It's really hard to believe that Facebook, Twitter, Youtube,etc designed itself and the codes are written by the text without human intervention. This is absolutely madness and blind belief. Which leads to believe in God and creator??? How such a great being (human) was created only for joke and spending time and death on this earth...!!! Is this all ??? Resurrection and reward of good and bad deeds are logical. The only religion that has full logic answers to all of these topics is Islam .Islam is the last monotheistic religion on this earth. It's with science and logic and seeking the reasons, read about Islamic Golden Age.
I think the profession doesn't have much of an impact on the actual belief/faith of a person in God. Hence, yes, because many take the easy way down and there are few who find truth.
But let's rephrase the question, shall we?? Can we utilise our programming skills to further our venture to truth, enlightenment and finding the meaning of our own life?
Since there must be something to be done to approach God ... unless he didn't exist ... since he wouldn't be perfectly just if he didn't give a tiny little chance to us hackers :) Thus he wouldn't be the perfect God that defines God - usually.
So, we now know there is something in our programming skill set that can further us to find utter and absolute truth and meaning of life. Implicit proof by the previous paragraph. Now if that doesn't get you excited read the sentence again and feel with it. OK.
So now, let's seek and not give up on seeking a manner on how to put to work our idle hands, haha ... BTW ... Kurt Goedel, Austrian mathematician, created a God proof. It's a theory not of numbers but of logic and it somehow, as far as I understood the concept, leads to the conclusion that God must exist. The theory has lately (2016 I believe, in Germany, just google !!!!) been run by some students who fed the logic to a computer and ... et voila ... proof, God exists.
By the way. God in no way is in any way in a position where he has to proof himself. Everyone thinking suchly is deceiving himself. If I create something do I have to proof to my tool that I created it or I will cease to exist??? Isn't it the other way round, that the tool has to proof itself useful unless it be deconstructed ... I'm afraid such says christianity which I admit to be a follower of.
However, Me for example. I belief I have come to grasp the idea of the meaning of life in a general sense. I once told it in a fight club like self helping group psycho session whatever. Response was utter ridiculing and stuff. As of my religion: reason for joy. Payable on death.
I'm gonna share this meaning of life to anyone who wants to hear, just give me a shout.
Anyway ..
Say we're searching for God with our computers ... let's experiment on that thought.
So what do we say about God.
God is Love maybe. OK, So, let's put our skills to create things that help other people. Foremostly people close to us, our next/neighbours ... so to speak. Let's assimilate ourself to the nature of God and by becoming a helpful and loving person and such becoming more like him ... we might change our perspectives. Our whole mindsets might change. We might see things differently. We might come to believe and trust in a loving God. Which is the best thing you can get :)
OK, sorry, I'm tired. Got much to say, but since I did away with the real headline of this article in the first sentence and then just saltened and peppered it to my own liking ... I'm gonna leave it at that.
God bless. May the force of love and light have mercy on ya
The question should be adjusted to use the word Agnostic vs. Atheist.
hi all! I don't believe it has much impact. Searching out how things work... being practical about implementing solutions... being inquisitive... being determined... all of these wonderful qualities that make developers popular and wholesome is not connected to any particular belief system: as far as I know... unless I missed something...
I was thinking about something related the other day → Do programmers question their own existence more than non-programmers.
I was thinking that part of programming is checking to see if things exists or not, always with the possibility that even if we expect them to exist, we accept that they may not and so with a complete lack of faith demonstrated, our code is full of asking if things exist, and comparing to make sure things are equal before using them.
Do you think this mode of thinking that we learn during programming applies to the programmer's life as well?
Personally, I'm not an athiest. I know programmers of many different religions, so I'm not sure there's a correlation between programming and believing in a god or multiple gods or not, but I do think programmers might have a unique way of thinking about religions, existence, and human purpose.
It would be interesting to see if the way that programming shapes your mind makes programmers happier in the long term, or less happy.
I know I am going to look pedantic with technicisms, but nowadays the word "atheist" is overloaded to such an extreme that it is hard to argue about it. The term itself has reached the status of fashion god term.
Take concepts like agile or lean startup. We all can define them properly, but for a large amount of people their meaning boils down to one core idea: "Everything that is beautiful, eternal, the right way, reliable and not evil".
Sadly many people believe the concept of god is binary, either yes or not. In that case one is moving only in one dimension: the Atheist (NO) vs the Theist (YES)
In my opinion most people fall into a third category, the agnostics, whose belief is more in line with: "I never thought it was such an important topic I had to think about and take a hard stance in one side". Obviously these people are extremely hated by those who thought hard to take an stance in their beliefs
Then there are people who do think about God and find flaws in the question. Most people think about God as a super human being, but a Pantheist thinker would claim that God is very much real, just not someone who is self aware, but rather "something", like the universe itself, the laws of physics, Gaia or any other thing
There is also the Pandeist branch. The ones who would claim God "was real" he is the one who built the universe, however that someone sacrificed his own life in the process, so is now non existent
In any case all these arguments are based around the belief that there is one Universe so one must argue if it was created. Ironically people also do argue there is no such thing as Universe or even a Multiverse. Some argue that anything that can be computed will exist, therefore that means that if one can imagine a place where the laws of physics are different as we experience them, it will exist
bbc.com/earth/story/20160901-we-might-live-in-a-c…
Coming back to your question: We programmers are the ones who deal daily with the powers of computing. We compute everyday of our lives. One should be more flexible to admit that anything that can be computed will inevitable exist, even the concept of God.
I think that Atheism is too strong of a stance. We do not have enough data to determine that God does not exist, yet. I would say Agnostic is more accurate.
I would argue this really depends on their cultural context.
Your question probably implies that the rational background required to be a programmer makes them more rational, and therefore less likely to believe in some religion.
But...
It has been proven that beliefs are not correlated with scientific education. People might have a strong scientific background and yet believe in creationism, don't trust the global warming, ...
There's an excellent article about that, unfortunately in French (but by copying-pasting the scientific studies and looking at the graphs you might be able to get the meaningful parts) It explain why Republicans don't trust in global warming, and the stronger is their scientific background the less they trust it! passeurdesciences.blog.lemonde.fr/2016/12/28/pour…
The key takeaway is that beliefs are bound (it might not be the best English adjective though) to the beliefs of their cultural group. A Human Being don't want to stand out of his own group. So the stronger scientific knowledge he has, the most he'll use it to find some (weird?!) explanation that fit his cultural group beliefs.
So, to come back to your question, my own opinion - but I don't have any data to prove it - is that programmers are more likely to be atheists if they come from - or belong to - an atheist group, and will be more likely to trust in some kind of deity if they come from or belong to such a group.
what a fascinating question! can we get a poll going so we can see where HashNoders stand?
I don't believe in god per se, but more like some being created everything and put rules in place so that we'd be able to survive. I guess I'd consider myself more spiritual than anything else :)
I think this a question that only can be backed with data. I don't see a correlation between atheism and programming.
And actually I don't really care what made up friend is surrounding you as long as you fix the bug and don't pray that it fixes itself :) ....
This is my view (will try not to offend) -
We're programmers, right? We all basically know - nothing exists unless we design it and create it. Randomness only exists because of bugs in code and if we did our job right, things are pretty consistent and work as designed. Now apply this to a god. Someone or something had to design life. Everyone and everything looks pretty consistent to the next - we all have 2 eyes, 2 hands, 2 legs, etc... The bugs are the cancers, someone born with 1 kidney, etc...
So "something" has to exist - this is why I'm religious. We were raised Roman Catholic (we're from Italy) and I personally can't believe something didn't design us and put us here.
The problem is, as programmers, we're ultimately scientists of sorts (IMO). And what do scientists want? Proof! To date, no one can prove a god exists. I don't subscribe to burning bushes or visions or whatever. Hallucinogens have existed since the beginning of time. Who knows what they were smoking back then, lol...
So - I try to keep an open mind. I believe in women's rights; I'm not against abortion (like the catholic church is), I don't believe you have to go to church to believe, I believe in gay marriage. It's hard for me to swallow Jesus was resurrected, it's hard for me to believe seas were parted. But it's also hard for me to believe some amino acids mixed in the right way, created a few cells and over billions of years, we have humans and animals. Who designed the amino acids then? Who designed gravity and light? These are complex processes that took an engineer to decide on the speed of light and the force of gravity.
God was one hell of an engineer.
Coming from Germany, I have the impression, that many are not religious, most are Christians, very few are actual atheists. Take me for example: I would not describe myself as atheist, but I would never say I am a Christian, either (I am not even baptized).
I am interested in the subject and fascinated by religions all over the world (especially Asian religions, like Shintō and Buddhism), but in my opinion, everyone should find their own way of thinking about the topic instead of taking the ideas of other people as their own.
from personal experience I noticed most are not outspoken atheist, they just are not religious. It's like most just don't think about it to much.
That said, I live in the Netherlands, where most people aren't really religious (over 50% describes themself as either atheist or agnostic).
Charly Flint
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