To see a World
in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour.
William Blake
Think about
an apple stem. You know what I’m talking about—that
reedy, brown filament you throw away when you have finished
your 'apple a day.' You might be tempted to think, “wait,
what? It’s just a twig! It’s just some stiff
organic strand, connecting the apple to the tree.”
What’s
the big deal?
If you spent
your lifetime trying to memorize every molecule in that
single brown filament, your mind would be too small to store,
much less recount, a blueprint of the stem you just threw
in the kitchen trash. Remember, you would have to describe
the revolution of every electron, circling every proton
at the heart of the elements making up that single, unique
apple stem. I’m not talking about just the apple’s
baroque inventory of chemical ingredients: calcium, phosphorous,
E300, E101, riboflavin, magnesium, sulfur, chlorine, fructose,
polyphenols, quercetin, (among hundreds of others). I’m
talking about the matter-matrix making up that particular
apple stem, including that cilia-like hair coming from its
trunk.
Even if you
were allowed to freeze the stem in time, you aren’t
smart enough to paint the super-dense picture of that single
apple stem. No one is
Before becoming
an apple farmer and a living historian, I programmed computers
for a living. The process of describing thought itself—mapping
out logic gates in a series of “if yes, then, else”
decisions gave me the sense you could scale up intelligence
and celebrate its speed. I learned programming back when
flight simulation was first attempted on PCs, and I imagined
a super-realistic, three-dimensional stored array of digitized
matter on all sides of the pilot—the composition of
the cockpit window, the leaves on Eucalyptus trees on the
side of the runway, the density of the clouds overhead.
Each matrix-cube radiating out from the pilot would have
some inventory of properties—chemical composition,
colour, density, mass. I was leaving space for 100,000 meta
properties not yet considered.
Overall, of
course, the 50-cubic-mile radius around the pilot would
be subject to forces outside itself—weather, wind,
sunlight, temperature and a few million more. Finally, the
actions of the pilot himself—flaps, throttle, elevators,
fuel weight—would govern the visual simulation of
him moving through space, as millions of parallel algorithms,
and the laws of perspective, cycled through a response to
each action he took. The computers weren’t up to it
then, and even realistic simulations today don’t attempt
to recreate an entire micro-universe, down to the molecule.
But if you have
ever improved ever so slightly at the violin, day by day,
measure by measure, you understand the human weakness for
contemplating the conquest of utter perfection. “If
I’m getting a little better at this today, I can imagine
being a lot better tomorrow and maybe, someday, I can experience
something like flawlessness.” Computer programming
is very much like that. You experience such astounding leaps
in efficiency. You keep being blessed with more storage
and faster processors. You keep being given such incredible
image resolution. Your algorithms get more efficient. It’s
not just like playing with lightning. It’s something
like commanding lightning. When you get on a big jetliner,
there’s some comfort in knowing engineers can now
visualize part failure, systems failure, a million different
ways before you actually ascend to 36,000 feet. They can
make thunderbolts hit the aircraft and assess the damage
without anyone getting hurt. They play with virtual lightning,
so you can be protected from the real thing.
All in all,
it’s an exciting time to be alive. We can make computers
do complicated tasks (we define) much faster than we can.
We might even be able to teach computers to learn from watching
nature, or crowds, or economies.
But omniscience
and omnipresence are beyond us. There is no fiddle metaphor
that works on that level. Imagine the sort of mind (the
sort of computer, if you will), that can simultaneously
contemplate a single electron swirling around a single hydrogen
atom on the farthest side of the universe and simultaneously
have compassion for, and utter comprehension of, the emotions
a three-year-old girl feels as she cries, watching her daddy
go off to work? Multiply that multitasking by a number too
large to be described. Ponder a mind great enough to monitor
it all at once. Imagine its precision and order. Imagine
a Mind that can fuse sodium and chlorine together (toxic
and volatile by themselves) into the compound salt, which
is necessary for human life, and then scale that chemical
poetry up to the spiritual poetry in the New Testament?
(“You are the salt of the earth.”)
Science is no
enemy to faith in God. Science, if you really ponder it,
utterly demands God. If you think the DNA molecule burst
into existence by virtue of radiation zapping a little hydrogen
and methane, you are the sort who imagines a Swiss watch
assembled by shaking parts in a bag. Even if a long series
of utterly natural conditions combined to create the life
we see all around us, the ‘natural order’ doesn’t
allow for accident, only the appearance of accident made
possible by complexity. The same scientists who insist COVID
vaccines are ‘utterly safe’ make that claim
because they assume the physical world acts in a predictable
way, governed by observable physical laws.
Some Great Mind
wrote the book, fellas.
We are something
like little boys kept from dad’s workshop by a padlock
and a father who spends a lot of time on the road. We get
a little older, a little more daring, and we break into
dad’s workshop, find the arc welder and the rotary
saw and the drill press and we think, “wait! there
is no father. There’s just this fantastic accidental
workshop.”
Fatherless boys
playing with power tools perfectly describes a world in
love with science but careless about moral law. It perfectly
describes people willing to play with the genetic code of
a killer virus without considering the human consequences
of doing so. Even if the Chinese Communists, and their traitorous
comrades here, intended the experiment for evil, they might
at least consider the gallows they are building; it just
might be their own.
As C. S. Lewis
observed, paraphrasing, scientific genius is often enjoyed
by moral dimwits. You probably shouldn’t learn genetic
engineering until you’ve studied biblical ethics for
a few years.
If we are to
learn anything from the COVID public policy disaster, it
might be the value of pure repentance before a Holy God.
With God, science can enrich our lives beyond our comprehension.
Without Him, well, are you ready to see your grandchildren’s
DNA fused with a timber wolf? Have you seen those robot
dogs with automatic weapons on their backs? Are you ready
for the horrors ahead?
Repent, America.
Humble yourselves before the Great High King of the Universe.
Science, ultimately,
is a servant of faith and we can’t let it go rogue.
