God is a programmer

Hypothesis on creation and origin of mankind

source:The Altlatic

In my last post, I talked about how I am using the hope that religion offers to stay afloat as Nigeria is after my life. I need all hands on deck to help me survive the dark days; omo, these days are dark. 

One of the things I have been doing is reading my bible; after years of total abandonment and complete negligence, I dusted off the dust and removed the cobweb on that thing;  I have started reading again. For some weird reasons, the first book I picked to study after my resumption was the book of Job. I think it is because Job’s situation perfectly mirrors Nigeria's current state. The enemies are after our lives.

The book of Job is an interesting one. I wouldn’t dwell on the theological argument;  that’s not my purpose of reading.  I am reading to find wherever support and hope can, so I read at face value. Job is not an easy book to read; those guys never talked in direct terms.  But one of the things I enjoy about reading it is the quality of the conversation; it is beautiful; it’s like watching poets using poetry to have conversations; the use of alluring, descriptive phrases and literary devices is so pleasant to see. It makes a wannabe writer like me cry, ”God when”. One recurring theme in the book is their adulation of God, man! Those men were in complete awe of God’s individual and his works; here, my sceptic self usually rears its head. 

Whenever they started their panegyric, My brain goes, “Guys, hold up, wait a minute, some of these things you ascribed to God like rainfall, thunder, and childbirth are natural phenomena and don't need any deity input to work”.

But one morning, while reading, I had this weird thought or, as church people will call it, “rhema”. The thought was that if a process on earth was going to be repeating and continuous, it shouldn’t require the input of God anytime it’s going to happen;  it’ll be a waste of his precious time. Such an event, process or phenomenon should be automated. All God needed to do at the beginning was to automate all the earthly processes and let them run on their own without needing his input again while he rests. So the earth is like this giant computer that runs all of the software God had programmed(rain application, thunder application, childbirth application, human stupidity application). That sounds like an intelligent answer right? my sceptical self won't let go. 

I asked myself again, what about evolution? (I believe that God created the earth via evolution) is it possible to automate a process that will make complex things from very simple ones? I seem to be at my wit's end after this question. Then suddenly, I remember AlphaZero, a chess engine, created using artificial intelligence by DeepMind, a company owned by Google. All they did was teach the engine the rule of chess and let it figure out the rest on its own. In less than 24hrs, AlphaZero had figured out a way to beat the best Grandmasters at the game using deep learning and neural networks(AI jargon), trust me, this is no easy feat. So, the possibility exists; that all God needed to do was create a model or atom in this case that was capable of learning and building a better version on its own, let it out into the wild and let it figure out the rest although it might take a very long time as evolution did.

All of these are just theories in my head before “Children of God” come for me.  I am just trying to explore thoughts in my head; I am not trying to blaspheme in any way. It’s just my own POV, and it is nice to imagine that God might be the best programmer of all time.