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Knol

decisions of law are established by a clergy that we’ve previously recognized as the judiciary. It is the task of these arbiters to interpret policy specifications and to apply sanctions when the specifications are in some way abrogated. While this system is designed to preferentially guarantee resolution as opposed to accuracy, in fact subsequent revisions of the system to enhance accuracy have had rather apparent deleterious impacts on resolution in the form of lengthy appellate processes.

At the present time, the primary policy environment in which we live our lives derives ostensibly from government policy, not from religious dogma; however, sometimes it’s hard to tell them apart. In the course of our nation’s history, the two have often been even more intertwined than they are today. In perhaps homage to those earlier social structures, today most U.S. politicians seeking to assume the mantle of governance do so under the guise of seeking to engage in public service. The term invites the somewhat facetious comparison to the Damon Knight science fiction short story in which the alien book with a title translated as “To Serve Man,” rather than being a tutorial on constructive coexistence between species, is actually found to be a cookbook (Knight’s story is also entitled To Serve Man).

In any case, those who aspire to public service typically present themselves as religious individuals with the implication that a subsequent basis of their public actions may be keyed to their private religious beliefs or at least to the morality and ethical codes of conduct that they derived from those beliefs. The bottom line is that social structures encompass grouping mechanisms that are in competition with one another. They encompass aspects of divergent social environments in which the process of natural selection is still at play on multiple levels. This existing tension is reflected in our consideration of the extension of social systems through the use of tools such as computers and computer networks.

As humans require social structure from which to derive evolutionary benefit, they also require tools. If completely devoid of tools, a naked human would have a difficult time merely functioning as a predator. Simply dismembering the slain prey for food can be a difficult if not impossible task without at least a sharp stone to use as a cutting tool. While today’s vegans might heartily approve, it’s not clear that the ascendance of the species would have been as pronounced on a diet of nuts and berries as on the high-protein meals provided by meat. During this evolution of the species, as our physiological facilities encompassed the higher level cognitive functions of our expanded brains, our tools were required to keep pace. We have learned, through our tool systems, to derive high-protein foods from vegetable sources. So, today our knives perhaps don’t have to be quite as sharp. On the other hand, over the last few decades, electronic stored program computers have emerged as the most complex and cognition enabling tools ever devised by the species. Computers and their networks have great impact on the social systems that we are driven to exploit. Consequently, the mechanisms we use in our natural grouping systems should have parallels in the mechanisms used by our tool systems. Hence, we would expect to see some reflection of religion and religious mechanisms in computers and computer networks.

A Theme

Computer Theology presents computers and computer networks as both concrete technological elements and as abstract components of modern society. It details their historical and prospective development and compares their evolution to today’s most advanced personal machines, that is, to human beings. Throughout our presentation we will follow the guiding principle of the actions of individuals and of individuals acting within groups, which is to say evolution and evolutionary

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