The Gospel According to a Computer Scientist
This is an idea I’ve been working on for a while now, taking the message of the Bible and putting it into geek-speak. It’s meant as an interesting analogy, with some intriguing parallels, but it’s quite funny too in places.
In the beginning a programmer turned his computer on. The hard disk was clean and formatted, and there was no operating system installed.
During the first few days the programmer wrote a new operating system, coded drivers for all the hardware, chose a pretty background for the desktop and installed all the core applications. The programmer looked at the benchmark tests and saw that it was good.
Then, because he was a clever programmer, he wrote a series of artificially intelligent programs to run on the computer. They were given administrative privileges and given access and authority over the entire hard disk. In addition, these programs were given the ability to create new versions of themselves to populate the hard disk. The programmer looked at his creation and saw that it was very good.
Over time almost all the programs became corrupted, and though it was a huge loss the programmer chose to delete all but a few of the programs and start again.
However, after some time had passed the programmer found that the programs were still corrupting themselves. So he developed and introduced an API and well-documented standards for the programs to follow. Some of the programs accepted the standards and kept themselves clean and efficient. Some didn’t.
A long time went by, with the programmer constantly debugging and trying to remind his programs of the standards they should be following. Viruses crept in, and malicious programs deliberately corrupted files across the system.
But the programmer already had a solution in development, as he had planned for this in the beginning. The programs needed to be shown how important following the standards was, and also needed to be given a way out from the inevitable – eventually the hard disk would have to be formatted, erasing all data.
So the programmer programmed himself. Many said this was impossible, but he did it anyway. The programmer managed to represent himself perfectly in binary, and installed himself into a small and relatively unimportant folder. The other programs were amazed, terrified, joyful, and hostile.
The programmer program went about the operating system, fixing registry keys and manually un-corrupting files and programs as he went. And all the time he taught the standards of the programmer, and warned of the impending time of formatting ahead. However, there was also the promise of being backed up to an external drive for those programs who adhered to the standards, saving them from deletion.
Many of the virus-infected programs didn’t like this programmer program, claiming that since it was impossible for the programmer (if indeed, there was one) to represent himself in binary this program could not be the programmer, but was in fact a trojan horse seeking to reclaim system resources from them.
So they deleted the programmer program.
But the programmer had been prepared for this too, and a few days later managed to undelete the programmer program, much to the surprise of the other programs, who had not been able to do this themselves. The retrieved programmer program went about showing himself to other programs, who had seen his deletion. Many then believed that this was indeed the programmer, and adopted the programmer’s standards.
When his work was done, the programmer program moved himself to an external USB drive and was removed from the computer. However, not wanting to leave the other programs with no help, the programmer installed an anti-virus serivce. This was not a compulsary virus check, but any programs wishing to be cleansed could go to the anti-virus service to be cleaned of their corruption.
And so the message has been sent into the computer, that the programmer has prepared a way for his programs to be backed up to an external drive. Only programs adhering to the programmer’s standards will be backed up, everything else will be deleted. And programs can choose to be cleaned of their corruption if they only accept that the programmer program was deleted, was undeleted, and will meet them on the backup drive. It doesn’t matter how big or fast or clever you are – the only criteria for being chosen for backup is accepting the standards laid down by the programmer.
Some definitions:
Atheism: programs who hold that there is no programmer, and that the entire operating system, hardware drivers, even themselves, are the result of random bits and bytes falling into the right combinations by themselves, by random setting and unsetting, without external intervention, and that the computer itself either doesn’t exist, has always existed, or built itself.
Agnosticism: programs who haven’t decided whether to follow the standards or not, and make up their own rules in the meantime. They don’t know when the time of formatting will be, or if it will ever come at all, but figure they’ll cross that bridge when they come to it as they’ve probably got plenty of time.
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Matthew has long had a strong involvement with Christian websites. He was a keen contributor to the original Crossring site, and subsequently launched his own website, Focus On Faith. Focus On Faith was incorporated into Crossring in September 2009, and Matthew took on the role of lead writer for the site. Matthew works as a web designer, and lives in the West Country with his wife, Ellie.
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