Van Huyssteen J.W. (editor) Encyclopedia of Science and Religion

Подождите немного. Документ загружается.

INCOMPLETENESS

— 452—

of the incarnation, at least as understood by the

Council of Chalcedon, implies that God wants to

relate to a world that is “other” than God. In order

to constitute such a relationship to the universe,

however, the presence of God to the world cannot

be one in which the divine presence dissolves the

world. To seek such an annihilating union of the

world in God is an expression of monophysitism,

the view that the distinctively human nature of

Christ loses itself in the divine nature.

A case could be made that the longing on the

part of some anti-Darwinian theists to have a

world carefully designed by God, rather than one

that evolves more self-creatively and sponta-

neously, is by implication indicative of a hidden

longing for a divine presence that abolishes the

world’s distinctness from its divine ground. Be-

neath much current religious anxiety about the im-

plications of Darwinian evolution perhaps there is

evidence of a persistent monophysitic hankering

for a kind of divine union with the world that

melts the world into God.

Any concept of God that theology hopes to

reconcile with biological and cosmic evolution,

however, would not obliterate the cosmos or

human existence in freedom, but would allow for

a world that could become increasingly independ-

ent. Today a number of Christian theologians see

in the doctrine of divine incarnation the basis for

such an understanding of the relationship of God

to the world.

See also CHRISTOLOGY; EMBODIMENT; KENOSIS;

EVELATION; TEIHARD DE CHARDIN, PIERRE

Bibliography

Brown, Raymond E. Jesus, God, and Man: Modern Bibli-

cal Reflections. Milwaukee, Wis.: Bruce, 1967.

Grillmeier, Aloys. Christ in Christian Tradition, trans. John

Bowden. Atlanta, Ga.: John Knox Press, 1975.

Pannenberg, Wolfhart. Jesus, God and Man, trans. Lewis L.

Wilkins and Duane A. Priebe. Philadelphia: Westmin-

ster Press, 1977.

Rahner, Karl. Foundations of Christian Faith, trans.

William V. Dych. New York: Crossroad, 1978.

Teilhard de Chardin, Pierre. Christianity and

Evolution,trans. Rene Hague. New York: Harcourt,

1969.

JOHN HAUGHT

INCOMPLETENESS

See GÖDEL’S INCOMPLETENESS THEOREM; MATHEMATICS

INDEPENDENCE

See MODELS; SCIENCE AND RELIGION, MODELS AND

RELATIONS; SCIENCE AND RELIGION,

ETHODOLOGIES

INDETERMINISM

In quantum mechanics there is deterministic evo-

lution only of the wave function describing a situ-

ation: The present state of the wave function de-

termines its future state uniquely and completely.

However, the wave function is not directly observ-

able. It determines the probability that measure-

ments will have particular outcomes. This proba-

bilistic aspect is not a consequence of an

incomplete description, loss of information, or im-

perfect observing equipment. It is intrinsic to the

nature of quantum reality. It is a manifestation of

the limits of classical concepts, such as position,

momentum, and energy that are used to describe

nature.

The standard interpretation of quantum me-

chanics includes indeterminism in principle. Per-

fect knowledge of the present state of the world

cannot be obtained even with perfect measuring

instruments. In Isaac Newton’s (1642–1727) picture

of the world (which does not contain the quantum

aspects of reality but which can be obtained from

the quantum theory as a limiting case when the

sizes of objects are much larger than their quantum

wavelengths) there appears to be determinism in

principle but not in practice. Newton’s laws allow

the complete prediction of the future from the

present state of the world if it is known with per-

fect accuracy, as envisaged by astronomer and

mathematician Pierre Laplace (1749–1827). How-

ever, it is impossible for the present state of the

world to be determined with perfect accuracy and

scientists know that many configurations of matter

have the property that any small uncertainty in

their initial state is amplified exponentially rapidly

LetterI.qxd 3/18/03 1:06 PM Page 452

INFINITY

— 453—

with the passage of time. Thus there is indetermi-

nacy in practice. This feature of the Newtonian

world is called chaos. There have been many at-

tempts to arrive at a full understanding of the

quantum version of this type of chaotic unpre-

dictability, but a complete understanding is still to

be arrived at.

See also CHAOS, QUANTUM; PHYSICS, QUANTUM

Bibliography

Barrow, John D. The Universe that Discovered Itself.

Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.

Earman, John. Primer on Determinism. Dordrecht, Nether-

lands: Kluwer, 1978.

JOHN D. BARROW

INFINITY

Infinity in a rigorous sense is a mathematical con-

cept, but the notion of boundless entities, such as

the number series and time, have since antiquity

touched a deep philosophical and religious chord

in the human heart.

Ancient and medieval conceptions

To the ancient Greek religious sect known as the

Pythagoreans, the notion of limit was valued as

conferring intelligibility and definition, while the

infinite (apeiron) was associated with void and pri-

mordial matter, imperfection and instability. Plato

(c. 428–327

B.C.E.) captures this negative sensibility

in Philebus when he reports that “the men of old”

viewed all beings “as consisting in their nature of

Limit and Unlimitedness” (16c). Drawing on this

background as well as reacting to it, Aristotle

(384–322

B.C.E.) adopted the solution of banning

anything actually infinite from philosophy. The in-

finite, he declared, is only “potential,” denoting

limitless series of successive, finite terms. Time is

infinite in this potential sense, without a first be-

ginning or end, but space, which exists all at once,

is finite. A similar treatment of infinity is found in

Euclidean mathematics, namely in Book 5, defini-

tion 4, which allows finite magnitudes as small or

as large as desired, but precludes anything actually

transfinite.

With the first-century Jewish philosopher Philo

and the founder of neoplatonism Plotinus (c.

205–270

C.E.), an actual infinite perfection is attrib-

uted in a new positive sense to God to mean that

divine perfection transcends every finite case and

is immense, eternal, incomprehensible, and unsur-

passable. The early Christian leader Augustine of

Hippo (354–430

C.E.) in turn stresses in Confessions

Book 7 that God is infinite according to a special

immaterial measure of perfection, invisible to the

bodily eye. The eighth-century theologian John

Damascene speaks of God in De Fide Orthodoxa as

“a certain sea of infinite substance” (1, 9). Medieval

Jewish mystics such as Isaac the Blind and Azriel of

Gerona who were active around the thirteenth cen-

tury enlist the Hebrew en-sof (infinite) to describe

the infinite extension of God’s thought. Later cab-

balists will use the actual infinite as a proper name

and refer to “the En-Sof, Blessed be He.”

In the mid-thirteenth century, Latin scholastics

became concerned with rationalizing divine infin-

ity by framing a coherent philosophical language

to discuss various types of infinity and to explore

the properties of the actual infinite, such as its non-

inductive and reflexive character. Two trends are

discernible. Thomas Aquinas (c. 1225–1274) built

on Aristotle to reach God philosophically as infi-

nite (unrestricted) Being, while his Franciscan

counterpart, Bonaventure (1221–1274), drawing

more centrally on Augustine, started with a finite

degree of ontological perfection and allowed this

perfection to be raised to infinity. A new apprecia-

tion of the distinction between extension and in-

tensity was thus brought to bear on the infinite,

with the notion of intensity serving to mask the

paradoxes inherent in the notion of an actual infi-

nite extension. Bonaventure promoted an ap-

proach that is introspective rather than cosmologi-

cal, involving the key premises that the human

soul longs for an infinite good (God) and cannot

find rest short of reaching it.

Another Franciscan, Peter John Olivi (c.

1248–1298), clarified the difference that exists be-

tween a concept taken unrestrictedly (e.g. being)

and the determinate infinite case falling under the

concept and denoting God (being of infinite inten-

sity). John Duns Scotus (c. 1265–1308), also a

Franciscan, formulated on this basis a univocal

theocentric metaphysics based on adopting the in-

tensive infinite as the “most perfect concept of God

naturally available to us in this lifetime.” Finally, by

LetterI.qxd 3/18/03 1:06 PM Page 453

INFLATIONARY UNIVERSE THEORY

— 454—

stressing the purely semiotic character of the con-

cept and explaining that denoting God by means

of the actual infinite does not imply comprehend-

ing God, William of Ockham (1288–1348) helped

to secularize the discussion and to give the actual

infinite a legitimate place in philosophy. The sci-

entists who introduced ideal elements at infinity in

geometry in the seventeenth century, namely Jo-

hannes Kepler, René Descartes, and Blaise Pascal,

were fully familiar with scholastic mainstreaming

of the actual infinite.

Modern conception of infinity

In the seventeenth century, Descartes made infin-

ity a keystone of his metaphysics and philosophy

of science. The idea of an actually infinite being is

innate in the human mind, he argues, and cannot

derive from anything finite, not even by extrapola-

tion. Rather, the human ability to conceptualize the

limit of an infinite process proves that the concept

of the actual infinite is in us prior to the finite.

Descartes also insisted that God alone is actually

infinite, so that physical space must be described

as merely indefinite rather than infinite. Another

seventeenth-century scientist to make creative

apologetic use of the actual infinite, based on its

mathematical properties, was Blaise Pascal

(1623–1662). In his famous “wager” argument, he

invoked the disproportion of an infinite reward to

urge human beings to bet their lives on God, no

matter how small the odds. Pascal also invoked

mathematical incommensurability to argue that

charity infinitely exceeds a life devoted to science,

just as a life of science infinitely exceeds a life

spent on material pleasure.

The taste for images of absolute transcendence

has waned among theologians in recent times,

prompting renewed interest in the potential infi-

nite. Process theology, in particular, inspired by

mathematician and philosopher Alfred North

Whitehead (1861–1947), has explored metaphors

connected with the inner unfolding of time and

the evolving universe to depict human beings as

partners of God’s open-ended creativity. Mean-

while, the actual infinite has found rigorous math-

ematical expression in transfinite set theory, fa-

thered by mathematician Georg Cantor

(1845–1918). Cantor not only extended classical

number theory by introducing transfinite numbers

but proved that there is a hierarchy of transfinite

magnitudes, such that, for instance, the infinite car-

dinality of the continuum (denoted by c) is larger

than the infinite cardinality of the rational numbers

(denoted by aleph-zero). The religious dimension

of transfinite ideation by no means evaporated on

account of this new rigor: Cantor actively sought to

enlist Catholic theologians in support of his math-

ematical discoveries, citing as a personal inspira-

tion Augustine’s speculation about God’s perfect

knowledge of numbers. Cantor’s fellow mathe-

matician David Hilbert has perhaps best summa-

rized the dual religious and scientific appeal of in-

finity in the 1925 address designed to herald

Cantor’s discovery: “the infinite has always stirred

the emotions of mankind more deeply than any

other questions; the infinite has stimulated and fer-

tilized reason as few other ideas have; but also the

infinite, more than any other notion, is in need of

clarification.”

See also THOMAS AQUINAS; ARISTOTLE; PLATO; PROCESS

THOUGHT; SPACE AND TIME

Bibliography

Davenport, Anne. Measure of a Different Greatness: The

Intensive Infinite 1250-1650. Leiden, Netherlands:

Brill, 1999.

Field, Judith. The Invention of Infinity: Mathematics and

Art in the Renaissance. Oxford: Oxford University

Press, 1997.

Kretzmann, Norman, ed. Infinity and Continuity in Antiq-

uity and the Middle Ages. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Uni-

versity Press, 1982.

Sweeney, Leo. Divine Infinity in Greek and Medieval

Thought. New York: Peter Lang, 1992.

ANNE A. DAVENPORT

INFLATIONARY UNIVERSE

THEORY

The Inflationary Universe Theory proposes a brief

period of extremely rapid accelerating expansion

in the very early universe, before the radiation

dominated era called the hot big bang. This accel-

eration is believed to be driven by a quantum field

(in effect, some exotic kind of matter) with a re-

pulsive gravitational effect. This can be achieved if

the pressure of the field is extremely large and

LetterI.qxd 3/18/03 1:06 PM Page 454

INFORMATION

— 455—

negative (unlike ordinary matter, which has posi-

tive pressure).

A specific example is a scalar field associated

with a potential energy. Such a field “rolls down”

the energy surface defined by the potential, and if

it is slow-rolling can act like an effective cosmo-

logical constant, driving an exponential expansion

with constant acceleration. During this epoch, any

matter or radiation density other than that of the

scalar field is negligible; one is left with an almost

constant energy density of the field, often called a

false vacuum because it behaves like the highly

energetic vacuum of quantum field theory. Every

−37

seconds the size of an inflating patch doubles

with its energy density remaining constant, so the

total mass in the region increases by a huge factor.

Inflation ends through decay of the repulsive ma-

terial into a mixture of matter and radiation, this

decay taking place by quantum processes similar

to radioactive decay of ordinary matter. The result-

ing hot expanding gas provides the starting point

for the hot big bang era in the early universe.

This scenario provides explanations for some

puzzles in cosmology: why the universe is so large,

why it is so uniform, and why it is so nearly flat

(scientists can not detect the large-scale spatial cur-

vature effects associated with general relativity).

Most importantly, this scenario provides an expla-

nation for the origin of large-scale structure in the

universe: Clusters of galaxies arise from seed per-

turbations generated by quantum fluctuations in

the very early universe, amplified vastly in size by

the inflationary expansion of the universe and in

amplitude by gravitational instability after the de-

coupling of matter and radiation. A major triumph

of the theory is that the subtle variations in the

cosmic background radiation it predicted have

been observed from satellites and balloons.

One popular version of the theory (Chaotic In-

flation) proposes that ever more inflationary bub-

bles are generated and expand to vast size, so that

on the largest scales the universe is an eternally re-

producing foam-like structure of interleaved inflat-

ing and post-inflation regions. It should be noted,

however, that this proposition is not observation-

ally testable. Indeed, despite its successes, infla-

tion is not yet a fully developed physical theory; in

particular the field (or fields) causing inflation (the

inflaton) has neither been identified nor shown

actually to exist. Moreover, various theoretical co-

nundrums remain, for example the problem of ex-

actly how inflation ends, how probable it is that in-

flation will succeed in starting in an extremely

inhomogeneous and anisotropic situation, and

how successful inflation can be in smoothing out

the universe if arbitrary initial conditions are al-

lowed. (A cosmology is anisotrophic if the physical

situation appears very different when we observe

from different directions in the sky.) Despite these

theoretical problems, and the difficulties in testing

the physics proposed, inflation is currently the

dominant explanatory paradigm for the physics of

the early universe. It has generated immense inter-

est because it provides a major link between parti-

cle physics and cosmology, allowing cosmological

observations to be used for testing theories in par-

ticle physics.

See also BIG BANG THEORY; COSMOLOGY, PHYSICAL

ASPECTS; PHYSICS, PARTICLE; PHYSICS, QUANTUM

Bibliography

Guth, Alan. The Inflationary Universe: The Quest for a

New Theory of Cosmic Origins. Reading, Mass.: Addi-

son Wesley, 1997.

Kolb, Edward W., and Turner, Michael S. The Early Uni-

verse. New York: Wiley, 1990.

Liddle, Andrew R., and Lyth, David H. Cosmological Infla-

tion and Large-scale Structure. Cambridge, UK: Cam-

bridge University Press, 2000.

Linde, Andrei D. Particle Physics and Inflationary Cos-

mology. Chur, Switzerland: Harwood Academic, 1990.

Peacocke, J. A. Cosmological Physics. Cambridge, UK:

Cambridge University Press, 1999.

GEORGE F. R. ELLIS

INFORMATION

The word information is used in three principal

senses: (1) the mathematical sense from which

arises the theory of digital communication or in-

formation theory; (2) the linguistic sense in which

it is synonymous with the dissemination of mean-

ings understood by members of a culture; and (3)

the formative sense in which information denotes

the process of giving shape to some medium or

substance.

LetterI.qxd 3/18/03 1:06 PM Page 455

INFORMATION

— 456—

Kinds of information

Counting-information is mathematical information

as defined by American mathematician and engi-

neer Claude Shannon (1916–2001) in a paper on

communication theory written in 1948. It has noth-

ing directly to do with meaning; rather it relates

solely to an arbitrary measure based upon the the-

ory of probability.

Meaning-information is information in the col-

loquial sense of knowledge. It is completely differ-

ent from Shannon’s concept of information; it is in-

terpretation-, language-, and culture-dependent.

Shaping-information denotes information as a

noun describing the action of giving form to

something. It is the oldest sense of the word, orig-

inating in the Latin verb informare, further re-

flected in current usage in the German in-

formieren and the French informer. In this sense,

one can speak of the “information” of a system

when one imposes constraints upon its degrees of

freedom, for example by giving content and struc-

ture to a spreadsheet.

Construed in these three ways, information

crosses boundaries between physics, culture, and

mind. In its modern, counting-information sense,

especially in the realm of information technology,

it seems to have taken on a life of its own, as if the

process of rendering things digitally had some in-

trinsic value apart from its use in conveying mean-

ing and enabling people to shape the world. As

with any new technology—the telephone, the tel-

evision, the motor car, the mobile phone—there is

a period during which fascination with the tech-

nology itself supplants the wisdom that governs its

use, but eventually the more important purposes

resume their ascendancy, and the technology once

again comes to be seen as no more than a tool.

The religious significance of the science of in-

formation is best understood in terms of the artic-

ulation of meaning and the establishment of a bal-

anced view of the place of information in human

life. That process is in full swing as digitization, the

Internet, global communication, and the dissolu-

tion of historical boundaries reshape how people

conceive of themselves and how they decide to

live their lives.

If technology is to serve rather than dictate

human needs, it is essential that people retain their

capacity to think creatively, which is to generate

the ideas that give shape to the technology by in-

vesting it with significant meanings. Otherwise

human needs will increasingly be at the mercy of

the agendas of those individuals, corporations, and

nation-states that control the technology, and peo-

ple will be powerless to resist their influence by

giving expression to their own objectives. Articula-

tion of worthy religious goals is one contribution

that theology can make to the restoration of the

balance between creative thought and technologi-

cal power.

Counting-information

The mathematical concept of counting-information

is based upon binary arithmetic, on the ability to

distinguish between two states, typically repre-

sented as 0 and 1, in an electronic device. One

such distinguishable state is called a binary unit or

bit. Combinations of these states allow data to be

encoded in strings, such as 01110101010, that can

be stored in two-state devices and transmitted

down communication channels. Electronic circuits

that can distinguish between only two states are

relatively easy to devise, although higher-state de-

vices are possible. The process of encoding facts

about the world in such binary strings is called

digitization, although any particular encoding is

arbitrary.

A string of n bits can exist in 2

; different states

and so can represent 2

different symbols. For ex-

ample, when n = 3, the string can be 000, 001, 010,

011, 100, 101, 110, or 111. If a particular encoding

treats these strings as binary numbers, they repre-

sent 0, 1, 2, . . . , 7; another encoding might treat

them as a, b, ... , h. In the early years of comput-

ing it was thought that 256 different strings would

be sufficient to encode most common letters, num-

bers, and control codes. The number of bits re-

quired to store a given amount of data is therefore

usually measured in eight-bit units called bytes be-

cause of the number of different states of a single

byte (2

= 256). Numbers of bits are counted in

powers of 2, so a kilobyte is 2

= 1024 bytes; a

megabyte is 1024 kilobytes (1024K); and a gigabyte

is 1024 megabytes. Typical hard disks can now

store between 20 and 100 gigabytes.

The states of a binary system are typically called

0 and 1, True and False, or Yes and No. The system

itself is oblivious to these interpretations of the two

possible states of a bit, and it is helpful to distin-

guish between system states and interpretations of

LetterI.qxd 3/18/03 1:06 PM Page 456

INFORMATION

— 457—

those states, for example using the terminology of

counting-, meaning- and shaping-information.

The physics of information

The physics of information has given rise to some

remarkable results. Shannon showed that there are

limits to the rate at which information can be trans-

mitted down a channel with a particular capacity if

it is to retain its integrity. Leo Szilard and Leon Bril-

louin demonstrated that there are fundamental lim-

its to the rate at which information can be

processed at given temperatures. Jacob Bekenstein

showed that the amount of information that an ob-

ject can contain—the Bekenstein bound—is di-

rectly related to its mass. Some, such as Carl

Friedrich von Weizsäcker, have attempted to re-

construct all of physics in information-theoretic

terms by conceiving of all physical processes as

streams of information. Still others have employed

information to look for a fundamental link be-

tween entropy and thermodynamics.

The ability to transfer information digitally re-

quires data to be encoded in a binary form; the

limitations of such transmission are the subject of

information theory as first elaborated by Shannon.

However, information is not always easily con-

verted to digital form, especially when it arises

from continuous analogue processes, when strict

conversion into a discrete coded form is not possi-

ble. Neither are the processes that arise from and

are useful to human beings easily distilled into the

pure digital states required by computers. Some of

the most difficult problems faced by those who

work in information technology concern the ac-

commodation of computer systems to the untidi-

ness of the data and processes that are typical of

human life.

The question of the fundamental nature of in-

formation is philosophically and physically deep. It

is irrelevant whether one counts to base 2 (as in bi-

nary systems) or some other base, but the question

of what one is measuring cannot be avoided, and

touches some of the hardest questions in physics.

The state of a bit cannot be detected without

degrading energy and so increasing the net en-

tropy of the universe. This familiar phrase encap-

sulates the physical truth that one cannot obtain

something for nothing. The Scottish physicist

James Clerk Maxwell (1831–1878) once proposed a

thought experiment in which a demon capable of

detecting the movement of molecules of gas could

open and close a trapdoor to allow fast molecules

through and keep slow atoms out, thus increasing

the temperature of one side of the partition and in-

fringing the second law of thermodynamics. It is

now generally accepted that the flaw in this argu-

ment arises from the need to increase the entropy

of the universe in order to ascertain the state of the

molecule; in other words, reading a certain number

of bits of information has a thermodynamic cost.

Encoding and encryption

Although encryption is important in the social and

political realms affected by information technology,

the fundamentals are mathematical and fall within

the realm of information theory. The details of

modern encryption involve difficult mathematics,

but the essential process is not hard to understand.

In a simple code or cipher one typically expects to

move from an everyday symbol such as 1 or a to a

binary string such as 000, to store and manipulate

that string in a computer, and then to decode the

result by reversing the encoding process. Unfortu-

nately, anyone familiar with the encoding can de-

code the results, and there are times when one

does not wish one’s messages to be read—perhaps

because they contain private commercial informa-

tion, perhaps because they contain the plans of

criminals or terrorists, perhaps because they con-

tain state secrets. So people would like a way to

transmit messages in code. But, if the recipient is to

decode them, it seems that the decoding rules must

also be transmitted, and they could themselves be

intercepted, thus compromising the integrity of the

message. What is more, it is far harder to know

whether an electronic communication has been in-

tercepted than a physical communication such as a

book or letter. Instead people need a way to trans-

mit code that does not require the recipient to be

told what the encoding process involves. Fortu-

nately, a way to do this has been devised. It is now

embodied in the RSA procedure and is as strong or

as weak as the number of bits employed in the en-

cryption. This procedure works as follows. Two

very large prime numbers that are intrinsically diffi-

cult to guess or find (the private key) are used with

another number to generate a pair of numbers (the

public key) that everyone knows. This process is

essentially irreversible in that there is no tractable

way to regenerate the original two prime numbers

from the public key. This key is then used by any-

LetterI.qxd 3/18/03 1:06 PM Page 457

INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY

— 458—

one who wishes to send me an encoded message

to encrypt it, and I, when I receive it, by using my

private key, can decode it. Anyone intercepting the

encrypted message, even if in possession of the

public key, cannot decrypt the message, because

they cannot get back to the private key necessary

to do so. The strength of the system lies in the size

of the public key: a 40-bit number is deemed very

difficult to crack; a 128-bit number is deemed al-

most impossible with current hardware; a 256-bit

number could not be decrypted within the lifetime

of the universe.

See also INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY; INFORMATION

THEORY

Bibliography

Leff, Harvey S., and Rex, Andrew F. Maxwell’s Demon:

Entropy, Information, Computing. Bristol, UK: Adam

Hilger, 1990.

Puddefoot, John C. “Information and Creation.” In The

Science and Theology of Information: Proceedings of

the Third European Conference on Science and The-

ology, ed. Christoff Wassermann, Richard Kirby, and

Bernard Rordorff. Geneva, Switzerland: Labor et

Fides, 1992.

Puddefoot, John C. “Information Theory, Biology, and

Christology.” In Religion and Science: History, Method,

Dialogue, eds. W. Mark Richardson and Wesley J.

Wildman. New York and London: Routledge, 1996.

Rényi, Alfréd. A Diary on Information Theory. New York:

Wiley, 1984.

Shannon, Claude E. “A Mathematical Theory of Communi-

cation.” The Bell System Technical Journal 27 (1948):

379–423, 623–656.

Singh, Simon. The Code Book: The Science of Secrecy from

Ancient Egypt to Quantum Cryptography. London:

Fourth Estate, 1999.

JOHN C. PUDDEFOOT

INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY

Information technology (IT) is a general term used

to cover most aspects of computer-related technol-

ogy. Intimately connected with information and in-

formation theory, IT deals with the representation,

storage, manipulation, and transmission of infor-

mation in digital form. The religious significance of

information technology must be considered in the

light of a general theological view of the nature

and purpose of human life. Wherever any medium

comes to permeate and shape almost all aspects

of social and individual existence, questions can

be asked about the direction in which such

changes lead, and whether they are favorable or

inimical to the purpose of human life as conceived

theologically.

At the center of the debate lies the broader

question of the way in which human beings repre-

sent, model, and shape the world. As computer

scientist Joseph Weizenbaum (1923– ) once put it,

“. . . the computer is a powerful new metaphor for

helping us to understand many aspects of the

world, but . . . it enslaves the mind that has no

other metaphors and few other resources to call

on” (p.277).

IT began as a tool that human beings could

use as they saw fit. In less than half a century it

came to occupy an indispensable place in the

world. No single human being altogether con-

trolled that rise, and no single human being un-

derstands all its implications. The question is rap-

idly becoming whether human beings will control

information technology or information technology

will control human beings. Is the demand that peo-

ple render the processes of human life in forms

that are susceptible to digitization forcing them to

alter the way they live their lives without giving

them a chance to decide whether those changed

lives are the ones they wish to lead? That question

forces people to examine, perhaps as they have

never examined before, the things they think valu-

able about human life.

Digitization adds a new dimension to the

philosophical issues associated with representa-

tion. Their sensory system limits what humans can

experience, and their intellectual systems attempt

to compensate with imagination for those limita-

tions. By universalizing concepts and generalizing

theories from experience of particulars, humans

have achieved an understanding of the universe of

extraordinary power, but that power is not without

its costs and its drawbacks. Universal concepts

overwrite the particularities of specific instances,

just as Plato believed they should, but they lose

sight of detail when number and quantity, statistics

and probability, replace specificity. Once the world

is digitized, this process takes another step toward

LetterI.qxd 3/18/03 1:06 PM Page 458

INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY

— 459—

unreality: A computer stores data in a medium that

is incapable of retaining all the detail and presents

people with clear-cut images, data, and their con-

structs that bear a more remote connection to the

“real world” than their usual appropriation in

human intellectual systems.

Conceptual clarity, of course, has its power

and its uses. By concentrating first on idealized

simplified situations, processes that are unimagin-

ably complex in reality can begin to be grasped.

Computer-generated models of the workings of a

living cell—its DNA-replication and division, its im-

mune-system response to attack by viruses, and so

forth—illuminate and clarify. But the reality is far

less clear-cut, like the digital signals that are repre-

sented as beautifully symmetric square waves.

The more pervasive IT becomes, the more it

will tend to influence, shape, and direct human

lives. In itself it is no more a force for good or evil

than other tools, but the range of its influence

makes it unlike most other technological changes.

The way colored glass affects everything seen

through it affords an analogy: As people come to

conceptualize the world more and more in terms

borrowed from IT, does a time arise when IT

comes to shape their view of the world rather than

transmit and interpret the world for them to view?

At a very basic level, IT does not answer questions

about what people should do with it. It is open

and indifferent to that use. But it is easy to over-

look the way it constrains what people can see,

what they aspire to see, and how they see it.

Uses and impact

Security and surveillance. Information trans-

mitted down wires or by radio waves is inherently

more vulnerable to interception than information

retained in a vault, and so security measures have

been developed to match the increased threat.

Chief among these are advanced methods of data

encryption using encoding systems that are virtu-

ally impossible to break, even by the most ad-

vanced computer systems.

The ability to render data safe by encryption

also has the potential to prevent those responsible

for surveillance from decoding messages between

subversives, terrorist groups, criminals, pedophiles,

and others deemed socially undesirable. There

have therefore been attempts to restrict access to

high-performance encryption systems, to forbid

the transmission of heavily encrypted signals over

the Internet, and to prohibit the export of encryp-

tion software likely to enable data to be made im-

pregnable to snooping.

Weaponry and conflict. Many of the pressures

that have produced advances in the understanding

and command of guidance and control systems

have arisen from military applications. Warfare has

been transformed by advanced technology.

“Smart” bombs that seek specific targets, “jamming”

devices that interfere with the ability of an enemy

to communicate on the battlefield, software viruses

that disrupt control systems, eavesdropping on

email and digital telephone calls, and electronically

disseminated misinformation are all part of the

stuff of modern warfare and state security. But

smart bombs are not as smart as people are led to

believe, and the technology has proved less reli-

able than military and political leaders insinuate.

Work and society. Information technology sig-

nificantly alters the parameters governing the way

human beings cooperate to achieve their goals.

The manufacture of physical objects requires peo-

ple to be physically present at the site of their con-

struction, in however widespread a way the com-

ponents are manufactured. Before electronic mail

and data communication through the Internet, of-

fice work similarly required people to be collected

together in their workplaces. Where added value

arises largely from the manipulation of data

strings—through programming, database design

and construction, composing and editing text, and

so forth—this physical juxtaposition is unneces-

sary. People can relate across digital channels

through video conferencing in ways that signifi-

cantly reduce the need and opportunity for physi-

cal meetings.

It is not yet clear what the consequences of

this shift in work patterns will be, and they are not

unique in human history. Just as the industrial rev-

olution drew populations to the cities and the in-

vention of the telephone and radio communica-

tion had a major impact on the relationship

between society and work, so decentralized but

cooperative data-working will effect further

changes in that relationship. The threat of loneli-

ness will increase alongside the opportunities for

freer work patterns and wider circles of friends,

and many have found their experiences of “virtual

communities” deeply unsatisfying and unfulfilling.

LetterI.qxd 3/18/03 1:06 PM Page 459

INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY

— 460—

Viruses, hacking, and censorship

The destruction of the modern Eden of computer-

generated communication by deliberately made

viruses is a story of almost biblical proportions.

The fact that computers must be accessible to a

public domain to receive email or access Internet

websites makes them vulnerable to attack from

malicious software that attaches itself to email and

downloadable packages. Executable files and at-

tachments, once opened, infect the host machine,

and commonly export themselves to other ma-

chines by spawning copies of themselves in bogus

messages sent to all or some of the entries in the

local address book. The cost to commerce, world-

wide, of damage caused by viruses is already

measured in billions of dollars, and the cost of an-

tivirus software that struggles to keep up with

ways to immunize systems against attack by

viruses that become more sophisticated every day

has added to that cost.

Hacking, as the process of gaining unautho-

rized access to another computer is known, is also

a major problem. Just as authors of software

viruses regard every new defensive shield as a new

challenge, so all the sophisticated mechanisms that

are employed to prevent unauthorized access to a

computer represent a similar challenge. Hackers’

conventions set up competitions where the win-

ners are those who can most successfully penetrate

the defenses devised by other competitors, and

there have been many instances where commer-

cial, national defense, and other secure systems

have been penetrated. Some hackers are motivated

by no more than the intellectual challenge; some

are malicious; some are politically motivated; some

are disgruntled employees; some are just socially

disenfranchised and angry.

The location of the physical machine hosting a

website is not easy to discover. As a result, it is dif-

ficult to police the Internet in order to impose any

kind of censorship. But it is not clear whose re-

sponsibility or entitlement it is to act either as cen-

sor or police force. National governments and in-

ternational organizations are frequently thwarted in

their attempts to track subversive, criminal, or other

groups by the lack of boundaries on the Internet.

The most obvious cases where some believe

censorship should be imposed are sites posting,

advertising, and selling sexual material. Others in-

clude terrorist organizations, industrial saboteurs,

and all sorts of political activists. But here as every-

where the boundaries between public security and

private freedom are hard to define.

On the other hand, the difficulty of policing the

Internet affords a means to support and help op-

pressed minorities in countries where they are per-

secuted. It enhances freedom of speech and ex-

pression. It joins together those who find

themselves in minorities. It affords the means for

all kinds of propaganda wars to be waged. It al-

lows books and art and music to be made available

to the poor and to those who live where some ma-

terial is prohibited or circumscribed. All of these

opportunities can, of course, be used for good and

ill, and whether the good outweighs the ill remains

to be seen.

Reality and virtual reality

Sciences and religions strive to increase knowledge

and awareness of what they take variously to be

“reality.” They have argued extensively and bitterly

about the boundaries of “reality,” even though

their conceptions of reality have grown and

changed through the centuries.

The term virtual reality is generally taken to

denote that new realm of experience fabricated

with the aid of IT from the connections between

people throughout the world and the capabilities

of software to generate new kinds of communica-

tion and even new fictional environments in which

they can interact. There is nothing in principle to

prevent people living on opposite sides of the

globe from donning some sort of virtual-reality

headset and sharing the exploration of an entirely

unreal virtual habitat.

Virtual habitats are not, of course, new. Every

fictional book ever written has created virtual habi-

tats for the human imagination, and so, more re-

cently, have films. It is the interactive capacity of

virtual realities that is new and poses sharp ques-

tions about what people take to be the nature and

purpose of human existence.

Individuals and societies

A person’s sense of self has typically been associ-

ated with a certain geographical locality, a work-

place, and a group of friends largely drawn from

his or her own nation. People and their cultures

are intimately intertwined, even if every culture

LetterI.qxd 3/18/03 1:06 PM Page 460

INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY

— 461—

consists of a myriad of subcultures with their own

mores and customs. Selves are distributed through

these cultures, and people know themselves as re-

flected and invested in them.

Because information technology offers people

the opportunity to associate with anyone in the

world with access to the Internet in a way that far

surpasses in immediacy and intimacy anything

possible through the telephone or “snail-mail”—

through email, video conferencing, websites, chat

rooms, and so forth—it is now possible to with-

draw from the community defined by a locality, a

geographically defined subculture, or a nation-

state, and to find (or lose) oneself in the greater

culture that exists through the interactions of per-

sons on the Internet.

It is often suggested that computer technology

has made human beings less sociable or neigh-

borly. Now that people can choose like-minded

conversational partners from anywhere in the

world, they are supposedly less minded to social-

ize with their neighbors. It is not obvious that this

is true. Computer technology is as ambiguous as

was the television, the telephone, or the motorcar.

Computer communities do, however, break

national boundaries without the need for expen-

sive travel, and it is certainly arguable that greater

international fraternization will reduce rather than

increase the long-term threat of war. What is not

clear is the extent to which having the world as

one’s neighbor will make one less able to negoti-

ate tolerantly with those physical neighbors who

surround one every day, or whether exposure only

to those who agree will make one less tolerant of

those who do not.

Although it is not true that the Internet has

spawned “virtual” communities as an entirely new

phenomenon—they have always existed through

newsletters, journals, conferences, and the like—it

has certainly made their activities more wide-

spread and the frequency of their interactions

much greater.

Whatever interest people have, there is almost

certainly an Internet community that shares that in-

terest. Through online discussions, websites, mass-

circulation email, and so forth, such groups estab-

lish both their mutual interest and, usually,

considerable interpersonal rapport that spills

over into wider aspects of life. Participants will

commonly share their joys and sorrows, support

one another, and exercise general pastoral care for

the group. This phenomenon has led some to sug-

gest that the World Wide Web may facilitate the

generation of a new kind of religious community

in which mutual care and even worship arise

within a virtual world rather than geographically

close localities or through meeting eclectically in

physical buildings.

Embodiment and realism challenged

Science and religion agree that human beings are

embodied: finite, physical existence in a physical

world, the fact that life has a beginning and an

end. These things occasion no disagreement, even

if the nature of the beginning and the end do.

Human evolutionary history has been dictated by

this physicality, and the need to reproduce, feed,

and survive as individuals and species has been

deeply influential in making all creatures what they

are. Virtual selves challenge this history by provid-

ing an intelligible alternative in which people

might one day come to exist not as physically em-

bodied selves but as remote functional intellectual

agents that would stand evolution on its head by

adapting the world to fit human imaginations

rather than adapting human bodies to fit the world.

Most people recoil from this suggestion be-

cause they do not want to lose their physical em-

bodiment. The pleasures of physical contact, what-

ever they may be, seem so central to what it is to

be human that people want to stop in its tracks any

process that would render them less than fully

physical and embodied.

This instinctive reaction raises clear questions

about what people really and genuinely and

deeply value as human beings. Science, in its pop-

ularly conceived objectivity, cannot answer those

questions because it is indifferent to them. For sci-

ence, human beings and all living and nonliving

things simply are what they are; there is no justifi-

able scientific view of what anything “ought to be.”

As soon as one asks how things “ought to be,” one

is in philosophical or religious or ethical territory;

science strikes rock, and its spade is turned.

Philosophy and psychology enable people to

see that there is no such thing as a raw perception

neither filtered nor colored nor shaped by certain

sorts of conceptual apparatuses. The world and

LetterI.qxd 3/18/03 1:06 PM Page 461