All Knowing

I don't think I've ever written directly about my religious beliefs, one way or the other. In all the verbiage I spout, I challenge anyone to find any clear endorsement of a position on a transcendent deity. Mostly, this is because it's my business, not of interest to the world; but there's something very Jewish (I think) in discussing the issues I focus on without dragging divinity into it.

This post will be no different. The point I'm about to make is about logic, not belief.

The earliest computers were invented in the 1930s, I think. As a child in the early 1960s I heard the grownups talk about machines that were learning to think, though I doubt I'd ever met anyone who had actually seen such a machine (and they still haven't figured out how to think). If you can believe it, I completed my undergraduate studies on a portable typewriter, and never considered acquiring a PC until I was doing an MA. When in 1994 I stood in front of an audience of hundreds of researchers and said that the goal of the Yad Vashem archives was to put everything we had on the Internet, the startled audience erupted in applause. (Only later did I begin to think about the practicalities. Ouch).

70-some years after the first invention, The Economist has a special report on the super-abundance of data we're creating. (The report begins here; a single-page introduction is here). The thesis: Everything is being recorded, and the world is dramatically changing. The Onion spoofs the reality here.

If we allow our thoughts to run forward a few decades, to, say, the first centenary of the invention of the earliest computer, it's reasonable to expect there will be digital images of every inch of the globe viewable from any direction; there will be mountains of data on every human and much of their activities; every human thought which has ever been put into writing and survived until the late 1990s will be available somewhere in digital form; any and every human interaction which takes place in any format other than face-to-face talk will be recorded... and probably much more.

Whether you like it or not.

Now, assume a deity which has been around for longer than the first century of human digital recording. Is there any logical reason to assume that this deity doesn't have the abilities Man has so recently acquired? What's so implausible about a deity knowing everything about us all, always? We're well on our way there on our own, and just starting...