­at­ed by all-pow­er­­ful pro­gram­mers. The first sce­nario gives mil­lions of peo­ple … Con­tin­ue read­ing The Phi­los­o­phy of “Opti­mistic Nihilism,” Or How to Find Pur­pose in a Mean­ing­less Uni­verse