What is the relation between the simulation argument and religion?
It has no direct connection with religious conceptions of a literally omniscient and omnipotent deity. The simulation-hypothesis does not imply the existence of such a deity, nor does it imply its non-existence. The last section of the original paper speculated about certain parallels that could be drawn between traditional religious conceptions and our relations to our hypothetical simulators. These simulators would have created our world, they would be able to monitor everything that happens here, and they would be able to intervene in ways that conflict with the simulated default laws of nature. Moreover, they would presumably be superintelligent (in order to be able to create such a simulation in the first place). An afterlife in a different simulation or at a different level of reality after death-in-the-simulation would be a real possibility. It is even conceivable that the simulators might reward or punish their simulated creatures based to how they behave, perhaps according to
