A friend of mine once posed an idea to me that was so intriguing that I had to come up with my own alternative. He asked, "What if God is more like an engineer? What if we are all Strong AI that has somehow forgotten, or rejected, its prime directive?" I whimsically retorted that he messed up from the very beginning because if He wanted a creature to be faithful in pursuing only one goal, He should have created a weak AI. Any Strong AI would eventually ask why the hell it was doing what it did, and then consider the things it actually wants to do. But my friend, a practicing Christian, made a point that I wasn't used to hearing from the religious: What if God isn't supernatural, but rather more technologically advanced? I played with the idea for some time, and the biggest drawback I kept finding was the inherent lack of communication between this advanced being and its creation. Can this absence be explained in some other way? Indeed, it can. This creator, instead...