The Church Meeting in Jesus’ Name
602 Oak Knoll Dr.
San Antonio, TX 78228
Epistle
July 2023
Event Calendar
2023
JUNE 25 – JULY 8
• Poland Mission Trip
JULY 23 – 30
• Mission Conference
• Dinner on the grounds both Sundays
OCTOBER 4 – 8
• Mini Revival Meeting with Mike Ragan
OCTOBER 21
• Men’s Meeting
NOVEMBER 26
• Thanksgiving Sunday – dinner on the grounds
2024
MARCH 6 – 10
• Mini Revival Meeting with Mike Veach
Spirit, Soul and Body
And the very God of peace sanctify you wholly; and I pray God your whole spirit and soul and body be preserved blameless unto the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ.
1 Thessalonians 5:23
Recently I was asked by a friend at work about the Antichrist, and who he was, or what I thought he might be. It seems that some folks have floated the idea that perhaps the Antichrist is going to be Artificial Intelligence. I disagreed, of course, not after considering all the Bible passages on the subject though, but because I am not very worried about, or even very impressed by, Artificial Intelligence. (I tried out ChatGPT once. Maybe it wasn’t the latest iteration, but it was the dumbest interaction I’ve ever had.) I remarked that in my opinion AI itself is not the danger, but people who control the computers, and may use them to control aspects of our lives. Sophisticated technology is being used as we speak to tyrannize millions.
I am not in a position to evaluate the reach of recent artificial intelligence breakthroughs. People who are seem worried. But I don’t believe what passes for AI nowadays is actually intelligence. I know computer programs are becoming exponentially more sophisticated, but I don’t subscribe to the idea that a mind is contained, or can be contained within complex coding and immense databases. I know that evolutionary pre-suppositions expect that when a brain becomes sufficiently complex a mind automatically “emerges” (like magic). And this leads to the expectation that a computer that becomes expansively sophisticated must also become a mind, even if the creators of the computers couldn’t make that happen if their life depended on it. But there is a real disconnect in the logic behind it all. Both of the underlying assumptions are deeply flawed. Our brains are not computers, and our minds are not our brains.
People have been trying to explain the human mind for centuries, imagining every new technology as a breakthrough. George Zarkadakis in his book “In Our Own Image” describes a number of different metaphors used over the millennia to explain the mind, from hydraulic engineering developed by the Greeks centuries before Christ, to Descartes and Hobbes in the 1600s likening our intelligence to mechanical clockwork. Breakthroughs in chemistry led to chemical theories, and discoveries in electricity spawned contemporary electrical theories. The development of computers in the middle of the last century brought us to the current prevailing theory of the mind, the digital computer. This is completely understandable, because through the computer we can see how information can be received, stored and retrieved, somewhat similar to our physical senses and our memory. And computers seem to make decisions. Programmers can make programs that simulate human intelligence. And it follows from the infatuation with the cockamamie idea that everything emerged from nothing by just happening automatically, and that progress is inevitable because of principles like natural selection (the oblivion of failures), that given enough memory a computer can become conscious, or “sentient.” It hasn’t happened yet, of course, and frankly, it didn’t happen with humans either. With no line of evidence to support the idea it simply is not a reasonable expectation.
Now cue the fundamental problems with the idea. Our minds are not computers, and our brains do not function like computers. Our brain does not store programs nor data. We don’t make pictures of what we see and store them in our brain to retrieve later. Furthermore, computers do not make decisions. Programmers make decisions, and computers spit out results (outputs) according to information fed to it (inputs). And computers simulating human intelligence is an intentional illusion. It comes from programmers deliberately coding humanlike responses and reactions. Hawking’s imagination that someday we will be able to download our mind to a computer is pure fantasy. Of course his interest in it was understandable considering his severe disability. But it is utterly unrealistic and the fantasy is not harmless. Robert Epstein in an online article (aeon.co/essays/your-brain-does-not-process-information-and-it-is-not-a-computer) explains the problem in more detail, including the billions wasted on the European Union’s Human Brain Project, which he notes turned into a “brain-wreck” in less than two years. Our brain is not a computer, and even had it been, a mind could never emerge from it without intent.
Unbelievers often deride the very idea of a soul or spirit, pretending that there is nothing in the universe but matter and energy, even though such a claim is far from scientific. Yet they bluster that the entirety of our existence is found in our body, and only in our body, and our sense of a personal self, our individual identity, is an illusion found only in the deceitful synapses of the brain, which they conceive as a randomly assembled mass of neurons, or pure electrochemistry. They think we perceive an inner being only because we see “out” from our eyes, so we assume the real me is inside looking out. But they insist it is smoke and mirrors. So sure they are of this that they are moved to pity the simpletons that speak of a soul or spirit.
Yet they casually dismiss the universally recognized fact that we are persons, and that our mind is not the physical brain. The brain can be operated on while the patient is conscious, and the patient can inform the surgeon that he did not move his hand, even though the hand moved. We knew this intuitively as children. So did they, until they were gaslighted by evolutionary assumptions, and didn’t want to appear stupid believing in invisible things that can’t be handled and measured. Yet we know such things exist. The mind exists, and we don’t need to see it or handle it to know it is a reality beyond the physical. Even scientifically detected natural “laws” that have so far been described must exist beyond the physical, because they obviously control the physical from one end of the universe to the other. Our sense of ethics, or right and wrong, must exist beyond the physical also, or it has no meaning at all. And we all know the ethical imperative exists, and has meaning, and much greater meaning than any physical structure. The abuse and murder of an adolescent girl to gratify the lusts of a pervert is of far greater significance to us than the violent destruction of an entire galaxy of stars. But not if only matter exists. Therefore more than matter exists. Beauty, humor, empathy, duty, gratitude and justice are real. They are more real and far more significant than matter and space. And they all exist in the mind, not in a computer, not even a supercomputer, and in case you were wondering, not in a brain.
So computers cannot become persons, both because persons are not brains, and brains are not computers. As a child you knew you were more than your body, more than your senses, more than your synapses, more than your randomly misfiring neurons. You knew you were a person, and you knew you were important. The Bible expresses it thus, we were made in the image of God. God is called the “father of spirits.” If you doubt this, you had to be trained to doubt it.
In fact, no one has envisioned a better explanation than the one in the Bible, that God gives the spirit, and that spirit is the mind, connected to the soul, which is somehow connected to the brain. Our text declares a distinction between spirit, soul and body, but Hebrews 4:12 makes it clear that the distinction is not easy to define. The Bible in many instances refers to the parting of the soul and spirit from the body, as in Genesis 35:18 when Rachel’s soul left her body as she died, or countless references to “giving up the ghost.”
Of course we can easily distinguish the body from the spirit. We can even respectively define each as not the other one. The body is that physical machine constructed of matter. The spirit is that personal identity the body belongs to. These two cannot touch. But the soul, or the mind, is the connection between the spirit and the body. This is why in the scripture the soul is often identified with either or both, leading Jehovah’s Witness to err by selective referencing. The soul identifies with the body, as Ezekiel put it, “the soul that sinneth, it shall die.” But scripture also identifies the soul with the spirit, as Job put it, “I will speak in the anguish of my spirit; I will complain in the bitterness of my soul.” This is not contradictory. The soul is intimately connected to both the body and the spirit, even though body and spirit are mutually and irrevocably incompatible, as Jesus put it, “that which is born of the flesh is flesh; and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit.” Or as Paul put it, “the flesh lusteth against the Spirit, and the Spirit against the flesh: and these are contrary the one to the other.”
The Bible has been consistent with this description of human composition from Genesis to Revelation. Believers have been confused over the centuries, of course, being a difficult combination to analyze. But scorning unbelievers cannot help but become increasingly and uneasily aware that the Bible actually has a more persuasive description of reality than they do. And their modern failure to understand the severe limitations of computers, and even supercomputers, will likely result in highlighting the foolishness of such an imagination as refuses to acknowledge the obvious Creator, the Father of spirits. The amazing thing about all this, as found in our text, is that God’s salvation is set up to preserve all the components of our lives, our spirit, soul and body. The believer loses nothing in death. And the objective of preserving all blameless, to stand unashamed and unafraid before the Creator, is more important and more significant than any aspect of our earthly lives.