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.