Thoughts on Hope

A couple days ago I wrote a review of Aaron Youngren’s book on AI and Christianity, Wild and Glorious. I am friends with the author and his family, and I knew a lot of what I had to say would not be well received. Still, I needed to get it out.

One thing that my review did not explain very well was how exactly my apparent pessimism around AI squares with being a Christian. Are we not told repeatedly not to worry, not to despair? Are we not promised Heaven on Earth?

Yes, we are promised these things. Yes, we must have faith. But faith is not found in certainty, or it would not be faith. “I believe; help my unbelief!” (Mark 9:94) is the pattern for faith we find in the Bible. Job scrapes his sores and does not curse God. Abraham binds his son upon an altar. Jesus prays in Gethsemane.

I am not a doomer. I wrote a whole essay about this. At the end of that essay, I allude to the opening of Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling, which examines the story of Abraham and Isaac. Abraham had everything to lose when he brought Isaac. He had been given his son beyond all expectations. He had been promised he would become the father of generations, numberless as the stars. And now God commanded him to sacrifice his son, and all future sons, all children of Abraham ever after.

So are we at this moment. We have been given the completely undeserved gift of life, and of all the blessings of the world. We stand to be the fathers of the new world that comes after us. But now we are about to bring down the knife on its throat, upon an altar of our own creation. It is a charming coincidence that the servant leading Abraham up to that point was named Eliezer. It seems it must be so. And yet, God will provide.

Of course, this is not a perfect analogy. But it holds well enough to express what I am saying here. I do not think we can deny the dangers before us. But though it is difficult for me to see a way out of this mess, I must trust there there will be one. I do not want to dismiss the Scriptures. I do not want to dismiss what I see before my eyes. I don’t think trying to rationalize this will work. As Kierkegaard said, in one hundred and thirty years, Abraham got no further than faith.

I was not trying to despair or discount God’s goodness with my review. Far from it. I think despair is the easy way out of this, and we have a lot of hard work to do. What I was trying to do was warn against a couple failure modes I often see in Christian reasoning about AI, both of which I saw in full display in the book. First, since the power and risk of AI is real, we would be fools to dismiss it. Second, making categorical rejections of what is and what is not possible based upon Scripture usually leads to either shifting goalposts until words become meaningless, or shock and rebound when one’s rejection is invalidated by actual events. I would call these hollow faith and fragile faith. I plan to write a bit more on these in the coming days.

For now, I hope I have made my position clear. We have already drawn the knife. I pray that before we bring it down, we see the ram in the thicket, waiting for us.