Intelligent Design, Omniscience and Spore
RODIE And I have been playing Spore™ on the iPod. Neither of us have the up-to-fabulous sort of computer you need to play it on the desktop. The iPod version is lighter, of course, but still quite fun.
What amuses me is the philosophy in the game.
One of the things I’ve seen over and over in the video promos for the game is how this game is about evolution. As we find out on the net this has not made everyone very happy: some person(s) are even want to be Anti-Spore, although they are a spoof site – really they just want to make Christians out to be stupid people. Ah well, they called us “Atheists” in Rome.
What amuses me, though, is the game is so very inline with pre-Helenic-contact ideas about God. The God who was not omniscient. The God who made everything in an experimental process. The God who tried to mate the Earth Creature with all kinds of animals before he decided on the possibility of another like creature named “life”. The other thing that amuses me about the game is the evident fact that no one really understands the implications of “intelligent design”.
The idea that God made everything through intelligent design or guided evolution is completely compatible with pre-Hellenic-contact ideas about God. It’s also completely not compatible with the idea of an all-knowing, all-powerful God. In order to account for all the dead ends in Evolution, Theistic Evolution has to allow for a God who learns from his mistakes, plunders the dustbin of historical backwash, picks up old DNA and reuses it, stumbles sometimes making up jury-rigged solutions to odd problems, etc. The game fits right in with this.
How the game-writers and the pre-release fan-boys missed this is: no game is complete without a player. You can’t picture the universe as a game-without-a-player. It makes no sense. And even if you do… once you put that game-without-a-player into a gaming environment, you end up with, exactly, a God-like being in your universe. Especially if you can conceive of a God who is learning as he goes.
It’s fun. It’s worth the ten dollars from the iPod App Store. It is probably worth the $50 for the computer version although I’ll have to wait until I get an up-ti-date computers. Spore may well be the biggest advance in gaming since Pong. But I’m betting no one bothered to think it through.
Update: Thanks to Episcopal Cafe, I know I’m not the only nut out there that thinks Spore uses intelligent design. Slate says the creator of the game says so as well.
So it goes with Wright. He admits Spore is a game that deals with intelligent design. He acknowledges the religious component.
Our goal was not to make Christians look stupid, you can see that by reading many of the comments from the atheists that flocked to the site that they are the ones that look stupid.
Making a parody of Christian beliefs seems to be making them look stupid too. No matter what your goal was. Irony and sarcasm are hard to convey in electronic fora.
But my initial comment (before I saw your “real” About page & noted the spoof) was based on the use of the entire anti-science angle as equal to Christian belife. Even though there are rather a lot of Christians who support the sciences as a way to understand creation (including some of the Saints) people who are not Christian equate the view parodied on you site as the only way to be Christian. It makes us look stupid even in jest.