Not to be confused with the node God as a programmer. This writeup the closest thing to logical proof for the existence of God you'll read until the whole debate is mathematically proved one way or the other.

Okay. Alan Turing showed that any computable problem can be solved on a Turing Machine. Since he proved this, that means Turing Machines are inherently computable, and therefore a Turing Machine may simluate another Turing Machine, provided the simulated machine is sufficiently less complex (note that the tape must be unbounded, but need not be infinite, so tape requirements change and in fact if you run into a bounding problem, it becomes a Finite State Machine and can't compute some problems -- I have to postulate that a Finite State Machine can considered be a Turing Machine for sufficiently simple computations).

We can currently physically build Turing Machines, meaning our universe is also a Turing Machine, since in our universe, Turing Machines are in fact computable. Further evidence that our universe is a Turing machine is that a Turing Machine's tape can only be unbounded in one dimension: and our universe appears to have an edge except in time: the future appears to be unbounded, while the universe has a distinctive temporal begining and all 3 spatial dimensions appear to be bounded (though growing) -- in other words, only one edge of one dimension is unbounded, very similar to our own machines.

In a Turing Machine, truly random data requires an infinite number of steps to compute and anything requiring an infinite number of steps is incomputable. Therefore, any Turing machine, including our universe, requires an initial state, which be manually entered since random initialization is impossible. Note also that pseudo-random data also requires an initial state and finite number of computations. Either way, an initial state is ultimately required. Something must initialize that state, not to mention buid and program the machine.

Therefore, not only does God exists, He's a computer programmer.


Disclaimer: This is not logical proof for the existence of God. It is the closest thing to logical proof for the existence of God that I can come up with. You can actually extend this "proof" to show that God doesn't ultimately run things, but by doing so, you also end up proving just as convincingly that He is omnipresent, omniscient and quite possibly omnipotent as well, and simultaneously show that he never existed and nor do we. Talk about zen.

The problem with this argument is that you assume the Universe is turing complete. It's not. Due to quantum mechanics, truly random events may happen. However, in the long run, it approximates to a turing machine enough to allow us to build devices that approximate to turing machines. In reality, however, there is nothing keeping the machine from, say, being struck by lightning or randomly blinking out of existence.

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