Thursday, 1 February 2024
Newly revealed evidence for ID
Hidden, Now Revealed: Amazonia, Fitness Landscapes, and Fibonacci Numbers
Here are some news items of interest for those who have followed my previous articles about Amazonia, fitness landscapes, and Fibonacci numbers. They are united by the theme of “hidden” things now revealed.
Hidden Cities in the Jungle
In 2022 (here), I shared news about “mind blowing” discoveries made with LIDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) in the Amazon rainforest. The forest-penetrating technology uncovered “geoglyphs” (large structures) that were made by previously unknown people groups. Last fall (here) I updated the story with new estimates that there might be many thousands more to discover. This was a classic test of The Design Inference: eliminating chance by specified complexity and small probability.
Since then, a “huge ancient city” has been revealed by LIDAR, reports BBC News, and was explored by ground crews. Some 6,000 mounds are at the large site, probably foundations for homes.
“It changes the way we see Amazonian cultures. Most people picture small groups, probably naked, living in huts and clearing land — this shows ancient people lived in complicated urban societies,” says co-author Antoine Dorison.
The city was built around 2,500 years ago, and people lived there for up to 1,000 years, according to archaeologists.
It is difficult to accurately estimate how many people lived there at any one time, but scientists say it is certainly in the 10,000s if not 100,000s.
See New Scientist’s article on this find, with a LIDAR scan of the extensive site. It adds,
In 2015, Rostain’s team did an aerial survey with lidar, a laser scanning technique that can create a detailed 3D map of the surface beneath most vegetation, revealing features not normally visible to us. The findings, which have only now been published, show that the settlements were far more extensive than anyone realised….
The survey also revealed a network of straight roads created by digging out soil and piling it on the sides. The longest extends for at least 25 kilometres, but might continue beyond the area that was surveyed.
This month, Jay Silverstein, an archaeologist renowned for the detection of hidden artifacts in Amazonia and elsewhere, wrote in The Conversation about these amazing discoveries. The title of his essay promises big news ahead, “Valley of lost cities found in the Amazon — technological advances in archaeology are only the beginning of discovery.”
A valley of lost cities has been discovered in the Ecuadorian Amazon. When you hear of such a discovery you might think of archaeologists with chisels and brushes or explorers in pith helmets stumbling across sites deep in the forest. Instead, without needing to brave the hazards of the forest, Light Detection and Ranging (Lidar) has revealed networks of buried roads and earthen mounds.
The point of exploratory science is to reveal what has so far been hidden. Whether at the edge of the universe with the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), the bottom of the sea with Underwater Autonomous Vehicles (UAVs), or through the canopy of the densest forests with Lidar, we are discovering things that reshape our understanding of the world.
It’s like finding the key to a cryptogram, or the figures in a stereogram, to see these city-scale structures under the forest canopy for the first time. Silverstein believes that scientists are nowhere near running out of things to discover. LIDAR and aerial search systems have revolutionized archaeology, but there will always be a need for ground-based searches and excavations — meaning, there will continue to be ample opportunities for design detection. (This is not to imply that design in the forest leaves, loaded with ATP synthase motors, does not warrant its own design inference.)
Hidden Assumptions in the Fitness Landscape
Like letters crossing in the mail, scientific papers can contradict one another. The authors of a paper in Oxford’s International Journal of Organic Evolution, blithely assuming there is wisdom in Wright’s “fitness landscape” metaphor, were apparently unaware of the PNAS paper the previous month that debunked it (see my post on that paper here). True, authors can innocently miss others’ work due to lag times between research, writing, and publication, even if they do a literature search, but this points to a problem in peer-reviewed scientific publications: wrong notions can persist even after they have been falsified.
The Oxford Evolution paper, “The fitness landscape of a community of Darwin’s finches,” by 18 authors, builds its case on the notion of a Gaussian landscape, not realizing that the landscape is flat with trapdoors (according to the PNAS authors), and that “holey landscapes” represent “the dominant evolutionary process.”
The drivers of adaptive radiation have often been conceptualized through the concept of “adaptive landscapes,” yet formal empirical estimates of adaptive landscapes for natural adaptive radiations have proven elusive. Here, we use a 17-year dataset of Darwin’s ground finches (Geospiza spp.) at an intensively studied site on Santa Cruz (Galápagos) to estimate individual apparent lifespan in relation to beak traits.
Onward they go, eager to perpetuate this icon of evolution that Jonathan Wells debunked 24 years ago. Now, with the collapse of Wright’s “fitness landscape” metaphor (at least the smooth Gaussian kind with curving hills and valleys), their work has been doubly debunked. It’s kind of sad. They mention fitness peaks 90 times, fitness valleys 16 times, landscape 154 times, and “fitness” 194 times. It would be one thing if they argued that Dochtermann et al. were wrong in their assessment of the landscape metaphor being “holey” in their PNAS paper, but these authors seem oblivious to the problem that composite traits cannot gain fitness on a flat landscape. They can only disappear through one of the trapdoors.
One can only wonder how long it will take for the landscape myth — organisms gradually ascending to higher fitness by natural selection — to collapse. Since the “fitness landscape” metaphor has been extremely useful to Darwinians, as in this new paper, it is likely to continue as a useful lie for some time. Perhaps Dr. Wells can use it as another case of Zombie Science.
Hidden Glories in the Infrared
The James Webb Space Telescope Mission Team revealed a blockbuster set of images at the end of January: a catalog of spiral galaxies displayed in exquisite detail. Adding to the splendor of the gallery, NASA scientists combined images from the Hubble Space Telescope and data from other instruments, including the “the Very Large Telescope’s Multi-Unit Spectroscopic Explorer, and the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array, including observations in ultraviolet, visible, and radio light.” The combined data sets provided a multicolored, high-resolution gallery of images that is sure to tantalize astronomers and delight the public.
The caption for one image of spiral galaxy NGC 628 (pictured at the top) includes this note: “The spiraling filamentary structure looks somewhat like a cross section of a nautilus shell.” This recalls posts here at Evolution News about the uncanny ubiquity of phenomena exhibiting the Fibonacci series (here, here, here, here, here). Why should a nautilus shell mimic the structure of a spiral galaxy differing in size by many orders of magnitude? As I remarked in this link, the question remains unanswered in spite of modelers’ attempts to explain one example in plant stems.
Darwinism's simple beginning nowhere in sight?
Astrophysicist: “We Do Not Yet Know How, Where, or Why Life First Appeared”
A fantastic article at Universe Today reports on “The Improbable Origins of Life on Earth.” It opens with a striking admission of our ignorance about how life arose:
We do not yet know how, where, or why life first appeared on our planet. Part of the difficulty is that “life” has no strict, universally agreed-upon definition.
The author is Paul Sutter, an astrophysicist at Ohio State University — and he’s absolutely right: there’s presently no natural explanation for the origin of life.
What Is Life?
Sutter provides some useful definitions of life, starting with what he calls a “simple statement”:
Life is that which is subject to Darwinian evolution. That is, life experiences natural selection, that unceasing pressure that chooses traits and characteristics to pass down to a new generation through the simple virtue of their survivability.
If we accept this definition at face value, life must be highly complex. That’s because Darwinian evolution requires both survival and replication. Survival requires the ability to metabolize materials from the surrounding environment into energy needed to power the chemical reactions of life, and replication requires the ability to make copies of yourself with some minimal level of fidelity. Both of these requirements entail highly complex systems.
Here’s how Walter Bradley and I described the minimal complexity of life in our chapter “Did Life First Arise by Purely Natural Means?” in The Comprehensive Guide to Science and Faith, published in 2021:
[A]ll living systems (1) process energy, (2) store information, and (3) replicate. In nature, these processes are performed primarily by molecules from three families of large biopolymers: proteins, DNA, and RNA. The mystery of how life began is essentially the mystery of how these three types of biopolymers formed and congregated within a cell with a barrier made of lipids as a self-replicating system.
Sutter seems to unwittingly agree with this description of life, because he then elaborates on what is necessary to make Darwinian evolution possible, and lands on exactly the same three requirements for life (though listed in a different order):
To succeed at evolution and separate itself from mere chemical reactions, life must do three things. First, it must somehow store information, such as the encoding for various processes, traits, and characteristics. This way the successful traits can pass from one generation to another.
Second, life must self-replicate. It must be able to make reasonably accurate copies of its own molecular structure, so that the information contained within itself has the chance to become a new generation, changed and altered based on its survivability.
Lastly, life must catalyze reactions. It must affect its own environment, whether for movement, or to acquire or store energy, or grow new structures, or all the many wonderful activities that life does on a daily basis.
Again, this is exactly right. And doing these “three things” — “store information,” “self-replicate” and “catalyze reactions” — isn’t simple. The whole process requires complex DNA and RNA molecules and molecular machines. Sutter appreciates this fact and gives a decent sketch of the complexity of life:
[L]ife on Earth has evolved a dizzying array of chemical and molecular machines to propagate itself — a menagerie so complex and interconnected that we do not yet fully understand it. But a basic picture has emerged. Put exceedingly simply (for I would hate for you to mistake me for a biologist), life accomplishes these tasks with a triad of molecular tools.
Sutter is correct that life is full of molecular machines and that we’re still untangling its complexity. And the molecular triad he refers to is composed of DNA, RNA, and proteins.
The Molecular Triad of Life
Regarding DNA, he says strikingly that, “The raw ability of DNA to store massive amounts of information is nothing short of a miracle.”
Regarding RNA, Sutter says that it “stores information but, again speaking only in generalities, has the main job of reading the chemical instructions stored in the DNA and using that to manufacture the last member of the triad, proteins.” Of course he’s right that RNA stores (and transports) information that is used in manufacturing proteins, but I would argue he understates its other important functions. As we recently discussed, we can now identify “RNA genes” which produce RNAs as an end in themselves that perform numerous important cellular functions.
As for proteins, Sutter provides a nice summary of their importance and their diversity:
“Proteins” is a generic catch-all term for the almost uncountable varieties of molecular machines that do stuff: They snip apart molecules, bind them back together, manufacture new ones, hold structures together, become structures themselves, move important molecules from one place to another, transform energy from one form to another, and so on.
But there’s a catch: proteins are also necessary for replicating DNA. Sutter explains: “DNA stores information, RNA uses that information to manufacture proteins, and the proteins interact with the environment and perform the self-replication of DNA.”
The Irreducible Complexity of Life
But then Sutter closes with a powerful conclusion that the “interconnected” nature of this triad means that all aspects of the system must be present for life to function:
The interconnected nature of DNA, RNA, and proteins means that it could not have sprung up ab initio from the primordial ooze, because if only one component is missing then the whole system falls apart — a three-legged table with one missing cannot stand.
This almost sounds like a description of “irreducible complexity” — if “one component is missing then the whole system falls apart.” And once again, he’s absolutely right: Life as we know it requires DNA, RNA, and protein to function, and it can’t arise in a stepwise manner on the early earth.
A Potent Challenge to Chemical Evolution
What about his comment that life’s “interconnected nature” means “it could not have sprung up ab initio from the primordial ooze”? That sounds like a potent challenge to chemical evolution.
Now make no mistake, Sutter clearly endorses evolution at multiple points in his article, and I have no idea what he thinks about intelligent design. And while he thinks that life “could not have sprung up ab initio from the primordial ooze,” it’s not entirely clear if that wording is intended to leave the door open to some other unspecified types of models for a natural origin of life. Nonetheless, his arguments here about obstacles to a stepwise explanation of chemical evolution — even alluding to the irreducibly complex nature of life’s fundamental biomolecules — are exactly right.
It’s good to find another scientist — with no connections to intelligent design — who sees the issue so clearly
The great apostasy: The Watchtower society's commentary.
An expression used by the apostle Paul at 2 Thessalonians 2:2, 3 in warning of the great anti-Christian apostasy that would develop before “the day of Jehovah.” The Greek word for “apostasy” here used, a·po·sta·siʹa, denotes more than a mere falling away, an indifferent sliding back. It means a defection, a revolt, a planned, deliberate rebellion. In ancient papyrus documents a·po·sta·siʹa was used politically of rebels.
A Religious Revolt. This rebellion, however, is not a political one. It is a religious one, a revolt against Jehovah God and Jesus Christ and therefore against the Christian congregation.
Foretold. Other forecasts of this apostasy were made by the apostles Paul and Peter both verbally and in writing, and the Lord Jesus Christ himself warned of its coming. In his illustration of the wheat and the weeds (Mt 13), Jesus said that the Devil would sow “weeds,” imitation Christians, “sons of the wicked one,” among the “wheat,” the “sons of the kingdom.” These would exist until the conclusion of the system of things, when they would be identified and ‘burned up.’
Paul warned the Christian overseers of Ephesus that after his going away “oppressive wolves” would enter in among true Christians and would not treat the flock with tenderness but would try to draw away “the disciples” after themselves (not just making disciples for themselves but trying to draw away the disciples, Christ’s disciples). (Ac 20:29, 30) He wrote, at 1 Timothy 4:1-3: “However, the inspired utterance says definitely that in later periods of time some will fall away from the faith, paying attention to misleading inspired utterances and teachings of demons, by the hypocrisy of men who speak lies, marked in their conscience as with a branding iron [feelingless, seared, so that they do not feel any twinges of conscience because of hypocritically speaking lies]; forbidding to marry, commanding to abstain from foods which God created to be partaken of with thanksgiving.”
Paul later wrote to Timothy that “there will be a period of time when they will not put up with the healthful teaching, but, in accord with their own desires, they will accumulate teachers for themselves to have their ears tickled; and they will turn their ears away from the truth.”—2Ti 4:3, 4.
The apostle Peter drew a parallel between the apostasy from Christianity and that which occurred in the natural house of Israel. He said: “However, there also came to be false prophets among the people, as there will also be false teachers among you. These very ones will quietly bring in destructive sects and will disown even the owner that bought them, bringing speedy destruction upon themselves. Furthermore, many will follow their acts of loose conduct, and on account of these the way of the truth will be spoken of abusively.” Peter goes on to point out that these would exploit the congregation but that “the destruction of them is not slumbering.”—2Pe 2:1-3.
A composite “man.” The “man” of 2 Thessalonians 2:1-12 is, therefore, not an individual, but a composite “man,” a collective group, as the foregoing scriptures show, and this “man” was to continue after the apostles’ death and exist down until the time of the Lord’s presence.
Treason against God. The “lawlessness” that this composite apostate “man” commits is lawlessness against Jehovah God the Universal Sovereign. This “man” is guilty of treason. He is called “the son of destruction,” as was Judas Iscariot, the traitor who betrayed the Lord Jesus Christ and who was instrumental in bringing about his death. He, like Judas, is to be annihilated, sent into extinction forever. This “man” is not “Babylon the Great,” who also fights against God, for she is a woman, a harlot. However, since he carries on a religious rebellion against God, he is evidently a part of mystic Babylon.—Joh 17:12; Re 17:3, 5.
“The man of lawlessness” sets himself in opposition to God and is therefore a “satan,” which means “resister.” And, indeed, his “presence is according to the operation of Satan.” (2Th 2:9) In the days of the apostle Paul, there was “mystery,” or a religious secret, about the identity of this “man of lawlessness.” To this day mystery shrouds his identity in the minds of many persons, because his wickedness is practiced under the guise of godly devotion. (2Th 2:7) By his lying teachings contrary to or superseding, as it were, the law of God, “the man of lawlessness” sets himself up over Jehovah God and other ‘gods,’ mighty ones of the earth, and also against God’s holy ones, true spiritual brothers of Jesus Christ. (Compare 2Pe 2:10-13.) Since he is a hypocrite, a false teacher claiming to be Christian, he “sits down in the temple of The God,” that is, what such false teachers claim to be that temple.—2Th 2:4.
A restraint. Paul speaks of “the thing that acts as a restraint.” (2Th 2:6) It appears that the apostles constituted this restraint. Paul had told the Ephesian overseers that after his going away wolflike men would enter in. (Ac 20:29) He repeatedly wrote admonitions about such apostasy not only here in Second Thessalonians but in many exhortations to Timothy. And he counseled Timothy to commit the things he had heard from Paul to faithful men who would be qualified to teach others. He spoke of the congregation of the living God as being “a pillar and support of the truth.” He wanted it built up as strongly as possible before the great apostasy blossomed out.—2Ti 2:2; 1Ti 3:15.
Much later, at the command of Christ, the apostle John was told to write, warning against sects, mentioning especially the sect of Nicolaus and speaking of false prophets like Balaam and of the woman Jezebel who called herself a prophetess.—Re 2:6, 14, 15, 20.
At work in apostles’ days. The apostle Paul said that the mystery was “already at work.” (2Th 2:7) There were those trying to teach false doctrine, some of these even disturbing the Thessalonian congregation, prompting, in part, the writing of his second letter to them. There were antichrists when John wrote his letters, and doubtless before that. John spoke of “the last hour” of the apostolic period, and said: “Just as you have heard that antichrist is coming, even now there have come to be many antichrists . . . They went out from us, but they were not of our sort; for if they had been of our sort, they would have remained with us. But they went out that it might be shown up that not all are of our sort.”—1Jo 2:18, 19; see ANTICHRIST.
Revealed. Following the apostles’ death, “the man of lawlessness” came out into the open with his religious hypocrisy and false teachings. (2Th 2:3, 6, 8) According to Paul’s words, this “man” would gain great power, operating under Satan’s control, performing “every powerful work and lying signs and portents.” Persons deceived by the operation of the composite “man of lawlessness” are referred to as “those who are perishing [literally, “destroying themselves”], as a retribution because they did not accept the love of the truth that they might be saved.” The apostle shows that they “get to believing the lie” and they will all “be judged because they did not believe the truth but took pleasure in unrighteousness.” (2Th 2:9-12; see Int.) The judgment is therefore a condemnatory one.—See RESURRECTION (Sin against the holy spirit).
Destroyed. This composite, hypocritical “man of lawlessness” is to be done away with by the Lord Jesus “by the spirit of his mouth” and brought to nothing “by the manifestation of his presence.” The annihilation of this wicked opposer of God will be visible, concrete proof that the Lord Jesus Christ is sitting and acting as Judge. He will not judge according to his own standards, hence the destruction “by the spirit of his mouth” evidently means in expression of Jehovah’s judgment against this wicked class of persons.—2Th 2:8; compare Re 19:21, as to “the long sword . . . which sword proceeded out of his mouth.”
Wednesday, 31 January 2024
Tuesday, 30 January 2024
ID has made Darwin Skepticism less unfashionable?
Dembski and Ruse Look Back on 20 Years of Debate — And a Special Anniversary
In 2004 Cambridge University Press published Debating Design: From Darwin to DNA, edited by William Dembski and Michael Ruse, a brilliant landmark anthology showcasing the vibrancy of the debate between intelligent design and evolution. Contributors included Angus Menuge, Kenneth Miller, Elliott Sober, Robert Pennock, Stuart Kauffman, Paul Davies, John Polkinghorne, Richard Swinburne, Walter Bradley, and Stephen Meyer. In 2024, it seemed worthwhile to look back at the two intervening decades and see how the debate has developed. So with great pleasure I invited Dembski and Ruse for a conversation on my podcast: When Debating Design was published, an ambiguity hung over it. Was this the beginning of a new chapter for ID? Or was it a swansong? Critics believed there were good reasons to think ID would peter out. The New Atheism — new at the time, in the years immediately following 9/11 which called it into being — was on the rise, enjoying far more popularity than ID did. People read New Atheist books and came away feeling courageous and victorious. Yet the New Atheism has since turned passé. Nothing guaranteed that ID would not suffer the same fate.
Intelligent Design in Two Senses
Twenty years later, ID is still here. How did it persevere? The secret, I think, has to something to do with ID being the flipside of discontent with Darwinian orthodoxy. Design can be thought of in two senses: a strict one, and an expansive one. The strict sense is design as advocated by ID proponents. It is the positive case for ID. Most atheist-leaning scientists remain averse to this. The expansive sense is design as a critique of current evolutionary theory, with the latter’s difficulties in explaining features of biology. That explanatory weakness is not, per se, evidence of design, but it does cause one to wonder about the possibility of intelligent design. Many scientists acknowledge the shortcomings of current neo-Darwinian theory. These two senses of design were discernible in Debating Design.
Debating Design gathered essays arguing respectively for four different viewpoints: Darwinism, Complex Self-Organization, Theistic Evolution, and Intelligent Design. As presented in the book, the ID viewpoint argued forcefully for design in nature. It is also true that out of the four viewpoints represented, three recognized that Darwinism by itself was an insufficient explanation for the sublime complexities in life. Seen this way, design in its expansive sense, reflected in a mass of pointed, well-reasoned criticisms, dwarfs Darwinism. By leveraging design in its expansive sense, ID proper provided a platform for scientific discussion. ID then became a viable option by championing the strict sense of design. Critics of ID who are nonetheless skeptical of Darwinism can be read as agreeing with ID that in principle evolutionary theory is not the end-all explanation for biological complexity.
Growing Doubt About Darwin
Since 2004, doubts about neo-Darwinian mechanisms have only grown. In 2014, Laland, Uller, Feldman, et al.published in Nature an influential article calling for an urgent rethink of evolutionary theory. They wrote:
The number of biologists calling for change in how evolution is conceptualized is growing rapidly. Strong support comes from allied disciplines, particularly developmental biology, but also genomics, epigenetics, ecology and social science. We contend that evolutionary biology needs revision if it is to benefit fully from these other disciplines. The data supporting our position gets stronger every day.
Yet the mere mention of the EES often evokes an emotional, even hostile, reaction among evolutionary biologists. Too often, vital discussions descend into acrimony, with accusations of muddle or misrepresentation. Perhaps haunted by the spectre of intelligent design, evolutionary biologists wish to show a united front to those hostile to science. Some might fear that they will receive less funding and recognition if outsiders — such as physiologists or developmental biologists — flood into their field.
…This is no storm in an academic tearoom, it is a struggle for the very soul of the discipline.
LALAND, K., ULLER, T., FELDMAN, M. ET AL. DOES EVOLUTIONARY THEORY NEED A RETHINK? NATURE 514, 161–164 (2014)
The protest about the “spectre of intelligent design” was telling. When critics start talking that way, as if looking over their shoulder, you can’t help wondering if the ID program is onto something. Darwinian mechanisms, as they stand today, are widely recognized as out of tune with the latest scientific discoveries in a variety of fields. This lends credence to ID, in its expansive sense, as the passage above grudgingly let’s slip. The ID community can take it as a matter of pride that from the very beginning, it has consistently been pointing out the inadequacies of evolutionary thought. Contrast this with recent fledgling viewpoints popping up in the scientific community where weaknesses in the evolutionary narrative are belatedly recognized under the euphemistic terms of “puzzles” rather than “problems,” in need of “revisions” rather than a brand new perspective. It is this trend that has encouraged a certain conciliatory quality in the debate.
Eschewing Polarization
As I listened to Dembski and Ruse, what struck me most is how their views today eschew the bitter polarization that characterized earlier discussions of ID. In the conversation, Ruse acknowledged that contemporary science has not explained how molecules could have led to mind. The mind-body problem is a fundamental question that science cannot answer. Ruse also explicitly distanced himself from the crude materialism championed by Daniel Dennett, one of the New Atheism’s Four Horsemen. While crucial differences between them remain, as Dembski aptly highlighted, overall the discussion was characterized by amiable restraint, cordiality, and even chumminess. Moreover, Dembski is a Christian, Ruse is an agnostic, and I am a Muslim, and it is significant that all three of us can take ID seriously as a topic deserving of critical engagement rather than dismissive caricaturing. It can be hoped that ID will continue making inroads in the evolution debate. Grand victories are not needed. Slow-but-steady will be far more productive than a quick-dash attempt to the finish line.
Any biological theory that cannot adequately explain the “appearance” (as Richard Dawkins puts it) of design cannot adequately explain life. ID positions itself as explaining this appearance — seen as actual, not illusory — while allowing ample space for competing non-ID theories to air their dissatisfaction with Darwinian orthodoxy. The stricter sense of design can thus be defended as a more reasonable, and a more intuitively straight-forward option amongst this plurality of the dissatisfied. Using this strategy, the ID community can hope to bolster its credibility and contribute to a greater push for a paradigm shift in origins science.
The continuation of ID across two decades where New Atheism failed shows that ID is closer to the scientific enterprise than the New Atheism ever was. The debate is not over. But as of now, it is clear that ID is heading in the right direction. Theodosius Dobzhansky’s famous saying, “Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution,” has gradually evolved into “Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of design.”
Why we wait in vain for the arrival of our AI overlords
Artificial General Intelligence: The Poverty of the Stimulus
In this series so far at Evolution News about Artificial General Intelligence, my references to AGI worshippers and idolaters will be off-putting to those who think the claim that AGI will someday arrive, whatever its ultimate ETA, is an intellectually credible and compelling position. Accordingly, I’m just being insulting by using pejorative religious language to describe AGI’s supporters, to say nothing of being a Luddite for not cheering on AGI’s ultimate triumph. I want therefore to spend some space here indicating why AGI does not deserve to be taken seriously
Let’s begin with a point on which the linguist Noam Chomsky built his career, which may be encapsulated in the phrase “the poverty of the stimulus.” His point with this phrase was that humans learn language with a minimum of input, and thus must be endowed with an in-built capacity (“hardwired”) to acquire and use language. Infants see and hear adults talk and pick up language easily and naturally. It doesn’t matter if the caregivers pay special attention to the infant and provide extra stimulation so that their child can be a “baby Einstein.” It doesn’t matter if the caregivers are neglectful or even abusive. It doesn’t even matter if the child is blind, deaf, or both. Barring developmental disorders (such as some forms of autism), the child can learn language.
But It’s Not Just the Ability to Learn Language
“The poverty of the stimulus” underscores that humans do so much more with so much less than would be expected unless humans have an innate ability to learn language with minimal inputs. And it’s not just that we learn language. We gain knowledge of the world, which we express through language. Our language is especially geared to express knowledge about an external reality. This “aboutness” of the propositions we express with language is remarkable, especially on the materialist and mechanistic grounds so widely accepted by AGI’s supporters.
As G. K. Chesterton noted in his book Orthodoxy, we have on materialist grounds no right “to assert that our thoughts have any relation to reality at all.” Matter has no way to guarantee that when matter thinks (if it can think), it will tell us true things about matter. On Darwinian materialist grounds, all we need is differential reproduction and survival. A good delusion that gets us to survive and reproduce is enough. Knowledge of truth is unnecessary and perhaps even undesirable.
The philosopher Willard Quine, who was a materialist, made essentially the same point in what he called “the indeterminacy of translation.” Quine’s thesis was that translation, meaning, and reference are all indeterminate, implying that there are always valid alternative translations of a given sentence. Quine presented a thought experiment to illustrate this indeterminacy. In it, a linguist tries to determine the meaning of the word “gavagai,” uttered by a speaker of a yet-unknown language, in response to a rabbit running by. Is the speaker referring to the rabbit, the rabbit running, some rabbit part, or something unrelated to the rabbit? All of these are legitimate possibilities according to Quine and render language fundamentally indeterministic.
Yet such arguments about linguistic indeterminacy are always self-referentially incoherent. When Quine writes of indeterminacy of translation in Word and Object (1960), and thus also embraces the inscrutability of reference, he is assuming that what he is writing on these topics is properly understood one way and not another. And just to be clear, everybody is at some point in the position of a linguist because, in learning our mother tongue, we all start with a yet-unknown language. So Quine is tacitly making Chomsky’s point, which is that with minimal input — which is to say with input that underdetermines how it might be interpreted — we nevertheless have a knack for finding the right interpretation and gaining real knowledge about the world.
Chomsky’s poverty of the stimulus is regarded as controversial by some because an argument can be made that the stimuli that lead to learning, especially language learning, may in fact be adequate without having to assume a massive contribution of innate capabilities. Chomsky came up with this notion in the debate over behaviorism, which needed to characterize all human capacities as a result of stimulus-response learning. Language, according to the behaviorists, was thus characterized as verbal behavior elicited through various reinforcement schedules of rewarded and discouraged behaviors. In fact, Chomsky made a name for himself in the 1950s by reviewing B. F. Skinner’s book Verbal Behavior. That review is justly famous for demolishing behaviorist approaches to language (the field never recovered after Chomsky’s demolition).
If Chomsky Is Right
But suppose we admit that the controversy about whether the stimuli by which humans learn language has yet to be fully resolved. If Chomsky is right, those stimuli are in some sense impoverished. If his critics are right, they are adequate without needing to invoke extraordinary innate capacities. Yet if we leave aside the debate between Chomsky’s nativism and Skinner’s behaviorism, it’s nonetheless the case that such stimuli are vastly smaller in number than what artificial neural nets need to achieve human-level competence.
Consider LLMs, large language models, which are currently the rage, and of which ChatGPT is the best known and most widely used. ChatGPT4 uses 1.76 trillion parameters and its training set is based on hundreds of billions of words (perhaps a lot more, but that was the best lower-bound estimate I was able to find). Obviously, individual humans gain their language facility with nowhere near this scale of inputs. If a human child were able to process 200 words per minute and did so continuously, then by the age of ten the child would have processed 200 x 60 x 24 x 365 x 10, or roughly a billion, words. Of course, this is a vast overestimate of the child’s language exposure, ignoring sleep, repetitions, and lulls in conversation.
Or consider Tesla, which since 2015 has been promising fully autonomous vehicles as just on the horizon. Full autonomy keeps eluding the grasp of Tesla engineers, though the word on the street is that self-driving is getting better and better (as with a reported self-driving taxi in San Francisco, albeit by Waymo rather than Tesla). But consider: To aid in developing autonomous driving, Tesla processes 160 billion video frames each day from the cameras on its vehicles. This massive amount of data, used to train the neural network to achieve full self-driving, is obviously many orders of magnitude beyond what humans require to learn to drive effectively.
Erik Larson’s book The Myth of Artificial Intelligence (Harvard, 2021) is appropriately subtitled Why Computers Can’t Think the Way We Do. Whatever machines are doing when they exhibit intelligence comparable to humans, they are doing it in ways vastly different from what humans are doing. In particular, the neural networks in the news today require huge amounts of computing power and huge amounts of input data (generated, no less, from human intelligent behavior). It’s no accident that artificial intelligence’s major strides in recent years fall under Big Tech and Big Data. The “Big” here is far bigger than anything available to individual humans.
Domain Specificity
The sheer scale of efforts needed to make artificial intelligence impressive suggests human intelligence is fundamentally different from machine intelligence. But reasons to think the two are different don’t stop there. Domain specificity should raise additional doubts about the two being the same. When Elon Musk, for instance, strives to bring about fully autonomous (level 5) driving, it is by building neural nets that every week must sort through a trillion images taken from Tesla automobiles driving in real traffic under human control. Not only is the amount of data to be analyzed staggering, but it is also domain specific, focused entirely on developing self-driving automobiles.
Indeed, no one thinks that the image data being collected from Tesla automobiles and then analyzed by neural nets to facilitate full self-driving is also going to be used for automatically piloting a helicopter or helping a robot navigate a ski slope, to say nothing of playing chess or composing music. All our efforts in artificial intelligence are highly domain specific. What makes LLMs, and ChatGPT in particular, so impressive is that language is such a general instrument for expressing human intelligence. And yet, even the ability to use language in contextually relevant way based on huge troves of humanly generated data is still domain specific.
The French philosopher René Descartes, even though he saw animal bodies, including human bodies, as machines, nonetheless thought that the human mind was non-mechanical. Hence, he posited a substance dualism in which a non-material mind interacted with a material body, at the pineal gland no less. How a non-material mind could interact with a material/mechanical body Descartes left unanswered (invoking the pineal gland did nothing to resolve that problem). And yet, Descartes regarded the mind as irreducible to matter/mechanism. As he noted in his Discourse on Method (1637, pt. 5, my translation):
Although machines can do many things as well as or even better than us, they fail in other ways, thereby revealing that they do not act from knowledge but solely from the arrangement of their parts. Intelligence is a universal instrument that can meet all contingencies. Machines, on the other hand, need a specific arrangement for every specific action. In consequence, it’s impossible for machines to exhibit the diversity needed to act effectively in all the contingencies of life as our intelligence enables us to act.
Descartes was here making exactly the point of domain specificity. We can get machines to do specific things — to be wildly successful in a given, well-defined domain. Chess playing is an outstanding example, with computer chess now vastly stronger than human chess (though, interestingly, having such strong chess programs has also vastly improved the quality of human play). But chess programs play chess. They don’t also play Minecraft or Polytopia. Sure, we could create additional artificial intelligence programs that also play Minecraft and Polytopia, and then we could kludge them together with a chess playing program so that we have a single program that plays all three games. But such a kludge offers no insight into how to create an AGI that can learn to play all games, to say nothing of being a general-purpose learner, or what Descartes called “a universal instrument that can meet all contingencies.” Descartes was describing AGI. Yet artificial intelligence in its present form, even given the latest developments, is not even close.
Elon Musk Appreciates the Problem
He therefore is building Optimus, also known as the Tesla Bot. The goals is for it to become a conceptual general-purpose robotic humanoid. By having to be fully interactive with the same environments and sensory inputs as humans, such a robot could serve as a proof of concept for Descartes’s universal instrument and thus AGI. What if such a robot could understand and speak English, drive a car safely, not just play chess but learn other board games, have facial features capable of expressing what in humans would be appropriate affect, play musical instruments, create sculptures and paintings, do plumbing and electrical work, etc. That would be impressive and take us a long way toward AGI. And yet, Optimus is for now far more modest. For now, the robot is intended to be capable of performing tasks that are “unsafe, repetitive, or boring.” That is a far cry from AGI.
AGI is going to require a revolution in current artificial intelligence research, showing how to overcome domain specificity so that machines can learn novel skills and tasks for which they were not explicitly programed. And just to be clear, reinforcement learning doesn’t meet this challenge. Take AlphaZero, a program developed by DeepMind to play chess, shogi, and Go, which improved its game by playing millions of games against itself using reinforcement learning (which is to say, it rewarded winning and penalized losing). This approach allows the program to learn and improve without ongoing human intervention, leading to significant advances in computer game playing ability. But it depends on the game being neatly represented in the state of a computer, along with clear metrics for what constitutes good and bad play.
The really challenging work of current artificial intelligence research is taking the messy real world and representing it in domain-specific ways so that the artificial intelligence created can emulate humans at particular tasks. The promise of AGI is somehow to put all these disparate artificial intelligence efforts together, coming up with a unified solution to computationalize all human tasks and capacities in one fell swoop. We have not done this, are nowhere close to doing this, and have no idea of how to approach doing this.
JEHOVAH'S Favorite type of prayer?
In your brother servant's very fallible an unauthoritative opinion:
2chronicles Ch.1:11,12NIV"God said to Solomon, “Since this is your heart’s desire and you have not asked for wealth, possessions or honor, nor for the death of your enemies, and since you have not asked for a long life but for wisdom and knowledge to govern my people over whom I have made you king, 12therefore wisdom and knowledge will be given you. And I will also give you wealth, possessions and honor, such as no king who was before you ever had and none after you will have.”"
Proverbs Ch.2:3NIV"indeed, if you call out for insight
and cry aloud for understanding,
4and if you look for it as for silver
and search for it as for hidden treasure,
5then you will understand the fear of the Lord
and find the knowledge of God."
Take it from one who knows.
James ch.1:5,6NIV"If any of you lacks wisdom, you should ask God, who gives generously to all without finding fault, and it will be given to you. 6But when you ask, you must believe and not doubt, because the one who doubts is like a wave of the sea, blown and tossed by the wind."
Monday, 29 January 2024
Substitutionary atonement falsifies unconditional immortality and thus eternal conscious torment
Isaiah ch.53:5NKJV"But He was wounded[k] for our transgressions,
He was [l]bruised for our iniquities;
The chastisement for our peace was upon Him,
And by His stripes[m] we are healed."
John ch.1:29NJV"The next day John saw Jesus coming toward him and said, “Look, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world!"
The animal sacrifices under law which set the principle for the mechanism of Christ own ransom were clearly of a substitutionary sort. That is why we read.
Leviticus ch.17:11NIV"For the life(lit.soul) of a creature is in the blood, and I have given it to you to make atonement for yourselves on the altar; it is the blood that makes atonement for one’s life(lit.soul). c"
The blood of these animals can serve as a token of their conscious existence because their conscious existence (or even subconscious existence is dependent on blood) so God was willing to accept the offering of this innocent creature's lifeblood as a substitute to the truly repentant worshipper's life. The meaning of the whole transaction was an acknowledgement that JEHOVAH Does not owe the gift of life ,let alone life as a Son of God to anyone. But if our personhood is not dependent on blood as would be the case if we are unconditionally immortal or a spirit being then the substitutionary nature of the transaction is falsified.
Christ's blood is called a superior offering to that of animal sacrifices under her law because like the first Adam before the fall he was utterly sinless and hence entitled to perpetual and perfect human life. His blood could only be token this if his life/personhood was dependent on same. If as leviticus ch.17:10,11 says of the typical victims that their souls were in their blood,so to speak, was true of him also.
Matthew Ch.20:28NIV"just as the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give(not lend)his life(lit.soul) as a ransom for many.”"
Isaiah ch.53:12NIV"Therefore I will give him a portion among the great, and he will divide the spoils with the strong, because he poured out his life(lit.soul)unto death, and was numbered with the transgressors. For he bore the sin of many, and made intercession for the transgressors."
The fact that an offering of perfect sinless flesh and blood was deemed as a worthy ransom sufficient to restore us to same sinless state possessed by our founders. Indicates that perfect human flesh and blood can sustain a sinless and perfect human life indefinitely. And that a perpetual future existence is not dependent on the possession of any immortal soul distinct from the body.
Jesus surrender of his superfluous physical form for parts of three days would not be a substitution for the eternal suffering of such an immortal spirit soul or the immortal body that would accompany it in its eternal suffering.
So we can have the offering of Jesus' sinless flesh and blood i.e his human perfection as a true substitutionary ransom or we can have unconditional immortality and eternal conscious torment but not both.
Matthew Henry's commentary on Michael the great prince.
"Michael signifies, Who is like God, and his name, with the title of the great Prince, points out the Divine Saviour. Christ stood for the children of our people in their stead as a sacrifice, bore the curse for them, to bear it from them. He stands for them in pleading for them at the throne of grace. And after the destruction of antichrist, the Lord Jesus shall stand at the latter day upon the earth; and He shall appear for the complete redemption of all his people."
Matthew Henry
:https://biblehub.com/commentaries/mhc/daniel/12.htm
(As tends to be the case) The slippery slope gets the last laugh.
Now Doctors to Help Younger People Commit Suicide by Self-Starvation
The euthanasia movement not only promotes lethal injection and assisted suicide but what is known in the death crowd’s parlance as VSED, which stands for “voluntary stop eating and drinking.” Because starving and dehydrating oneself produces agony, VSED usually requires a doctor’s palliative assistance to ameliorate what would be otherwise unbearable suffering that would lead the despairing person to give up the attempt.
VSED is pushed here for the elderly by groups like Compassion & Choices. Now, in the Netherlands, younger people are to be granted help in starving themselves to death. From the Dutch News story:
Doctors’ federation KNMG has scrapped the age limit for care for people who have chosen to end their lives by refusing to eat and drink.
Some 700 people a year die by this method in the Netherlands. Under the new guideline, meant for doctors and other caregivers, people younger than 60 can now also apply for end of life care, for instance from a hospice.
Hospice, properly understood, provides palliative and other medical and social services to people who are terminally ill. But now, apparently Dutch hospices will do that for people who would not be dying but for starving and dehydrating themselves.
The Theory of Harm Reduction
In the usual Dutch manner, experts opine that rather than seek to prevent awful occurrences, it must be accommodated — the theory of harm reduction:
De Graeff, who works as a doctor at the Demeter hospice, said space must be made for younger people wishing to die by refusing food and drink. “If a patient has made the considered choice to do this, we can all think what we like,” he said. “But if that is what they want then it is better to do it in an environment where they can be supported than on their own.”
NO. Doctors and hospices can — and should — refuse to participate in any patient’s suicide. That doesn’t mean refusing to help the suicidal person. Of course, prevention efforts should be engaged. But it does mean refusing to be complicit.
Of course, we in the U.S. have our own such issues, even beyond pernicious VSED advocacy. After all, Terri Schiavo — who would not otherwise have been dying but for the medically unnecessary removal of her feeding tube — spent her last years in a hospice. And her agony wasn’t even palliated. Due to the demands of her husband, her family wasn’t even allowed to soothe her drying and cracking lips with ice chips. What a vile travesty.
It’s almost like the West has developed a death cult. Or maybe, not “almost.”
Sunday, 28 January 2024
There is a time to punish: The Watchtower Society's Commentary
When Is There a Basis for Taking Offense?
AT ECCLESIASTES 7:9, the Bible states: “The taking of offense is what rests in the bosom of the stupid ones.” This verse shows that we should not be overly sensitive when someone offends us; rather, we should be forgiving.
However, is Ecclesiastes 7:9 saying that we should never be offended by anything or anyone, that we are to forgive all offenses regardless of how severe or how frequent they are and not do anything about them? Should we be unconcerned about our giving offense by word or action because we know that the one offended should be forgiving? This cannot be the case.
JEHOVAH God is the epitome of love, mercy, forgiveness, and long-suffering. Yet, in the Bible, he is many times spoken of as being offended. When the offense was severe, he took action against the offenders. Consider some examples.
Offenses Against JEHOVAH
The account at 1 Kings 15:30 speaks of the sins of Jeroboam “with which he caused Israel to sin and by his offensiveness with which he offended Jehovah.” At 2 Chronicles 28:25, the Bible says regarding King Ahaz of Judah: “He made high places for making sacrificial smoke to other gods, so that he offended Jehovah the God of his forefathers.” Another example is found at Judges 2:11-14: “Israel fell to doing what was bad in the eyes of Jehovah and serving the Baals . . . , so that they offended Jehovah. . . . At this Jehovah’s anger blazed against Israel, so that he gave them into the hands of the pillagers.”
There are other things that offended Jehovah and that called for strong action. For example, at Exodus 22:18-20, we read: “You must not preserve a sorceress alive. Anyone lying down with a beast is positively to be put to death. One who sacrifices to any gods but Jehovah alone is to be devoted to destruction.”
Jehovah did not continually forgive the major offenses of ancient Israel when they kept offending him and did not show true repentance. Where there was no true repentance and no actions to indicate that there was a turning around to obey Jehovah, God eventually gave the perpetrators up to destruction. This happened on a national scale in 607 B.C.E., at the hands of the Babylonians, and again in 70 C.E., at the hands of the Romans.
Yes, Jehovah takes offense at the bad things that people say and do, and he even executes unrepentant offenders whose sins are gross. But does this put him in the category of those of whom Ecclesiastes 7:9 speaks? Not at all. He is justified in taking offense at gross sins and always judges fairly. The Bible says of Jehovah: “Perfect is his activity, for all his ways are justice. A God of faithfulness, with whom there is no injustice; righteous and upright is he.”—Deuteronomy 32:4.
Major Offenses Against Individuals
Under the Law that God gave to ancient Israel, there were serious consequences for major offenses against individuals. For instance, if a thief came into a house at night and the householder killed him, there was no bloodguilt on the part of the householder. He was an innocent victim of a major crime. Hence, we read: “If a thief should be found in the act of breaking in and he does get struck and die, there is no bloodguilt for [the householder].”—Exodus 22:2.
A woman who has been raped has a right to be highly offended, as this is a major crime in God’s eyes. Under the Mosaic Law, a man who raped a woman was to die “just as when a man rises up against his fellowman and indeed murders him.” (Deuteronomy 22:25, 26) While we are no longer under that Law, it gives us insight into how Jehovah feels about rape—a horrible wrong.
In our time, rape is also a major crime with severe penalties. The victim has EVERY RIGHT to report the matter to the police. In this way the proper authorities can punish the offender. And if the victim is a minor, the parents may want to initiate these actions.(italics mine)
Lesser Offenses
However, not all offenses require action by the authorities. Thus, we should not want to take undue offense at the relatively minor mistakes that others make, but we should be forgiving. How often should we forgive? The apostle Peter asked Jesus: “Lord, how many times is my brother to sin against me and am I to forgive him? Up to seven times?” Jesus answered: “I say to you, not, Up to seven times, but, Up to seventy-seven times.”—Matthew 18:21, 22.
On the other hand, there is a continuing need for us to work on our Christian personality to try to minimize giving offense. For instance, when you deal with others, are you at times blunt, tactless, insulting? Such ways are likely to offend. Rather than blaming the victim for taking offense and feeling that the burden of forgiveness is on him, the offender needs to realize that he is the reason that the person took offense. The offender needs to work on controlling his actions and speech so as not to give offense in the first place. This effort will reduce the number of times we hurt the feelings of others. The Bible reminds us: “There exists the one speaking thoughtlessly as with the stabs of a sword, but the tongue of the wise ones is a healing.” (Proverbs 12:18) When we offend others, even if we did not intend to do so, our making an apology goes a long way toward remedying the situation.
God’s Word shows that we should “pursue the things making for peace and the things that are upbuilding to one another.” (Romans 14:19) When we are tactful and kind, the proverb applies: “As apples of gold in silver carvings is a word spoken at the right time for it.” (Proverbs 25:11) What a pleasant and delightful impression that leaves! Mild, tactful speech can even change the rigid attitudes of others: “A mild tongue itself can break a bone.”—Proverbs 25:15.
Hence, God’s Word counsels us: “Let your utterance be always with graciousness, seasoned with salt, so as to know how you ought to give an answer to each one.” (Colossians 4:6) “Seasoned with salt” means that we make our expressions tasteful to others, thereby reducing the possibility of giving offense. In both word and deed, Christians strive to apply the Bible’s admonition: “Seek peace and pursue it.”—1 Peter 3:11.
Thus, Ecclesiastes 7:9 must mean that we should refrain from taking offense at the relatively minor sins of others. These may be the result of human imperfection or may even be deliberate yet not gross. But when an offense is a major sin, it is understandable that the victim may be offended and may choose to initiate appropriate action.—Matthew 18:15-17.
Saturday, 27 January 2024
Yet more re:the God hypothesis.
Andrew Klavan and Stephen Meyer Talk God and Science
On a classic episode of ID the Future, philosopher of science Dr. Stephen C. Meyer sits down with talk show host and bestselling novelist Andrew Klavan to discuss Meyer’s Return of the God hypothesis. In this fast-paced conversation the pair touch on the Judeo-Christian roots of science, how fine-tuning in physics and cosmology point to intelligent design, and how a great many scientists held out hope that the universe was eternal and therefore did not require a creator, until the evidence for a cosmic beginning mounted. What about the multiverse hypothesis as an escape for atheists wishing to explain away the evidence for a cosmic designer? Meyer explains why it fails the test of Occam’s razor. Finally, Meyer and Klavan discuss a noted atheist philosopher who frankly admits that he doesn’t want theism to be true and yet also admits that modern Darwinism has failed and that the evidence for design in various scientific fields is too powerful to be ignored.
Download the podcast or listen to it here.
Friday, 26 January 2024
The rise of the machines is a thing?
Artificial General Intelligence: An Idol for Destruction
Artificial general intelligence, or AGI, if it is ever achieved, would be a computing machine that matches and then exceeds all human cognitive ability. To those like Ray Kurzweil, who are convinced that humans in their essence are computing machines, humans will soon achieve AGI by creating such machines. Then for a time, humans will become cyborgs, merging with machines. But ultimately, humans will dispense with their bodies, uploading themselves without remainder onto machines. In this way, they will achieve digital immortality.
This vision, which I will be considering in a series at Evolution News, has captured the imagination of many, though not always with the optimism of Kurzweil. Worries about a dystopian AGI future in the vein of Skynet (The Terminator), Hal 9000 (2001: A Space Odyssey), or the Matrix (The Matrix) are widespread. Elon Musk, for instance, sees the coming of AGI as a greater threat to humanity than nuclear weapons, and thus warns about placing safeguards on artificial intelligence, as it currently is being developed, so that as AGI emerges, it doesn’t run amuck and kill us all. Musk’s worry loses some urgency because AGI does not appear to be imminent. Even with the recent impressive advances in artificial intelligence, the improvements have been domain specific (text generation, automatic driving, game playing) rather than all encompassing, as they must be for a true AGI.
Even so, many notable intellectuals and influencers are now convinced that AGI is in our near future. Some, like Kurzweil, think this will be the best thing ever to happen to humanity. Others, like Musk, see grave dangers. But even Musk feels the siren call to play a part in bringing about AGI. Take his Neuralink initiative, which is to “create a generalized brain interface to restore autonomy to those with unmet medical needs today and unlock human potential tomorrow.” The Neuralink brain interface is invasive, requiring electrodes to be implanted into the brain. It’s one thing for technology to unlock human potential by acting as a servant that minimizes tedious chores so that we can focus on creative work. But it’s another thing to merge our brains/minds with machines, as with neural implants. To the degree that this merger is successful, the mental will give way to the mechanical and render AGI all the more plausible and appealing.
The Argument of This Series
I will argue in this series that AGI is an idol and so, like all idols, that AGI is a fraud. Idols are always frauds because they substitute a lesser for a greater, demanding reverence for the lesser at the expense of the greater. Granted, we misappraise things all the time. But with idolatry, the stakes are as high as they can be because idolatry misappraises things of ultimate value. The AGI idol is a call to worship technology at the expense of our humanity (and ultimately of God). Humans, as creators of technology, are clearly the greater in relation to technology, and yet AGI would reverse this natural order. The AGI idol demeans our humanity, reducing us to mere mechanism. Because of the inherent fraud in idols, there’s only one legitimate response to them, namely, to destroy them. This series attempts a demolition of the AGI idol.
An obvious question now arises: What if AGI eventually is realized and clearly exceeds every human capability? Will it then cease to be an idol and instead become a widely accepted fact to which we must reconcile ourselves if we are to maintain intellectual credibility — or just be functioning citizens in an increasingly technological world? We might equally ask whether a SETI cult that worships advanced alien intelligences would still be idolaters if aliens superior to us in every way finally did clearly and unmistakably land on Earth. Such counterfactuals, whether for AGI or SETI, raise intriguing possibilities, but for now they are only that. As we will see, the evidence for taking them seriously is lacking.
There are sound reasons to think that AGI is inherently unattainable — that the human mind is not a mechanical device and that artificial intelligence can never bootstrap itself to full human functioning (to say nothing of achieving a human’s full inner life, such as consciousness, emotions, and sensations). I will offer such an argument in this series. But the real point at issue with the AGI idol is the delusional effect it has on its worshippers. For thinking AGI a live possibility, AGI worshippers reduce humans to machines and thereby denigrate our humanity. In this, AGI worshippers are merely following the logic of their beliefs. The key feature of belief is its power to govern our actions and thoughts irrespective of the actual truth of what we believe.
Not every anticipated scientific or technological advance is an idol. It becomes an idol when the prospect of that advance degenerates into religious zealotry aimed at dethroning God. Kurzweil displayed such zeal when he wrote a 2005 book titled The Singularity Is Near and then, without apparent irony, followed it up with a 2024 book titled The Singularity is Nearer. It’s like the old cartoon of a man wearing a sandwich sign with the words “The world ends today!” A cop stops him and says, “Okay, but don’t let me see you wearing that sign tomorrow.” I’m eager for Kurzweil to release The Singularity is Here.
An Even More Intense Zeal
Though Kurzweil’s zeal for AGI may seem hard to beat, we find an even more intense zeal for AGI at OpenAI, whose ChatGPT has put artificial intelligence front and center in the public consciousness. OpenAI chief scientist and board member Ilya Sutskever is reported “to burn effigies and lead ritualistic chants at the company,” such as the refrain “”Feel the AGI! Feel the AGI!” We even find OpenAI cofounder Sam Altman now the subject of articles with titles such as “Sam Altman Seems to Imply That OpenAI Is Building God.” Altman describes AGI as a “magic intelligence in the sky” and foresees that AGI will become an omnipotent superintelligence. Likewise, the Church of AI teaches that “at some point AI will have God-like powers.” If this is not idolatry, what is a more apt description?
Before we go further, let me emphasize that this series is not religious in nature. Granted, I will be using religious terminology and themes to illuminate AGI and its destructive role in misshaping our view of the world and of ourselves. But this series is principally a philosophical and scientific critique of AGI. Religious themes provide a particularly effective lens for understanding the challenges raised by AGI. Worshippers of the AGI idol agree that AGI has yet to be realized but they see its arrival not only as imminent but also as a messianic coming. Whereas artificial intelligence is a legitimate field of study, artificial general intelligence, as its apotheosis, is a religious ideology. AGI worshippers are like those apocalyptic sects that are forever predicting a new order of things and constantly rationalizing why it has yet to arrive, scapegoating those who resist their vision.
The Problem with Idolatry Historically
Before getting into the nuts and bolts of AGI, I want to say more about idolatry and why historically it has been regarded as a problem — indeed, a pernicious evil. Traditionally speaking, an idol attempts to usurp the role of God, putting itself in place of God even though it is not God or anywhere close to God. By analogy, it is an “Antichrist” vying to take the place of the true Christ. The Greek preposition “anti,” when appearing in modern English, is usually translated as “against.” But “anti” in the Greek actually means “instead of.” The Antichrist falsely assumes the role of the true Christ. Idols are always “anti” in this sense to whatever has, up to now, been regarded as of ultimate value (which traditionally has always been God).
In the Old Testament of the Bible, idolatry is universally condemned. The first two of the Ten Commandments are explicitly against it: Don’t have any other gods (except God) and don’t make any graven image of any gods (even of God). It can be argued that the last of the Ten Commandments is also against idolatry, namely, the prohibition against coveting. In the New Testament Epistle to the Colossians, the apostle Paul warns against covetousness, which he explicitly identifies with idolatry (Col. 3:5). But what is covetousness except an inordinate desire for something to advance one’s selfish interests at the expense of others and ultimately of God? It is placing a created thing above God as well as above creatures made in the image of God (namely, other humans). In his Four-Hundred Chapters on Love (I.5 and I.7), the seventh-century Christian saint Maximus the Confessor elaborated on this connection between covetousness and idolatry:
If all things have been made by God and for his sake, then God is better than what has been made by him. The one who forsakes the better and is engrossed in inferior things shows that he prefers the things made by God to God himself… If the soul is better than the body and God incomparably better than the world which he created, the one who prefers the body to the soul and the world to the God who created it is no different from idolaters.
Idols are inherently ideational. An image carved into wood is just an image, but it becomes an idol depending on the ideas we attach to it and the reverence we give those ideas. What’s important about idols is their perceived, not their actual, connection to reality. Consequently, AGI’s power as an idol does not reside in its attainability but in the faith that it is attainable. Idols can be given physical form, as the idols of old. But they can be purely ideational. The great movements of mass murder in the 20th century were governed by ideas that captured people’s imaginations and produced a collective insanity. These idols of the mind are arguably more pernicious than the physical idols created by ancient cultures, which can be reverenced without understanding. But an idol of the mind created out of ideas must, by its nature, be understood to be reverenced.
Prohibitions against idolatry abound in the Old Testament. Yet most of those prohibitions do not explain what exactly is wrong with idolatry. In the worldview of the Old Testament, idolatry was so obviously wrong that its condemnation was typically enough, requiring no further justification. The uncreated God who resides in heaven surpasses any humanly created idol — end of story. But Isaiah 44:9-20 examines the problem of idolatry more deeply. The idol maker who fells a tree uses part of it for basic needs like warmth and cooking, and from the remainder crafts an idol. This idol, despite being the handiwork of the idol maker, thereby becomes an object of worship and devotion.
Isaiah’s critical insight is to explain the idol’s deceptive power. The craftsman, blinded by his own creativity, fails to recognize the idol as merely his creation, and so becomes entrapped in worshiping a delusion: “A deluded heart misleads him; he cannot save himself, or say, ‘Is not this thing in my right hand a lie?’” (Isaiah 44:20, NIV) Unlike other Old Testament passages that emphasize the uselessness of idols, Isaiah points out a more insidious danger: the temptation to craft gods according to our own desires and specifications and then to delude ourselves into thinking that these mere creations are worthy of our highest regard, which is to say worthy of our worship. When we worship something that is not worthy of our worship, we degrade ourselves. (This and the previous paragraph are drawn from Leslie Zeigler’s talk at Princeton Theological Seminary in 1994 titled “Christianity or Feminism?”)
Effusive Praise and Hushed Awe
Just to be clear, I understand that to the modern secular mind, the language of idolatry and worship will seem out of place and off-putting. But given the effusive praise and hushed awe with which the advent of AGI is being greeted, this language is hardly a stretch. The secular prophets who are promising AGI, who are earnestly striving to be at the forefront of ushering it in, see themselves as creating the greatest thing humans have ever created, which they advertise as a giant leap forward in our evolution. Even if AGI were to turn against them and the rest of humanity, killing all of us, they would view AGI as the pinnacle of human achievement and take satisfaction in whatever role they might play in its creation.
If idolatry is so gross an evil, what should be done about it? In the Old Testament, idols were embodied in physical things (golden calves, fertility images, carvings of Baal), and so the obvious answer to idolatry was the physical destruction of the idols. But the problem with idolatry is not ultimately with an idol’s physical embodiment but with what’s in the heart of the idolaters that turns them away from the true God to lesser realities. That’s why, in both the Old and New Testaments, the call is not just to destroy physical idols but more importantly to change one’s heart so that it is directed toward God and away from the idols. Without that, people will simply keep returning to the idols (as with the constant refrain in the Book of Judges that the Israelites yet again did evil in the sight of the Lord by worshipping idols). In the Old Testament, God’s people are called to turn (Hebrew shuv) from evil and return to a right relationship with God. In the New Testament, the same concept takes the form of redirecting one’s mind (Greek metanoia), and is typically translated as repentance.
How then to get people to turn or repent from idolatry? Ultimately, overturning idolatry requires humility, realizing that we and our creations are not God, and that only God is God. The eastern Orthodox theologian Alexander Schmemann saw the problem clearly: “It is not the immorality of the crimes of man that reveal him as a fallen being; it is his ‘positive ideal’ — religious or secular — and his satisfaction with this ideal.” For AGI worshippers, AGI is as positive an ideal as exists. The answer to it is humility, realizing that AGI will never rival God and thus also never rival the creatures made in God’s image, namely, ourselves. In particular, we do not get to create God.
The closest thing to AGI in the Bible is the Tower of Babel. The conceit of those building the tower was that its “top may reach unto heaven.” (Genesis 11:4) Seriously?! Shouldn’t it have been obvious to all concerned that however high the tower might be built, there would always be higher to go? Even with primitive cosmologies describing the “vault” or “arch” of heaven, it should have been clear that heaven would continually elude these builders’ best efforts. Indeed, there was no way the tower would ever reach heaven. And yet the builders deluded themselves into thinking that this was possible. Interestingly, God’s answer to the tower was not to destroy it but to confuse its builders by disrupting their communications so that they simply discontinued building it. AGI’s ultimate fate, whatever its precise form, is to run aground on the hubris of its builders.
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