Lunch at the Labs
Stuff I used to talk about during lunch at AT&T and Bell Labs. You are visitor
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).