Christianity and Computer Science

Sometimes, when I'm asked what I'd most like to be doing, I reply that I'd like to go back to school. When I visit my son's or daughter's campuses, I get this longing to be back at university. Not that I did all that great when I was in college. I managed to cram four years into five. But, still, I'm older and hopefully wiser and I hope that I would do much better the second time around.

But what to study? My standard response these days is either theology or computer science. Then I add that I'm not sure that I really see a difference between the two. While driving in to work this morning, my subconscious found that my flippancy isn't so far off the mark. If thought is matter in motion in certain patterns (which it is), then writing software is the act of putting thought in physical form. A moment's reflection shows that this must be so: the computer is all hardware. The software is just ones and zeros but, again, this is just a collection of physical states arranged in specific ways. If the criticism is that "computers don't think!", the answer is that this is because computers don't have the huge number of connections that are in the human brain. But in time they will.

Putting thought in physical form is what God did with His Son. "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. … And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us." Jesus is God's thoughts in physical form.

So Christianity and computer science are both incarnational.
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