The Whole Shibang (Sp?)

The American Museum of Natural History has posted a YouTube video of the whole (known) Universe (h/t BBspot.com). The video impressively takes the camera from the tip of the Himalayas, out into space, and, eventually, gives a extra-universal view of the universe itself. What I found particularly striking about the video is how it initially succeeds in making our planet look terribly vast. There's something about the horizon-shot in the opening that gives you a sense of just how puny an individual is to the largeness of the globe...but that grandness is short-lived as the Earth eventually drops out of sight when it is reduced to less than a pixel can represent. As you might expect, the video repeats this experience for the sun, Milky Way galaxy, and whatever it is that is bigger than our galaxy.

What might be even more mind-blowing than the imagery, however, is that the AMNH claims that the 3D graphics are derived from an astronomical databases that houses all the known positions of every known astronomical body in perceivable space. Even when you can't see the objects on the screen, the computer, in theory,"knows" that they are there.

So this gets me thinking, why should a skeptic have a problem with an omniscient God? For that matter, think of all the data that is streaming around the Internet at any one given moment in time. If you take the Internet as a whole and include Wi-Fi technology to boot, then, in a way, man has already taken steps to creating an omniscient and virtually omnipresent entity. The Internet, almost like the Force in Star Wars, is moving all around us, passing through us, binding us together, and binding us with our cars, our iPhones, the rock, the ship...
And the Internet knows a nigh inexhaustive amount of data about the things that it passes through.
It just doesn't have a conscious...so far as we can tell.

If we, meat-computer monkey men, can make something so godlike out of our primitive understanding of physics and math, just imagine how more godlike our creations will be when we (or our creations) know even more.

As we are, one might say that the supercomputer that knows everything about astronomical bodies doesn't quite know it all at once. It isn't necessarily aware of all of these things simultaneously. It assumably has to read code in a linear fashion, bit by bit. It can't even really project the data on the screen all at once. It just looks like all of the images appear simultaneously because it does it so darned fast that our eyes can't see the progression. But computers are getting faster...and I suppose it's just a matter of time before a computer can know and express multiple pieces of data simultaneously (unless they already can, and I'm just behind).

Anyway, my meat computer brain is straying off course, like they tend to do.

My point is that if we can make things that approach godness, then why should godness independent of human creation be so unbelievable?

Why should we doubt God's ability to be a more perfect version of what we are trying to do with our tools? In a way, don't these tools point us back towards God? Aren't we ultimately trying to build God?

We build vehicles in reflection of God's speed (C.S. Lewis has some commentary on this, I believe); we fabricate medicines in reflection of God's healing; we build computers in reflection of God's knowledge; we build governments in reflection of God's wisdom; we build weapons in reflection of God's justice.

It's a fool's task (although certainly a profitable and useful foolery) to try to make God out of base matter (and energy). All of the human constructs above always fall far from the thing they reflect, but perhaps because we can make things that do (in a currently very limited way) what we would expect God to be able to do, we somehow think we have surpassed God or a need for His existence. We take our reflections for the things themselves (Oh, boy, I think I just reinvented Plato...).

But it might also be that even our technological drive is more like our narrative drives than we imagine. Our sciences and humanities might converge in a Hegellian synthesis in this regard.

In "On Fairy Stories," Tolkien suggests that all human myth, narrative, and story taps into our natural desire and even awareness of God. He says that the Gospel is the most perfect, satisfying expression of that desire and awareness...which he claims is a testament to its truth if not historical accuracy. But what if the things we build and the tools we construct derive from that same yearning and awareness? What if they are intertwined?

From one perspective, Daedalus's waxen wings are a tool to escape worldly confinement. From another perspective they transform his son into a virtual angel.

Problems arise, of course, when Icarus forgets that tools themselves can never really surpass nature.

Comments

[Akh Ari]

Hm, sounds like a more poetic approach to the idea contained in St. Thomas Aquinas' "fourth way" of philosophically proving the existence of God (Summa Theologiae Part I Question 2 Article 3).

I realize you are just using computers as a metaphor for the brain & mind, but it is underappreciated by modern thinkers (because of the poverty of their philosophical systems and their inadequacy for describing reality) just how inadequate to the object this comparison really is.

[Akh Ari]

A very Merry and Blessed Christmas to both of you, Peter and Isabel, and a Happy New Year!