Google might well be the nearest we’ve come to a tangible divine power. (Yahoo is heresy)

Maybe it’s because of the secularization of the United States. Maybe it seems like the traditional gods don’t seem to affect our day to day lives. We now know so much more than we used to about the underlying structure of ourselves and the universe, culminating in genetically modified children created just 70 years after DNA was first modeled. Maybe it’s because we’ve found a new God; the monotheistic element that’s dominated human culture for the last decade and a half.

Google Search.

It could be that the answer to meaning’s question very well lies in this internet web crawler, at least in context with the ways we’ve traditionally tried to find it. In fact, Google itself is the most efficient source for discovering all other religions.

If it was customary for children to choose a religion instead of it being instilled upon them at birth, the process would likely be an overwhelming experience. The rising adult would comb through thousands of pages and years of history to make an informed decision, pouring over the Bible, Quran, the Torah; Siddhartha Gautama’s life story or the various Hindu, or pagan gods.

If you told a child living in the final days of 2019 to research world religion, they’d likely ask the omniscient figure they’ve worshiped for the formative years of their life. The entity they’ve prayed to asking “How do I know if my crush likes me?” under the covers after their parents sent them to bed.

This hypothetical world is far fetched not in its structural form, but in the sense that modern children would choose religion at all. To talk about Google as a deistic entity we must first discuss how our belief in the omnipotent wanes as the generations go by, at least in the United States. Over the last several years, the amount of people identifying as Christian – still the most popular religion in the country despite the growth of Islam, Hinduism, and other faiths brought through
immigration – has decreased significantly according to a Pew study, while the unaffiliated, agnostic, and atheist populations grew.

However, to assume our place in history to be somehow separated from the thousands of years of human spirituality would be ignorant, as the context and magnitude of faith is perpetually in flux. The rise of new economies and the discovery of new lands and resources affects our religions as much as our religions affect our political, economic, and ethical motivations and so we must first define what we even use deistic entities for.

Gods were used first as a way to explain the unexplainable, and quickly through their personification became tools for our needs. The rain gods of the fertile crescent weren’t thought of as merely untouchable entities; we wanted more wheat, and so ancient people gave offerings and prayer to create a semblance of control.
The pipeline is more direct with Google, as it provides both an explanation for, and how to obtain the wheat. It explains the world as we know it in all levels of understanding (cue Google scholar) while acting as an advice board when we need help fixing our humanly problems.

Even Google’s origin story mirrors those of some religions. Replace Mohammed in the Hira cave with Larry Page and Sergei Brin in a San Francisco garage and the story begins to sound a bit the same. Mohammed dreamed the beginnings of the Quran, a means to navigate the complex human world of thoughts and emotion, and Page and Brin created the means to navigate the digital one.

At the height of Christianity, answers to life’s biggest and smallest problems could be found in the pages of the Bible. Be it how the Earth turns or how to better raise a family, the text and its preachers could tell you how to navigate your problems.

Google’s access to the collection of human knowledge works in a similar way. Though the content of Google’s answers aren’t its own, the collection of articles and books it finds through its algorithm serve the same purpose as a Gideon Bible or the Quran. These religious texts weren’t written by one person, but rather a collection of writers together creating a larger work based on the same core beliefs. Substituting the core teachings of Jesus or Muhammed with a user’s search query, each
Google search creates a sort of faux religious text where thousands of writers contribute to the term you’ve entered into the search bar.

But like a preacher, Imam, or Rabbi decides which section of the religious text relates best to your situation, Google does the same with it’s suggested answers. Looking up basic facts like “the largest rodent in the world” will lead to a box at the top of the list with the word “Capybara” written in Google’s primary font. These answers come from sources like Wikipedia or other encyclopedic places that the Algorithm deems acceptable.

But straightforward facts don’t encompass all of a person’s search for meaning. Bigger questions remain, and Google may not be able to tell you exactly how to answer them, but will point you in the direction it deems the most useful.

Articles are sorted based on Google’s algorithm which, like a religious leader with their scripture, crawls the web for an article’s items that best match the search term.

Not every result works for your situation though, and oftentimes Google will give you sources that contradict each other.

Instances like these are parallel to situations in religious texts where the right answer to an ethical and moral question depends on where you look. Killing a fellow man is the first of the seven deadly sins, but in Exodus 32:27 we see that “Thus sayeth the Lord God of Israel, Put every man his sword by his side. and slay every man his brother…companion…neighbor.” Now that’s not what we saw in Exodus 20:13. In the same way, Google provides us with its interpretation of the moral right.
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The scientific revolution challenged the authority of the Catholic church when many turned to empirical thinking to discover the world (after copious executions, that is). It posed a problem for the established church. Why go looking for new answers when all the answers can be found here in this book? The same worries apply to Google, where we base a lot of our information off the Google selections that make it to page 1.

Companies pay for their articles or sites to be displayed further up in the query, and to trust that their intentions are always for the benefit of the public could be dangerous. The search choices are not egalitarian in this regard. Profits drive the content we see, potentially leading to another bubble where we don’t stray too far from page 1.

And while we’ve seen God as the answer machine and creator of meaning, their greatest power comes in their mysterious ways. No-one really knows what God is about, or how they go about their decisions on yours and everyone else's lives. We’ve pondered for millennia as to what the texts mean, and why bad things happen to good people.

We know the answer. God is made up by humans, and humans simply don’t know all the answers. All the information about God can literally be found in the religious texts where ancient people wrote the blueprints for entities they believed people would trust. In this way, saying God is mysterious is a fallacy, as they’re only mysterious in the sense that their descriptions were left purposefully vague.

Google’s manuals are much more comprehensive. We can find exactly how Google works with a computer science education, but even without a detailed knowledge of everything related to programming the information is available at a high level.

However, like religious texts, few people have the time or ability to fully read up on and understand anything beyond plugging in the term into the magic box and assuming an answer will come out. Maybe the more tech savvy know how web crawlers work, and how algorithms hunt for keywords. But a large population doesn’t. Education hasn’t caught up with the technology of the times, and because the user interface is delightfully simple, there’s no real reason for people to learn more about the magic box.

All hail.