Almost every aspect of our modern technology is filled with iconography and metaphors from the Judeo-Christian tradition (i.e. the 'West'), perhaps not surprising as all technologies are man-made systems, made, that is, in the image of their creators. Some of these links are obvious, I am writing this post in a web browser called 'Epiphany', then I will 'save' it, and then it will be available as part of the Ethernet (i.e. the heaven-net). Some of these links are not so obvious. in this post I look at binary numbers, the basis of all computing.

What is truth?

It seemed that Roman governor Pontius Pilate was not very interested in executing people over Jewish religious disputes, and when presented with both sides of such an argument, famously responded with τί ἐστιν ἀλήθεια - What is truth? (John 18:38), i.e. who is to say what the absolute truth? Pilate, often described as the world's first recorded atheist, certainly did not feel that he (or anyone else, presumably) was qualified to answer the question.

In our postmodern age, the same question is still relevant today, is there any truth at all any more? Recently we looked together at the Holocaust, and whether it qualifies as Archimedes' one fixed point from which to stand and look for absolute truth. Others may start from the cross, or the Qu'ran, or from a belief that God does not exist, or a belief that "all you need is love" as the Beatles sang.

Something that has no problem with believing in absolute truth is a computer. Computers are very much built according to the Aristotelian world view, computers are Christendom represented in electricity. Binary absolutes are at the core of everything, you have 1 and 0, something is True, or it is False.

George Boole - The God of numbers

George Boole was one of the greatest mathematicians of the 19th Century. His achievements however, are perhaps most important in computing. We could explore Boole's formal mathematical work and how it relates to computing, and hopefully we will do that in the future. However, in this post we will look at Boole the man. George Boole he was the son of a lowly shoemaker but he taught himself Greek and Latin:

> for two years he studied the works of the fathers of the church with the intention ... of preparing himself for ordination. (Kneale 1948, 150)

Boole had many interests and was very academically minded, he also thought the religious establishment of his day was hypocritical and corrupt, so he abandoned the quest for ordination as an Anglican Priest, and in general he tried to avoid fanatical conservatives at all costs. However, Boole reminded an active member of the liberal wing of the church his whole life, for example, at forty he married the twenty year old daughter of his vicar. Even while becoming a prominent mathematician, Boole remained as interested in religion as mathematics:

> "he spent a great deal of time reading theological and devotional literature of the most varied kinds from Aristotle to Bohme." (Kneale 1948, 154)

Boole understood mathematics and religion as intertwined. He famously composed religious poetry on mathematical subjects, such as his Sonnet to the Number Three.

Although he was a liberal Anglican and believed in the value of completely open discussion, Boole believed there was absolute good and evil:

> His wife declares that his horror of evil was sometimes so intense as to produce a morbid depression, and says that at such times she thought it her duty to make fun of him. (Kneale 1948, 157)

On his death bed, he repeated Psalms 119:89, "For ever, O LORD, thy word is settled in heaven". For Boole, it "expressed for him the excellence of mathematical truth" (Kneale 1948, 158).

What does that mean?

To understand why, you need to know a little background, you need to know three facts.

I am not a hebraist and have never played one on TV. However, the Old Testament (which is also the Jewish Bible), has a different names for God, one of them - ADNI, pronounced Adonai, is translated in English bibles as 'O Lord' or 'Oh Lord'.

The second fact is that the word 'zero' is a french import, the normal word for the number after -1 in English is pronounced 'Oh', like the letter that starts the word orange. So 'O' the direct address, and '0', the number, are the same.

Thirdly, Deuteronomy 6:4, the 'Shema', is the one of the most important passages in Judaism and according to Jesus forms the basis of the two Christian commandments (see Mark 12:29). The verse goes: "Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one". There are also dozens of verses that equate God with the concept of 'everything', God orders everything, gives life to everything, and so on (some randomly selected examples, Psalm 24:1, Ephesians 1:23, 1 Corinthians 11:12, 1 Corinthians 10:26, Philippians 3:21, Colossians 1:18, 1 Timothy 6:13, Hebrews 3:4, Hebrews 4:13).

Lastly, while in modern evangelical Christianity (the dominant form in Protestantism today), the Bible is the only source of revelation; in Boole's time it was not like that. Traditional Anglican theology had four sources of revelation: scripture, tradition, reason and experience.

So to Boole, 'O Lord' means 'Zero Lord' or '0 1', and when something is 'settled' it is fixed, ordered. So for Boole, the mathematical system itself is the basis of reason, a source of revelation, through mathematics you can access the heavenly order. Zero and one, the binary pair, is the starting point of truth itself.

References

• William Kneale, 1948, 'Boole and the Revival of Logic', Mind, New Series, Vol. 57, No. 226. (Apr., 1948), pp. 149-175.
• James W. van Evra, 1977, 'A reassessment of George Boole's theory of logic'. Notre Dame J. Formal Logic Volume 18, Number 3, 363-377.