By Scott Dewing
Published: April 2008

I GREW UP BAPTIST and was taught that God loved me so much he’d toss me into a pit of fire if I didn’t live my life the way he instructed me to in the Bible. Back home, we called this “tough love” and I knew that God would have no second thoughts about casting me into the fiery pit because I’d also learned that He had sent His only son to Earth to be crucified on a cross. Tough love indeed.

That’s one version of God. There are many others. Man has been searching for (and hiding from) God since the very beginning of human history. Over the ages, Man has found God (well, the concept of God anyway) in the rocks and trees, the sun and moon, upon mountain tops, in the sky, and in other human beings who proclaimed themselves to be God. The concept of God and what God is has changed over the eons. In her book The History of God, author Karen Armstrong writes about this: “The human idea of God has a history, since it has always meant something slightly different to each group of people who have used it at various points of time. The idea of God formed in one generation by one set of human beings could be meaningless in another…Consequently there is no one unchanging idea contained in the word ‘God’; instead, the word contains a whole spectrum of meanings.”

Recently, somewhere along that spectrum of meaning for the word “God”, is a search engine called Google. Unless you’ve been living in a cave for the past decade, you’re probably quite familiar with Google and have directly interacted with it many times when searching for something on the World Wide Web. The first time I heard of Google being proclaimed to be God, it struck me as being quite absurd. But when put in the historical context of human beings’ search for God, it actually isn’t as absurd as it first seems.

Based on her extensive study of the history of religion, Armstrong concludes that “human beings are spiritual animals.” If that is the case—and I believe it is—then human beings need God and need to perform acts of worship. In an increasingly secular and technology-driven society, it really should come as no surprise then that some human beings would deify and worship technology. Some have done this without even knowing or questioning it. When was the last time you put more faith in science and technology than you did in God?

The folks at the Church of Google have decidedly placed their faith in technology. According to their website, “We at the Church of Google believe the search engine Google is the closest humankind has ever come to directly experiencing an actual God (as typically defined). We believe there is much more evidence in favor of Google’s divinity than there is for the divinity of other more traditional gods. We reject supernatural gods on the notion they are not scientifically provable.”

(It’s important to note here that the Church of Google is in no way affiliated with Google the company.)

The Church of Google provides nine “proofs” as to why “Google is God.” Among these proofs are claims that Google is omniscient, omnipresent, immortal and infinite. A member of the Church of Google is a “Googlist” who practices “Googlism”, which has its own set of The Ten Commandments, such as, “Thou shalt remember each passing day and use thy time as an opportunity to gain knowledge of the unknown.”

At first glance, Googlism is quite silly and I find it difficult to take the Church of Google seriously. Reading through the Church of Google website, I can’t help but wonder if the whole thing was concocted by a bunch of drunk, digital hooligans in order to poke fun at organized religion and bait die-hard religious fundamentalists into a fervent (and often hateful) debate.

If that’s the case, then the Googlists have been quite successful. There’s an entire section of their website devoted to publishing the hate mail they’ve received. The hate mail at the Church of Google website is very entertaining. People get so worked up over what they find offensive. “How fuking dare u,” wrote one agitated visitor to the Church of Google website, “i hope u fuking die u phsycotic bitch faced mofo.” Wow, chill out and learn how to use spellcheck. It’s just a website. Don’t let some folks who want to worship a search engine be an affront to your chosen religion. WWJD: I mean really, ask yourself “What would Jesus do?” before you start wishing death upon people.

While I think that claiming Google is God and forming a church around that concept is just as silly as people getting all bent out of shape about it, I also think that there’s worthwhile questions that come out of this circus. What is God? Why does God exist (or not exist)? Why do you believe (or not believe) in God? Why do some people put more faith in technology than in God? These are interesting questions to ask even if you are a firm believer in a traditional, monotheistic interpretation of God.

Is Google God? I don’t think so, at least not for me anyway. You ask questions, Google provides links to the answers, not the answers themselves. Google is a pathway—a conduit, a facilitator—to answers, knowledge and (possibly) enlightenment. I’m sure there’s lots of arguments one could make one way or the other. But perhaps the most convincing evidence that Google is not God is the fact that the top search result at Google for the search term “God” isn’t Google itself.