There is an old saying, "Takes one to know one," and that may be what is both weird and satisfying about this whole exploration.
For example, on my way to Panera, to start my daily boxing match with writing code, I saw a helicopter slowing down and making an approach to land. He slowed down and descended, turned just a bit, and just hovered. Cars slowed down to stop and watch. And he just hovered. And hovered. And hovered. And I thought to myself as I drove under him, "I wonder if something is in the landing area, like a tarp or something that can blow around." So I slowed and looked at the spot where I thought he was going to land. I scanned it for something I thought might blow around, so I could go secure it for him.
Why? Because I am a commercial helicopter pilot, my training made me look at the situation completely differently than a non-pilot. I asked a completely different set of questions about what I was seeing. I didn't wonder what the pilot might do next. I already knew. I put myself in that pilot's seat and asked, "What would make me hover for a longer-than-expected time, when the landing spot was right there?" It takes a helicopter pilot to know a helicopter pilot.
The training is not a gate. It is how some people can tell north with no instrument at all, and those are the ones who can draw a map. Other readers already brought a compass of their own, and they will not need this. What follows is the map, for anyone who wants to check the ground.
Takes One to Know One… or at Least See One#
With that said, it may also "take a programmer to see a Programmer." Or maybe "systems designer" is a better term. Either way, it helps explain why this structure and pattern can stay hidden in plain sight for so long, yet jump from the pages when creating digital simulations becomes someone's daily life. And that's no longer rare. A few generations have now learned to code in school, which may be why a reading like this is possible (or meaningful) now, and wasn't a century ago.
Having that many programmers among us now, and with them, simulation has become a practical, everyday tool. They unlock a whole new category of analysis of our reality. They let us go back and re-evaluate things we thought we already had answers for. The microscope did something similar. People had long noticed that those who stayed in close proximity to the sick tended to get sick themselves, but it took the microscope to examine why, and to map the cause and effect. People search for meaning the same way they once searched for why proximity spreads sickness. Programming, and therefore simulation, unlocks that same capacity to ask different questions about different things.
Take Nick Bostrom's simulation argument. It makes a serious case that we may be living in a simulation, but it stops short of who would run one and why. Genesis starts right there. It names who is running the program, then lays out what was made, in what order, and under what rules. Theology has always described this in broad concepts like order, word, and separation. Simulation gives those concepts a technical structure to lay on, and the fit is close enough that it reads like it was designed to fit, not like an accident.
Look at the Questions the Microscope Opened#
Around 1600, lens makers in the Netherlands built the first microscopes. In the 1670s, Antonie van Leeuwenhoek turned one of his own handmade lenses on a drop of water and saw living things no one had ever seen. One man with one microscope changed how the world understood life and sickness. Today there are millions of microscopes in labs, hospitals, and classrooms around the world, and every day they still open new questions. Programmers and the systems they build are much the same today. Every day, we build something new digitally, and each new thing lets us ask questions we couldn't ask before.
What makes that fit more strange is that the fit gets tighter as technology advances. Every era has read its best technology into the universe. A clockwork caught the order but not the information. An engine caught the energy but not the instructions. A program catches all of it: order, information, instructions, state, and sequence. Other documents from the same ancient world don't do this. Read them through a sharper lens and they stay what they were, the myths and records of their time. I can't think of one that comes into clearer focus the way this one does. Better tools usually make an old text look older. Here they make it look sharper.
Starting from the beginning of the Bible, to most readers, Genesis just looks like a story or poetry, and the Bible just a compilation of them. Oddly enough, that's not a bad description of a program, either.
At its simplest, a program is a list of instructions, carried out in order, one step at a time. But read one, and it unfolds like a story: something is created, its variables are defined, they're adjusted, sometimes actions happen, the results come out and are observed, and the cycle runs again. Over and over and over. Some programs do obvious things. Some don't. But every one of them tells a story, and that's what makes it possible to debug someone else's code: you follow the story until you find where it breaks. It's also how many people can work on the same system and still produce something cohesive, as long as someone, somewhere, guides the whole process.
Programmers Ask a Different Set of Questions#
Programming trains a different way of reading. Code isn't skimmed. It's walked line by line, sequentially, asking at every step what exists (or doesn't, or may need to exist next), what was just set (or unset), and what depends on it (and what doesn't), because one variable set out of order may change every single thing that comes out the other side. A programmer notices things that others simply don't, because what matters to them doesn't matter to anyone else.
So, when you read Genesis that way, and then the Bible as a whole, details that pass for storytelling start to look like they have an order, act like a system, and that system has states and outcomes. Focus on what God says and does, and ask, "What did He say or do? Why did He do that? How did it happen inside? Do you see a pattern emerge?"
The nuance in Genesis 1's text may not be obvious, and honestly, really isn't required at all for the ideas in this series to stand. Genesis 1 can be collapsed down to this: God created a space to place humanity, animals, and plants, where He can observe and monitor progress over time. That's it.
In the Bible, whether it's read theologically or architecturally, both readings can usually agree that God exists "outside" our reality and can see and make changes on the "inside," where we exist. It's a one-way view, though. He sees us, but we can't see Him.
Now Imagine The Sims™#
Think of the game The Sims when you visualize this. The game itself is the created test environment. You can see and control their entire world, and they just respond. They aren't intelligent, though, so you can't gather any useful data, because they can't generate it. You can just watch the patterns emerge from their programmed behavior. They can't see you at all.
But now imagine them a different way!
Imagine they were made intelligent, self-aware, autonomous beings (like AI) that will follow the rules you set… but only if they want to!
The game becomes something entirely new, and they would have no idea you exist unless you drop in some kind of proof that you're there. The question is, should you? What would your goals be for them? Would you just want to watch them like a fish tank and see what they do on their own? Or do you want to test them somehow? What if that self-awareness had a catch, and it sent them down a spiraling path of self-destruction? Do you even care?
What would you do to save it?
Picture this very scenario when you re-read Genesis. Genesis 1–3 launches the game, builds the environment, and shows they are intelligent and autonomous. Genesis 4 -12 starts the play outside the garden. Chapter 4 sets the rules, the scale, and the consequences, and what you need to do to fix them. Now watch who does and who doesn't. The "doesn't" group wins by a mile by Noah.
Backup. Reformat. Restore.
What do the characters in Genesis through 12 do following that pattern? What does God do and say back? Notice how it happens in the world.
Then read Job. That is the book where you are shown the outside of the game, and the reason it is being run at all. But instead of you, God sits at the controls.
Picture this very scenario when you re-read Job, and think about what Genesis 1–3 builds. What do the characters in Genesis 4–12 do? What does God do and say back? Notice how it happens in the world.