Video Games and Miracles

A Classic!

Originally posted here. I suppose I grew up in the "Nintendo generation," having graduated from Pac-Man and Donkey Kong  to spending hours squashing "goombas" to save the princess in Nintendo's Super Mario Bros. Then there was Link, always working to save Princess Zelda. But regardless of which game I was playing or even which genre of game I played, each video game had its own consistent laws of what was possible. Mario and Luigi may be able to jump several times their own height, which is impossible in our world, but that was perfectly normal in the Mushroom Kingdom of Super Mario Brothers. And those laws had to apply equally to each player for the game to be fair. But ... as any gamer knows, there are "cheat codes" - those little hidden combinations of movements, game actions, sequences of pushed buttons on the controllers, and so on, that allow a user to sidestep the rules of that game's reality. A cheat code may let the player get more lives, become invincible, get abilities beyond what's normal in that game's world, access new weapons or levels, or bypass difficult levels or enemies to finish the game faster.

But what does all this have to do with miracles? Well, consider where cheat codes came from, and why they're called cheat codes. These have historically been programming "back doors" for the game developers to test different parts of the game without having to play through the entire game at the intended rate. If I'm developing a game, and I need to test game play in level thirty-seven, I don't want to have to play through the first thirty-six levels that I know work well just to repeatedly test out small changes in level thirty-seven. An easy way to handle this is for me to write in a hidden jump to the higher levels, or a code for superpowers that would let me go through the tedious parts quickly. As the creator of the game, I'm outside the game, while the players are immersed in the game. I'm not limited by the rules of that game world (unless I choose to be), while the players are limited by the rules in a fair contest. With that in mind, it's not cheating for the game creator to bypass levels or grant himself superpowers to accomplish his work. However, if a player learns of the programmer's secret, and uses it unfairly, then it is cheating.

Now, this leads me to a few observations.
1) We are open to the possibility of miracles (i.e. bypassing or circumventing a world's observed physical laws) in a game world.
2) We recognize that the game's programmer isn't violating any actual real-world constraints when he alters physics inside his game - the code he's writing in his dimension is functioning perfectly in accordance with whatever programming language he used whether he writes a "normal" game scenario, or one with a secret invincibility switch in the game's dimension.
3) We recognize that these "miracles" (from an in-game perspective) tend to be the work of the game's developer as a means of accomplishing his work outside of normal game play.
4) We have an expectation that these events are not the norm, and are supposed to be used judiciously by the right person (i.e. the developer) to make the game better.
5) We recognize the right of the game developer to exercise privileges beyond our own as players.

With that in mind, I have to ask why we turn around and deny even the possibility of miracles in our physical world. Why think that it is impossible that our world had a developer - a Creator - who is not bound by our reality's constraints? Why think that such interactions between our Creator and His creation - ones that appear miraculous from our "inside-the-game" perspective - are impossible if He's simply not limited like we are? Why think that our Creator doesn't have a right to alter our world's "game" as He sees fit to make it better?

When we look at the miracle of God entering the game He created at a specific point in this game's time and space, and becoming a player like one of us. He still retained His title of Sovereign Programmer, using His power to beat what we never could. In this we see a move of unfathomable love and mercy that made the game immeasurably better. Imagine playing an unwinnable level, with the deck stacked against you, and suddenly, the game creator appears in the game next to you and says, "You can't beat this on your own, but I've got this - just follow me." That's what Jesus did when He physically appeared almost 2,000 years ago and conquered death. Will you turn away and keep playing on your own? Please don't, there's a better way.

Deep Conversations With My Nine Year Old

I was in the car last night, driving back from a boy scout event with my middle child. Now, in my family, any trip longer than a half hour is usually filled with spiritual questions, and given that my kids are as weird as I am, those questions are generally pretty deep.

The ride back from Alaflo last night was just shy of an hour! ;-)

Usually, it's my oldest daughter, the eleven year old, that asks the question, but being as it was just me and the boy, that duty fell to him. Like a trooper, he delivered ... and it was a doozy.

I don't remember how we got on the subject -- I'm sure it had something to do with Halloween, and fear, and the like -- but he told me that he sometimes doubts that God exists, not so much because he doesn't see Him working in this world and in our lives, but because he can't understand Him. The example he gave is "Who made God? Where did He come from?"

Like I said -- we go deep. I mean, my kids get their weirdness from me, so I can't recall them EVER asking me an easy question.

Of course, I told him that God was never made, that He didn't "come from" anywhere or anyone, but that answer didn't satisfy him. He brought up how scientists think the universe started with a Big Bang, and how it produced all this gas that came together to form the stars and planets and stuff, and maybe that gas made God too. So I asked him if that was true, where did the materials for the Big Bang came from? He said, "I don't know. It haunts me."

His words. Seriously. What nine year old talks like that?!?

Anyway, it occurred to me that some aspects of our conversation might have good apologetic value beyond me and my son. Granted, this thought is not on the level of my more learned apologist brothers, but it's the best a shade-tree like me can come up with.

The thought is, actually, pretty simple. My argument to Caleb was that God has always been -- ever existing, without beginning. That's what scripture teaches, and it's perfectly in keeping with ancillary truths in scripture regarding the nature of God, so that's what I believe.

Atheistic thought -- as represented by Caleb's argument, the question that "haunts" him -- is that the whole universe was created by a Big Bang. This Big Bang COULD be seen as the beginning of reality, or as simply the continuation of a previous reality. The Big Bang singularity point explodes, throwing out the boundaries and materials of the universe. But where did that singularity come from?

The atheistic community addresses this question in myriad ways, but all of them come back to the same theme -- the universe has no beginning. Kinda like God, ya know?

Oh sure, the universe might've started with a Big Bang, but where did the singularity come from? A previous universe, or a parallel universe, of course. So where did THAT universe come from? Another universe ... and another ... and another, ad infinitum.

Or maybe the Big Bang is the next step that follows a Big Shrink? This universe stops expanding, and winds up contracting, falling back in on itself until it once again becomes that singularity point, ready to explode and do it all over again.

Or maybe time itself is a continuous loop (the central theme to the AWESOME Wheel of Time series, by the late Robert Jordan)? In simple terms, yesterday feeds into today which feeds into tomorrow -- the essence of linear time -- but at some point in the distance, tomorrow loops back around and feeds into yesterday.

There are other arguments, but they all seem to end the same way -- the universe created, and creates, itself. Like a phoenix, this universe rises anew from its own ashes, a paradoxical child ultimately becoming its own parent.

The thing is, the atheistic community finds a self-creating universe perfectly reasonable, and yet they find an UNcreated God complete nonsense.

Ultimately, neither argument can be truly and empirically substantiated, not even the scientific one, as we are caught in the box of THIS universe and totally incapable of looking outside the box into any other universe. All we have available is what we see, which we use to inform our beliefs on what we DON'T see.

Funny, there's a passage of scripture that sounds that way...

Hebrews 11:1, 3 "Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.... Through faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the word of God, so that things which are seen were not made of things which do appear."

Usually, when speaking of faith, people stop at verse one, and that's perfectly fine, but I found verse three particularly applicable to this question that "haunts" my son. Watch what happens when we substitute God for nature....

"Through faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the worlds before, so that things which are seen were not made of things which do appear."

With just that small change, the argument for God becomes the argument for nature ... and both of them perfectly and inexorably linked to faith. For all of the atheistic community's arguments, for all the evidence and logic and math problems that they work through, their argument comes from the exact same place in their thought process that ours comes from. They see what they CAN see, they believe about what they CAN'T see, they argue from faith. Just like us.

So once more, we find that the argument against God is no more logical than the argument for God, and ultimately, our faith comes down to a choice, a leap of logic from what we DO know to what we CAN'T know (with any certainty) -- whether an eternally uncreated God created the universe, or whether an eternally self-created universe created the universe. Both possibilities are far deeper than we can fathom, but it's remarkable to me that one might be considered more inherently believable than the other.