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God and Gamesmanship
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 October 2008
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Norbert Wiener has recently pointed out that the relation between God and man, according to orthodox Jewish and Christian theology, is analogous to the relation between men and ‘intelligent’ machines. God is supposed to have created man just as man has created (or ‘manufactured’) machines. And just as God has endowed man with intelligence, creating him in his own image (although the Imago Dei admittedly involves more than this), so man has endowed the machine with intelligence—i.e. with problem solving capacities of a high order. Moreover, just as the endowment of man with intelligence led to unintended, if not unforeseen developments (i.e. the Fall), so the development of sophisticated computing machinery raises the possibility that some unintended and unwanted consequences may be forthcoming in the man-machine domain. Just such a possibility is realised in the recent film 2001: A Space Odyssey, where a quasi-human computer is represented as having both emotions and purposes of its own. Even though this particular film may be regarded as a bit far-fetched, in some respects, there are nonetheless many who, like Wiener, wonder whether the machines we have brought into being will always behave with reasonable predict ability, and in ways that will promote rather than frustrate human purposes.
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page 233 note 1 Wiener, Norbert, God and Golem, Inc.: A Comment on Certain Points Where Cybernetics Impinges on Religion (Cambridge: M.I.T. Press, 1964). I have taken the liberty of extending this analogy a bit more than Wiener actually does.Google Scholar
page 233 note 2 I do not wish to become embroiled in the issue of whether human intelligence is paralleled in every essential respect by computing machines which we now have or which we may conceivably have in the future. It is sufficient for my purposes to have it granted that some skills, such as checker-playing (an example cited by Wiener), can be performed by machines at least on a par with human beings, and in many cases better than humans can perform them.
page 233 note 3 Op. cit., p. 17. By a ‘significant game’, Wiener means one in which there is some objective criterion of merit—some way of evaluating the performance of the players, and of computing real gains and losses.Google Scholar
page 234 note 1 Cf. Heim, Karl, The Transformation of the Scientific World View (New York: Harper and Bros. 1953), Chapter IV.Google Scholar
page 234 note 2 Jung, among others, has also pointed out that the erosion of the church's authority and teachings in the modern world is now yielding a bitter harvest in the form of widespread neurosis and psychosis (especially in Protestantism.) Theologians may think that science has rendered belief in Evil Powers obsolete, Jung notes, but the human psyche knows otherwise: the unconscious, especially that of the mentally ill, is aware of something that the conscious mind cannot or will not admit, viz. that there are negative or evil forces in the universe which influence human behaviour in various subtle ways. Cf. Jung, C. G., Psychology and Religion: East and West, trans. Hull, R. F. C. (New York: Pantheon, 1958), pp. 43–9Google Scholar. See also Custance, John, Wisdom, Madness, and Folly (New York: Pellegrini and Cudahy, 1952).Google Scholar
page 234 note 3 In his book The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society (New York: Anchor Books, 1964), Professor Wiener uses just this analogy.Google Scholar Cf. also Zaehner, R. C., Matter and Spirit (New York: Harper and Row, 1963), pp. 138 ff., where it is noted that the Ahriman of Zoroastrian theology ‘corresponds exactly to what thermodynamics calls entropy, the vis interiae that tends to drag all evolution back into a meaningless and “dead” uniformity.’ (p. 141)Google Scholar
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page 236 note 1 This analogy also has its limits, of course. The Bible, somewhat anthropomorphically, does depict God as being free to ‘change his mind’, or to destroy what he has made (as in the Flood) and begin again. This freedom, however, does not extend to the destruction of persons.
page 236 note 2 Op. cit., p. 17.Google Scholar
page 236 note 3 Just what ‘losing’ would involve is hard to specify, but it would presumably include having some of God's wishes (e.g. that all men repent) frustrated.
page 236 note 4 Cf. Custance, op. cit., p. 205. Custance is willing to allow that the Devil has ‘perhaps even a fifty-fifty chance’ of frustrating God's plans, although he immediately adds that, according to Christian belief (which he shares) Satan's chances are no longer as good as they once were.Google Scholar
page 237 note 1 Op. cit., p. 17. Wiener points out that the ascription of infinite power, goodness, etc., to God is perhaps rash, given the paradoxes surrounding the notion of infinity in mathematics. We would be far wiser, he suggests, to confine ourselves to assertions (e.g. that God is ‘very powerful, etc.’) to which clearer meaning can be given.Google Scholar
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page 239 note 1 Barring the possibility that we could make machines so nearly in our own image that they would produce ‘moral’ responses because we had given them this capacity.
page 240 note 1 Cf. MacKay, Donald M., Freedom of Action in a Mechanistic Universe (Cambridge: The University Press, 1967).Google Scholar
page 240 note 2 MacKay argues this point very cogently, showing that there is strictly speaking no ‘information’ that someone with foreknowledge of another's future could transmit to the latter and which the latter would be obliged, or even in a position, to accept.
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page 241 note 2 Loc. cit., p. 210.Google Scholar
page 241 note 3 Loc. cit., p. 212.Google Scholar
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page 242 note 2 Cf. Bohm, David, Causality and Chance in Modern Physics (New York: Harper and Bros.; Torchbook, ed., 1961).Google Scholar
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