Damn, I sure missed a firestorm in this thread over the holiday weekend!
I feel the need to throw in my Grand Theft Auto metaphor again:
I had a revelation while playing Grand Theft Auto, Vice City on my PS2 a few years ago. Yeah, I know, you can't get much farther from good religious ideals than that game. But this was my revelation, which to me suddenly explained, in terms an engineer can understand, how there could possibly be such a disconnect between a created universe and its creator:
Imagine if you were one of the "innocent civilians" walking or driving around in the Grand Theft Auto world. Let's say it's Grand Theft Auto 99 - the 99th version where the innocent civilians have more sophisticated AI and can learn things on their own. You are a fully simulated little person. For all you know, the world you live in and see is all that exists, and you are free to come and go as you please. If you wanted to, you observe and deduce laws of physics that apply to things you see in this world. In fact, thousands of other AI bots that came before you have done so and have worked it out to the point that you believe there isn't much doubt that your universe has existed the way it has for a long, long time. They've even gotten so far that they've figured out that even the subatomic particles are composed of even tinier things called "strings" that appear to have no mass. Yep, they've figured out that even mass is just an illusion, a manifestation of energy.
Of course, the programmer(s) look at these deductions and are impressed with their design work - these AI bots are perilously close to discovering that the "strings" are actually just bits of data, corresponding to nothing physical whatsoever. The "universe" the AI bots live in is the result of hundreds of iterations of program design and refinements (remember that cheesy "Dinosaur World 2500" game series? Yeah they used the world model from that piece of crap), and at any given time, on any number of the thousands of PS1000's in existence, the universe in any particular game of Grand Theft Auto 99 could be as old as a few minutes, or several weeks, depending on when that particular game was booted up (i.e., sprang up from nothingness). And of course, some bots are actually controlled by real people, and the AI bots sometimes get all flustered trying to figure out these strange, unexplained events and remarkable "people" who spring up throughout their history to play games of "War" or "Rule the World" or "Investment Bank ing Tycoon" or just go around randomly killing bots and destroying things. And even more rarely, the moderators of the game will let a bad player slip through who uses cheats, to either play "God" and try to start a new religion, or just zip around seeing the sights, confusing the hell out of the AI bots, who think they've seen an alien spaceship that can defy the laws of physics.
So if you want an engineering explanation of how a man walking on water can be explained, you could try thinking along those lines. Kind of Matrix-ey, I admit, but it goes even farther. "There is no spoon." But they really mean it this time.
Maybe I should get back to work now.
