The vast amount of data tech companies collect from your Facebook posts, Google searches, and online purchases allows them to create a detailed profile of you. They have insight into your thoughts, desires, and reactions to events and can even know you better than your closest friend. However, the most disturbing use of AI I have heard of is creating a virtual person based on the social media posts of your deceased loved ones. When I first learned about this, it was a few months after my father had passed away. Although the idea of interacting with a virtual version of him was appealing, I would still prefer to meet my loved ones in heaven rather than in a virtual world.
There is a story in which a father was distraught that one of the leading supermarket chains constantly sent his teenage daughter advertisements about pregnancy stuff in the mail. He wrote to the company to complain about it. It turns out that his teenage daughter was indeed expecting a child. That company used her online footprint to figure out she was pregnant long before her father discovered it.
Our God is a far more supreme being than AI can ever be. In AI, the more data it has, the better the prediction. God knows everything about you. Even all the hairs on your head are numbered. (Matthew 10:30 New English Translation). If tech companies can predict your behavior based on your social media posts and browsing history, how much more accurate will God be in predicting your behavior?
The traditional argument states that since God created time, He exists outside the constraints of time and can foreknow, predetermine, and foreordain events. To illustrate this concept, consider a two-dimensional world where inhabitants can only perceive the XY plane and cannot comprehend the third dimension we live in. If I suddenly move up, from your perspective, I disappear into thin air since you can only see things in the XY plane. Similarly, we humans are limited by time and cannot fully understand a transcendent God beyond time and space. In physics, time is considered the fourth dimension. Time is a fascinating concept; we can move freely in three-dimensional space but only in one direction in time. Mentally, we can review past events; we experience time at the current moment but cannot see into the future. The future is for us to experience and not to see. However, God is not experiencing time the way we do; He can travel in any direction He wants. Your past, present, and future can appear to Him simultaneously; God knows about your future.
As humans, we are limited by time, which makes it impossible for us to comprehend the transcendent nature of God beyond time and space. It’s similar to how a 2D creature cannot comprehend the 3D world. Our inability to understand how God can see the future is understandable. However, I believe that the argument that God is outside time and knows the future is a lazy way to avoid answering the question. Furthermore, this approach lacks a clear model of how God interacts with the real world. My AI analogy suggests there’s no need to push the answer to the timeless regime, where we can never get an answer. God doesn’t have to exist beyond time to know your future. In the up coming posts, we’ll discuss the problem of free will after examining how God interacts with the physical world. Let’s assume that God can predict your future accurately based on your actions, inner thoughts, and moral and non-moral decisions.
I’m not saying that God is not outside time; I’m trying to say that you don’t need this attribute of God to explain how He knows about your future. After all, God created time and space. God revealed His name to Moses as “I’m who I’m” which indicates that He is everlasting and no external explanation is needed.
If God uses your history to predict your future, isn’t God just a super AI? Some people in Silicon Valley think so. In fact, a new church was formed in 2015 called “The Way of the Future (WOTF).” Its document stated that WOTF’s activities will focus on “the realization, acceptance, and worship of a Godhead based on Artificial Intelligence (AI) developed through computer hardware and software.”
God surely can do everything a super AI can do. Having superhuman intelligence is necessary but not a sufficient requirement for God. In Christian belief, God is omnipotent, omnipresent, and omniscient. AI in the form we know today doesn’t fit into any of the above descriptions.
Omnipresence means being present everywhere at the same time. Although there are many surveillance devices and sensors everywhere, and smart devices in our house listening to our conversation, we can hardly call AI omnipresent; even in a police state, there will always be blind spots.
Omniscience means knowing everything. As we will see later that we can’t know everything, the act of measurement will disturb the subject under measurement. AI can only know our outward behaviors; it cannot know the dark secret of our hearts. Furthermore, Einstein’s theory of general relativity tells me that information cannot travel faster than the speed of light. For example, it takes about eight minutes for light to travel from the sun to Earth, so super AI cannot know everything simultaneously on Earth and the sun.
Omnipotent means being all-powerful. If super AI is a created being, it cannot be above the physical laws that govern this universe.