Understanding Software Theology
In practical software production formalist software theory is always a tool rather than a truth. Software theory becomes software theology when we start thinking of formalist software theory as a truth in practical software production rather than a tool.
Today these is no shortage of ultraformalist software theology in the software theory research world. Software science theology and toys consume a considerable chunk of software research budgets today. This is why major IT companies, especially hardware companies, keep cutting back on support for software science research.
The software theory available at present is critically important in some kinds of practical software such as cryptography. Yet software theory generally does not have broad or routine application in most kinds of practical software production.
Hopefully someday it will. This will require refocusing software theory research efforts on building a firm foundation for a mature empirical science software production technology.
Yet today we keep looking for the foundations of software science in software theology. Software theology starts with one or more of these three key assumptions built on the legacy analytic philosophy:
computation is universal
the cosmos is a computation
computation = cognition
Computation is, of course, universal in a very narrow mathematical sense. The trouble starts with the conjecture that computation is universal in the material and metaphysical sense as well as the mathematical sense.
This empirically unjustifiable conjecture opens the door to computation as the basis for a universal philosophical science. This perfect exact science of everything unifies the entirety of overall universal order including both occult and observable order. God is another name for overall universal order. So this is where software science becomes a secular theology.
Universal computation comes as standard equipment on every personal computer. Perhaps if we just find the right metamathematical formalisms we can unlock the unlimited power of the universal logic and universal language of universal computation. Then we can think and talk as the gods. Then we can understand everything exactly.
There's really nothing wrong with all this if you treat it as speculative philosophy. Philosophy should be and is full of speculative secular theologies. As a basis for practical software science this sort of theology is distracting and defocusing and thus dysfunctional. It's really bad for business.