The Universe as Computer

In April 2005 the computer journal PCPro ran an article on the fact that a few scientists now believe that the universe is a huge computer.  Exactly how it carries out its calculations, as all computers must, wasn't specified, although much play was made of the new science of quantum computing.

Now the universe may very well be a huge computer, but if it is then it almost certainly won't be ever explicable by mere man, and the very concept begs the question anyway as to who or what set it up and made it run in the first place.  But, once again, to 'know the enemy', we really need to see see where the scientists are coming from here.

Evolutionists increasingly have had to come to terms with the fact that
a) life is not now evolving (well, there's no evidence that it ever did, of course, but I'm sure you understand...) and
b) that many animals and plants appear to be formed so superbly for their environment and what they have to do that their designs could not be improved upon.
It is therefore argued that in some amazing way the design for all life is somehow embedded in the universe, and the universal computer has been beavering away to bring everything up to spec, so to speak.  So a wolf inevitably ends up as a wolf, a rabbit as a rabbit, and a pear tree as a pear tree (er, excuse me?  I suppose this is a proof of the proposition that science is the laborious rediscovery of the obvious.)

This belief begets an interesting consequence.  Computers all work by manipulating information, which we call data.  So, if the universe is a huge computer, where is the data with which it works?  The problem is that we cannot see any data, all the stuff of the universe appearing random.  'Ah but', the scientists say, 'this data is not recognisable to us, but must be there.'  Scattered through the universe, the argument goes, is loads of data all awaiting processing, and life is the result.

So why can we not see some of this raw information that the universe uses as data?  Because, the argument goes, data is only data when it is in context.  Words appear random if we don't know the language.  An encrypted file looks very random before we de-encrypt it.  An image file at a fundamental level looks like a string of random characters.  But find someone who understands the language, or put the encrypted file through a de-crypter, or load the image file into an appropriate program and hey-presto!, meaning suddenly appears.  Hence we are (or perhaps may be) looking at masses of useful data without realising it.

It is important at this point to keep our feet firmly anchored to the ground.  There isn't a shred of evidence that the universe functions as a computer, except in the beliefs and minds of those who just have to find another explanation for the presence of life on earth, in all its altruism and fearsome complexity.

So how do we prove that something is or isn't useful information?  Well, the simple fact is that you can't do either.  Unless and until you can translate a chunk of apparently random nonsense into something meaningful for you, it remains unproveable, either way.

However, one thing is apparent.  Like a number of other ideas evolutionists put forward, this argument about universal data conveniently steps over some hard facts, and there is an indirect connection with evolutionistic thinking here.

If we can think of life as an area of land in which living things have the feeedom and ability to change and evolve, and the ocean where there is no possibility of this happening, then evolutionists act as if life consists of huge continents of possibility with a few small, scattered lakes of impossibility.  Life, they say, can develop easily, moving between many different possibilities, much as we can move around on land, and only in a few scattered and unimportant areas is life impossible.

Experience in the real world convinces us of the very opposite.  In point of strict fact all who have extensive experience of life, like animal and plant breeders, will testify that life is like a few, very tiny, very scattered islands in an immense ocean of impossibility.  Each island is represented by an organism, or several which are genetically very close, and while moving around the tiny island is possible (microevolution), moving bodily from one island to another (macroevolution, generation of new species, or genera, or families) is impossible.  In the vast range of all biochemical possibilities only a vanishingly few configurations are viable as living forms.

This has its parallel in the 'data of the universal computer'.  It may very well be that there are small areas of information out there, not truly random, but containing something useful.  The overwhelming likelihood, however, is that the vast proportion, if not all of it, is truly random and contains no data of any useful kind.  It is a remarkable fact that in many instances we find the same patterns in large and small, sometimes uncannily so, but is that because a universal computer is working with similar data sets for large and small, or because a supremely intelligent being is in control?  And, as I intimated near the beginning, if the universe is a computer, who or what built it, and programmed it, put the data in the right places so that it could be acted upon, and directed the output into the appropriate channels so that it would be useful?  Who indeed?

After all is said and done, no sane person, looking at a modern computer, would even begin to think that it had come by chance.  These things simply cannot come as a result of random events.  The very idea is off the wall.  And the problem with a celestial computer is that it must be orders of magnitude more complex than anything we build, which merely rams the point home.

The significant question, always dodged by those who put this sort of stuff forward, is where the order came from in a universe whose laws, now well characterised for many years, show that order never comes from disorder.  An insistence that the data is there, even if we cannot decode it is a) rank speculation anyway, and b) if true implies a coder in the first place.  So, sorry guys, we are back where we started, really.