Larry Wall, the inventor of Perl, is being interviewed on Slashdot. One of the questions from the peanut gallery asked him if he really believed in God, and how he reconciled faith and science. His answer is the nerdiest expression of theology I've ever encountered — and I mean that in a good way.
You can't please God the way Enoch did without some faith, because those who
come to God must (minimally) believe that:A) God exists, and
B) God is good to people who really look for him.That's it. The "good news" is so simple that a child can understand it, and so
deep that a philosopher can't.Now, it appears that you're willing to admit the possibility of bit A being a 1,
so you're almost halfway there. Or maybe you're a quarter way there on average,
if it's a qubit that's still flopping around like Shoedinger's Cat. You're the
observer there, not me–unless of course you're dead. :-)A lot of folks get hung up at point B for various reasons, some logical and some
moral, but mostly because of Shroedinger again. People are almost afraid to
observe the B qubit because they don't want the wave function to collapse either
to a 0 or a 1, since both choices are deemed unpalatable. A lot of people who
claim to be agnostics don't take the position so much because they don't know,
but because they don't want to know, sometimes desperately so.Because if it turns out to be a 0, then we really are the slaves of our selfish
genes, and there's no basis for morality other than various forms of tribalism.And because if it turns out to be a 1, then you have swallow a whole bunch of
flim-flam that goes with it. Or do you?
(Thanks, Pat!)
