Why we need miracles…
Jul 15th, 2010 by ljkim
If you’re like me, your inner geek hyperventilated when Disney decided to do a sequel to the campy 80′s movie TRON. I think it was the first movie to use CG so extensively (the light cycle scenes), and it was the first movie to teach my ten year old mind about some basic theology. The story takes place within a computer…where programs lived happily until the evil MCP (master control program) threw the world into despair. Meanwhile a former programmer for ENCOM breaks into the system by digitizing himself into the system and becoming a living program. His hope is to destroy the MCP with the help of a missing super program named TRON.
Right from the beginning the movie makes the comparison of programs believing in “users” to religion. ”Do you believe in users?” asks one program in the prison. ”Of course,” says the other, “otherwise who wrote me?” Meanwhile Jeff Bridges’ character shows up – and manages to survive the prison and gladiator arena thanks to his video game skills. And slowly he begins to realize that as a “user,” he has the power to do things in that world that regular programs cannot: He can fix programs and bring them back to life after they’ve been deleted.
One of the things non-believers have trouble with (in the Bible) is the presence of miracles. Jesus doesn’t make a big deal of them – he doesn’t try to attract attention to them – on the contrary he down plays how extraordinary they are… And yet they are an ever present part of his life and work. Some people try to gloss over the miracles, but any honest reading puts them right up in the front row of Jesus’ daily life. And to non-believers, believing in miracles sounds like we need to suspend our belief in a rational world…(in order to believe in God).
But…what if we were actually created… “Written” like characters in a play…kinda’, but more like programs in a computer world that can operate without the user’s constant intervention… And what if the creator decided to enter into this world to do something? If that were true, how could we know it?
One way would be: if that were the case, it makes perfect sense that although we are bound by the rules within which we were created – the creator is not. He would not only understand us and the world on a different level, but he’d be able to do things that we (as created things) could not. Actually, any belief in God or an incarnation that doesn’t have miracles would NOT make sense. Anyone (who claimed to be the creator incarnate) who could not see beyond or act beyond a created being’s perspective would be suspect.
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