AUBURN, WA - Myron Bassett, a thirty-seven-year-old devout atheist, says he has been playing the same continuous game of Minecraft for eight years. While this in itself may not be unique among Minecraft enthusiasts, Bassett says that unlike other players, he has chosen to take a completely atheistic approach to the world-building adventure game: he waits for all complex structures and buildings to simply assemble themselves out of nothing.
"I have been sitting here watching the open landscape since 2011 when Minecraft first came out," Bassett told reporters. But critics say that evolutionary theory claims that it takes billions of years for worlds to magically create themselves. When confronted with this question, Bassett adjusted his fedora and explained, "Minecraft starts out further along than our universe did. It has all the essential building blocks, plus a lot of other blocks."
Bassett also cites math to justify his experiment. "Let me drop some math on you. A Minecraft day is 20 minutes long. That means one Minecraft year is 72 Earth years. By the end of 2019, I'll have reached nearly 576 years of Minecraft time."
On average, adult males currently die at 78 years old. But Bassett says his vegan diet will easily prolong his life into centenarian territory. "If I live to be 100, that will be 71 Earth years: over 5,000 Minecraft years. There is a good chance I will witness some spark of a crude shelter, house, or castle creating itself in that time if I remain vigilantly observant." Bassett commonly examines his screen with an assortment of strong magnifying glasses to look for slight changes in the pixels.
If Minecraft evolution takes longer, Bassett is hopeful he will still be around to see it. "Chances are that human medicine will advance greatly in the coming decades, potentially giving me the ability to live for over one million Minecraft years." Bassett believes he has the potential to live for nearly 14,000 years. "Potentially," he clarified again. "To doubt that is to doubt medical science. And that's not even getting into human cloning."
At one point, Bassett leaped up from his gaming chair excitedly, thinking he had witnessed a fly spontaneously generate itself in the game world. Unfortunately, it was just a fly on his computer screen.
The strong believer in atheism confirmed his character has been killed by mobs thousands of times as he simply stands there and waits for some kind of shelter to generate itself. Creepers, zombies, spiders, and skeletons have killed him over and over again as he steps out in blind faith and hopes a complex structure will come into being without any kind of intelligent input.
Other critics say Minecraft is a video game and needs intelligent designers to actually assemble things in the game world. But Bassett believes Earth itself is a detailed video game designed by "transdimensional aliens from Partex 1.3x." "It's a lot more scientific than the benevolent sky wizard in the clouds the sheeple of Earth commonly accept," Bassett said while examining the pixel in a block of Minecraft cobblestone with a twelve-pound magnifying glass.