Yesterday as I was walking my daughter home from school, my mind wandered and I found myself thinking about the mabul. Specifically, about how unfair it was for Hashem to punish everyone with death. After all, I reasoned to myself, if the product is defective, it’s the fault of the designer! If a computer programmer wrote a program which failed to function properly, it wouldn’t be reasonable to blame the program. Obviously, it’s the programmer’s fault. He messed up somewhere in the code, and he needs to fix it, not yell at his computer.
Then I had an epiphany. Hashem IS a programmer. And the mabul wasn’t a punishment. It was God saving the bits of the program that worked properly and deleting the faulty code so that He could try to fix the program.
Unfortunately, God isn’t a very good programmer.
With this perspective, so much makes sense.
God created the Universe (the program): In the beginning, God created the program. And the page was empty, blankness was on the monitor, and God’s fingers were hovering over the keyboard. And God typed, “Let there be light” and there was light. God saw that the code for simulating light effects was good, and He separated the light effects from the shadow effects. God called the light program “day” and the shadow program “night.” By then it was evening, and He powered down His computer until the morning – this was the first day.
God is omniscient, omnipotent, and omni-benevolent (more or less): He knows everything about the program and can see all of the results of the program (but doesn’t quite know why it’s not working properly); He can change the program as He wishes (but He’s not a very good programmer, so his code often doesn’t do quite what He wants it to); and He wants the ultimate good for the program, that is, for it to work properly (but individual pieces of the program are unimportant in themselves). He cares about and investigates the behavior of each part of the program, and is constantly involved in adjusting it.
There is a wonderful theodicy: Bad things generally are a result of bugs in the program. The plane crashes because of a bug. The little girl emerges from the wreckage without a scratch because God was furiously coding to try to fix the bug.
Other gods are software pirates who try to take credit for the program. This understandably upsets God.
And so on…
C'mon. This was WAY before any higher-level languages, even before assembly language which is way hard. He probably had to do it with cables and punchboards ala Eniac. Give the Man a break, why dontcha?
ReplyDeleteI have always said that if a human ruler behaved like god, (as described in different variations by orthodox Judaism), we would consider him to be a psychopath.
ReplyDeleteI friend of mine was attending a Shiva call for a young man who was killed in a motorcycle accident. The rabbi was droning on about god's graciousness and that the family is given an opportunity to turn their grief into something good and strengthen their emuna. Suddenly my statement "god is a psychopath" went through his head, ruining the moment for him.
The flaw with the programmer analogy, of course, is that it contradicts Orthodox theology, which says that nothing is random. If there were random events, we could never tell whether something was random or intended by god, and therefore would be unable to claim that ANY event had meaning. It would also negate the idea of prayer.
Zach
ReplyDelete:-)
> I have always said that if a human ruler behaved like god, (as described in different variations by orthodox Judaism), we would consider him to be a psychopath.
Something I read a long time ago a read in a book of (translated) Yiddish sayings: “If God lived on Earth, people would throw bricks through His windows.
> The flaw with the programmer analogy, of course, is that it contradicts Orthodox theology, which says that nothing is random.
Depends who you hold like. While it’s true that I was taught in 1st grade that “there’s no such thing as a coincidence” there were plenty of rishonim who held that the world basically ran itself, with Hashem only intervening now and then, or only for people He took a particular interest in.
> It would also negate the idea of prayer.
Why? You pray, and if He has time and is in the mood, God writes some code to try and accommodate your prayer. Sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn’t.
God the Programmer.
ReplyDeleteBy the same artist: God the Cook.
I added the picutre to the post.
ReplyDeleteI hear you G3, I understand the spirit of the post.
ReplyDeleteI thought of something additional-- that in your model god's program is EVOLVING!
Oy vey, its evolution again:)