In last summer’s issue of Plough David Schaengold wrote a delicious essay entitled, “Computers Can’t Do Math.” It’s an excellent title: enticingly simple, provocative without crudity, almost naive but not quite. I commend the whole piece in its entirety.
For our purposes here, however, I will simply summarize a basic contention from the essay and reflect on its import for the Christian life: computers, in spite of all seeming, don’t actually do math they offer mathematical answers but don’t actually do the work. Like the student who gets a hold of the answer key before the test and commits it to rote memory isn’t doing math, but regurgitating answers.
“Great effort has been expended in hiding these realities from ordinary users. The impression given to casual users is that computer math just works. But the underlying reality of “just works” is a quite complicated substructure invented by clever humans, and reality sometimes slips through the cracks.”
He offers an example: “Try typing “999,999,999,999,999 minus 999,999,999,999,998” into Google, for an illustration of how hazardous it is for a computer to calculate the difference of two very large values.” Go ahead and click that link, the answer will confound you.
This is why I take issue with the claim that “Computers Can Do Words” (a la John Piper). They can’t. They can only imitate composition by regurgitating scraps culled from a massive inventory of human out-put (called, with all the sci-fi romanticism of contemporary Scientistic thinking, “data-sets”) and arraying them along procedural lines.
Schaengold admits that computers, for what they do, can be incredibly useful tools. Just like a person who can’t do math but who knows a given set of answers can be helpful, or a person who has memorized a lot of great quotes might helpful when writing something. But there’s a distinction between “getting the right answer” and “doing the work” —and its a huge one.
Leaving the rest of Schaengold’s essay for you to read at your leisure (Plough generously gives you three free articles before you hit the paywall), I want to deploy this distinction between actual doing and the simulation of it in the direction of the spiritual life. It is easy, it has always been easy, to live like a computer before the Lord —simulating prayer or devotion or reflection but not actually doing them. Rejoice in your humanity before God. It is easy to hear pastors today say something like “don’t just go through the motions” aimed at ritual or gesture or devotion of any kind, but often this misses the point. I think Schaengold’s distinction here offers a more refined exhortation: don’t simulate the motions, actually do them. And now may the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, and the Love of the Father, and the unity of the Holy Spirit be with you all. Amen.