This morning I spent a while pondering the claims of religious zealots, as I often do, and started to think about the God hypothesis from one of the few perspectives I am able to handle: the programmers perspective. I've created lots of universes using various computer programming languages, but none nearly as sophisticated as the one we find ourselves living in. I then went on to think a bit about the heaven/hell theory, and how it would fit into a universe simulation.
Let's say I'm a designer who has devoted my life to creating a really complex universe simulation. In fact, let's say it's a simulation identical to the universe we live in. I come up with the idea that I want to encourage good behavior and discourage bad behavior for the individuals in my simulation. It makes no difference in this thought experiment what kind of standards I want to set for "good" and "bad" behavior.
It is assumed that I am free to intervene in the simulation in any way whenever I please, which seems to be a good fit with the god hypothesis as presented by christians, muslims, jews and other less common denominations of terrestrial faith. Now, let's think about what would be a good way to go about stimulating the kind of behavior that I want to see. To me, an obvious way of encouraging good behavior to spread is to make sure that individuals that behave well will have a greater chance of reproducing (and thus making sure that their genes for good behavior are inherited), and vice versa for bad behavior. This could be accomplished by making "bad" individuals less attractive to their mates and/or simply giving them a shorter lifespan by intervening in various ways. If you give this system a couple of thousand generations, the "good" behavior will spread and bad behavior will recede until eventually, the population in the simulation are almost exclusively by my definition "good". All fine and dandy.
Another option, since I am all-powerful, is simply to alter the conditions for the simulation and make sure that all individuals are born with the traits that I want. This seems more like painting a picture than creating a living universe, though, and we are assuming that that is what I want, a living universe populated by individuals with some sort of free will (or at least an illusion thereof).
Now, what seems to me like a rather wicked way of going about this, would be to instead do the following.
I implant a myth into the folklore of the population, that is spread only by word of mouth. This myth contains information about what I think is good or bad behavior, along with a warning to everyone that engages in bad behavior that they will be punished after death and promises of a reward for those that behave well, a reward that will also be given to them after death. This seems at first glance like something that could also work, and it might well do so. It does however show that I have a rather low sense of empathy for the individuals in the universe I've created, given that I still allow them to be born bad but order them to be good, or else. Doesn't this seem more like a "mad scientist" type of experiment than a "loving father" to you? The individuals have absolutely no way of verifying the claims in the folklore myth, and the faculties for critical thinking that they have been born with will instead tell them that those claims are no more likely to be true than those of the madman wearing the tinfoil hat screaming about alien invasions. And yet, they are expected to believe this without question or be punished for eternity in the afterlife. Why would you want to torture someone after they die? This is nothing short of sadism, and I find it a revolting thought that this is how the creator of the universe would act. If he does, he could at least have the decency to warn us about it.
