So we can create robots in a few years, but God cannot create man in a day?
The inability of secular minds to imagine the power and creativity of God as Creator is wonderful to behold.
Hyper evolution is the new term to hype up man’s creativity. It is astonishing to see what man can create, but secularists don’t have the imagination to imagine what God can create. They cannot even imagine the existence of the Being of God.
Robotics took off in Japan in the 1980s, where the philosophy of animism promotes the idea that the spirit in man is the same as the spirit in all material things. In the western world we are used to the secular concept that there is no difference between man and animals, but animism believes that there is no difference between man and machines. It is an old theological debate, but secularists don’t bother with theology and spirit. This is a blind spot in their thinking – ideologically driven by their fear of the concept of God, infinity and eternity, just as Pythagoras and Aristotle didn’t like infinity in mathematics, and it took a thousand more years before the Indians inserted zero into mathematics.
Robotic evolution is developing hybrids of biology and technology (industrial robot arms with designer claws, or legs with wheels instead of feet), and animism is a hybrid between pure secularism (no spirit) and theism (spirit is more essential than matter and God is the supreme Spirit). Animism agrees with secularism that there is no transcendent God but disagrees with secularism that there is no spirit. This hybrid suits some secularists, just as islam suits some religious people who want to believe in one god but not in Christ’s explanation of God as Trinity – one God existing as Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
It is an old debate, and the difference is explained in the theological terminology of theism (belief in God), atheism (belief in no God nor spirit) and pantheism (everything is god or spirit). The latter is poorly known nor understood in western society but it is common in African cultural animism and in Japan. So the Japanese are not as frightened of robots as those in the west, who are afraid that robots will 1. take over our jobs and 2. take over the world.
The first fear is Luddite and shows a lack of imagination about human adaptability, and the second fear arises from the mistaken belief that artificial intelligence (AI) will match and outperform human intelligence. AI will certainly outperform many human actions and abilities, but not intelligence because machines do not have spirits like human beings nor animals. Animals have different spirits from human beings (Ecc 3:21). Secular science has still to determine this, which is intuitively known to small children but ideologically suppressed in secular adults – ‘who suppress the truth in unrighteousness … as they did not like to retain God in their knowledge’ Rom 1:18,28.
The boundaries between man, animal and machine are clear to human intuition, but secularism blurs the distinctions for ideological reasons, out of fear of God, the infinite and eternity. Jesus Christ addresses these fears and one of the commonest phrases in the Bible is ‘Fear not’.
‘There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear, because fear has torment. Whoever is afraid has not been perfected in love.
1Jn 4:18
Jesus says: ‘This is the will of Him that sent Me, that every one who sees the Son of God and believes on Him, may have everlasting life: and I will raise him up at the last day’ Jn 6:40.
Welcome to the love of God and salvation from fear.
Update:
21 Sep 2017: Peter Hitchens’ diagnosis of irreligion: “it is because humanity is afraid of God and the reality of what could happen after death.”
23 Oct 2017: Richard Dawkins correctly notes that eternity is a frightening concept to those who do not like it, and like many others he is in denial about what he fears. His fear does not alter the reality. This is why God says ‘Fear not’ so often in Scripture.
Caption to a photograph: “Charles Lyell just before his death in 1875, a blind widower obsessed with the problem of an afterlife. Darwin admitted that, similarly placed, the same fears would strike him ‘in the dead of the night with painful force’.”
Darwin, Adrian Desmond and James Moore, Michael Joseph, London 1991. Caption to a photograph opposite p. 652.
13 Jan 2020: Sir Roger Scruton on your lifetime and eternity. Daniel Hannan’s personal testimony to the “greatest conservative thinker” of our age, since he first heard him speak about Wittgenstein, the use of language and prejudice.
27 Nov 2023: the Pros and Cons of Artificial Intelligence.
1 Jan 2024: the joy of the Lord is your strength.
Donald's Thoughts 
“They cannot even imagine God.”
Who can? Better not to try. You will only succeed in inventing another religion.
Does Yeshua not free us from the need to try? That he is Almighty God becomes increasingly clear, or put another way, increasingly difficult to circumvent, the more you contemplate him. God is ‘Beyond Imagination’ (Hebrew: Pele – i.e. Wonderful, Beyond Comprehension – Isaiah). The ‘Man made in the image of God’, Yeshua, puts Almighty God within reach. In Yeshua the otherwise incomprehensible is rendered comprehensible.
“Christ’s explanation of God as Trinity – one God existing as Father, Son and Holy Spirit”
Really? Where?
‘The Father and I are One’
Simple, beautiful and profound. No mention of Trinity. Not here, and not anywhere else in the entirety of the Bible.
The Father and I the first and second persons respectively of God the holy trinity.
Ugly. And he didn’t come close to saying it.
Yeshua didn’t feel the need to describe God as a Trinity or as Tri-une. So why should we?
Sorry i am being rather critical. It is too easy to feel roused by things you do not resonate to than to express appreciation for things you do like. So; good food for thought.
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Duncan,
The words ‘imagine’ and ‘image’ are related. If your point is that we should not form images of God, I agree. Man is created in the image of God, without which he could not reflect upon the Being of God, so I have replaced the ambiguity with an expansion. Some things are beyond our reason and beyond even our imagination. The Being of God is so, but not His existence, which is the point I made.
It is common for Richard Dawkins to complain that creationists cannot imagine evolution taking place, and it was in this sense that I use imagination, referring to the limited capacity of man’s thinking. God reveals Himself to man’s reason and imagination sufficiently to render him without excuse Rom 1:20, but the secularist has suppressed his innate knowledge of God and curtailed his imagination.
It is evident that we cannot comprehend the Being of God to perfection, and I agree that Jesus Christ is the perfect embodiment of God manifest in the flesh. He is Wonderful Isa 9:6 as you mention, and a great mystery 1Tim 3:16.
On the Trinity, there are copious books on the subject. The fullness of the explanation of the Trinity comes from nowhere else than Jesus’ own words as recorded in the Gospels, and the doctrine is seen throughout the Old and New Testaments. This blog is not a theological forum as such, but about the application of Christianity to public life. I am not averse to dealing with theological issues as they arise and I point you to Jesus’ own baptismal formula: ‘Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost’ Mat 28:19. One name, not three, as He is one triune God. ‘Ugly’ is a visual concept and it is hardly a word to use about a concept that you have just admitted is ‘beyond imagination’. Wittgenstein’s “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent” may go too far, but it is a caution.
Thanks for your interaction.
Every blessing,
Donald
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