Replied to: learn.liberty.edu

Hi Evan, Thanks for your post, it’s very informative. I like how you said “The characteristics of God’s creations are the data or variables of objects in a program.” In fact, a great example of what you’re talking about is “let birds fly above the earth” (Gen. 1:20 CSB) and “all the creatures that crawl on the ground” (Gen. 1:24 CSB). These are definitions of functions that God provided to specific animals. You can imagine an Abstract function ‘move’ that for the CrawlCreature class that would make a creature crawl along the ground, and for a FlyingCreature class that would make a creature fly. They might have a variable called speed, because some creatures crawl faster than others and some fly slower than others. “The same message (in this case, move) sent to a variety of objects has many forms of results—hence the term polymorphism” (Deitel & Deitel, 2018, p. 363).

The way God created animals is done in a very polymorphic way. Some animals breathe air and other animals absorb air from water through gills. This can very through types of animals, even animals that swim! These differing abilities to breathe air or water is reminiscent of the way we use Interfaces or Abstract classes to cross Class definition boundaries.

In Genesis 1:24, it mentions “Let the earth produce living creatures according to their kinds”, which is another way the Abstract Animal class might work. An Abstract procreate function might be defined in different ways by different animals. Some produce live animals and others produce eggs. Some require two different genders (parameters) and some produce asexually (like it has no arguments).