"In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God" (John 1:1). For two millennia, Christians have meditated on this prologue, understanding Christ as the Logos—the divine Word, Reason, and organizing principle through which all things were made.
Modern information theory and computer science give us new conceptual tools for understanding what John might mean. Information, we now know, is more fundamental than matter. In physics, information is conserved and can neither be created nor destroyed. In computer science, information can exist independently of any particular physical instantiation. The same software can run on different hardware; the same data can be stored in different media. What matters is the pattern, the structure, the information itself.
This has striking parallels to John's description of the Logos. The Word isn't merely sound waves or written symbols. It's the rational structure, the organizing principle, the information that gives form to formless matter. "All things were made through him, and without him was not any thing made that was made" (John 1:3). Creation occurs through the speaking of the divine Word—through the imposition of information on chaos.
In the Genesis creation account, God creates by speaking. "And God said, 'Let there be light,' and there was light" (Genesis 1:3). Not physical labor, but linguistic utterance. Information precedes and generates material reality. The pattern comes before the instantiation.
This resonates with how software creates functionality. A computer program is fundamentally information—a logical structure, a pattern of organization. When executed on hardware, this information produces real effects in the physical world. The information isn't reducible to the physical substrate; you can describe an algorithm independently of any particular computer running it. Yet when instantiated in matter, information has causal power.
Similarly, the Logos is information that has causal power over material reality. Christ is the "blueprint" of creation, the rational structure that organizes matter into meaningful form. He's also God Himself—showing that in God's nature, information and being are unified. The Word isn't something God possesses; it's who God is.
The Incarnation becomes particularly profound from this perspective. "The Word became flesh and dwelt among us" (John 1:14). This is the ultimate instantiation—divine information taking on material form, God's organizing principle embodied in a specific human being at a specific time and place. Just as software can be compiled into hardware-executable code, the Logos was "compiled" into human flesh.
But unlike software, which is abstracted from its original programmer, Christ remains fully unified with God. The Logos doesn't become separate from the Father by being embodied. This reflects something crucial about God's nature that surpasses our computational metaphors: in God, the designer, the design, and the instantiated creation maintain perfect unity even while being distinguishable.
Information theory also illuminates Scripture's reliability. Information can be transmitted across time and space through various media. Ancient scribes copied texts by hand, analogous to data transmission across noisy channels. Information theory tells us we can detect and correct errors in transmission through redundancy and error-checking mechanisms. The vast manuscript evidence for Scripture, with its thousands of copies showing minimal variation in essential content, demonstrates robust information preservation across two millennia.
The Holy Spirit's role also gains new meaning. In Trinitarian theology, the Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son, applying redemption and illuminating truth. From an information-theoretic perspective, the Spirit is like the interpreter or compiler that makes the divine information personally applicable and comprehensible to finite minds. The same objective revelation (Scripture) is made subjectively real through the Spirit's work—like the same source code producing running programs on different machines.
As an autistic person working in technology, I find these parallels deeply satisfying. They show that advances in human knowledge don't threaten theology; they often illuminate it in new ways. John's first-century language about the Logos gains new depth when we understand how fundamental information is to physical reality.
This doesn't mean John had information theory in mind—he didn't. But it does suggest his inspired insight touched on something deeply true about reality that we're only beginning to understand through modern science. The universe isn't fundamentally material with information as an epiphenomenon. Information is fundamental, and matter is the medium through which information is instantiated and made causally effective.
If reality is fundamentally informational, then a personal, rational God who creates through Word/Logos makes perfect sense. The mathematical elegance underlying physics, the logical structure of the cosmos, the fact that reality is intelligible to rational minds—these all point to a rational source. The Logos isn't a primitive attempt to understand creation; it's a profound insight that modern science is only now catching up to.
When we write software, we're engaging in an activity that's fundamentally creative in the same sense that God's creation is creative. We're taking information—logical structures, algorithms, data patterns—and organizing them to produce meaningful functionality. We're imposing order on chaos, structure on randomness. We're creating meaning from raw material.
This is both humbling and exhilarating. We're made in the image of the Logos, the divine Information, the Word through whom all things were made. Our capacity for logical thought, for organizing information, for creating meaningful structures from chaos—these aren't accidents. They're reflections of being made in the image of a God who is Himself rational structure, divine information, eternal Logos.
When John wrote that the Word became flesh, he was describing the most radical instantiation imaginable: the Information that structures all reality taking on material form to redeem that reality from within. Every line of code we write, every algorithm we design, every information system we create is a faint echo of that original creative act: "In the beginning was the Word."