That is another interesting problem – if the universe is not intrinsically random, it is impossible to build a real random number generator. As John von Neumann said:

Anyone who considers arithmetical methods of producing random digits is, of course, in the state of sin

Quanta aside, last I heard a free photon could have any wavelength in a continuous, real valued spectrum. Such a number in general requires an infinite number of bits to represent. Makes computer simulation quite of a problem when just one particle takes an an infinite number of bits to represent correctly.

The general problem here is that the universe does not contain enough matter to build a computer big enough to accurately simulate the universe. The best simulator of the universe is the universe itself. So one might imagine that a believable real world computer simulation would have to make up things as it went along.

Here’s an outline of the argument:

http://www.scribd.com/doc/9205678/The-New-God-Argument-Lincoln-Cannon-and-Joseph-West-Handout

Here’s a video presentation of the argument:

http://www.vimeo.com/2237236

No. Not one that assumes the Cartesian project. But I think that is the epistemic problem. His project was to find a ground for certainty, one that eventually ends in the only cogito as its end. But, I’m sitting here and my feet are burning without cause (they just do at night, I don’t know why). That is because in part because I am an embodied being that is more than just a consciousness connected to neural inputs (brain in a wet humany vat). My neurology is part of my consciousness in a way that is unseparable from what it means to be a ‘being.’ I am a brain and a vat together. I think this is the strength of Mormonism in that God is embodied too. Our linkages to the world are not just links to a thing called mind we are intertwined things where body and mind and indeed universe are all part of a deeper connection. Descartes separated mind stuff and physical stuff but I think that was the mistake. When we buy into that separation and make our project that kind of undoubtable certainty then we fall pray to thinking there is mind and a body when in reality they are connected into a single thing. I think that is why bodies matter in our theology. Spirt and body are linked in a way that goes beyond just physical data input from spirit to body (like the brain in the vat) we are one thing now. So to find some undoubtable certainty that we are not a simulation? No, not if that is the goal, but I think that is the wrong project.

I’ll try to write something up and post it as a guest post or something. My explanation is getting too big for a comment.