[asa] A Theology of Information(?)

Below are some thoughts I've had swirling around for a while. One kind of
tangential reason I've been thinking about this is my professional work on
intellectual property theory (see http://www.tgdarkly.com). In a nutshell,
intellectual property theory tends to offer a thin description of
"information": it sees information as an economic commodity. I (and many
other legal scholars) am trying to provide a thicker description of
"information," with a view towards influencing intellectual property and
other information policy according to broader social justice concerns than a
strictly economic view might allow. Though my professional writing isn't
and really can't be explicity theological, there's an obvious connection
between thinking about what information "is" in the legal sphere and a
theology of information and the ID discussion. I'm curious for thoughts and
responses on the outline below. Are there theologians who draw a connection
between the social aspects of "information" and the social aspects of the
Trinity?

I've noticed that ID debates often circle around a question that can be
framed as: "what is information". Strong materialists argue that
information is physical -- what we call "information" is ultimately
reducible to physical states. A weaker materialist position might agree
that what we call "information" may be an emergent property of matter that
can become capable of exerting downward causation on matter (a nonreductive
physicalism). ID theorists seem to suggest that what we call "information"
is at some level the word and will of God -- often directly invoking the
logos of John 1.

What I haven't seen in these debates is a social view of information. From
a sociological perspective, many would argue that much of what we call
"information" is socially constructed. The semantic content of
"information" arises from language, which is not preexistent but is built
over time through social and cultural norms.

As a Christian, I can't except the more extreme sociological conclusion that
if information is socially constructed then reality itself is socially
constructed. But the social view of "information" seems to suggest a richer
theological perspective. A trinitarian perspective suggests that there is a
social aspect to the Godhead. If there is a social aspect to the Godhead,
God's act of creating was at least in part a process of social
construction. When the logos spoke the world into existence, this was not a
sterile act of computer programming; it was the expression of the Father,
Son and Holy Spirit's perfect fellowship concerning the desire to create and
the contingencies of creation.

Given this social, trinitarian perspective on the "information" of creation,
it wouldn't be surpising if one of the gifts God breathed into creation was
the ability to construct information through social structures. The
cultural mandate given to Adam and Eve, for example, seems to suggest
exactly this sort of thing. There was a time when things like, say,
univerisities and corporations didn't exist. Humanity was given the
ability, and stewardship, to construct such entities. It was not necessary
that universities and corporations should have come into existence; their
existence is contingent on the social informational content developed by men
and women (though of course the degree of human freedom and contingency is
bounded by the givenness of creation's basic laws).

Perhaps, at different levels, the physical phenomenon of self-organization,
the emergence of complexity, the ways in which the "social" interactions of
organisms result in the change and development of creation, are also
expressions of the fact that "information" is ultimately a social
construction of the Trinity. God made a creation that, like Him, but in
different measures and at different levels, has the freedom and ability to
create new "information."

If this is so, it's not quite accurate to think of "information," as many ID
theorists seem to do, as an independent property of the universe that God
"programmed" into the creation. But likewise, it's not quite accurate to
think of "information," as many materialists do, as ultimately reducible to
the physical. Rather, the ultimate root of "information" is the social
relationship of the Trinity.

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Received on Wed Jul 18 10:07:01 2007