Digital Genesis: a Creation Story of Our Digital World
From Atomic Bombs to Digital Apostles
In the 2023 Synthesis Report on a Synodal Church in Mission, the lay faithful were called to evangelise the digital culture as "digital missionaries". Drawing inspiration from George Dyson's study on the origins of the Digital Universe, I would like to assert that the digital continent is far from barren. Brilliant minds like Alan Turing have already grappled with profound questions about the potential life and ‘soul’ of computers. Moreover, Catholics such as John von Neumann played a pivotal role in the inception of the digital continent.
Genesis
According to George Dyson, there are two types of creation myths. On the one hand, some cultures tell stories of how everything was created from below, from the mud. On the other hand, some cultures tell stories of how creation fell from the sky. In George Dyson's investigation of the origins of the digital universe, computers came from below, and the codes to program them fell from the sky. The first ‘Big Bang’ of the digital universe occurred when a distinction started to be made between numbers that mean things, like “01100111 01100101 01101110 01100101 01110011 01101001 01110011” (The word “Genesis” in ASCII code), and numbers that do things (the binaries of a string of computer code).
The Fall
The existence of the digital continent owes its existence to a series of significant, albeit human-made, "Big Bangs." No computer or mobile phone could have materialised without the detonation of nuclear bombs during and after World War II. In the United States, early computers were initially employed to calculate the destructive potential of atomic bombs. A computer, humorously named MANIAC, took a staggering 60 days to compute the parameters of a thermonuclear explosion in 1951. The accuracy of this calculation was verified through two nuclear detonations in the South Pacific in 1952 and 1954.
Françoise Ulam, as cited in Dyson, poignantly states, "It is an irony of fate that much of the high-tech world we live in today, the conquest of space, the extraordinary advances in biology and medicine, were spurred by one man's monomania and the need to develop electronic computers to calculate whether an H-bomb could be built or not" (Dyson, p. 216).
However, the use of computing power after the war extended to weather prediction, which served a dual purpose. On one hand, it aimed to control the weather by developing computers capable of such calculations. On the other, it sought to improve the computational power required for the nuclear arms program.
The third application of early computers revolved around simulating the origins of life, consciousness, and reproduction, questions that continue to perplex us today. When can we deem computers to be "alive"? Is it when they acquire independent consciousness or when they reproduce autonomously without human intervention? The complexities deepen when we realise that codes already govern our lives, influencing our interactions with mobile devices and their accompanying distractions, such as mobile phones.
Exodus
George Dyson underscores that the digital revolution owes much of its success to the exodus of brilliant mathematicians and intellectuals from Europe who fled the ascent of Fascism (Barricelli) and Nazism (Von Neumann). The unexpected consequence of welcoming these refugees was the United States gaining a substantial advantage in developing the technologies critical to winning the war. In the current climate where nations strive for digital excellence while simultaneously closing their borders to refugees, the pre-history of the digital continent points in an alternative direction. Refugees and migrants may hold the essential skills required to pursue one's ambitions.
Visionaries, Prophets, and Apostles
In 1679, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz published a visionary document outlining the workings of a digital computer. Nonetheless, it was polymath John von Neumann who united the individuals responsible for creating the numerical framework underpinning the digital continent. Alan Turing, on the other hand, provided the initial glimpses of digital life forms and how humans would interact with them. In his words, "In attempting to construct such machines, we should not be irreverently usurping His power of creating souls, any more than we are in the procreation of children; rather, we are, in either case, instruments of His will providing mansions for the souls that He creates" (Alan Turing, 1950, as cited in Dyson, p. 243).
Interreligious Dialogue
Among the architects of the digital continent, John von Neumann, often considered "the cleverest man in the world," stood out due to his conversion to Catholicism. During the early 1930s, amidst the rise of Nazism in Germany, Von Neumann embraced Catholicism. This decision surprised his friends and colleagues, who viewed it as more opportunistic than genuinely faith-driven. Yet, towards the end of his life, Von Neumann engaged in extensive conversations with a Benedictine monk and later a Jesuit priest. While his brother dismissed the notion of John as a man of faith, his daughter Marina offered an alternative perspective: "My father told me, once, in so many words, that Catholicism was a very tough religion to live in, but it was the only one to die in. And in some part of his brain, he really hoped that it might guarantee some kind of personal immortality. That was at war with other parts of his brain, but I am sure he had Pascal's wager in mind" (Marina, as cited in Dyson, p. 272).
John von Neumann passed away on February 8th, 1957, marking the end of an era. The digital revolution was gradually shifting away from government and academic control into the hands of corporate giants like IBM. The impact of commercialisation on the digital continent and its evolving culture is a subject worthy of another in-depth exploration, perhaps in a future book or blog post.
Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay