ABSTRACT
Theology has an interest in any metaphor which threatens to limit and to distort the way we think of ourselves. In the “information age” it encounters a reductionist enterprise concerned to analyze all natural phenomena in terms of information processes, all living things in terms of the information content of their genetic material, with a growing interest in the information-theoretic aspects of intelligence and mind which some take to show that human beings are no more than information-processing machines. The impact of the concept of information on human self-understanding makes it a proper concern of theology. 1 As Joseph Weizenbaum has put it,
[T]he computer is a powerful new metaphor for helping us to understand many aspects of the world, but … it enslaves the mind that has no other metaphors and few other resources to call on. 2
