Deus ex machina

amazon.com just posted a new book called God from the Machine : Artifical Intelligence Models of Religious Cognition (Cognitive Science of Religion Series). It has an ambitious and strange program: the author creates a model town, then, "using rules for individual and social behavior taken from the social sciences, he models a complex community where residents form groups, learn to trust or distrust each other, and develop religious faith. Bainbridge's straightforward arguments point to many more applications of computer simulation in the study of religion. God from the Machine will serve as an important text in any class with a social scientific approach to religion." it sounds like a lot of fun, but having modeled things with strict physical parameters, I know that you can generally make a model do what you want. i'm interested to check out his models, but i fear that the book will just serve as fodder for social scientists already engaged in undermining any faith.