God, technology, and unquenchable fire

Rapture for the Geeks: When AI Outsmarts IQ

Author: Richard Dooling

Publisher: Harmony

Price: $22.00 (Amazon.com)

Literary Jack-of-all-trades Richard Dooling once told me that he begins "every novel with the vow that I will not write about technology, Catholicism, or hell," but it never sticks. "I end up writing about all three." It's true for his book-length essays as well; Dooling's first work of nonfiction, Blue Streak, ended with a memorable passage articulating what one can only describe as a theology of swearing.

The last chapter of Dooling's new work, Rapture for the Geeks: When AI Outsmarts IQ, considers what will happen to religious belief in the coming age of Higher Tech. It includes the opening chapters of the book of Genesis as if they had been rewritten by Microsoft contract lawyers ("The Source Code of Good and Evil you shall NOT view, for the day you view it you will surely die"), then tweaked by our coming open-source friendly robot overlords ("The one true God runs the universe in UNIX"). Dooling also takes issue with noted scientists who are trying to popularize atheism as a necessary part of technological progress.??

The author calls Richard Dawkins's bestselling book The God Delusion "a collection of arguments that most liberal-arts students encounter before their junior year" and are bored of by graduation. He confesses that he read the polemic "out of curiosity, same way I'd read a book by Mother Teresa if she had suddenly decided to write one called The Math Delusion"—a subject she would have been utterly unqualified to weigh in on.

Dooling quips, "Many scientists smarter than Dawkins, like Einstein, for instance," believe in a God. He insists that Dawkins is a disingenuous wuss for allowing that "Einsteinian religion" is okay while calling for the abolition of those old time religions, because it amounts to special pleading by a new religious minority. "Dawkins can't declare Einstein's God somehow not God," he writes, "and thereby free himself from calling the greatest physicist of the twentieth century deluded for believing in him."

And that's just a single chapter.

I mock, therefore I am

The pointed challenge to Dawkins is not an outlier. Dooling doesn't just use the book to criticize the people, trends, or businesses he dislikes—he also ridicules them for fun and profit. Microsoft comes in for repeated (mostly deserved; often hilarious) mockery. Not even permanent disability can shield someone from Dooling's rapier wit.

David Gelernter, the Yale computer scientist who lost an eye and most of a hand to the Unabomber, takes a drubbing for his theorizing about machine consciousness. ("Anyone who asks you to explain [consciousness] is changing the subject or cheating.") And Dooling has a run at Cambridge's current wheelchair-bound Lucasian professor of mathematics, Stephen Hawking, for good measure.

"It's fashionable these days to laugh at creationists and intelligent design kooks," he writes, "but come on: is the notion of a big bang really any more plausible? Hawking and other cosmo-megalomaniac astrophysicists 'know' that the big bang happened at least fifteen billion years ago." How do they know that? Through their measurements of something called "cosmic microwave background radiation."

Dooling calls Hawking "a smart fellow with a lot of equations [who's] used them to make a nice story about how the universe began."

In Dooling's telling, the mathematician's theorizing only raises the same concern that the "great physicist and electrical engineer Nikola Tesla complained of." Tesla complained that "today's scientists... wander off through equation after equation and eventually build a structure which has no relation to reality."

For good measure, Dooling likens Hawking et al to those "medieval astronomers" who had "elaborate equations, postulates, and theorems" that "made their numbers work to prove that the sun revolved around the earth."

Unfair? Probably. But it's at least a brazen and entertaining debater's trick. Disagree with Dooling? Hey, go right ahead, but his friends Einstein and Tesla might ask you to step outside. Big bang? That's a good one, buddy. Bet you bought into heliocentrism, too.

But cut out all the jagged pirouettes and Dooling really is onto something here. Science fictioneers used to imagine a future in which technological progress had moved us beyond the need for religion and spirituality, but they've learned a thing or two.

Now, sci-fi storytellers are starting to incorporate into their yarns the notion, backed up by some scientific observation, that the religious impulse cannot be stripped out of humanity. In fact, it might affect us more deeply as Tech marches on, and not necessarily in a good way. Which brings us to the Cylons.