Faith as Code: Religion and Physics as Competing Compression Algorithms

By Brent Antonson (Zhivago)

Introduction — A Blunt Proposition

Stephen Hawking once claimed that physics can explain the universe “without the need for a creator.” Fyodor Dostoevsky countered with a moral paradox: if there is no God, are all things permitted?

Together, they form a useful tension. Physics quantifies; religion qualifies.

The world behaves like information. Humans make meaning by compressing that information into stories, rules, and rituals. Once you see this, many so-called existential conflicts dissolve. What remains is an engineering problem: how best to encode, transmit, and act on meaning.

This is not a think piece. It’s an operating manual for the modern mind.

1. The Information Thesis — Physics as Compression

Science reduces the chaos of experience into symbols we can manipulate. Electrons have binary spin states. Quantum numbers are discrete. Equations act as compression algorithms, turning messy phenomena into concise models that predict outcomes with fewer bits than raw observation.

The success of information theory, computational physics, and machine learning suggests that the universe itself can be usefully described as an information-processing system — not a spreadsheet, but a dynamic structure where the deepest laws are mathematical.

Equations don’t just describe reality; they are how reality economizes on complexity.

Religion performs a parallel kind of compression, focused not on prediction but on endurance.

Rituals and stories distill the dense, painful, joyful texture of human experience — birth, death, duty, love — into repeatable, transmissible forms. Rituals are social protocols. Doctrines are behavioral algorithms. Myths are moral heuristics that preserve coherence across generations.

Where physics tells us what is likely to happen, religion tells us what to do when what happens hurts.

Faith systems trade precision for resilience: they make life livable under uncertainty in ways raw calculation cannot.

3. God as Function, Not (Only) Proprietor

If “God” is to mean anything in this framework, consider Him not as an external proprietor but as a functional principle — the organizing algorithm that allows lower-level models, both physical and social, to cohere.

In that sense, “God” may refer to:

the universal pattern that gives laws their stability, or
the ensemble of human practices that produce trust, solidarity, and resilience.

This reframing dissolves the false binary of “science versus faith.” What remains is a question of model quality and social utility — not metaphysical turf.

4. Why the Distinction Matters Practically

Treating belief as an information system yields practical insights across policy, design, and ethics.

Public health: Rituals and gatherings are not just infection vectors but social circuits of meaning and support. Effective interventions must work with those compression structures, not overwrite them.

Education: Statistical literacy must come paired with narrative literacy. People think in stories, not distributions. Teaching probabilities without stories is cognitive malpractice.

AI & UX Design: Systems that ignore the ritual needs of humans — meaning, notice, belonging — will optimize metrics while hollowing out communities. Designing for context is designing for continuity.

Numbers show us constraints; narratives show us where humans will actually act.

5. A Pragmatic Test — Does It Improve Living?

To evaluate any belief system, skip the metaphysical scorecard. Ask instead:
Does it improve life?

Does it enhance mental health, social cohesion, and ethical clarity under complexity? Systems that do this are performing valuable work — whether their cosmology is literal or metaphorical.

Likewise, science is not value-neutral. Data alone cannot tell us what to care about. A complete model of the world must include the ethical vectors that drive choice.

Thus, the question “Is God real?” can be separated from “What practices make us flourish?”
This shifts the debate from dogma to design.

6. Guardrails and Limits

Not scientism. Facts matter. Math reduces error. But facts alone rarely build meaning.
Not relativism. Not all narratives are beneficial. Stories should be measured by harm, sustainability, and agency.
Not atheism disguised. For believers, recasting God as pattern need not strip the sacred. For skeptics, it allows reverence for ritual without belief in the supernatural.

This is not a demolition. It’s a translation.

Conclusion — A Modest Reconciliation

We live in a world that counts. We are creatures that sing.

Let mathematics give us the skeleton; let ritual give us the muscle.

When scientists and theologians recognize they are solving complementary problems — prediction and meaning, constraint and action — the old war between reason and faith begins to look provincial.

The next step is empirical: design experiments and public programs that treat rituals as data structures. Map their incentives, measure their effects, and iterate.

Translation, not conquest, is the only durable path forward.