In the Beginning Was Information (22 page)

The four basic entities — mass, energy, information, and will — are illustrated in Figure 30, each time with the appellation "spiritual" in analogy to the biblical description of a spiritual person. It is now clear that these four created entities originated from God, the Creator. When a natural man is changed into a spiritual person, it is also a creative act of God, working through Jesus: "Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come!" (2 Cor. 5:17). This creative transformation from old to new, from the natural to the spiritual, and from lost to saved, is called both repentance in the Bible (Luke 22:32; Acts 3:19) and being born again (John 3:3 and 1 Pet. 1:23). This act can only be accomplished through our own will (e.g., Matt. 23:37; Luke 19:14). Our willingness or our rejection is decisive for life and death, comprising the choice between heaven and hell. The four spiritual foundations take a central place for a born-again, a believing, or a spiritual person:

1. Spiritual information:
In the Old Testament, God said parabolically that He has a fixed purpose when sending His Word to a recipient: "As the rain and the snow come down from heaven, and do not return to it without watering the earth and making it bud and flourish, so that it yields seed for the sower and bread for the eater, so is my word that goes out from my mouth: It will not return to me empty, but will accomplish what I desire and achieve the purpose for which I sent it" (Isa. 55:10–11). This clearly illustrates the purpose-achieving and the human-assisting way of divine information.

By means of several technological and biological examples we will illustrate (see appendix A3) that in such systems, in each case:

– energy is
saved
,

– waste of energy is
prevented
,

– energy is
utilized
, and

–the consumption of energy is
optimized
.

The divine (or spiritual) information affects us in a similar way, because it

–
saves
us from being led astray,

–
prevents
us from wasting our lives,

–
uses
our gifts in life (natural talents, time, and money),

–
optimizes
our life situations (marriage, occupation, and pastimes),

and

–
saves
our life from perdition, giving us eternal life.

2. Spiritual will:
There is a saying which goes like this: "Whoever does what he desires, often does what he should not do." Martin Luther stated, "Whenever our free will does what is inherent, then we commit a deadly sin." Even the Apostle sent to many nations, Paul, confessed, "I know that nothing good lives in me, that is, in my sinful nature. For I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out. For what I do is not the good I want to do; no, the evil I do not want to do — this I keep on doing" (Rom. 7:18–19). Our best ethical intentions for doing good will not be successful if we rely on our own strength. Egoism is the most certain human characteristic.

Jesus described our will and nature much more strikingly than all philosophers, humanists, and psychologists: "The spirit is willing, but the body is weak" (Matt. 26:41). The deadly poison of sin is so deeply infused in us since Adam’s fall, that we are "sold as a slave to sin" (Rom. 7:14) in the truest sense of the word. "Good" intentions will not deliver us from this condition, but we require redemption through Him who conquered sin. The command "Be transformed by the renewing of your mind" (Rom. 12:2) cannot be obeyed in our own power, but only through close ties with Jesus and by the constant influence of God’s Word on our mind.

The principle mentioned by Goethe in his poem ("Erlkönig": King of the Elves) "And if you are unwilling, I will use force," does not hold for us. We gladly submit ourselves to God’s will as Jesus taught us in the Lord’s Prayer and as He lived daily right up to the Cross: "Yet not my will, but yours be done" (Luke 22:42). When your will is bound to God’s Word through your conscience, then you are no longer egocentric (e.g., Isa. 53:6: "each of us has turned to his own way") but Christ-centered (e.g., Col. 3:23: "Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord, not for men").

3. Spiritual energy:
There is no machine which can run continuously without input of energy. Similarly, a spiritual person is not a perpetual mobile. His source of spiritual energy is the Holy Spirit, without whom nobody can call Jesus Lord of his life (1 Cor. 12:3). The ministry of the disciples was not based in themselves, but in the divine energy given to them: "You will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you; and you will be my witnesses" (Acts 1:8). Paul expresses the immense source of available energy when he refers to "his incomparably great power for us who believe. That power is like the working [Greek energeia] of his mighty strength, which he exerted in Christ" (Eph. 1:19–20). Although Paul was weak of body (2 Cor. 12:9), his spiritual achievements were incomparable: "To this end I labour, struggling with all his energy, which so powerfully works in me" (Col. 1:29). God commands us to "be strong in the Lord and in his mighty power" (Eph. 6:10).

4. Spiritual matter:
Except for mass deficits occurring in nuclear processes, there is also a conservation law for matter. If, by way of analogy, we search for something permanent in our spiritual life, it will be found in the fruits of our labors for God according to the Bible. Heinrich Kemner always emphasized the difference between success and fruit. Natural man seeks success in life, but a spiritual person finds it in fruit. Success depends mainly on our efforts, but fruit stems from grace and it only grows when our life is linked with Jesus. He unlocked this secret in the parable of the vine: "No branch can bear fruit by itself; it must remain in the vine. Neither can you bear fruit unless you remain in me. I am the vine; you are the branches. If a man remains in me and I in him, he will bear much fruit; apart from me you can do nothing" (John 15:4–5). All our works will be revealed when God judges the world. Whatever we may regard as great successes in our life will be consumed in God’s testing fire; only fruit in Jesus will be conserved and earn rewards (1 Cor. 3:11–14). It is God’s declared will that we should build our life on the fruit (John 15:2; Rom. 1:13; Gal. 5:22; Phil. 4:17; Col. 1:10), for Jesus said, "I chose you …to go and bear fruit — fruit that will last" (John 15:16).

Only one life, it will soon be past;

Only what’s done for Christ, will last!

Appendix

Appendix A1

The Statistical View of Information

A1.1 Shannon’s Theory of Information

Claude E. Shannon (born 1916), in his well-known book
A Mathematical Theory of Communications
[S7, 1948], was the first person to formulate a mathematical definition of information. His measure of information, the "bit" (binary digit), had the advantage that quantitative properties of strings of symbols could be formulated. The disadvantage is just as plain: Shannon’s definition of information entails only one minor aspect of the nature of information, as we will discuss at length. The only value of this special aspect is for purposes of transmission and storage. The questions of meaning, comprehensibility, correctness, and worth or worthlessness are not considered at all. The important questions about the origin (sender) and for whom it is intended (recipient) are also ignored. For Shannon’s concept of information, it is completely immaterial whether a sequence of symbols represents an extremely important and meaningful text, or whether it was produced by a random process. It may sound paradoxical, but in this theory, a random sequence of symbols represents the maximum value of information content — the corresponding value or number for a meaningful text of the same length is smaller.

Shannon’s concept:
His definition of information is based on a communications problem, namely to determine the optimal transmission speed. For technical purposes, the meaning and import of a message are of no concern, so that these aspects were not considered. Shannon restricted himself to information that expressed something new, so that, briefly, information content = measure of newness, where "newness" does not refer to a new idea, a new thought, or fresh news — which would have encompassed an aspect of meaning. It only concerns the surprise effect produced by a rarely occurring symbol. Shannon regards a message as information only if it cannot be completely ascertained beforehand, so that information is a measure of the unlikeliness of an event. An extremely unlikely message is thus accorded a high information content. The news that a certain person out of two million participants has drawn the winning ticket, is for him more "meaningful" than if every tenth person stood a chance, because the first event is much more improbable.

Figure 31: Model of a discrete source for generating sequences of symbols. The source has a supply of N different symbols (e.g., an alphabet with 26 letters), of which a long sequence of n symbols is transmitted one after another at a certain time. The source could be a symbol generator which releases random sequences of symbols according to a given probability distribution, or it could be an unknown text stored on magnetic tape which is transmitted sequentially (i. e. one symbol at a time).

Before a discrete source of symbols (NB: not an information source!) delivers one symbol (Figure 31), there is a certain doubt as to which one symbol ai of the available set of symbols (e.g., an alphabet with
N
letters
a1, a2, a3, …, a
_N
) it will be. After it has been delivered, the previous uncertainty is resolved. Shannon’s method can thus be formulated as the degree of uncertainty which will be resolved when the next symbol arrives. When the next symbol is a "surprise," it is accorded a greater information value than when it is expected with a definite "certainty." The reader who is mathematically inclined may be interested in the derivation of some of Shannon’s basic formulas; this may contribute to a better understanding of his line of reasoning.

1. The information content of a sequence of symbols:
Shannon was only interested in the probability of the appearance of the various symbols, as should now become clearer. He thus only concerned himself with the statistical dimension of information, and reduces the information concept to something without any meaning. If one assumes that the probability of the appearance of the various symbols is independent of one another (e.g., "q" is not necessarily followed by "u") and that all
N
symbols have an equal probability of appearing, then we have: The probability of any chosen symbol
x
_i
arriving is given by
p
_i
= 1/
N
. Information content is then defined by Shannon in such a way that three conditions have to be met:

i) If there are
k
independent messages
^[21]
(symbols or sequences of symbols), then the total information content is given by
I
_tot
 = 
I
₁
+ 
I
₂
+…+
I
_k
. This summation condition regards information as quantifiable.

ii) The information content ascribed to a message increases when the element of surprise is greater. The surprise effect of the seldom-used "
z
" (low probability) is greater than for "
e
" which appears more frequently (high probability). It follows that the information value of a symbol x
_i
increases when its probability
p
_i
decreases. This is expressed mathematically as an inverse proportion:
I
~ 1/
p
_i
.