Human Intelligence

We are living in a time of artificial intelligence (AI), but as we saw yesterday, AI isn't really artificial; it's automated. It's human intelligence formed into an algorithm, with all of a human perspective and bias programmed right into it. 

But...

What if I told you there's no such thing as human intelligence?

See, human intelligence is not fundamentally different from what we are calling 'artificial intelligence' these days - that is, it is dependent upon the Creator of humanity. 

There are, of course, humanists who will tell you that's all bunk. That there is no such thing as a "Creator." That one day, billions upon billions of years ago, nothing exploded into something, something developed into a breathing something, that single-celled amoeba spouted fins and started swimming, then legs and started walking, then hair and stood upright, and then somehow became a thinking being (a pastor friend likes to say the fish stood upright and became a paleontologist, which always makes me laugh) and so humans simply have an "evolved" intelligence, which came from fundamentally nowhere and nothing and became the apex of all creation but is not, at its core, really any different than the fins by which the fish swims or the instinct by which the skunk raises its tail. 

The problem here is that if human intelligence "evolved" this way, then it is, fundamentally, still nothing. Nothing does not create everything; it creates nothing. Just as notes do not create music - notes create noise; structure creates music. So the simple existence of neurons firing in such a way that it resembles intelligence does not intelligence create; it creates only noise. It is the structure of intelligence that makes it something. Otherwise, our so-called intelligence is really nothing but chaos. 

So we're left with a Creator (which, by the way, more and more science is circling back around to, when it gets out of its anti-"religious" biases; the structure of the universe strongly suggests intentionality, which suggests a creator of some kind). And if we are, like artificial intelligence, merely products of our Creator, then we have His perspective and wisdom and bias in it.  

Some will say, wait a minute - God doesn't have any biases. But of course, He does. He is biased toward grace, toward mercy, toward hope, toward faithfulness. God is biased toward love. This is how there remains something fundamentally good about human nature. 

But the point of the conversation is this: we are products of our Creator, so whatever intelligence we think we have is actually only the intelligence that He has given us. And if He has given us intelligence, it is formed on His understanding of what intelligence is. Thus, we think the way that God thinks. 

Which shouldn't be surprising. The Bible tells us plainly we are created in His image. That includes the way we think and process information. 

How, then, does it end up that there is so much broken and evil and dark in this world? If we, in our human intelligence, have merely the mind of God, why does the world look the way that it does? 

Because we do not merely have the mind of God....