A Third Party in the Dialogue of Science and Religion

Number 8 from the Top Eleven List of topics in science and religion adapted from my book Negotiating Science and Religion in America

It used to be that the conversation between science and religion involved just two parties. But technology has become increasingly crucial in dialogue of science and religion. In fact, for a robust and relevant conversation today, we have begin by taking in the omnipresence of cell phones, laptops, video conferencing, social media, etc., especially as we consider science, especially for emerging adults. 

Simply put, 18–30 year-olds have only known a technologically-saturated world. The presence of technology (and specifically the internet) is the main reason many call the generation born 1995-2012 "iGen." Topics in technology then must be brought to the top three or four topics in science and religion where scientific and theological method, interactions with evolutionary biology, and cosmology once reigned supreme. And why not just call it Science, Technology, and Religion in the process?  

One of these topics is Artificial Intelligence or AI. What is is it? Science Daily defines AI

“The study and design of intelligent agents where an intelligent agent is a system that perceives its environment and takes action which maximizes its chances of success.” Science Daily, Artificial Intelligence

This naturally leads to transhumanism, a term Julian Huxley coined in 1967 to describe the belief that the creation, development, and use of technology will improve human physical, intellectual, and psychological capacities. Transhumanism is hot: Popular culture loves to speculate about what it might mean in the future years. Consider films like Her (about a man who falls madly in love with an operating system) and Ex Machina (about the creation of a beautiful, and ultimately, deadly robot, Ava). 

Ava pondering herself in Ex Machina

And then there's Ray Kurzweil’s vision, which promotes "a Singularity" where artificial intelligence (AI) and human thinking will merge by 2045. Indeed this would take humankind toward something like omniscience. But something, according to Kurzweil, will arrive first: AI will pass the famous Turing Test, a rubicon when computer intelligence or AI and human intelligence are indistinguishable. 

In a 2017 Futurism article, Kurzweil was quoted as follows: 

“2029 is the consistent date I have predicted for when an AI will pass a valid Turing test and therefore achieve human levels of intelligence. I have set the date 2045 for the ‘Singularity’ which is when we will multiply our effective intelligence a billion fold by merging with the intelligence we have created.” Futurist Ray Kurzweil

Furthermore, from this Singularlity, Kurzweil seeks a form of immortality by uniting our (or at least his) brain with the cloud and living forever. I am fascinated by this drive toward immortality as it brings to mind whether religions are indelibly invested in the afterlife. Will religions survive if human beings can survive indefinitely? Put another way, if we can be saved by technology do we need also God to do it? 

And I'm full of questions. Second, is it really possible for an AI to pass the Turing Test and thus become indistinguishable from human intelligence? If so, does this mean we have become creators and therefore like God (Genesis 3:22)? 

Finally, what does AI imply for the existence of the soul? If an artificial intelligence machines seem to us to be interactive and self-reflective, do they have souls? Or maybe neither of us have souls.

These are hot topics, and in this post, I've pushed the scary questions. In my mind, they are worth pondering, especially since high-tech firms are investing mounds of financial capital to produce increasingly impressive AI. And, as these rapidly advancing fields expand, they will create questions with significant implications for those who seek to integrate contemporary technology and science with Christian faith. 

As indeed I do.

Great Films Tell Us Who We Are

One more excerpt from Mere Science and Christian Faith, now available. 

With this link, it's 10% off!

Certainly, great films entertain us. They also tell us who we are culturally. And a considerable number in the relatively recent past focus on technology, particularly artificial intelligence (AI) and robots. They exemplify a cultural landscape that affects how emerging adults see science and religion. Before those, of course, The Matrix in 1999 demonstrated the evil side of AI in which a computer program generates the artificial reality in which all humans live, itself receiving energy by literally sucking the life out of human beings. In the twenty-first century, so the film’s backstory goes, human beings created and then waged a war against these technological machines. When we blocked the machines’ access to energy through solar power, they began to harvest the humans’ bioelectricity for power. When in 2001 I posed this question to my twenty-something church group in New York City, “What film best describes spirituality?” The Matrix was their number one answer. 

Some of this material reaches back into the last century, including the year made infamous by George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984. That year The Terminator posed the idea of Skynet, a conscious artificial intelligence originally designed as a digital defense network that controlled computerized military hardware and systems, including the entire nuclear arsenal of the United States. The idea was to avoid human error and slow reaction times and thus guarantee a rapid and accurate response to attack from our enemies. But there was a problem—we became the enemies. Skynet gained self-awareness after it spread to millions of computers and its developers tried to shut it down. Realizing its imminent demise, Skynet rebelled and started destroying human life.

A film from more recent years, Ex Machina (2014) depicts the creation of the beautiful and ultimately dangerous robot Ava. (Ava sounds a great deal like the biblical “Eve” to my ears—we haven’t strayed too far from the previous chapter.) Ava has been created to pass the Turing test, developed by the Cambridge- and Princeton-educated computer specialist Alan Turing in 1950, which evaluates a machine’s ability to exhibit intelligent behavior equivalent to or indistinguishable from a human being’s.

Is this our future?