Thursday, December 07, 2006

The God I Want

Writing computer systems allows me the opportunity to create a world where activities are bound by rules, yet free to act in order to accomplish their assigned tasks. To a computer program, I am God.

Now writing systems and creating an environment for activity requires that I be aware of quite a few different things. If I want my system to be stable and effective, the rules I create need to be consistent and predictable. The components need to relate to each other without violating the rules. The rules, components and activities must mesh in such a way that the system does not crash when something unexpected happens. In the end it is a pretty complex process and at times it makes my head hurt.

There is an old story about three blind men who are asked to describe an elephant after examining it. One man was at the trunk, another at the leg and the third at the tail. As you can expect, each came up with a different description and none of them were right. The lesson is that each was wrong because each only had limited knowledge and experience of the elephant. They could not see the whole picture.

Those who say things like "If there were a God He would ..." are like the blind men and the elephant. These people attempt to define how God should act based upon their limited knowledge and experience. (And their selfish motives)

Let's face the fact that as humans, our knowledge is limited. We are simply incapable of knowing all the interactions between the components of our existence. And, if we were to take seriously the requirements for God proposed by some and expand them to a universal scale, we would find that many, if not all, of these requirements just won't work.

When I write a computer program which consists of three components and maybe 100 lines of code, there are complexities and interactions to be considered, but for the most part they are manageable. When I write a computer program that consists of thousands of components and hundreds of thousands of lines of code, the complexity exceeds my ability (and probably most programmers') to maintain alone.

Each potential event starts a string of activities and activates a series of interactions that must function consistently in order for the system to operate correctly. Any modification to the system creates the possibility that one of the relationships will break and cause the system to crash. Any competent programmer will tell you that it is near impossible to know every interaction within a system. And computer systems are really quite simple in comparison to the universe of human interactions.

People who say "God should ..." are people who don't know how much they don't know. Logic demands that if God exists, that He be infinite in every way. And if these people who make demands on God knew anything at all, they would quickly realize that it would take infinite intelligence to produce a system like our existence that operated as consistently and predictable as ours does.

When people say "God should ..." or "God would ..." they don't really want God, but simply a genie that they can command so that they don't have to deal with reality. People who attempt to define God in their image are people whose idea of God is too small.

3 Comments:

At 12:25 PM, Blogger Tom Gagne said...

"People who attempt to define God in their image are people whose idea of God is too small."

I like that one a lot.

 
At 5:27 PM, Anonymous Muhammad Khan said...

I bumped into your site while looking for "Rational religion">I think if we can convince people to study each faith impartially with reason and logic and thus choose it ,the world will be a better and more tolerant place.

 
At 6:19 PM, Blogger Russel Trojan said...

I definitely agree, Muhammad, knowledge leads more tolerance and productive interaction than any imposed rules ever can.

Thanks for stopping by.

 

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