Hey, guys, this topic thread looks like it was intended seriously. Let's honor the wishes of the person who started it.
Gruntboy writes:
How can God be perfect if he made this dump pile of a planet?
If you've already read my religious opinions before, you know that the idea of me stepping in for a Judeo-Christian's reply is kind of laughable. That said, let me offer up a simulation:
A developer creates a program with sentient bits of code. They don't know his (or her) purpose, but they argue incessantly as if they do. They claim their environment stinks, even though they can't understand the reason for the program, and their part(s) in it. In fact, they themselves, operating autonomously, have made certain changes to the environment--and one another--that has really degraded the surroundings.
But again, that may be part of the program--or it may not. Though they pride themselves upon all sorts of mental and physical tools they've designed, they still don't understand the "why" of anything even when they grasp the "how," and many of them have learned to ignore the why question altogether, believing that how solves all their needs.
They've developed many theories about the programmer. Given that many have built up these theories about the creator from their own fears and desires, they envision a programmer who creates code for their specific enjoyment, at their behest, and erases code when they frown at it. The notion of a programmer who has an interest in them, but no greater an interest than in any other program or code he's running, is enough to scare the subroutines out of them, and they refuse to consider it.
Jumping back away from this fiction, I prefer to reserve judgment about most of the why's in this argument, believing that none of it is logically knowable, and damn little can be explained outside of an intuited, non-causal series of systems which hardly help matters.
