Oxford mathematician John Lennox contends that science should increase our respect for what God has created and allowed us to do:
Robert J. Marks: Interesting. The development of science is said by some to replace the need for a belief in God. Wherein I think you could also look at sciences as exposing how great God is. Do you think that that is going to be the case with artificial intelligence?
John Lennox (right): Well, I just don’t know, but I spent most of my life contending with people that think that science replaces God. And I see that as a very foolish argument really. It’s like saying that if you understand how a Ford motor car works, you don’t need to believe in Henry Ford. It’s a confusion between different kinds of explanation. And I often say to people, look, the God explanation, no more competes with the scientific explanation than Henry Ford competes with the law of internal combustion to explain a motor car engine.
And in fact, you need both levels of explanation, the scientific one and the one in terms of the creative agency of God to give you a complete explanation. And so it’s been clear to me for many years that a lot of the heat could be taken out of this science versus God thing if people only could realize that explanation comes at different levels.
News, “Can AI replace the need for belief in God?” at Mind Matters News
One of John Lennox’s motivations in writing 2084 was to offer a rebuttal to the Silicon Valley idea of techno-immortality via uploading our minds to silicon.
Also: Do some passages in the Book of Revelation appear to talk about AI? Revelation is notoriously obscure but a passage about a future “total control” state gives pause for thought. Lennox notes that in Revelation, the freedom to buy and sell is determined by a kind of mark, like China’s social credit score.