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I know what you're thinking -- What does time travel have to do with the question of God's existence?

Remember that one of my assumptions in exploring the concept of God is that the only place to find this answer is in understanding the reality that makes up our Universe. Therefore any subject which tries to dissect how our Reality works, and how we interact with it is fair game for discussion.

In the course of this exploration we'll be looking at a lot of different concepts about our Reality, including Relativity, Quantum Mechanics and the nature of matter and energy.

Time travel is about as far out as you can get, but I came across an interesting thought recently during my research which I thought would be fun to share with you. We don't have to be serious all the time, do we?

In his Theory of Special Relativity, Einstein postulates that it is possible to travel forward in time, but it is not possible to travel back in time.

If you stop to think about this, it reveals a very interesting characteristic of our Universe. According to Einstein, time is relative, but only in the forward direction.

I was watching a documentary yesterday about time travel and one idea in particular caught my fancy.

Basically, it goes like this: as computers become faster and more powerful, eventually we will have computers capable of creating an exact replica of our world. This virtual world would contain every single element that our actual world contains.

From examining this replica of our world, the computer would be able to project backwards to any point in the past. How would it do this? By utilizing the law of cause and effect, the computer would simply be identifying the cause (the past) by understand the effect (the present).

Make sense so far? But that isn't the tricky part.

This computerized replica of the world, or virtual world, would be so perfect in every respect that the elements that made up this virtual world would not even be aware that they inhabited a virtual world rather than the real one.

In other words, the people who populated this virtual past would be unaware that it is not real. They would be conscious entities inhabiting what is to them a completely real and valid universe.

Assuming this does these virtual worlds become possible in the future, it is reasonable to assume that there will be more individuals inhabiting those worlds than the real one -- since one can assume there would be multiple computers creating multiple worlds, each with populations equal to the real one.

Therefore, based on this fact, there is a greater likelihood that you exist in one of those virtual worlds than that you exist in the real one.

How would you know?

(Of course my parents have been telling me I'm living in a fantasy world for most of my life anyway...)

Eric W. austin has been considering the question of Christianity for more than twenty years. Founder and creator of the immensely popular but controversial The Need for God Blog, Eric continues to rock the boat and bring new ideas and questions to the subject of God's existence and the meaning of Reality.