God the Greatest Programmer

[I like this article I wrote, I posted it at my previous blog. So, now I copy it to here.]

In the beginning, I dislike programming. This is because I felt that for creating AI (Artificial Intelligence), robots and else is something arrogant. Because men will think that they are intelligent beings that can create intelligent things. Even the movies like “Matrix”, “Terminator” and else show that what the human created will dominate the human being. It indicates that the human have the intelligence to create something greater than themselves, the human are more intelligent than the Creator.

However, as I learn through programming, the more I learn, the more I like. It is because I found the sweetness of programming and how great He is.

If we are doing Computer Graphic (CG), we will deal with lighting, ambient, material and other else. But whatever we create, we are only simulating the real world. You can see the reflection of sunlight from the river. I don’t think what you create will better than the real world.

Now, imagine that you are going to create a program or a game such as “The Sims”, or even greater. Then you want to create a virtual world. Then you choose a programming language. Then you create an earth in 3D form, because you feel that earth is the main environment of the virtual world. You might use OpenGL to create the 3D objects. Then, you feel that it is empty for the background. Then you use your programming language to generate the array of the heaven. Maybe you just using texture mapping to map your bitmap file at the background. Or if your computer has enough memory, you can also create the each star as 3D object. How similar is this work with the Creation of the world.

When you create your virtual world, how do you write your program? Imagine that, you need to add light to your virtual world, what will you do? You might write a function, named “HaveLight()”. So, you call the function “HaveLight()”, and your virtual world will have the light.

Function, a very important component in programming, a very important component in mathematics, a very important component in our lives. Even in philosophy of mind, there is a philosophy called “functionalism”.

In programming, functions are written in programming language. How great is a programming language, because you can write many functions, many programs as long as you have the algorithms.

Let us see how God created the world. God said “Have light”, then the world “have light”. And, if we read the bible, we know that the Word of God created the heaven and earth. And we create the world using the “programming language”. Besides that, from the bible we also found that “what is visible came into being through the invisible”. The real world which we can see is created by through the Word that we cannot see; the virtual world which we can see is created through the “programming language” that we cannot see.

The technology is developed fantastically today. Is the development of the technology of this world by chance or by fate? Before the existence of programming language, the bible already talks about the creation the world through the Word of God. There is nothing to be surprised that what we do today is only imitating the Creator. Because the bible said that humans are created according to the image of the Creator. Therefore, what the programmers do is nothing special.

Note: These are only my personal perception about this world.