Saturday, my grandchildren were playing a new game on their Nintendo DS systems, an educational game, of sorts, which allowed them to type a word and immediately see a corresponding figure on the screen. For instance, if they typed "pirate" a stereotypical pirate would appear, armed and ready to murder the hapless, unsuspecting seaman they typed next. We tested it a little, creating such characters as a zombie--who bit the other characters and turned them into his minions, and a psychiatrist who brought his couch so he could analyze any confused people left on the screen. When Mim typed
dog and
cat on the same screen, there was a chase, and she had to type
tree to save the cat from certain torment. It's a fascinating game with some profound applications.
How can words typed onto a screen produce creatures which follow their own instincts? Simple. Every image on the computer is really just a string of commands, written in code: It's a language. It's consistent; it's mathematical, and if symbols or letters are deleted, it breaks down in an error.
God spoke a language far more complex than anything we've been able to imitate in our virtual worlds, and yet we are beginning to understand its grammatical anatomy and physiology.
He used four letters:
A, G, T, C.
God spoke DNA.
And here we all are, walking around and doing our own thing, insisting that we existed before
the instructions.
