Religion-Conspiracy-Code

Due largely to the essential role it plays in new technology and media, the term "code" has become one of the most successful memes—borrowing a term from Richard Dawkins—of the late twentieth and now twenty-first centuries. The term as we have come to know and use it today is indelibly marked by the context of cybernetics, where it was first used in the mid-1940s in popular and scientific journals to refer to the series of punctures made in a strip of paper that could then be interpreted by the rudimentary computer as instructions for carrying out its task. Soon thereafter the term was adopted by the relatively young field of genetics, as it sought to understand the process by which certain chemical reactions determined the formation of biological traits. On the basis of Watson and Crick's discovery of the double-helical structure of DNA, geneticists began to theorize how the proteins that are the building blocks of more complex biological structures could be produced from a rather simple array of 20 amino acids, themselves encoded by an even more simple series of codons constructed on the basis of four possible nucleotide bases.

Perhaps we should pause already to reflect on how different these two contemporary examples of encoding actually are. The encoding of machines involves a deliberate act by a human programmer to create a series of instructions that a machine will follow. The encoding of DNA, which creates a series of instructions that chemical processes follow in constructing living organisms, results from the non-deliberate evolutionary processes of natural selection. Yet, the analogy between programming and the creation of life is doubtlessly tempting, and has been implicitly and explicitly appropriated by those convinced that the complexity of life offers clear signs of intelligent design.

Let us call the two logics of coding "religious" and "natural" respectively. Under this nomenclature, computer programming would be "religious" not because programmers are like God, but because the extrapolation of their task to the cosmic level necessarily invokes the image of a God-like, intelligent creator. The encoding of life at the genetic level, on the other hand, is "natural" insofar as the basic assumption of evolutionary biology is one of encoding without an encoder. According to this logic, complexity can indeed be produced according to a code constructed of simpler elements, but this fact does not require us to posit an author of those rules, and hence a more complex entity at their origin (a posit that, as many have noted, undermines theoretical explanation insofar as the answer is even more enigmatic than the enigma one sought to answer) (Dawkins, God 86-90).

The idea of encoding, of course, predates the development of both cybernetic and genetic theory by centuries. The original meaning of code or codex in Latin was a series of laws, as in the code of Justinian or of Hammurabi, and the Latin word itself evolved from the earlier caudex, meaning trunk of a tree, from which the wooden tablets used for inscribing such codes were hewn. In a usage now obsolete, code also carried an explicitly religious connotation, such as the code of Christian and Jewish sacred writings that together made up the Christian scriptures. This seeming semantic heterogeneity belies a fundamental unity, however. Whether meaning law, foundational religious text, or system of rules underlying the construction of complex bodies or tasks, a code is primarily the symbolic simplification of some construct, process, set of actions, or experiences. Where the action or construct in question may be complex, sometimes dizzyingly so, the code for its construction is relatively simple. This simplicity allows for its recollection, transmission, and reproduction.

Perhaps the element of reproduction or repetition is of greatest importance here. In the seventeenth century, the originator of the idea of the modern cybernetic machine, Gottfried von Leibniz, argued that there could be no such thing as true repetition. What became known as his principle of the identity of indiscernibles claimed that were two things to be alike in every possible way, then they would be identical and hence not in fact two things but one...