Wednesday, April 15, 2009

06: Virtual Eternity

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"I am the true vine, and my Father is the gardener. He cuts off every branch in me that bears no fruit, while every branch that does bear fruit he prunes so that it will be even more fruitful. You are already clean because of the word I have spoken to you. Remain in me, and I will remain in you. No branch can bear fruit by itself; it must remain in the vine. Neither can you bear fruit unless you remain in me.

"I am the vine; you are the branches. If a man remains in me and I in him, he will bear much fruit; apart from me you can do nothing. If anyone does not remain in me, he is like a branch that is thrown away and withers; such branches are picked up, thrown into the fire and burned. If you remain in me and my words remain in you, ask whatever you wish, and it will be given you. This is to my Father's glory, that you bear much fruit, showing yourselves to be my disciples.

"As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you. Now remain in my love. If you obey my commands, you will remain in my love, just as I have obeyed my Father's commands and remain in his love. I have told you this so that my joy may be in you and that your joy may be complete. My command is this: Love each other as I have loved you. Greater love has no one than this, that he lay down his life for his friends. You are my friends if you do what I command. I no longer call you servants, because a servant does not know his master's business. Instead, I have called you friends, for everything that I learned from my Father I have made known to you. You did not choose me, but I chose you and appointed you to go and bear fruit—fruit that will last. Then the Father will give you whatever you ask in my name. This is my command: Love each other."

................John 15:1-17 (NIV)
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The long and short of it....

We are stuck in a kind of Virtual Eternity with no way out. The rules of this universe indicate no exit other than death. So how do we find our way home, back to the safety and sanity of a place that has lasting, eternal meaning? Someone has to come from the larger, better eternal universe into this smaller virtual eternity and say, “Follow me, this is the way out.”


Imitating vs. Creating
Naturalism is very popular and permeates nearly any conversation one has in the West regarding the meaning of life. It is the “religion” of science and is a direct descendant of materialism and pragmatism (none of which distinguishes the supernatural from nature). So, for instance, Naturalism doesn't look to anything “supernatural” in the sense that it cannot be examined or proven outside the mechanisms of the scientific method, which are the rites and rituals governing a measurable, material universe. Here's an interesting exercise; ask a scientist if there could be an explanation other than evolution for the existence of life in the universe.  Don't ask about creationism or God.  The answer will be short.

The main thing that I've found is that this world view understates the significance of mankind by lumping us into the same bucket as apes and tomatoes, seaweed and banana slugs. It's the kind of world view that gazes forever down into the dirt. But like any view that only considers itself as the universal measure of all things, it turns a blind eye to all things outside its definitions of how things work and labels them as “immaterial”, or worse, heresy. How like the medieval church cleric is the modern naturalist—people never change.

One of the many things that separate us from all other life on the
planet is humanity's ability to creatively invent. The first sentence of the Bible is “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” The very first thing we know about God is that He has the ability to create something from nothing. It is this gift of creativity that shows humanity to most resemble their creator. Where are the great symphonies written by banana slugs? Where is the copy of Hamlet written by the infinite monkeys? Sure, animals can build nests and hives, and they can even use sticks and rocks and whatnot as “tools”, but they do not invent new configurations, they do not combine sticks and stones to ultimately end up with nuclear fission—they may apply a low level of ingenuity, but they do not apply invention.

Some of the most impressive structures built in the animal world are the termite mounds found in Africa. If they were scaled to our body size, they would equal sky-scrapers, complete with air conditioning and waste management. But these structures are the same everywhere across time and space, built using the same blueprints encoded in their DNA. A termite mound is the same today as it was a bazillion years ago, as are any of the structures from the animal world. This kind of building points back to the ultimate designer, not to the local builder.

Nothing new under the sun
A few years ago I got into an interesting discussion with a developer with whom I worked. We were discussing the nature of computer language compared to the development and nature of human language. He argued that this was a completely new thing, that the whole computer revolution was completely unparalleled in human history. He thought that we had created a whole new virtual universe, completely unknown within the existing universe. In other words, we created our own reality—virtual reality. I argued that everything we are doing is more like mimicry than creation, that we were inventing on a smaller scale using ideas already executed on a larger scale, or put another way, there is nothing new under the sun.

All the inventive revolutions in human history were centered on answering a need, combining existing elements or reconfiguring existing paradigms to address the problem it solved. There have been many inventive revolutions like this through our history—the agricultural revolution, the various metallic ages, the industrial revolution, the Information revolution and the next big one, the biological revolution. But there's a difference between invention and creation.

Invention combines existing elements in new combinations to create a new compound. Creation brings new elements into existence from nothing. While invention can be creative, creation is not inventive. The light bulb (perhaps the most important invention of all time) is the combination of existing elements in a new compound, but Edison did not create Carbon to make it work. In the same way the computer revolution is more of a reconfiguration of existing principles (language, relational space, television, etc.) and not the creation of a previously non-existent, self contained, non-referential universe.

This is not splitting hairs. Like children learn through imitation, so humanity invents by imitation of creation. We have the
creative ability that manifests itself in invention, but we do not have the procreative power that manifests itself in creation. We never will because we are not God. We can conceive of creation, but we don’t have the power to create.

Here is the crux of the matter—“If you eat of the apple, then you will be like God.” This is the argument of the serpent to Eve; this is the lie that got this whole thing we are now banging around in rolling. Satan was right, if we ate of the apple of wisdom, of the knowledge of good and evil, and this gave us the ability to invent, to connect the dots, to understand paradox and desire one dimension of it over the other, then we would be truly like God. We would gain the ability to conceive of the thing internally through our new-found wisdom, but not the power to act externally. If we had eaten from the other tree, the Tree of Life, then perhaps we would have gained the ability to be God. Perhaps the Tree of Life would not only give us eternal life, but also the power to create new life—perhaps new and wonderful life, perhaps new and terrible life? If we could create what we can conceive, then wouldn't we become truly dangerous? Was this why we were promptly shown to the door after eating from the tree of Knowledge, so we didn't seize the opportunity to promote ourselves from inventors to creators?

The Holy Grail of the Naturalist is to create life—to access the power of Life, to bring forth life from the primordial soup that is the whirling mess of elements of the universe, to ultimately cheat death and become immortal. If we can do that, on our own, without any superstitious “divine intervention”, then we will prove that there is no need for a “God”, that there is in fact no “God”, for if we can create life, then surely the random engine of the universe can do the same, given enough time, and we are therefore the children of the random forces of the universe. Cheating death is one of the driving forces in the rising Biological Revolution. Scary.

So here we are, imitating our Father, but unable to do the same tricks. Thank God for that. If you define creation as bringing about absolute something from absolute nothing, and add that the absolute something must be completely different from all other absolute somethings that currently exist (including the underlying laws of physics that govern the something), then we have failed, and there is nothing truly “new” under the sun. We can't even make gold out of lead (e.g. taking an existing something and transforming it into another existing something). So in the literal world we do not have the power to be God, to create in the progenitor sense, but in the abstract we most certainly do wield the same creative force that God uses, that God has given to us and that is in fact the very essence of God's image from which we are made—imagination. From the fertility of our imagination we combine what is into new permutations of what could be—invention. And it is interesting that through the millennium our inventions are getting more and more “God-like”, the imitation via invention is more and more resembling creation, conceptually at least.

Virtual Eternity
Back to the argument about computers. Consider the Internet. We may not have created the alloys and materials required to build the Internet, but the virtual world that exists there is certainly our creation, a world of 1s and 0s closely imitating the real world of flesh and blood.

The Internet is a global series of interconnected computer networks that communicate with each other using standardized protocols for communication. Nodes, or individual computers, are all interconnected through a complex combination of public, private and government server and network infrastructure and communicate using a standardized series of universal protocols called the Internet Protocol (IP). These millions of smaller networks make possible the support of the various services that make up the content of the Internet: email, chat, web pages, etc—the World Wide Web. Within the World Wide Web is a new universe, a bubble of play reality, made up of all of these communications and activities that solely exist within an artificial, imaginary space called virtual reality.

Virtual reality is governed by a series of laws and principles that make possible its existence. These are like the rules of the physical universe that God set in place to govern matter (e.g. physics, biology, all the studies we call “hard science”). If the principles of networking coupled with the laws of communication did not exist to govern the Internet, our virtual reality would devolve into a virtual Tower of Babel. In other words, we have solved the conundrum of the curse of the Tower of Babel in virtual space. Here is the answer: homogeny. Uniform standardization and global acceptance of the fundamental protocols of the Internet are what keep the lines greased, enabling all of that wonderful data and information, that staggeringly complex virtual reality of ours to remain up and humming.

We invented this. Cool, huh. In the hundreds of millions of years that the dinosaurs ruled the earth they never invented a single thing, not a single tool, not a single toy, not a single recorded communication. The silence of the past is deafening. But in the past few thousand years we’ve gone from clicking together stones to building skyscrapers to building our own virtual universe. Maybe I’m wrong; maybe it was the dinosaurs that invented and built the infinite number of typewriters needed by the monkeys used to write Hamlet.

So, like God, we’ve “created” a universe. And while this work we’ve done is impressive, is it really creation, or is it a vastly complex imitation of the work of God? Consider
this. What if the physical world we live in is the same thing in principle to God as the virtual reality we have “created” is to us. What if the world in which we live is a kind of Virtual Eternity, a shadow reality compared to the fuller, realer reality of eternity?

Whereas we can go safely into virtual reality and play around, do work, communicate, we are in essence isolated and separate from the virtual world which we have created, and the virtual world is isolated and separate from “real reality”. We can go into the virtual world as avatars perhaps and learn things, be virtually exposed to virtual things, do virtual things, but all safely at a remove from the actual, physical universe in which we live. This allows us safety. We can model things in the virtual reality that we either can’t do in reality, or would be too dangerous to do if we could.

So what if our “real” reality is simply a virtual reality God created to keep us from doing harm in Eternal Reality until we are ready to live there? What if the universe in which we live in is a kind of more vast, more complex virtual reality, and all the art, science, philosophy, religion and everything else we are doing is a kind of universe-wide-web in which we are trapped, a tiny bubble of play eternity where we are working out the big question—Why? When man stepped through the gates on the east of Eden he was stepping from eternal reality into physical reality, from Eternity into Virtual Eternity. It would be comparable to step from the rich reality you know now into the rigid, two-dimensional, data-driven reality of virtual space.

This is all fun, but what's the point?
When you are a virtualized participant within the virtual world, no real harm can come to the real you. In fact, the only “real harm” related to the virtual world is when we put too much of ourselves (like our real financial and personal data) into virtual reality and it becomes a target for the bad guys, or when we invite the bad guys to come visit us in reality. Now consider what Jesus did. He took himself out of the safe Eternal universe that is His real world and inserted himself wholly into our dangerous Virtual Eternity with the aim of bringing out anyone who would follow him. In doing so, He put all of His personal information out there for anyone who would listen, good guys or bad guys, and He invited the bad guys to destroy Him. Imagine stepping wholly into a first-person shooter game in which the bullets would really kill you. Imagine stepping from the safe, known universe in which you live and suddenly being exposed to the crazy protocols and extreme violence of DOOM. This is exactly what Jesus did.

We are stuck in this Virtual Eternity with no way out. The rules of this universe indicate no exit.
So how do we find our way home, back to the safety and sanity of the Eternal Universe? Someone has to come from the larger, better eternal universe into this smaller virtual eternity and say, “Follow me, this is the way out.” But here’s the thing I love about all this. Unlike the soulless, two-dimensional data-blobs we’ve created in our virtual reality that cannot do anything without following a line of code or an end-user command, we have choice—we have free will. We can be pointed to the exit and shown the solution and yet still say, “Nah, I’m good. Thanks anyway.”

So what is the way out? What is the homogenous protocol that God provides us to overcome the rules of this Virtual Eternity and find our way out? Simple: the universal protocol is Love. This takes us back to the two rules:

  • Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.
  • Love your neighbor as yourself.
The law of Love is the homogenous standard, applicable across all humans in all cultures in all geographies across all of history. Love is the secret language of God; it is the key to Eternity. God does not speak Hebrew or Greek or Latin—God doesn’t need to speak any of our languages to express his universal character, since His universal character is Love itself. And our primary function, the optimization we must accomplish in this Virtual Eternity, is to learn this language, to become conversant in it, to make this our prime protocol to which all other protocols conform. The laws that we have instituted within this Virtual Eternity that govern our behavior and define our relationships between ourselves no longer follow this law. Finding our way home is all about finding the original language, our first language, God’s language, and using it. Put another way... 
    "I am the Universal Protocol, and my Father is the Mainframe. He cuts off every node connected to Him through me that does not execute the universal protocol, while every node that does execute the universal protocol He optimizes so that it will be even more productive. You are already connected behind the fire-wall because of the protocols I have given to you. Remain in me, and I will remain in you. No node can be optimized by itself; it must remain in the Intranet. Neither can you be optimized unless you remain connected to the Internet via the universal protocol. "I am the Universal Protocol; you are the nodes. If a node remains in me and I in him, he will be optimized; apart from me you can do nothing. If anyone does not remain in me, he is like a node that is disconnected and obsolete; such nodes are picked up, thrown into the recycling bin and crushed, melted down and returned to the environment. If you remain in me and my protocols remain in you, ask for whatever upgrades you wish, and they will be downloaded to you. This is to my Father's glory, that you be optimized, showing yourselves to be a part of my Network. "As the Father has used the universal protocol to remain connected with me, so I use the universal protocol to remain connected with you. Now remain in my universal protocol. If you obey my logic, you will remain in my network, just as I have obeyed my Father's logic and remain in his network. I have told you this so that my joy may be in you and that your joy may be complete. My universal protocol is this: Love each other as I have loved you. Greater love has no one than this, that he lay down his life for his friends. You are my friends if you do what I command. I no longer call you stand-alone, because a stand-alone node does not know the mainframe’s business. Instead, I have called you friends, for everything that I learned from my Father I have made known to you. You did not optimize me, but I optimized you and appointed you to go and produce eternally. Then the Father will give you whatever you ask in my name. This is my universal protocol: Love each other.

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