God in the computer age

At the risk of offending more literal readers of the Bible, I thought you might like this analogy from a conservative Anglican friend of mine: God is the computer. The Bible (and every other contact with God) is the interface. We never know God directly; all we see is a vague image of him – "through a glass darkly," as Paul puts it. Interfaces can distort the original. If we're having to evaluate the messages of the infinite with our teeny-weeny brains, it's reasonable that we'd distort what God is like, just as over the centuries we've distorted what the universe is like. But the fact that we only have a partial, distorted view of the universe doesn't mean that the universe doesn't exist. From the Christian point of view, this isn't a drawback (or not always, anyway) but rather is the essential nature of the God-man relationship. What I've just described as "distortion" (because it does have devastating effects at times) Christians see as strength. The incarnation was a "distortion" of God, because we weren't able to see the entire eternal truth about God in a first-century Palastine man. But what we saw was enough to give us something tremendously important. The Greeks thought the whole Christian idea was freaky; they couldn't imagine why the infinite would want to limit itself. But from the Christian point of view, humility and submission is so essential to the universe that even God was willing to limit himself, for our sake. If you write, you already know what I mean. The more restrictive a writing form – such as a sonnet – the more you can do with it. But somebody who doesn't understand all those restrictions would say, "Why are you limiting yourself that way? Why aren't you writing in free verse?" Or, in the words of Dgennero, "Shouldn't an eternal truth be independent? Why is Man's imperfection shining through?" As to why I believe in a higher power of some sort – well, I'm a writer. From my earliest years, I encountered Something guiding me in my writing beyond what my normal abilities could do. When I started falling in love, I found myself once more seeing beyond the veil of the normal universe. And hey, guess what, the same thing happened in church, and in meditation, and in the Bible, and in my dreams. I don't believe in a higher power on faith. I believe in that power because I've met it. Heather [E-mail]   [Home Page]