Larry Wall and Religion.
A couple of weeks ago
Slashdot
(News for Nerds. Suff that matters.) posed some
readers' questions to
Larry Wall,
the creator of
Perl
in an email
interview.
Question 7 asked:
Please tell us how in the world a scientific or at least technical mind
can believe in God, and what role religion has played in your work on Perl
.
Larry's entire response can be read
here,
but the part that most intrigued me was:
If God is creating the universe sideways like an Author,
then the proper place to look for the effects of that is
not at the fuzzy edges, but at the heart of the story. And
I am personally convinced that Jesus stands at the heart of
the story. The evidence is there if you care to look, and if
you don't get distracted by the claims of various people who
have various agendas to lead you in every possible direction,
and if you don't fall into the trap of looking for a formula
rather than looking for God as a person.
And I emailed him the following in response:
By "evidence" do you mean "scientific" evidence or "evidence" like
at a trial where the prosecution has a witness testify about what
they heard or saw? If you have "hard evidence" (like evidence for
Einstein's theory of relativity) I'm sure the world would like to
know about it. The funny thing is that even with hard evidence
people are often wrong. How many times have scientific theories
had to be revised (e.g. Newton's law of gravity) when new evidence
comes along. Given the limits of the human mind (consider being at
a magic show), to be so absolutely sure of anything seems illogical
to me. Is there anyway your belief system can be proved wrong?
If not, it's just blind faith.
With so many religions in the world giving different versions of
the same story, how do you choose which one to believe? What are
the odds that you would believe as you do if you were brought up
in a Jewish or Moslem culture rather than a Christian one? It's
probably similar to the odds that you would think python is a
better programming language then perl. But at least for programming
languages you seem to realize it's not a matter of "evidence".
That was over two weeks ago and I have not heard back from him
(probably because he gets so much email that he never
even noticed mine).