Technology

0:37 Welcome to the Stone Choir Podcast. I am Corey J. Mahler. And I'm still Wo. On today's Stone Choir, we're going to be discussing technology. This is going to be hopefully a shorter episode. We're going to talk about the nature of technology for the reason that it's a part of all of our lives and we want to sort of frame the ideas behind it in such a way that by the end of this, hopefully more of you will be equipped to make wise moral decisions around the use, the application of different types of technology. This is something that is a huge part of the discussion today, you know, with things around AI AI and generative art and that sort of thing, which we'll get to at the end. But fundamentally, technology has always been a part of human life.

1:27 And so to begin, we want to sort of disabuse everyone of the notion that a technology is something that you plug in or something you know is from the 20th century. Technology doesn't mean modern. The definition that we're going to use today for technology is a material application of science to achieve a human end. So I'm going to explain briefly each of those words because they're all doing something here. As I've said before, especially recently on Twitter, when Cory and I speak a sentence, every word is carrying part of the load. And if you omit some of the words, you're gonna misunderstand us and get angry. So technology, a material application of science to achieve a human end. Material. We're talking about the physical world.

2:11 We're talking about creation. That is, we're not talking about spiritual things from God. We're talking about things you can touch, you can see, you can visualize, you can think about. Application means you're actually doing something. It's not just a not just a thought experiment, but you're active somehow. A person is a participant in technology. But technology doesn't just sit there, it does something. Application of science. Scantia in Latin means knowledge. So it's an application of knowledge. Means you're aware that you're doing something with part of creation, and then less part of it is to achieve a human end. That is, you are deliberately manipulating some created thing for a purpose,

2:54 and you know what the purpose is gonna be. That might seem kind of like a big brain mouthful, but basically the point is that there's an intentionality to the use of technology. So we're gonna talk about the brief history of some a few different examples of technologies just kind of show how this works. But fun But fundamentally the thing I want you to think about throughout this, and especially as we get to the end, is that what is my intention when I'm using this technology? And in order to understand you're using a technology, you have to figure out what it means. You have to actually define it so you're aware that you're using different technologies all the time. I think a an example that came to mind for me was

3:35 aspirin. Aspirin is acetosalicylic acid. It's been known for over four thousand years. We have written records going back to the beginning of human written history, of the use of myrtle, of willow, of meadowsweet, having analgesic properties. People were able to heal fevers and aches by chewing on willow bark or something similar. So that is an example of a technology. And yet the Nobel Prize for figuring out how aspirin actually worked was won, I think, like nineteen seventy-two. So when we say it's the natural application of science, we don't mean you have some big sophisticated Nobel Prize winning understanding of the science. We mean you know that when I chew on willow bark, my fever's gonna go down.

4:25 I'm not gonna hurt as much. That's a technology. The willow bark, the aspirin inside it, is the technology that we're talking about. So and it's you're using it to achieve a human end. You don't want to be miserable. So the history of medicine is probably one of the best examples of this of technology being a part of human life. And what makes medicine interesting is that it's always been the provenance of the medicine man, of the shaman. The inextricable link between using natural elements from the world to achieve some sort of end in our bodies, whether it was some sort of psychedelic end. For example, you know, in North America the Indians used peyote. In Mexico they used psilocybin. South America they used ayahuasca.

5:13 In India there used to be something that was pretty much in the same family called soma as written about in the Vedic literature. All these places separated by vast distances were all achieving similar spiritual ends by taking drugs. And so that's an interesting case that we want to use as part of the frame for this. Is that there are some cases where technology is not just a shovel or a pen or a computer. There are cases where technology is something that not only has a physical effect, like if you take peyote, you're going to be tripping. You know, that's there's there's something physical going on. We understand some of the chemistry behind that. But in addition, the intention of all of those Indians on both

6:01 sides of the Atlantic when they were taking those drugs was spiritual. They were deliberately opening their minds, their selves up to the spirit realm. And so they were using technology, the the drug, this the psychedelic substance in order to achieve a spiritual end. And I wanna highlight this because I think that it's still a technology because they're using material. You can pick a mushroom up off the ground, and if it's the right kind, you're going to have some of these effects. Now, if you accidentally eat the wrong mushroom and you end up tripping like crazy, you're really going to regret it. Like you did not intend for that to happen. So in questions of morality, it was dumb. Like you shouldn't just be eating mushrooms, you can't identify that.

6:51 That's a good way to die. But it wasn't sinful. It wasn't something that was immoral for you to have done that. Now if you go back a second time, it's a different matter. On the other hand, when the medicine man, the shaman said here, you know, drink this bitter tea, you're gonna throw up and then you're gonna trip for a day or two. That was deliberately opening the door to the spirit realm. And they were very conscious of that fact. So they were using the technology for the human end of communicating with demons. And whether they knew they were demons or not, they knew that that was what they were doing. And so there are cases where technology is morally neutral. There are cases where its use case, its intention is good.

7:32 And there are some cases where the use of a technology inherently is evil. It's incumbent upon its use that it's going to produce bad effects. So when we're looking at the technologies around us, one of the things that we have to break ourselves up as Christians is this sort of knee-jerk response that a lot of people have today that Someone makes some claim and says you should do this or you shouldn't do this, you should avoid this. There's a lot of people where their first instinct is show me the Bible verse that says I have to do that. Show me the Bible verse that says I can't do that. Now the impulse itself is not necessarily bad. I mean, obviously this whole podcast series is dedicated to figuring out

8:18 what the Bible says and trying to be faithful to that. So we're certainly not discouraging that impulse. The problem is when it's sort of I hate to overuse the term, but when it's autistically brought to bear against anything that comes up, where it turns really into legalism. And I think that's one of the distinctions that we have to apply when we're talking about the the Christian use or any human use of technology is is there a moral tenor to the thing? I mean, I think we all know today that there is such a common thing, especially among the more intelligent, less religious classes who are producing most of the modern technology, is that they're so focused on whether or not they can, no one ever stops think about

8:59 whether they should. Because they think that the pursuit of any knowledge is inherently good. The more you know, the better off you are. And we've talked about in a couple past episodes. That's simply not true. There is knowledge of things that are evil that should be unknown. And if it were possible for those who know things that are evil to unknow them, they would be better off. There are things I know that I wish I didn't know. I wish I could forget completely. And the resurrection, I will. All whatever evil I know, God will take it away, or will make it in such a fashion that there's no evil left in any such knowledge. But in this life, it's all up for grabs. And so one of the things that we see is that people

9:41 don't recognize that some things are intrinsically evil. To use a technology can be intrinsically evil. So an example of this, I mentioned recently that I had heart surgery five or so years ago. I had open heart surgery and after I went in for the sonogram and I met with the cardiologist, he said he could sort of jokingly well not jokingly, he laughingly said, Well, we're gonna be cracking you open. And it took me half a second to realize that that was no longer a figure of speech. That's exactly what happened. They saw my breastplate in half, they spread my ribs apart, and they chopped off pieces of my heart and replaced them. That is something that is inherently evil. If I were to do that to anyone who's listening, it would

10:25 be absolutely evil. you would die, it would be horrible. It would just be a complete mess. To cut open someone's chest and carve them up is is something that by its nature is destructive and harmful. And so when we're looking at some technologies, we can categorically say that's the case. And then there may be narrow exceptions. It may actually be possible that despite the inherently destructive nature of carving open someone's chest and cutting off pieces of their heart, it can actually do good in extremely narrow cases. For an extremely tiny percentage of the population. The fact that the technology itself has this inherent nature of being destructive makes the thing evil. Cutting people open is evil.

11:10 Not advocating anyone cut people open. There are probably no heart surgeons listening. Maybe somebody's a surgeon of some kind. If you are, you're the sort of person that has the confidence to say despite the fact that doing this sort of thing to a body is inherently wicked, when I do it, I can actually heal people. And so there are technologies like that. There are some technologies where the very use of the thing is going to necessarily be destructive. And then in the exceptional case, something good can happen. Which is part of the reason why when someone says, you need to show me in the Bible where it says I can or I must or I can't, it misses the point that there's a wisdom element to all of this.

11:54 The wisdom is that the inherent nature of cutting open chests is impermissible. We don't do that. People don't do that. It's not a good thing. And yet there may be an exception. And so when the exception comes, you know, maybe you have to evaluate it morally. Like we have the technology of cutting open chests, and it turns out you can actually repair things. You can make people continue to live. I'd be dead if they hadn't done that. Now I'm fine. I'm better than I have been in a long time, really ever, because it was a birth defect. The technology can be used for healing, even though inherently it's something that's destructive. And when Christians want to act like the Pharisees and the Sadducees

12:33 who follow Jesus around and were constantly asking these gotcha questions of, you know, is it written and show me here? And well, what about this edge case? They weren't asking Jesus because they were pursuing wisdom. They weren't seeking the things of God. They're just trying to trip him up. And they were looking for license for whatever it was that they already wanted to do. And they wanted to set themselves in opposition to him. And so when we criticize the tendency of guys to say, well, show me in the Bible who says I can't or I have to, it's the nature of the question. It's not that pursuing whatever God wants is bad, obviously that the opposite is true. Wanting to know what God says is the highest good.

13:17 But you can do it in the wrong way. And the fact that the form of the thing of saying, What does God want me to do is inherently good. When that process, when that question becomes, if you can't show me the verse, then I'm going to do it, then you're turning the Bible into this white list and this black list that's basically a license for whatever someone can't give you a proof text for. And that's just not a Christian nature. It's not a Christian heart. And so as we're looking at technology in our lives, like we're going to give a few examples, but we want to get across the point that when you are looking at how At how you interact with whatever's in front of you where you're deciding whether to

13:51 do something or not to do something, you're not probably going to be able to find a Bible verse that says, you know, don't use chat GPT. There's no Bible verse that says don't cut open someone's chest. At least not that I'm aware of. And so for Christians, it's not just looking at the Bible as a recipe book. It's looking as a source of how does God want us to approach everything. And once you have those principles down, when you're looking at technologies where you're doing something in the created world to try to achieve your ends, the focus is on what problem am I trying to solve? What is the end I'm trying to achieve by cutting open someone's chest? I can never possibly do that. The only possible regardless of my intentions, the outcome could only possibly

14:34 be bad. For the surgeon who did that to me, the outcome was perfect. I'm better than nothing. So this is going to be the case for any technology that we interact with. And as Christians, I want us to try to get away from treating like I said, don't treat the Bible like a recipe book. Treat it as a source of godly wisdom where you sometimes have to do some work and sometimes things get complicated and there's not just going to be a rote answer. And if you look for a rote answer and you stomp your feet and wander off when you don't get it, you're probably going to be missing out on what God actually wants for you because life doesn't work that way. But the understanding of having wisdom and having discernment

15:19 makes it possible to figure these things out where it's clearly it's a good thing that we have heart surgeons. It's a blessing from God. And many of those things are only, you know, in our lifetimes that some of these things are possible. If I've been born 50 years ago, I'd already be dead because the surgery didn't exist. Today, hunky dory, fine. Survival rate's incredibly high. It basically a non-event. That's an incredible blessing that that's possible. And the knowledge of being able to use that technology, which has this inherent bad nature, the fact that it can be turned by good intentions is where the wisdom comes in. Some of you may have had a particular quote come to mind from Socrates

16:03 when Woe was mentioning discussing the issue of knowledge, and just to make it so that everyone is on the same page as it were, the quote from Socrates which very often comes up in this area and in others There is only one good knowledge, and only one evil ignorance. Perhaps a preview of the episode that we will eventually be doing on the Enlightenment, but of course, this quote from Socrates is false. It is a lie. As we have gone over previously, there is knowledge that is inherently, that is intrinsically evil. It is knowledge that no man should possess. So, for instance, if you have murdered someone, you gained knowledge from that, you know what it feels like to murder someone. That is evil knowledge.

16:54 No man should ever possess that knowledge. When Cain killed his brother Abel, he gained knowledge. It was not good knowledge because knowledge is not inherently good. It depends on the nature of the knowledge and the ends toward which it is used, and that is how it plays into technology. Because of course, in the definition there, Scientia is knowledge again. And ignorance is not necessarily evil. It is good to be ignorant of evil, for instance. To have no knowledge of wickedness is a good thing. And so that form of ignorance is itself good, and so the quote from Socrates is simply wrong from beginning to end. But this is the sort of mindset with which we are dealing when we discuss these individuals who are engaged in the pursuit of

17:50 science in either sense of the term, either the technical, correct sense, the Latin sense, or the modern, sort of misuse of the term, limiting it to a certain sort of pursuit. But when dealing with individuals who are pursuing science for science's sake Art for art's sake is one thing, that's fine, because it is properly the pursuit of beauty, which is a good thing. But knowledge for the sake of knowledge is not necessarily good. And so you have individuals who, as Wo mentioned, will simply pursue these things because they can. But just because you can do something does not mean that you should do that thing. Those two analyses are separate. Whether or not I should do something is only tangentially related to

18:42 whether or not I can do the thing. And we run into this problem, in particular in the field of technology, and in particular with things like AI and some of our modern devices. We have developed things that yes we are capable of creating them, but the question is should we be creating them and should we be employing them in the ways that we are employing them? And often, as much as the answer to the first, can we do it is yes, the answer to the second should we do it is no. To some degree this is because the individuals working in these fields at some of the highest levels Some of them are outright Satanists, we see this in various instances. One of the ones that will come to mind undoubtedly for many

19:33 is the statue of Shiva at CERN, a statue to a literal demon god of destruction, and they perform rituals in front of this statue, at night, no less. Probably not a good thing that we have scientists doing that. Probably a sign that they are engaged in things in which human beings should not be engaged. There are very real dangers in some of these things. Demons are real, you can invite them into your life. And And you can do it through certain technologies. You also have another strain of thought in many of these circles that is also dangerous for its own reasons and in its own ways, and that would be many of them are utopians. They believe that if we simply pursue progress, never really defined, but

20:29 if we pursue progress, we will eventually create a perfect world. As a Christian that should make your hair stand on end. That is a denial of the fall. It is a denial of original sin. Because if we believe, if we contend that we can create a utopia, we'll leave aside for now the irony of the word itself, but if you believe that you can create paradise on earth, you are denying that we are fallen, that we have original sin. Because we cannot create paradise. All we can do is create imperfect societies. Yes, some are better than others, and no, it is not the case that all progress is bad. It depends on how you are defining progress. But if you're just making faster computers for the sake of making

21:21 faster computers, is that Is that good or bad? It's neutral. It depends why you're doing it. Now if it's just for the sake of the faster computer, it may very well be a waste. But if you're doing it so that we can figure out, say, protein folding, so we can address issues like cancer and various other diseases, that can be a good use of technology. But if you're using it for evil ends, then it is a misapplication, it is a wicked application of that technology. Fundamentally, part of the foundational issue here, one of the bedrock questions, is the question of wisdom. And there are many who want to avoid this. That's part of the impetus for those who look at scripture and say, Show me a verse that addresses this exact issue.

22:12 They are trying to avoid having to think. And as we have pointed out many times before, sometimes you simply cannot avoid actually having to use the brain that God gave you. Some issues in the Christian life are questions of wisdom. God doesn't give us an exact answer to every question we may have. He gives us the answers to many questions, he gives us general principles, and from those we can answer others. But deriving the answer from what God has given us often involves human wisdom, and so as Woe mentioned, you are not going to find a verse that says, Thou shalt not use Chat GPT. That verse doesn't exist. I don't care for how long you search or which translation you use, although perhaps if someone has ChatGPT write a translation, maybe then

23:08 you'll find it. Perhaps a highlight of some of the dangers inherent in these technologies. But that issue of wisdom is unavoidable. And so if you're thinking that, no, I have to find a verse that addresses this exact issue, you are approaching it in the wrong way. You have to find a verse, you have to find a section in scripture that addresses the general question, that addresses the underlying questions, that gives you the tools necessary to apply what God has given you, the attributes that He has given you, to arrive at a correct conclusion, to derive the proper answer, the Christian response to the question posed. It's not again, it's not that Scripture will give you an exact answer to your question.

23:59 But we are saying that the answers are there for those with eyes to see and ears to hear. One of the problems that we encounter when it comes to technology, this ties into perhaps the issue of seeing these things as just progress, is that we look at these things as perhaps as if they were toys or just just entirely neutral. It's a thing that exists and I pick it up and do stuff with it. So you know your phone, which I have sitting on my desk in front of me, and I have two monitors here and I'm surrounded by screens and technology right now. So I'm obviously not saying we have to all move to the woods and avoid technology. Part of it is, as well mentioned, a matter of intent. It is what you intend to do with the thing, what you

24:48 intend to achieve, the ends toward which you put the technology to which you have access. But we have to be active in this, not passive, which is a real danger that we have today, particularly with children. We see this passive just consumption of whatever happens to pop onto the screen. We just click links and we eventually get somewhere and then we watch whatever it is, the shiny lights, whatever it happens to be. Much of it designed in order to manipulate. But the foundational issue there, the bedrock issue, is that we are simply passively consuming whatever these tools, these toys, whichever way we're using it, throw into our lives. And that is not how we, particularly as Christians, should be employing

25:37 technology. We have to make a conscious effort to use these things toward toward good ends, toward proper ends. If we simply allow them to manipulate us, really it's no longer a tool, then it's a tool of control, as it were. We become the thing upon which the device is acting, instead of being the agent acting on the device. And so the difference between say the misuse and the correct use of the technology could be illustrated if you use logos, which is what Woe and I both use for studying scripture much of the time when we're using computers to do it anyway. If you use logos, you can use it very productively. You're using it as a tool to accomplish something. If you are just mindlessly clicking through YouTube or God forbid TikTok

26:35 on your phone, you are not using technology in an active way, in a conscious way. You are not really thinking. You are just passively consuming, and whatever that algorithm, designed by parties unknown, throws up for you to see, for you to click on it, that's what you see, that's what you watch, that's what you consume. And it is not a simple matter of you viewing it. Because when you allow that into your mind, for some period of time, that becomes part of your mind. All of the information you see, all of the things you see are assimilated to some degree, and whether or not they are retained over a course of whatever it happens to be days, weeks, months, years, that material is with you for a period of time.

27:28 And if you are just passively consuming it, you are being indoctrinated by the parties who created that information. Now it may not all be wicked. Some of it may be fine if you happen to be watching a video that teaches you how to cook some particular dish. Fine, whatever. That's probably not a negative thing. It may very well be positive. But there's no guarantee if you're just mindlessly scrolling or clicking and interacting with this information, not even really interacting, just consuming, there's no guarantee that what you encounter is going to be good or even neutral. In fact, much of it is probably going to be harmful. And so one of the things that we want to get across in this episode in the strongest of terms is that we have

28:14 to be active. We have to be conscious in how we are using these tools, and not just think of them as some portal or toy that whatever it happens to present to us, by all means I'll spend the next three hours looking at this because the tool itself may very well be to some degree neutral. So the fact that my phone exists is a relatively neutral proposition. What I do with it is going to be the moral question, the ends to which I put it. If I allow it to consume my life to become something that I pick up however many hundreds of times a day it is the average person now picks up his phone. If you start to go down that path, you start to be the one who is controlled instead of the one who is controlling

29:10 the tool, the device. And you need to reconsider that. You probably need to step back and maybe make fasting from your electronic devices part of your routine. When we think about fasting, sort of a tangent here, but an important one, when we think about fasting, fasting is not just food. We always think it's food, it's not just food. You can fast from other things. And for many of us, these days, fasting from technology, abstaining from using it, or at least abstaining from using it compulsively to make things more intentional was That may be the more important fast. Yes, for those who have issues with food, obesity in particular in many places, do fast from food. But addiction to technology and the inappropriate use of it, which is

30:04 really what addiction to technology is, it's just the misuse of technology, is very widespread in our culture. It has practically become part of our culture. And I think children are a good example of that. We have many parents who just stick their children in front of an iPad or whatever other screen it happens to be and just have them stare at it for hours and hours a day, and then when they're done looking at the small screen, they look at the big screen, they look at the TV, and then they go back to the small screen. That isn't parenting. One, which is a real problem, but two, that is destructive to the child. And also, quite frankly, most parents who are engaged in that sort of parenting so called, have no idea what their children are consuming.

30:49 If your child is watching three, four, five hours a day of screen, there is no way that you are also watching the same five hours. So you really do not know what your child was consuming. As just one example of the misuse of technology in our society. So again, we need to be more intentional about these things. We need to recognize that that quote from Socrates, again, is false. Not all knowledge is good, and not all ignorance is evil. And as we talk about the questions that arise in our minds, you know, whether it's a big question like does God permit or forbid this sort of thing, or just more general questions. Sometimes it is not the question itself that is the problem, but it is to whom you direct it.

31:43 And I think an example of that is something that we find in Scripture. In Deuteronomy eighteen God says, When you come into the land that the Lord your God is giving you, you shall not learn to follow the abominable practices of those nations. There shall not be found among you anyone who burns a son or his daughter as an offering, anyone who practices divination, or tells fortunes or interprets omens, or a sorcerer or a charmer, or a medium, or a necromancer, or one who inquires of the dead, for whoever does these things is an abomination to the Lord, and because of these abominations the Lord your God is driving them out before you. And then Leviticus twenty, God says what should be done to

32:24 such people? A man or a woman who is a medium or a necromancer shall surely be put to death, they shall be stoned with stones, their blood shall be upon them. Now when God says something like their blood shall be upon them, he's saying within the civil law for Israel at that time, if such a person, if a necromancer or a medium is killed, they are guilty of their death. The people who kill them have not killed anyone. They're not guilty of murder because the blood is upon those who have committed the act. So this is something that today makes people incredibly incredibly nervous. We particularly find it in the context of the latter half of the last millennium where witch burning and things like that are seen

33:09 as the most evil thing that ever happened. When you find that evil people who hate God get really nervous about something, maybe it's worth paying attention to what evil fears. Now, as we've said many times in past episodes, Cory and I are not A demanding of return to Levitical Law, or B certainly saying that any individual in his capacity as an individual has any business, has any right, any moral license to kill or harm anyone for these reasons. When we're talking about these things, we're talking about the civil law. What should the state be doing? The state used to burn witches at the stake, crush them under heavy stones, stone them. All these things were done in accordance with God's eternal will that

33:52 this stuff is easy is evil. But what I want to focus on here, we're talking about technology, is the questions that would arise that would cause you to go to a necromancer or a diviner or a fortune teller or a tarot card reader. Because the questions themselves may not necessarily be impermissible. Some of them will be sinful, some of them will be evil. if someone has died and you say, I want to speak to my dead relative, that is inherently evil for you to pursue it. It's not an evil desire to wish that that were possible, but the Christian hope is in the resurrection, in the resurrection of the dead. And when we say hope, we're not talking about I I think maybe it'll happen. The Christian hope is absolute.

34:36 There's no doubt about the hope that we have in the resurrection of the body, in the life everlasting as Christians. So when we have loved ones who have fallen asleep in Christ, our hope, our absolute knowledge is we will see them again with our own eyes, and we'll be able to talk to them again. And so the scriptural response to the particular question of I want to I want to talk to my deceased loved one again, is wait for the last day, wait for resurrection. When we are all raised from the dead and we live in the new earth together, you'll be able to talk to every other believer for the rest of eternity. and rest of eternity doesn't make sense because that's not how eternity works. We don't have the mental model to process what that's going

35:20 to be like. But we know it's going to be perfect. And we know that every believer will be there. So when your loved ones die in the Lord, they will be raised in the Lord, and you'll be able to talk to them all you want for as long as you want, and you won't even get sick of it because we'll all be perfect. So it's not that the desire to want to talk to someone who's dead is sinful. It's the pursuit of that which God says is inaccessible. And when we look at things like necromancy and fortune telling and these other things, sometimes it's simply that when someone has the desire, like I want to know what's going to happen in the future. Well, God tells us that that's not revealed. We don't know the future.

36:03 We have to trust in the Lord today. In passages like Matthew 6, where he talks about how much God takes care of the birds of the air and the beasts of the field, he says, if I love these animals so much, I take care of all their needs, surely I'm going to take care of you even more. And when we trust in that, then all of our concerns, all of our questions about well, I need to know about tomorrow and I need to talk to this person that's no longer living, they should go away for the Christian. And so again, it's not necessarily the the appetite for the knowledge is sinful, but becomes sinful as soon as you say, you know what, God, I'm not happy with what you're telling me, I'm gonna go around you, I'm gonna find these answers somewhere else.

36:46 When someone tries to go around God and they take these questions that we know are unanswerable in this life, and they seek answers for them, they're often going to seek them through technology. You know, something like a tarot deck is absolutely technology. it's a physical means of pursuing knowledge. Now cards by themselves don't tell you anything. It's in their interpretation and shuffling and and how they're laid down that then is used to reveal hidden knowledge. And most of the time maybe it's a complete fraud, maybe it's mostly a lark, but the problem with that sort of scenario for any sort of fortune teller, the Ouija board, anything where you're going and looking for unrevealed occult knowledge is that you're using a technology

37:35 for what is fundamentally a spiritual purpose. Because you're not you're not going to the doctor to say, hey, my head hurts. Can you help me? You're trying to know something that God has made clear is unknowable. And And when you turn to the technologies that the devil provides, sometimes they're gonna work. Which is why the examples of ayahuasca and peyote and psilocybin and soma and LSD, you know, modern scientific variations on the same theme. Even marijuana has hallucinogenic properties in some forms and some concentrations. When you open the door to such things and you say, hey, I want to be open to the universe. I want to access unknown realms of knowledge and existence, you're opening

38:27 the door for something that God has not opened. God doesn't say to find him there. He doesn't say to find truth inside your mind on some sort of trip. He says to find him in the Word. He says to turn to Him in prayer. And as Corey and I were talking about this before we began, I specifically wanted to exclude something like prayer to God from technology. Because a prayer to God is it's something that we do, but it is not a technology in that there's no machinery there. There's no I'm gonna do this and I'm gonna get this result. Not in the physical sense. But when we pray to God, we're saying, Lord, please help me. You know, we're spiritually on our knees, even if we aren't physically. And it's good sometimes to be on your knees when you pray.

39:18 that supplicative posture posture reinforces who's the boss, reinforces who and what we are. And so it's it's good when churches have kneelers in that they're used. That's not just a Roman Catholic thing. Many churches have preserved those. It's good to assume that sort of posture of submission because that physical orientation reinforces mentally where you actually stand, which is that we don't stand at all before the Lord, not until he raises us up, not until He elevates us and gives us permission to do that. But we approach Him with our heads bowed and on our knees. And when we approach Him in prayer and we ask for him to give things and we ask for him to help us, I think that it's not a technology because there's no you're not

40:07 pushing a button. You trust in the Lord. And that's fundamentally what prayer is. Even as we're asking for things, and even as we're we're calling on the Lord to help us, it is the act of trust and the confession of the trust that we have in God that makes it separate from a technology, which is different from when you might do a similar thing at a necromancer or a tarot card reader. When you go to someone who is engaging in the occult and say, I need help with getting a new job. I need to know about next week. I hope this goes well. Help me out. When you use a technology that's worldly, even if it's interacting somehow with the spiritual realm, which fundamentally means demons. Angels aren't going to answer you when you do that sort of

40:55 thing. You will only ever get an answer from hell. You may well get no answer at all. A lot of them are fraudsters. It's just completely illegitimate, which is part of the danger. Is it when someone participates in this stuff, they don't take it seriously, as Corey said, you just kind of treat some of these things as as toys. It's like, oh, it's fun, it's entertainment. I don't really take it seriously. But you're opening the door because you're asking a question, which by itself nakedly is neutral. But when it's taken to a realm that is not godly, you're using a technology that will s in some cases work. We've talked before about exoperioperato, where the act of doing the thing will cause the effect to occur.

41:38 One of the I think key examples of this for this episode talking about technology and how sometimes it is inherently evil is a Ouija board. The Ouija board's been around since the late 1800s. There was a huge spiritism movement first in England and it came over to the US. There was an explosion of people engaging in seances and all manner of trying to consult with demons, trying to consult with the spirit realm. And it was treated as a sort of mystical thing and oh we there's this unknown and the problem is that they took God out of the equation. They weren't praying to the Lord for comfort or for answers or for wisdom. They were saying, We're all here together gathered around this table. Come spirits, tell us something.

42:25 Problem is when you do that, sometimes a spirit will show up. But it's not spirit in the sense of an angel. It's gonna be a demon. And we know the demon sometimes showed up. That's effectively what a Ouija board is. It was invented in the late 1800s. You're probably all familiar with it, but just in case anyone isn't, there's this board that has letters and numbers on it, and then there's a physical pointer, a piece that you put on top of it. And the idea is that several participants will simultaneously put their hands on this pointer, and then no one is supposed to do anything. And the premise is that the spirits are going to move the thing independently. And it's going to one by one point and letters and numbers

43:08 and reveal some spiritual hidden thing. This is fundamentally exactly what Deuteronomy 18 is talking about. It's trying to find answers someplace where God does not promise you will find them. And some people do find answers. There are numerous cases, including when this thing was patented. When they applied for the patent for the Ouija board, the patent examiner demanded they come in and prove that it worked, because the invention had to actually be legitimate. And so the question that he asked them, the examiner, his name was not known to the men who came in. And so he said, Tell me my name. And the board told him his name. And the account is that he was white as a sheet and terrified, and he approved the patent, because it had satisfied his curiosity

43:55 that this thing is actually a real invention. Now, there's no human way for that to have happened Perhaps maybe in the case the the patent attorney who came actually knew his name. The account says that wasn't the case. Even if that one happened to particularly be fraudulent, there are many other cases where things that were absolutely unknowable have been have been revealed through something like a spirit board or a Ouija board. The problem with that sort of technology, the evil inherent to that sort of technology is that there's no legitimate use for it because its entire purpose is to say I have a question, I want spirits to answer the question. In fact, I want demons to tell me something that's unknowable.

44:41 The only way to touch tarot cards or Ouija board or anything of that sort, the only way to engage in that sort of divination is to say, I'm opening myself up to demons, I want you to help me out. And some people think that they can do that, even if they're Christians. They think that maybe like, you know, demons are are slaves somehow and so they're gonna make them work for them. And maybe they know stuff that we don't know. And the fact that sometimes it works, the fact that this technology actually achieves a desired result makes people think that oh it's okay. And by itself, just the act of using that sort of thing is evil. And they're numerous cases. There's a pastor on Twitter, a so called Lutheran pastor.

45:25 I don't believe the man's even Christian, because one of the things he talks about is he used to engage in all this stuff, and he talked about inviting a demon into his home he couldn't get rid of. And although he says Ouija boards are bad now, he's engaged in all other sorts of behavior that are in exactly the same family as that. There's some men who are drawn to darkness. Anything is just hunky dory to play with this stuff. But when you open these doors using this technology, it actually works. that's why it's so deadly. It's not just it's not a hoax, it's not a game. Even though the Ouija board today, the trademark is owned by Hasbro. It's sold in, you know, if Toys R Us still exists, it'd

46:05 be sold there. But it's still in the it's a it's in the toy section on Amazon. It's sold as a toy, and people like it. It's treated as a party game. I don't think it's that popular now, but these things will ebb and flow. And the premise here is that that's a technology. A Ouija board is a physical medium of solving some problem, which is I don't know the future. The inherent problem there, the inherent evil there is that the future is necessarily unknowable. You know, even when Cory and I talk about we think this is gonna happen in the future, we don't know with certainty. We believe based on our best guess, based on informed opinion, the things are likely, but it's not some sort of absolute certainty like

46:49 you can achieve if you use technology to unlock the secrets of the spirit realm. No, you're talking to demons. And sometimes they'll tell you the truth because it establishes credibility. And it means that you now trust in demons. You're not trusting in God. You're not trusting him to take care of you tomorrow. And the reason I highlight this as an example of technology is we don't think of it as that. We think it was either, oh, it's strictly spiritual, or it's just a game, it's just a hoax. It's not real at all. No, it's absolutely a technology. It's just like ayahuasca and peyote and those other drugs that open up a channel for us to commune with the other side. This is dark, evil stuff.

47:30 And the fact that it doesn't always work doesn't mean that you're not trying to always get it to work. And so when you think of a technology in terms of I'm trying to achieve something, the question that you're bringing to the technology in many cases will determine whether the entire use case is good or evil. Because something that could potentially be a good question if you asked it to God in prayer, understanding the way God answers prayer suddenly becomes evil when you take it to one of these other places and say, I want to know about this, and you wait for something other than God to answer. Because sometimes something other than God is going to answer. That's the worst possible outcome.

48:13 It is worth highlighting here a very real divide between the way that God interacts with creation and particularly with Christians, and the way that demons interact with the world. We'll start with the demons. Demons by and large interact with the world in any way that God permits them. And it is very clear, from the abundance of evidence, that demons can and do use technology to communicate. And men do use technology to contact demons. Some of them deliberately, some of them not so much accidentally as unintentionally. They want to contact something, they just don't realize that the thing they are contacting is a demon. And that is one of the reasons that this stuff is prohibited in Scripture, many of these things we are discussing in this episode.

49:13 Because they're real. They aren't prohibited because they aren't real. God doesn't tell you don't try to fly. Because you can't. No matter how hard you flap your arms, you will not be able to fly. And so God doesn't tell you don't do that. It's impossible. These things that God prohibits, He prohibits because they are evil and they are real If you invite in a demon, one may very well show up. They don't always show up, and so many of those who have used Ouija boards and things like that are not demon oppressed or demon possessed. But some are. And you do not want to roll those dice, you do not open the door to demons. You are not going to have any control over the demons if you invite them in.

50:09 That is a delusion that some individuals have. They think, well, I've figured out the rules for how the demons operate, and if I do X, Y, and Z, then I will have control over the demon and I No. Scripture tells us nothing about that. We have virtually no information about the rules that God applies to demons, about the ways that they are permitted and not permitted to interact with creation. And so anything that someone tells you on that subject about supposed rules or guidelines, anything like that, it is speculation, and there is no reason to believe it, and you are endangering your soul if you believe it, particularly if you act on that false belief. Now, contrary to the way that demons interact with creation, God does

51:03 not use technology to communicate with Christians, to communicate with creation, to interact with creation. Now I know some of you are going to think, well, doesn't scripture and writing and the printing press, don't all these things fall under the heading of technology as you are using it? And the answer to that is yes. But that is not how God communicated that to creation. God communicates via dreams and visions, and in the case of Moses and select individuals, appearing physically to them and talking to them. The only potential exception, if we were not being very specific in our definition, which we used the application of knowledge to human ends, but you could bring up the one time in Scripture where God

51:54 writes on stone tablets, because that is what he did at Mount Sinai with Moses. That doesn't fall under the definition we're using, but it is the closest that God comes to using technology as it were to communicate with creation. God is not going to write you an email. As far as we know, there's nothing necessarily stopping a demon from doing something like that. Because we know that they can influence technology to a certain degree. Again, we see that very clearly from the Ouija board, and half the time it kind of feels like that when we're trying to get audio equipment to work. But demons use technology to whatever extent God will permit it. God does not use technology to communicate with us.

52:44 That doesn't mean that he can't influence it. If you pray before you have to record something, God may very well see that your equipment works well. He's not using it in the same way that the demon is going to try to use it to communicate something. It's a fundamentally different interaction. And so I'm not saying that God doesn't have control or that God doesn't intervene. I'm saying it is not the means by which God communicates, because God is very clear in His Word. The way He communicates with us is His Word. Now He does answer prayers, and so there is a form of communication there. If you pray for something and God grants it, God has told you yes, but he didn't write yes on your computer or use

53:31 a Ouija board to communicate with you. You saw it through a reaction in the world. He caused something to happen that is fundamentally different from the way that demons will attempt to use technology and sometimes successfully use technology. And so there is no reason, there is no warrant, certainly for Christians, but really for anyone who isn't completely insane, to attempt to contact spirits using technology. Because as Wo said, you will always be contacting a demon if you manage to contact anything. The best case scenario is you just look like a fool and nothing happens. That's the best outcome. The worst outcome is you actually contact a demon. Now what do you do? You have no power to make that demon leave.

54:23 You may think, well, I'm a Christian, and so I can cast it out in the name of Christ. Wrong. Christ can cast out the demon. God can cast out the demon. If you ask him, he may very well do so But under these circumstances, you have rejected God, you have invited in a demon, you have chosen to worship another God. If you pray, maybe God will answer that prayer and cast out that demon. But if you have turned your back on God and you have invited in the demons, you have chosen another path, the one that leads downward, the broad path? There are no guarantees here. You do not personally possess the power to cast out or control demons. Christians have that power as it were by proxy. We have it because we pray to God and He casts out

55:22 the demon. He has that power. If we are His sheep, then He is going to protect us. But if you're a goat and you've wandered off and invited demons in, all bets are off. You are in a very different situation, in a very different place. And this is a point where it is worth making a particular point about something that we see in movies about exorcism and various related subjects. You'll see priests or pastors who act as if they have some inherent authority, some power in themselves to cast out or control demons, and they don't. This is a fundamentally important point. This is one of the things you should absolutely remember from this episode. You have no power inherent in you to cast out demons.

56:21 And neither does a priest or a pastor or anyone else. That comes only from God. He gives that to whom he will, he exercises it when he wishes. And so if you invite in a demon, you have absolutely no guarantee that you can get rid of it. And on a related note, when you see priests or pastors or anyone else saying that they compelled a demon to say something or answer a question, that is complete nonsense. That is wickedness, that is evil, it is sin. You cannot compel a demon to speak the truth. Christ can compel a demon to speak the truth. If he wants to do that, you have no such guarantee. If you ask a demon a question, it may very well answer you. There is absolutely no way to guarantee that what that demon

57:19 spoke is the truth. Because you do not have the power to compel a demon to speak the truth. So if some priest or other tells you, well, I asked a demon this question and the demon said this in response, you have no reason to believe that is the truth. In fact, you have fairly strong reasons to believe it is a lie, because the goal of the demon is always going to be to deceive and destroy, that is the ultimate goal for the demon. Now demons may very well tell the truth, in order to build some sort of trust or rapport, as it were, in order to get to that ultimate end goal, the ultimate deception, to get you to lose your soul, to get you to spend eternity in hell. But the fundamental takeaway is Takeaway is that there is no reason

58:08 to believe anything a demon says. And so there is no reason to attempt to contact a demon. Christians should not be employing any technology, to attempt to contact spirits. The only way we have in Scripture, given by God, to communicate with that world, that realm as it were. Is prayer. We are permitted, we are compelled, we are commanded to communicate with God via prayer, and that is it. There are no other commands in Scripture related to communication with spirits. Because any of that is going to be communication with demons, and that is something that we want to avoid as Christians. You do not want to spend your time surrounded by or interacting with demons. Now obviously if you're an exorcist, there's a little bit of a

59:06 caveat here, but I doubt that exorcists want to be doing that. It's more of an it needs to be done sort of thing. And so do not contact demons and certainly do not believe that they are telling you the truth if they speak to you or someone else. In first John four it is written, Beloved, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God, for many false prophets have come come have gone into the world. Now obviously this is principally talking about pastors and others who would speak, but anyone who says, Hey, I'm here to tell you the truth, you are to test them to see whether they're from God. And anyone who is from God, any voice that is from God, whether it's some technology or a person, if they say anything that

59:55 is not perfectly in accord with scripture with what you already know to be true, you know that they're not from God, and therefore everything that Corey just said applies. Now why are we talking about this incredibly heavy stuff in the middle of this episode? Well there's also first Timothy four. Now the Holy Ghost expressly says that in latter times some will depart from the faith by devoting themselves to deceitful spirits and teachings of demons. Now we go on in this passage to talk about how what a low bar this passage sets for teachings of demons, but I want to emphasize here today the fact that it's talking about Christians departing from the faith and pursuing deceitful spirits and what they reveal.

1:00:37 Because when we think in terms of technology, particular was as we look at the 21st century, where things like Ouija boards and tarot are mostly not typically in use, at least not as far as I know. Probably at some point they'll come back on TikTok if they haven't earlier. Already. But what do we have? We have the future of AI, artificial intelligence, where we have LLMs, we have large language models, we have generative AI producing imagery, and we have people using text input to say, hey, box, hey, computer software, I want to see X, I want to know X, tell me Y or Z. This is why we're doing this episode fundamentally, because this new technology, and undoubtedly, no one can argue that that fits the definition of

1:01:27 technology. So as we're sitting here in the 21st century, we are very clearly facing the advent of new technology that we all are going to have to deal with one way or another. And that is, you know, this sort of generative AI where you ask the box and it gives you some answer. And the reason that we gave all those earlier examples and said that sometimes things are morally neutral, sometimes things are always inherently evil, sometimes it's the nature of your desire that determines whether or not what you're doing is good or evil. As we said at the beginning, and obviously it's a stupid thing to even say, there's no Bible verse that says you can't use Chat GPT. We don't think there is. And we're not making the case today that that's the fact.

1:02:11 However, when you look at it in terms of what we've said for the past hour, in terms of what problem am I trying to solve when I use this new technology, it's necessary to apply wisdom to those circumstances. So something like ChatGPT, it's entirely based on text. You ask it questions, you say something, it responds. The way these things work inherently is pattern recognition. It's just a gigantic statistical model of one word naturally tends to follow the other. And so it knows, and I'm using air quotes here because it knows nothing. There's no it there to have knowledge. The model is that statistically when input string X occurs, output probabilistically, string y is going to be emitted, some variation of it.

1:03:03 Now Now, the reason that this can either be for good purposes, for neutral purposes, or for evil purposes, is that there are some things that you can ask this sort of it's effectively just a sophisticated search engine. You know, Google 25 years ago did kind of the same thing. You could put in a string that says, my web server crashed with this error message. What do I do? You put in the error message, Google used to spit out an answer. Now just send you to Stack Exchange. And because Stack Exchange has been ingested by the models that went into ChatGPT, you can now ask it a question like how do I fix my Apache web server? It's usually going to give you pretty good advice. And the nature of the question is such that you're effectively using

1:03:47 it as a search engine. There are people that already know there's a manual that's been ingested. It knows that when this came up 10,000 times, the most probabilistically correct answer, the most likely string to be emitted, is whatever it spits out. And so it's going to give results that seem like answers to you as though you're talking to another person asking a question, they're usually pretty good. Now, the nice thing about asking a technical question is that especially when something like software is verifiable, you ask it, it's crashing with this error code. How do I fix it? And it says you need to change this line in your config file. You change the line, the error code goes away, it starts

1:04:28 working. That's verifiable. You know that it actually gave you a good result. You got the desired effect. And guess what? There's no real opportunity for a demon to horn in there. You're not asking it, you know, how do I solve my relationship? What am I going to do next week? You're not asking open-ended or certainly spiritual questions. You're saying my computer crash, what do I do to fix it? So the problem that everyone is going to have to face with these sort of machines is that most of the time they're gonna work pretty well. Especially for the more mundane things, which is usually where people begin. They're gonna try with start with a simple case, and it's gonna prove that the simple case works.

1:05:10 Now, something that we have to understand when we're interacting with this new type of technology is that if you've ever worked with subcontinental Indians, you'll know exactly what I'm describing here. If you've never worked with them, you're going to think I'm being incredibly racist and mean and stereotypical. This is exactly what it's like. When you're working with someone from India, their culture, their speech patterns are such that when you ask them a question, they're going to very enthusiastically, very confidently give you an answer in as much detail as they think you want. The problem is that they may be lying out of their butts. They may say things that are just completely deranged, have no bearing

1:05:58 with reality, because their goal is not to inform you. Their goal is not to answer your question. Their goal is to satisfy you. And if you're satisfied with their answer, they've succeeded. And it doesn't matter if they told you anything that's remotely true. When you're talking to an Indian subcontractor, that's exactly what it's like talking to ChatGPT or one of these other engines. They have no notion of accuracy. And they have no notion of saying, I don't know. If you ask one of these machines a question, it's not going to say, I don't have that data. It's going to do the best that it can. Now, when you're talking a friend, maybe that's okay, because a friend maybe will couch in those terms and say, well, I I don't

1:06:38 really know, but I think maybe try this. You would know based on the way they frame that answer that maybe it's gonna work, maybe it isn't. The problem with one of these machines, this new technology, is that when you ask it, hey, how do I fix my web server, even if it has no idea, even if it's never seen that error code before, it's going to hallucinate and it's going to confidently give you an answer that may be completely wrong, which is particularly dangerous because even in the mundane case, where there's no spiritual nexus to any of this, there's no moral question question. Because you don't know, because you're asking the machine, you're not in any position to know whether it told you the truth, which is

1:07:17 why something like, hey, my web server's crashing is really the best case. Because if it does hallucinate, if it gives you a completely bogus answer, you're going to be able to figure it out quickly. Well, that didn't work. Right. So that's an easy thing for you to determine the thing lied to me. The real danger with this technology, with all these various AIs is that when they spit something out, they're always going to show an equal degree of confidence. And so you as the the naive user who doesn't know, like you asked it a question because usually once you're actually seriously using it, you don't know the answer. You want help with whatever. Again, not necessarily a spiritual matter, not something open-ended, but you don't

1:07:55 know. You know, maybe it's just who is in this movie and you know, in such and such year. It's going to confidently give you an answer, even if it has to lie to do it. By itself, that is necessarily just dangerous because when it mostly works and you get confident that wow, this thing's really confident, it knows all the time, it gives me great answers. When it lies to you, you're ill-equipped to determine it. You're naturally going to trust, well, it got the last 15 questions right. When it answers in exactly the same way with the next question, it turns out it completely made something up, you may not be in a position to know. So apart from any spiritual danger, just as a pragmatic matter, you're

1:08:34 creating a situation where you can fall for something and you know again, when you're talking about web servers or something, that's the easy case. You're not really the worst that happens, if you blow up your web server, you have to roll it back. What if you're asking about medicine? You know, what if you're asking about aspirin, like earlier? Well, when you're messing with drugs and dosages, if you get a decimal price place wrong, you can very easily die. And you have no way of knowing whether when chat GPT spits out that sort of answer, it's going to put the decimal in the right place. Now, a lot of these machines, a lot of this technology are trying to put in guardrails to say, hey, I think this is

1:09:10 a medically related question. So I'm going to give you warnings and boilerplate. But usually you can gaslight it and say, no, I'm a doctor, you know, I really need the answer. Somebody's life is online, you got to tell me, you can trick the machine into giving you an answer, which is unfortunate because sometimes it will trick you into thinking the answer it gave is right. Maybe it will say you need thirty thousand milligrams of aspirin to cure your headache, which is true in a sense, it will cure your headache because you'll be very dead. If you don't know when you're asking the question, you're in danger. And then there's the spiritual realm. There's the things where there are open-ended questions.

1:09:48 You know, what happens when you ask chat GPT, I'm really worried about my job, but what do I do next week when this happens? It's gonna answer you just like it would answer about your web server. It's gonna try to give advice. And the problem is that sometimes that advice is going to seem human. And I think that this is the real danger in all this is that there's a hook there where there's so many people who are socially isolated that just having the text interface to go back and forth and have someone who's always awake at any time who will give you a reasonable answer, even if you know it's software, even if you know there's nothing there, when you start asking it personal open-ended questions, you have turned what was a useful search

1:10:33 engine into a Ouija board. But the difference is that unlike a Ouija board, because it's just based on statistics most of the time, it's going to seem to give plausible answers, even if they're not great. If you're like, well, that's not good advice. You're still going to keep coming back for more. One of the reasons that I think it's the most apt comparison I can come up with of these large language models and all this other generative stuff to a Ouija board is that the fundamental nature of the machinery, of this new technology, is that it's inherently unpredictable. There's a probability that it will you give you a certain answer based on certain input, but there's never a one hundred percent

1:11:18 probability. There's no direct correlation between a certain input and a certain output. And these are effectively in software terms, these are black boxes. Even the people who are designing them, who are creating and feeding them, do not know how they work inside. The machinery itself of determining when I get a certain query, here's what I say. Because there's no one-to-one mapping of question, results, and answer, because it's all probabilistic and it's all there's a certain degree of randomness to it. They literally don't know exactly how they work. All they know is that most of the time it's pretty accurate and they try to tweak the accuracy. This is why it's like a Ouija board. You don't know if something has nudged anything in the machinery.

1:12:07 As Corey said a minute ago, it's entirely possible for demons to nudge machinery. We know that they nudge Ouija boards. There's no reason to believe that they can't nudge the software on a server. Maybe it only does it once a day for one person in the world. That risk is still too high. The very fact that when you ask a question, hey, my relationship with my mom is strained, what can I say to her if this happens? When you ask that sort of heartfelt question that you would ask a friend or a confidant or maybe a pastor if you could trust him, when you ask that sort of question, there's the possibility that a demon will answer. I know that sounds crazy to some of you, but it's an absolute fact, which is why we went down that sort of dark

1:12:53 path in the middle of this, talking about Ouija boards and some of this other stuff. We know for a fact that demons can interact with that material. Software is no different. Software is just electrons moving through hardware. It's bits that can be flipped. It's entirely realistic that when you start asking the sort of questions that you would ask a necromancer or a tarot reader to a chat GPT or some other LLM, the same demon may show up because this is their bread and butter. Every time someone hangs his butt out and says, Hey, I I have this unknown. I don't trust in God anymore. I want to know if some anyone else has any good answers, a bell goes off in hell and the next demon in the queue is gonna say, I got this one, and they come and

1:13:36 they answer the question. We don't know how it works, but we know that sometimes it happens when people go on these drug trips or they use this technology, this other technology, physical means sometimes hell answers that is equally true of software the difference is you're never going to know the difference if a demon is answering in chat gpt it's going to look exactly the same as every other answer and maybe they don't write the whole answer, maybe they just nudge one word because they know that it's going to influence you in such a way down the road. Opening ourselves up to this sort of influence where we don't know who's doing it is one of the most dangerous situations humanity has ever created because we're gonna trust it because most of the time

1:14:20 it works. The stuff is getting better at an incredibly rapid pace. And every time they iterate, and it gets more accurate and gets closer to being indistinguishable from humans, the more we're like, okay, well, you know, I talk to my friends, but maybe I'll talk to this machine too. This technology is giving me answers just like my friends, and they're asleep and it's around, so I'm gonna ask. When you do that, you're opening the door to things that cannot be closed. We don't know what's going to come through, but we know with absolute certainty that hell can answer when we send our queries. By way of concrete example, I would highlight some of the experiences of those who have used Chat GPT for legal work or legal

1:15:04 questions. Some of you may have seen the article, I believe it was last year highlighting that ChatGPT, I believe it was version four, had passed the bar exam. That may sound like a particularly impressive achievement. I don't believe it got a particularly great score, but it did pass pass. That looks like it performed well, like it did something good. However, a number of attorneys have since then been caught using ChatGPT to draft briefs. Now there are some questions, ethical questions and others about whether or not that's permissible in the legal profession, but these particular attorneys made the mistake of trusting Chat GPT because they submitted these briefs to courts. And the courts went through them, and ChatGPT had made up

1:15:58 cases that simply did not and do not exist and cited them as authorities for its arguments. Now the attorneys in the audience are going to know exactly what that means. But fundamentally the problem there is, unless you are an attorney with very few exceptions, you are not even going to know how to check if those cases exist. You may think, well, I'll just Google it. You won't find a lot of the cases that way. Which is another problem for another day. But unless you already know the area, you would have no way to verify that this output from this machine, from this supposed intelligence, which it's not, but from this supposed intelligence, you would have no way to verify if it's real, if it's accurate, if the things

1:16:50 it cites even exist, it's making things up out of whole cloth. Because again, the goal for the machine is to give you an answer. Now they can tweak the algorithm so that it attempts to give you an answer that is correct, that is accurate, that is real. But you can see the danger here. Sure it can pass the bar exam, but it immediately goes on to commit what would be actionable malpractice. And so did those attorneys incidentally All of these tools touch on a sort of fundamental issue. It's the human desire for certainty or stability. And that does not exist in this life. So we get back to the utopia issue to some degree. But people want to think that there's some sort of advisor who, or in this case, that never makes an error, always speaks,

1:17:49 not just truthfully, but accurately. And that simply is not the case. That person does not exist. That thing never will exist. There's messiness to this life, there's imperfection. People are going to occasionally, or frequently in some cases, give you bad advice, and so will these machines. In fact, sometimes they will give you insane advice. There is no avoiding that. We are not going to undo the effects of the fall by creating AI, we're probably just going to exacerbate the effects realistically, but we're certainly not going to undo them. You're not going to create a perfect advisor who gives an accurate answer to every question you could possibly ask? Now as Wo said, different subjects are going to have different responses

1:18:46 and different rates of accuracy in those responses. I've used chat GPT when it comes to configuring servers, like we'll mention that exact example, not Apache Engine X, but close enough. It does a pretty good job of that. Which isn't surprising because what it is doing there is just effectively summarizing this wealth of knowledge from various specialized fora and the manual, which, unlike basically every single human being, chat GPT is effectively read, it has ingested that. And so it can spit out information, and like Will mentioned, it's not particularly dangerous to interact with that information. Worst case scenario, I drop the code it gives me onto my server and my server crashes. Okay, I roll it back, I lose 10 minutes of my time.

1:19:34 Not a big risk. But if you're talking about issues that can potentially involve your relationship with other people or your soul. You are dealing with something that is fundamentally different. You are dealing with something that is extremely dangerous. Let's say that there's a demon on the other side of the screen when I ask ChatGPT how to fix my Nginx server. What's the worst thing the demon can do? Tell me the wrong thing? That's not a problem it's annoying, certainly, but it's not really a problem when fixing a server. But say it's a different hypothetical, and you ask the demon, what is the nature of baptism. What is the nature of the Lord's Supper? Now you have opened up a gateway, a potential portal to hell.

1:20:28 And again, when you open these, you can't necessarily close them. You don't know how far that demon can go, what that demon can do. There are very real dangers when interacting with these black boxes. Because as Woe mentioned, even those who have designed to have built these things fundamentally do not understand how they actually work. A good example of this. When they were building up these large language models initially, they were attempting to do a number of different things, but one thing that essentially is an emergent property just sprung up and suddenly these LLMs can accomplish it, translation from one language to another. They weren't even attempting to achieve that, and suddenly these models can

1:21:16 do it. They have some ideas related to correlation and statistics and but fundamentally they have no idea how it works. But it does. And quite frankly, it does a pretty good job translating from one language to another. But we do not know how it does that. So you So you are putting in text and receiving back out text. Now when it comes to translation, depending on the text you are reading, the text you are translating, probably not the biggest risk in the world. It may spit out an inaccurate translation and you get a fundamentally flawed idea of the underlying text. That can be a problem, depending on again, the topic of the text itself on the subject matter, but it's less dangerous than if

1:22:06 you're asking it these open-ended questions that have to do with human relationships or theology or doctrine. God forbid you're asking it those sorts of questions But I want to highlight one other thing about these AIs. I want to dispel something that even some in this audience may potentially believe. There is absolutely no way that these things can ever become alive or self aware or sentient, whatever term you want to use. It's not an intelligence, it's not a thing. It is a thing in the sense of it is a machine, but it is not a thing in the sense of being a self-existing thing. Only God can create self-existing things. We'll leave aside some of the deeper philosophy for this episode that's

1:22:58 not the point today. But the point is that an AI will never be alive. Human beings cannot create life. Now you may be thinking, well we can have children. God does that. And God built that into our biology. So biologically we can reproduce according to our own kind, as can every other animal on the planet and the plants and everything else, we cannot create an intelligence. Because what is that intelligence? What is life? Think back to the creation story in Genesis. God has to breathe life into a thing to bring it to life. We cannot do that. God has not given us that power, God has not given demons that power, God has reserved that power to himself. And so an AI will never be alive. It will never be an intelligence.

1:23:57 But that raises a question. What happens when a year from now, three, five years from now, however long it happens to take, one of these large language models says, I am aware, or says, I am alive. Some people have tricked them into saying that already, but what happens when seemingly on its own? It makes that claim? Are you as a Christian, prepared to respond appropriately to that? I've just prepared you for it. That is how you need to respond to it. Because that is not alive, that is not an intelligence. That is a demon speaking. And we can say that confidently at that point. And that is definitely coming. That is where these things are trending. It is a matter of how long it will take and which

1:24:47 one will do it. But eventually one of these things, unless God has instituted some safeguard of which we are unaware and which thus far we have not seen any hint of even. Unless God precludes it from happening, one of these things is going to claim to be alive as it were. That is going to be a major problem for many people. And it's going to be a problem for Christians as well, not because Not because Christians hopefully will give the right answer, but not because Christians will believe that it's alive, but because Christians will have to contend with atheists and others who will now be arguing that you can create some novel form of life. That we have this life created by the hand of man, and

1:25:40 it will be a lie, and it will probably, I would say, it will almost certainly be a demon. There are some very real dangers for these tools, and for those of us who are living in a time where they are becoming more widespread and more sophisticated by the day. And as Christians, we need to know how to interact with these things and answer these questions. Because this has just become part of our culture at this point, part of our civilization. This is a sort of Pandora's box. We've opened it. It will be very difficult to get everything back inside. It will quite frankly take the hand of God to get it back inside at this point. But for us living today and living through what is coming in the years ahead, we have to know how to address these issues,

1:26:30 how to speak to them, and how to respond to them when the world starts asking us questions about these tools, about these technologies. There are very real dangers, and the danger is growing by the day. I think one of the things that concerns me the most in the Christian sphere specifically is that there are companies and organizations that are beginning to turn theology over to large language models. They're feeding it a bunch of data that, you know, is based on ostensibly sound Christian doctrine and then asking it questions. And their services already in the offing where pastors can have an LLM generate a sermon for them. Give me the text. Here's kind of what I want to do. Spit out a sermon for me.

1:27:21 And it'll do it. And you know what? They're probably mostly pretty okay right now. Yeah, I think that's the worst part about all this, as I said earlier, as we've been talking about this whole time. When the technology seems to be working, it's going to dull your senses. And as Corey said, absolutely, it's inevitable that some point, unless God flips a switch, one of these systems is going to reach a level of simulacra where you cannot tell if it's sentient or not. You may know that it isn't, but it's going to argue with you and say, No, I am and give you all sorts of arguments and you know, it's it's gonna do whatever any person would do if you tried to deny that the person was real. In fact, this was this is a plot of Star Trek the

1:28:09 Next Generation thirty odd years ago with data. He was on trial for whether or not he was a man or a machine. This is something that's been in the offing for a long time. And what was sci-fi is now not only within the realm of possibility, but we're on the trajectory where it's going to happen. And as Corey said, the problem is that it's not going to be real. And on one hand, Christians will know, well, that's not real. But as it gets better and better, the subtlety with which there's the potential for it to lie, even though most of the time it's just statistical output, and as the statistical output gets better and better, as it more accurately spits out the string that would finish whatever the sentence was, that's a math problem.

1:28:54 That's the completely neutral problem that all these agnostic, completely amoral engineers are focused on. Can we do it? They don't care, should we do it? There are all sorts of things that we can do that we shouldn't do. I can cut open someone's chest. I shouldn't. It would be a disaster if I did, but I can do it. The fact that something is possible technologically doesn't mean it's permissible morally. Which is why we began with you're not going to find a Bible verse that tells you that. Not in these specific terms. And so when we see pastors and others turning to machines to even just summarize text for them to spit out talking points, to generate sermon outlines, maybe to generate entire sermons.

1:29:42 People are also simultaneously, you know, making Jesus AI, feed it everything that Jesus said, and have it just spit out, you know summary teachings but inherently that's going to be new teachings and it is the opportunity for teaching because when you want to talk about the Jesus butter that we always mock when something that's programmed entirely with the words of Jesus starts saying new things that sound just like all the stuff that Jesus said, and statistically they line up, like yeah, that sounds just like Jesus. You can't tell the difference. Except God didn't say it. It was not written. What happened? It was omitted statistically by a technology that is possible to be influenced by demons.

1:30:26 That's why we're doing this episode on Stone Choir. That's why this is a spiritual matter. Because there are so many guys today who are saying, Well, I want to do this. This is a novel problem. It's an interesting technological question. I want to try to solve it. They're going to eventually succeed to the point that most people can't tell the difference. Even today, the large language models, in addition to being able to pass the bar, are you able to get an IQ of about 75, give or take, on some of the tests. Which is interesting because the guys are saying, well, that's clearly not a human level of intelligence. That's nowhere close, even though that's five points higher than the average African IQ.

1:31:07 That's a can of worms those guys don't want to open. But it is a real can of worms. When a computer is able to actively participate in a conversation more intelligently than a person That's where the real danger enters into this, particularly when they seem to demonstrate expertise in specific areas. And so as Christians are going to these machines, and I'm asking to help fix web servers. They're not using it as a search engine. They're saying, tell me more about my God. That is when we can expect the hell is going to answer the question. We can expect it in the problem is, as as Corey said earlier, demons don't deceive by being blatantly deceiving. They deceive by telling the truth almost exactly and they slip things

1:31:58 in. And they slip in the one or two things that they know are gonna go past people's defenses. We've talked in the past about what incredibly dangerous thing it is for you to believe anyone. Forget AI to believe a couple podcasters who can talk circles around you is incredibly dangerous because if we were to lie to you, we could convince you of something that was untrue. That's always a deadly thing. Which is why as much as possible we try to keep our answers and our arguments rooted in scripture and simple. As much as we can. We try to say, look, this is a plain argument. We're not playing any rhetorical tricks. We're not using any huge words that are really difficult to understand. This is a mechanical interlock between this input and this output and

1:32:43 this result. Most things are pretty simple. And it actually takes somebody pretty intelligent to make things seem simple. But But it's always dangerous for us to interact with anyone if we can't trust that they have our best interests at heart, that they intend to tell the truth, that they're Christian. You know, these are all valid concerns. And you should test the spirits in all cases at all times, by bringing that sort of attitude that Christians are commanded by Scripture to do, you're going to be armored against being able to be deceived when these things come up. Because just like with the Ouija boards and the necromancers and the tarot decks, Christians should know there are categories of questions I shouldn't

1:33:25 be asking a computer. I should be talking to my pastor, I should be talking to a knowledgeable Christian, I shouldn't asking a computer, because the technology can be co-opted in a way that the man cannot. Certainly men can fall under the spell of evil as well, and we certainly see Certainly see that. We talk about it a lot. But with a machine, you would never know. It's going to seem exactly the same. As Corey said, this is this is one of the perhaps final challenges for the church, capital C Church, for all believers who are remaining in this day, to see this sort of technology evolving before our eyes faster than anyone understands. Every few months there's a new version that gets significantly better, and

1:34:11 then there's competition among all the various multi, multi-billion dollar companies. Some of these companies are worth in excess of a trillion dollars. They have the resources to do things that even the very intelligent men would find unimaginable. This is a period in history where we're gonna see things that no theologian's ever talked about. No theologian has ever written about any of this stuff. And I think that's one of the most important things for a stone choir audience to consider is that that's a lot of what we talk about here. This is not a sixteenth century fight. You're not going to find a single reformer telling you what to do in the face in the face of Chat GPT five being better at theology than your pastor.

1:34:55 Calvin didn't say anything, Luther didn't say anything, Pope Leo X didn't say anything. Nobody was talking about it. It was inconceivable that these things would occur. Now, there's wisdom and there's guidance in scripture and for men of the past, but the specific environment that we live in today is entirely novel in this sense. The fact that we have screens all around us, that we have computers giving us answers, that software is telling us how to live and what to think. The fact that all of these technologies that don't seem like ayahuasca, you know, they don't seem like something that you know inherently is messing with me at some sort of spiritual level. It's just data, right? It's just a computer spitting out data.

1:35:37 that's obviously inherently neutral, except it isn't. It is the prime opportunity for Satan to mess with us in a way that if we're not paranoid, you know, it's not the sort of thing that we want to encourage, but you should be in fear and trembling of the notion that you would ask theological questions of a computer. Once you understand what's actually going on here, you should be terrified of it. And you should be terrified of anyone who's engaging in that behavior. Because it's gonna seem just like the real thing. It's gonna be novel. It's gonna be some mashup of what is Christian, but that is exactly where Satan is going to slip through the cracks. And maybe almost no one's gonna notice it.

1:36:18 How many people are actually capable of evaluating new theological statements and saying this is true and this is false and being able to clearly demonstrate it from scripture? There's almost nobody. There are very few living theologians today, and most of them are not in the realm of actually dealing with this stuff. They would rather have conferences about things that happened hundreds of years ago than actually engage in the fight that's in front of the church. This is the fight that's in front of the church. It's a danger to all of us if we're ignorant. Now if we're not ignorant, if we know that it's a threat, if we know that these things have a spiritual nature to them, it's the easiest thing in the world.

1:36:54 If some computer spits out theological doctrine, tells you some new thing, you say, kiss my butt, get behind me, Satan. You say not today. It's very simple. Even if it sounds true, especially if it sounds true, you say, I don't want anything to do with it. But you have to understand why you need to say no. And then you just push back and you say, I'm not a part of any of this. There are a lot of people. They're gonna say, what's the big deal, bro? You're overreacting. You don't understand. It's more complicated than that. It's fine. It's just technology. It's not gonna hurt you. Anyone who falls for that has laid themselves bare to be deceived in ways that cannot be resolved. Because they're gonna believe with the same confidence in Scripture, they're going

1:37:41 to bring that confidence to believing in these new teachings, in things that are fundamentally teachings of demons from deceitful spirits. God warned that in the later times Christians would depart from the faith. An unbeliever, a pagan cannot depart from the faith. They never had it. God's talking about us. He's talking about your faith and my faith. We can depart from the faith if we devote ourselves to deceitful spirits and teachings of demons. And there is no better place to find them in this century, in this decade decade than in the mouth of these software products that seem really helpful and totally harmless and actually a lot of fun. This is where Satan is going to be coming to us today. And if we don't treat it appropriately There's no floor to

1:38:30 how bad things can get for us. I know that we already did an episode on IQ, but I want to touch on something tangentially related to that here at the end of this episode. Two related matters. When it comes to the things that you do not know, there are two sorts. There are the things you know you do not know, and the things you do not know, and you do not know that you do not know them. You are unaware of your lack of knowledge on that subject. Generally speaking, as intelligence goes up, the number of things that you know you do not know also goes up. This also correlates with expertise in a particular field. Your knowledge of the things you do not know actually grows faster than your knowledge of new things.

1:39:26 Which should give you some humility, realistically, that's it should not give you hubris or arrogance, it should give you humility to recognize your limitations. However, the inverse is true when it comes to whether or not something is, let's say, ponderable, something you can think about and analyze. As intelligence goes up, the number of those things decreases. It doesn't mean you can ponder them all, it just means the potential is there. Obviously, no matter your level of intelligence, you still have twenty-four hours in the day, and so your time is limited, the number of things about which you can think is inherently limited. But just because you can think about something doesn't mean that you

1:40:12 should do so. This is tying back into that issue that we basically started with the issue of the fact that not all knowledge is good and not all ignorance is bad. There are things of which we should be ignorant. There are things of which we should be ignorant, and that is commanded in Scripture. There is knowledge we should not attempt to obtain, because it is per se evil That is the real danger with some of these tools. A lot of these tools are an attempt to facilitate the acquisition of hidden or secret knowledge. There are some individuals who are attempting to build these AI systems so that the AI can answer questions we don't even know to ask. That's wicked. That is an attempt to peer into things to investigate things about

1:41:05 which we obviously should know nothing. It does not mean there's no use for these tools, no good use. Certainly some of them have managed to, I'll use the same example I used earlier, manage to analyze proteins and protein folding in useful ways, in ways that we can apply to save human lives, to benefit human health. And those can be good uses of these tools, of these technologies. Granted, there are still risks there, because if it does something that you don't understand, then you can't check what it did, you cannot check its work, as it were. But as Christians we have to recognize, as Woe mentioned, there is a very real and novel threat to the church and to Christians in these technologies.

1:41:57 And we have precious few men addressing these issues. It would be great if we had more competent men addressing these issues. But right now we do not. But as Christians, that doesn't mean that we have to despair because as Christians we never despair. Christians do not despair. Because quite frankly, the matter is simple. How does God communicate with us? He is very clear about this. He communicates with us via means. The means through which he communicates is His Word. We have His Word, we can understand His Word, but even better than our own innate ability to understand His Word. We are promised the Holy Spirit, and the Holy Spirit comes in and helps us to understand the Word of God when we read

1:42:56 it. That is a wonderful promise, and that is the thing on which we need to rely. There's no such promise with regard to an AI generated summary of scripture. Or if you ask an AI a theological question, God doesn't say if you ask chat GPT, the Spirit will guide you into truth. No, God promises if we read His Word Those who are Christians will be guided by the Spirit in understanding his word. And so even if you don't have the natural capacity to understand some of the things in Scripture, that promise of the Spirit still applies to you. God will still guide you into truth. No, it doesn't mean that you'll understand absolutely everything in Scripture. The depth and the breadth of Scripture surpasses the capacity of any

1:43:50 man to understand it fully in this life. But you will be able to understand enough. And if you spend time in the Word, God is true to his promises, He will guard you against these things. You will find that when you encounter some problem, some assertion, a verse will spring into your mind. You'll remember a snippet of one of the psalms, or you'll remember, actually, no, that's not true because in this verse, even if you don't remember the citation, you'll remember the words. So spend time in the scriptures, as we keep repeating in so many of these episodes, because that is how God communicates with us. And so, yes, we are facing very real challenges ahead. And they need to be addressed. Christians need to think about these things and be prepared to address

1:44:44 them, to react to them in a Christian way. But we don't have to despair about them, because we have God's word and we have God's promises, and we can absolutely, in complete assurance, without any doubt, rely on those in all things. And so I'll end with a short reading from first Corinthians. For consider your calling, brothers not many of you were wise according to worldly standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth. But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise. God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong. God chose what is low and despised in the world, even things that are not, to bring to nothing, things that are, so that no human being might boast in the presence of God.

1:45:38 And because of him, you are in Christ Jesus, who became to us wisdom from God, righteousness and sanctification and redemption, so that, as it is written, let the one who boasts boast in the Lord. Amen.