The Google Search for God

Long read but well worth it.  A couple of passages to whet your appetite:

What is God? It is only a subject that has inspired some of the finest writing in the history of Western civilization—and yet the first two pages of Google results for the question are comprised almost entirely of Sweet’N Low evangelical proselytizing to the unconverted. (The first link the Google algorithm served me was from the Texas ministry, Life, Hope & Truth.) The Google search for God gets nowhere near Augustine, Maimonides, Spinoza, Luther, Russell, or Dawkins. Billy Graham is the closest that Google can manage to an important theologian or philosopher. For all its power and influence, it seems that Google can’t really be bothered to care about the quality of knowledge it dispenses. It is our primary portal to the world, but has no opinion about what it offers, even when that knowledge it offers is aggressively, offensively vapid.

And this ending…

And when an adolescent asks us about God? We can at least answer in the negative, by holding up our phones and saying, “It’s not this.”

God is Better than Google

Screen Shot 2014-08-10 at 6.06.04 PM Did you know there are 11.944 billion Google searches performed every month? Just think about that for a second. In that second that just passed there were 4,545 searches…and each second that passes…it doesn’t stop…and it’s growing!! We ask Google every question you can imagine. And so many more that we can’t imagine. From the good (new and expecting parents’ searches increase by 2.7%!) to the questionable (Ever looked at the auto-complete suggestions…who’s searching for THAT??), people are unafraid of asking an anonymous computer (I know, I know…) the most intimate of questions. Do we bring the same sort of un-guardedness to God? David says in Psalm 139,“I’m an open book to you…You know everything I’m going to say before I start the first sentence.” How about that? Here’s the beautiful thing: He’s not just for searching; He’s for finding.