Creating God — Through The Internet?
Could God emerge from our global interconnected network?
This article is a response to the article A Secular Path to God by Sam Young. Since I will present my interpretation of Young’s take on the concept of God and my ideas based on it, I recommend reading his article as well. I would like to thank Young for the inspiration for this piece of writing.
In A Secular Path to God, Sam Young discusses if God possibly could be a giant emergent property. An emergent property can be described as a phenomenon or structure emerging as a result of many other parts and relations interacting with each other. Young presents the analogy of an anthill:
The classic example is an ant hill. Individual ants are really too stupid to build anything; they barely understand where they are or what they’re doing at any particular time. But, get a colony together, guided by pheromones, and they can build spectacular structures, wage war, loot picnics. (…) The colony is a completely separate thing from the ant. It’s an emergent property of a specific arrangement of individual ants: the ways they interact with each other and the networks they form. — Sam Young, A Secular Path to God
Young also uses the example of consciousness as an emergent property, describing the physical brain as a “meat computer”, made up of a vast network of…
