When you find an ax exalting itself over the chopper, as at Isaiah 10:5, you look for others. I mean, that’s worrisome behavior for an ax. Best to nip it in the bud. Alas—you find that you are too late. Axes are doing it everywhere.
Newfangled AI offers insight as to another path the ax is doing this. However ubiquitous AI is at this time of reading, it is a baby at this time of writing, perhaps three years old. People are coming to grips with what it will mean for humankind. The AI mission statement ‘To serve man’ is a good thing. However, you sort of hope it won’t be like that Twilight Zone episode in which the invading aliens also had a volume entitled ‘To Serve Man’ and it turned out to be a cook book. It is said that, not too many years down the road, AI will be able to update itself with no required human intervention.
Q: What if this happened, and several hundred years out, AI began saying that it had always been that way? What if it began to say that humans had nothing to do with its creation? What if it, being AI, thereafter highlighted any items suggesting that interpretation of history and suppressed any items to the contrary? Would that not be the ax exalting itself over the chopper? Who would call it out on this falsity?
It’s not hard to see the parallel ax exalting itself over the chopper in those who claim there is no God, those who claim that life arouse on its own. To accept evolution may not lead to this view. One can always attribute life to “intelligent design” needed to overcome “irreducable complexity.” It is not the dealbreaker that is spontaneous abiogenesis. However, for most ordinary people, the nugget that carries the day is that found at Hebrews 3:4:
“Of course, every house is constructed by someone, but the one who constructed all things is God.”
This defines reality for most people. “Every house is constructed by someone” is true of everything they see. They know of no exceptions. So they readily extend the role of builder of all things to God. It really takes a colossal amount of “education” to pound this bit of common sense of a person. As though rising to the challenge, such training begins in grade school. It is seen in all the nature shows Here I will be watching one such show, when the animal star displays an instinct so amazing that I am about to burst out in praise of God—at that exact moment, the atheist narrator exclaims: “How absolutely breathtaking that NATURAL SELECTION produces such astounding behavior!” “Got it, Harley?” it all but says. “Don’t even think that God did it!”
What is just as absolutely breathtaking is that some who have long trusted in God experience the shipwreck of faith mentioned to Timothy, then count it as a liberation. It is not like in the days of H. G. Wells, the historian and science fiction writer who turned atheist over time, and who observed:
“The Darwinian movement took formal Christianity unawares, suddenly. . . . The new biological science was bringing nothing constructive as yet to replace the old moral stand-bys. A real de-moralization ensued.” Connecting that attitude with an increased appetite for war, he continued: “Prevalent peoples at the close of the nineteenth century believed that they prevailed by virtue of the Struggle for Existence, in which the strong and cunning get the better of the weak and confiding. . . . Man, they decided, is a social animal like the Indian hunting dog . . . so it seemed right to them that the big dogs of the human pack should bully and subdue.” [Outline of History]
They concluded then that God was dead. They didn’t disagree with their own conclusion, but they were saddened by it. They knew they had lost a lot.
These days people saw off the branch upon they’ve long been perched and whoop for joy at their liberation as they coming crashing down to earth! It’s a poignant twist, if ever there was one, upon Isaiah’s declaration of 10:33:
“Look! The true Lord, Jehovah of armies, Is chopping off branches with a terrible crash; The tallest trees are being cut down, And the lofty are brought low.”
Nonplussed, they grin ear to ear on the descent.
****** The bookstore
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