Ampersand, I don't really understand your point. Sure, your math is probably irrefutable (I haven't checked, but I trust you), but the original point was just to show that a piece of Qu'ran described God as distant from Earth, and that information took time to reach him, though it moves at such speed that there is observable time-dilation.
The point was to show God as distant and not acting directly. The fact that speed of light is talked about isn't that big a deal. As far as I know, every speed implies time-dilatation, but I doubt that across the entire world the average joe has a deep understanding of the relativity theory.
In fact, that verse (wherever it comes from originally) is quite interesting.
Off topic, Mike, I find interesting that you took time to rethink part of your religious education. I usually see religions as philosophical guides that you're not bound to. Ideally, you should document about them all, consider their point of view, take what looks most right here and there, come up with your own ideas when none fits you, etc. Perhaps religious books were made for people who didn't have time (or motivation) to think, sort of a philosophical ready-to-wear, and was misused and misunderstood as a vision of the one and only truth.
The universe as a distraction for God isn't a new idea, but a fascinating one. Asimov wrote about it in "The last answer", for example.
Speaking about soul, conscience or whatever you call it, perhaps it is immaterial and uses the brain and nervous system as an interface with the material world.
Other people think every conscience is part of a sort of super-conscience, so we are all linked in a way, through this super-conscience. I use to represent it as a big ethereal cloud with sort of tentacles linked to our brains when I need to have an image it, but of course it's not even trying to be exact. Yet we would be like puppets. And now that I think of it, if I made up a simulation with sentient beings, I would have a "sentientManager" class that would care of, well, sentient beings.
The aspect of the universe as a simulation would gain even more weight if time was proven as discreet, as in ticking. Then a "tick" would match a processor cycle I guess. I haven't followed this question lately, but I think that due to Planck time being the smallest time interval bearing a meaning, we tend toward discreet time.