The Impossible Number

The Impossible Number

I am a faithful man who believes in God. However, because I have schizophrenia and autism I am not as eloquent as I’d like to be. Sometimes I have difficulty justifying my religion even if I can picture how the thoughts and ideas work in my head. And I am writing this down because I was thinking about computer code, and I realized I can use simple logic and numbers as evidence of God. Not earth-shattering concrete proof of course, but evidence nonetheless.

I can use the metaphor of binary code: humans and computers are akin to God and man. More specifically, how a logical construction such as a computer cannot comprehend the “impossible number” of 2 because it can only think in 1 or 0. This very factual “impossible number” of 2, while easy for a human to grasp, is inaccessible to a computer’s basic binary language even though the computer is a logical being. This is akin to man’s inability to comprehend God’s actions.

Or to put it another way, it is as though God understands his own “impossible number” which our minds cannot grasp or even understand. This is why it often appears to us that God is illogical or at least not fully making sense. No matter how intelligent or self-aware or well-programmed a computer is, because it simply cannot understand “impossible” 2 it cannot fully comprehend the human who created it. Perhaps 2 could represent a human range of emotions, which man possesses and the computer does not. And so therefore a highly-sophisticated computer, upon studying human beings, would likely conclude that emotions are illogical and frivolous.

Just as the impossible number for a computer prevents it from understanding human emotion, God’s impossible number could be the key to why it seems to us that He is cruel and unfair to the world. But we cannot visualize or understand this number, so it seems to us that life is random and full of needless suffering. In reality, everything makes sense, but our minds are incapable of grasping what is beyond our limit of human comprehension. This is just as genuine emotion is, for the time being at least, outside the scope of a computer’s understanding.

It would be like if right now, as you are sitting at your computer trying to figure God out, your computer was trying to figure you out. But because it could not understand anything other than 0 and 1, and because it had no emotions, and because it had a very limited scope of existence and experiences compared to you, it could never come close to comprehending you. It might even conclude that you were a fictitious being, and that everything the computer had experienced had been purely random chance and not dictated by some mythical “username” it could find no hard evidence for.

Or maybe the impossible number is in itself God. God is after all a logical being, and what better form for a being of pure logic to occupy than a number that solves any equation?