When Whittaker Chambers abandoned atheistic communism for Christianity in the late 1930s, he told his wife that they were joining the losing side in what he viewed as a great spiritual struggle. Later, after the Hiss case, when Chambers wrote his magnificent autobiography Witness in the early 1950s, the preface of the book was in the form of a in which he described the struggle between communism and Western civilization as a battle between those who believe that “Man” is the center of the universe and those who believe that God is the center of the universe. Communism, Chambers explained, is “man’s second oldest faith” whose “promise was whispered in the first days of Creation under the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil: ‘Ye shall be as gods.’” Artificial Intelligence (AI) whispers the same promise as the Serpent made to Eve and Adam in the Garden of Eden.
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Christians believe that God is our Creator who provided us with natural intelligence that includes an instinctive knowledge of good and evil and the free will to choose good or evil. AI is wholly a creation of man. The promise of AI is that it will improve the intelligence that God gave us, and in the end, replace God’s natural intelligence with man’s artificial substitute. AI, we are told, will create better students, better teachers, better doctors, better lawyers, better scientists, better soldiers — better everything. God’s natural intelligence includes free will to make errors, mistakes, and accidents; AI will make us error-free, mistake-free, and accident-free. And all of this will be man’s work, not God’s.
The loudest promoters of AI have listened to the Serpent: “Ye shall be as gods.”
Chambers would understand. He wrote that science and technology inspired the communist vision of “man’s mind displacing God as the creative intelligence of the world.” Man becomes, in Chambers’s words, “the masterwork of the Creation … by using the force of his rational mind to end the bloody meaninglessness of man’s history.” Chambers wrote that the communist vision of a man-centered universe was shared by millions of non-communists — it still is, as the promotion, indeed reverence, for AI grows.
Far too many in the Christian West (or what is left of it) are worshipping at the altar of AI. God’s promise, after all, is a perfect world (Heaven) after death for the human soul. AI’s soulless promise is a near-perfect world for the living — and perhaps the end of death if you believe in transhumanism.
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AI is silent on good and evil. It does what works; what is necessary. “Freedom” and “liberty” are not scientific, rational concepts; they are, as Chambers pointed out, “need[s] of the soul.” “It is in striving for God,” Chambers explained, “that the soul strives continually after a condition of freedom.” “God alone,” he continued, “is the inciter and guarantor of freedom … [and] without the soul there is no justification for freedom.”
Suffering and pain are part of the human condition; AI holds out the promise of ending both. But Chambers told his children that “True wisdom comes from the overcoming of suffering and sin. All true wisdom is therefore touched with sadness.” The loudest promoters of AI have listened to the Serpent: “Ye shall be as gods.” Chambers told his children that he was leading them not to utopia on earth, but instead to Golgotha, which teaches that “life is pain, that each of us hangs always upon the cross of himself. And when [they] know that this is true of every man, woman, and child on earth, [they] will be wise.”
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