331: Are Christians Ready for the Age of AI?

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Charles Roberts (00:02)
Welcome to Out of the Question, a podcast that looks behind some common questions and uncovers the question behind the question while providing real solutions for biblical world and life view. Your co-hosts are Andrea Schwartz, a teacher and mentor, and Pastor Charles Roberts.

Andrea Schwartz (00:19)
You often hear about the desire for authenticity or transparency in terms of relationships among people. While there are aspects of life where something artificial is acceptable, it is also usually very obvious. Artificial flowers may look authentic, but up close, you’re able to discern they are not. The same goes for artificial fingernails, eyelashes, artificial turf that looks somewhat like grass, but it isn’t. There are countless other examples. However, sometimes what is artificial is less ideas. Many times, women augment certain parts of their anatomy, but those who look at them might not readily realize that there is literally less to them than meets the eye. So it is safe to say that something artificial can sometimes approximate a deception or a fraud. Today, Charles and I are going to discuss a book that was released this year, 2025, by Andrew Torba, entitled Reclaiming claiming reality, restoring humanity in the age of AI. Ai, if you’re not familiar with the term, means Artificial Intelligence, and signifies that a particular result, whether it’s text, graphics, photographs, have been produced using computer algorithms and machine learning methods. Very often, the results come quite close to approximating something that came from human performance, but it’s not always detectable.

Andrea Schwartz (02:02)
Charles, is AI something new or is it just gaining more awareness and acceptance? How does Torba’s book help answer the question, Does this technology honor God?

Charles Roberts (02:17)
In some ways it’s new, but in other ways it’s not. Technological advances have been around for millennia. When you go from fashioning weapons out of one type of material and somebody comes up with fashioning a weapon out of something totally different and more enduring and heavier than you’ve made a technological advance in the area of fighting and warfare. And that goes back, as I said, millennia. All of our things are dressed up in technological language and technological dressing. So it looks very scientific and advanced. And most of us, of a certain age, and even younger people, they’ve grown up with the Hollywood vision about the future, with spaceships and computers. Everybody he remembers Star Trek and the computer program that was on all the starship, and you could talk to it and all that. So that’s a template that many people have in their heads. And so when something like this starts to be available, it looks very advanced and makes us look like very smart people. On the other hand, I think Torba’s book makes some important points about what Christians need to be thinking about concerning this. And I think our listeners need to understand that this is really a very good book in many ways, and he puts forth some extremely important arguments that this is not something that we brush aside as just crazy atheists, humanists only would be interested in this.

Charles Roberts (03:45)
His position is Christians ought to be out in the forefront of being involved with this and creating types of artificial intelligence programs that honor God, and that in and of itself, like an automobile. Does an automobile honor or dishonor God? Well, it’s just something man has made, it can be used for good or ill. I think his position is, it’s the same with artificial intelligence.

Andrea Schwartz (04:08)
I remember a book way back entitled The Future and its Enemies by Virginia Pastreil. It’s good to think about it because there’s often a reticence for something new, especially for older people who aren’t used to it. My husband’s uncle had the first car dealership in New Jersey, and people thought was crazy for investing in that because nothing was ever going to replace the horse and buggy. Well, I’m about you, but I don’t see too many horse and buggies around right now. The same is true with everybody had a typewriter, and then we went to computers, and you’d be hard-pressed to find a typewriter now and on and on. Now, sometimes you don’t even need a keyboard to input something. It seems to be that the younger generation embraces technology much faster than their parents or grandparents, and a lot of that has to do with familiarity. When you say Christians ought to look at this, there is an effort to differentiate between technological advancement and potential tyranny.

Charles Roberts (05:19)
Yeah, and as I was thinking through what you just said about that and the whole project of discussing this, I was reminded of a chapter in a book that I read in college by the Existential philosopher Gabriel Marcell, who, unlike Sartre and Heidegger, was a devout Roman Catholic Christian. People can quibble about whether you could be a full-blown existentialist philosopher and a devout Roman Catholic Christian, but he claimed that he was. Anyway, in his book, Man Against Mass Society, he had a chapter. Now, this was written, I think in the early ’50s, late ’40s, somewhere in that time frame, called Technological Progress and Sin. And that title really jumped out at me when I first saw it back in the ’70s, when I read it, I was like, wow, what’s the story there? And the gist of what he was arguing is that when technology reaches the level of where you can create weapons of what we today, weapons of mass destruction, and of course, in his day, it was the atomic bomb that can violate an entire nation of people in a flash, then you’ve crossed a boundary. And there needs to be some, if not theological, philosophical break on doing things that really do cross into sinful type activity and thinking.

Charles Roberts (06:37)
I think that can be applied in other areas, like in what we are talking about. And this is something that, as I mentioned, with the films and the movies has been played with for a long time. And one of the more recent examples of that, that I think borders on a technology becoming sinful, is a movie that was out a few years ago, I think it was called Her, H-E-R, and it started Wakeem Phoenix. And this guy falls in love with the voice of his artificial intelligence that’s on his phone. So this predates what we understand as AI today. I mean, people were talking about artificial intelligence for a long time. I saw the movie because the whole subject intrigued me, and I thought, Nobody can pull this off. How could you fall in love with a voice on a phone? But it looked pretty realistic as far as the emotional attachment that this guy had. So I think once we cross into that, then from the biblical standpoint, which is the only true standpoint, we’ve really crossed a boundary where we’ve replaced genuine human relationships, which is what God has ordained for his creation, with something that is a total distortion of it.

Andrea Schwartz (07:48)
And I actually think it goes one step further. Sometimes you are actually experiencing things that were generated by artificial intelligence intelligence or computer algorithms and such, and you don’t even know it. But I remember, I don’t know what, the ’80s, ’90s, I forget, when the movie Forest Gum came out. People loved that movie. It bothered me so dramatically because I knew Tom Hanks, the actor who played Forrest Gump, had never shaken hands with Nikita Khrushchev or Richard Nixon or Lyndon Johnson, whatever he did. It bothered me Because at the time, now, I think if you look back on it, you can see the limitations of the technology unless they’ve remastered it. But I knew that if people saw something, then they would likely believe it because I saw it with my own eyes. I remember being so distressed after watching that, realizing that with enough skill, you could put anybody, any place, and say that person was there when, of course, that person was not there. I think we’ve already been manipulated into thinking that if we see it, if we hear it, if we read it, it must be true. One of the things I was talking to my grandson, who at 18 years old, he’s of the younger generation.

Andrea Schwartz (09:15)
I asked him, What do you think about AI? And his answer was, I have a very nuanced opinion of AI. He liked what it could do, but he saw with his contemporaries that they were losing the ability to think critically because they were more than willing to digest whatever came up in terms of a search or in terms of a particular topic. So he wasn’t all that thrilled, but he also was communicating that there are some things that are advantageous that the use of this artificial intelligence could help people do.

Charles Roberts (09:55)
That raises an interesting point that applies in a variety of areas in our culture. In this particular instance, we are talking about, in its present form, a new fascinating type of technology that it’s like the microwave oven and the cell phone. We have many, many people alive today who did not know a time where there was not a cell phone and a microwave oven. So it’s a common thing. Many of us can remember a day when people actually gave turn signals before Well, they turned right or left. But once you cross this boundary into a time where all of that is gone and nobody has, whether maybe ancestral memory is too strong a term, but a memory of a common cultural practice or understanding of how life is, it won’t seem so crazy or revolutionary or inhuman. And I was thinking about this, too. I remember just before the whole COVID business started up, I think it was around 2017, 2018, somewhere in there. There was something that was making quite a bit of news, at least in some circles. And I mean, you’d see this on network news, maybe not in explicit terms, but it was the production and the interest that people had in producing sex robots.

Charles Roberts (11:19)
And all of a sudden, like in 2017, 2018, I get lit up to about the time of the COVID stuff. That whole thing just disappeared because there were people who were investing big money in this. And I hadn’t heard that much about any of that lately. So I went online just before we started our podcast, and I was looking this up, and I came across a statement here made by a woman who had written a book on this subject. And I want to quote what she says here in terms of people buying and using sex robots. She says, It’s about intimacy and technology, computers and psychology. It’s about history and archeology, love and biology. It’s about the future, both near and distant, science fiction utopias and dystopias, loneliness and companionship, law and ethics, privacy and community. Most of all, it’s about being human in a world of machines. That was her quote. So I think the same thing applies here with AI, and that it’s about being able to come to an awareness of knowledge of things and having access to that knowledge in a convenient form, but also recognizing that this can also be a great threat in terms of what genuine knowledge is, and something we’ve talked about before.

Charles Roberts (12:36)
A lot of people talk about this. There’s a difference between wisdom and having access to facts and figures. I think that’s where the line gets to be drawn.

Andrea Schwartz (12:45)
When technology outpaces ethics and the examination of it, Oh, wow, a car that will drive itself. When I first heard about the self-driving cars, I was pretty sure that lawyers had pushed for this because I could just imagine the lawsuits that come about with the absence of a driver taking a car around. But there always is going to be some ethics. The question is, what ethics? As the modern American church, and I would say maybe in terms of worldwide as well, as the church has become more and more antinomian and not looking at God’s law as how it pertains to particular situation. That makes it so that there’s all sorts of practices, starting with abortion, going with euthanasia. Then we have organ transplantation and in vitro fertilization. If religious and by that I mean Christian biblical ethics, aren’t applied, then it seems as though anybody who says no to such things is just against progress and that they become pushed to the back as you’re just an old fuddy-duddy. But the truth is that when people, for example, you brought up the question of automobiles, there are certain things that an automobile allowed people to do for good or bad that the horse and buggy couldn’t do because in terms of range and exposure to the elements.

Andrea Schwartz (14:21)
So there always has to be the template of how does this conform to God’s law? But of course, if you’re not taught the law, or if you’re taught that the law no longer applies, then I think you’re really a sitting duck.

Charles Roberts (14:36)
Yeah, Torba addresses this in a number of places in the book. And on page 108 of the book, he talks about, and I’m just going to quote him here, The path forward is neither Ludditeism, a Luddite is somebody who doesn’t want any progress anymore. Everything should just stay the same or go backwards, more or less. So the choice is neither that nor capitulation, but dominion through discernment. And he points out early Christians transformed the Roman Empire by creating a vibrant subculture that outlived, outloved, and out hoped the collapsing world around them. And then he says, Today’s believers must similarly innovate, coding AI that rejects data exploitation, launching social media platforms, resistant to censorship, designing neural interfaces that enhance human agency rather than erode it. And he goes on from there. So that’s an example of both how he sees Christians have been progressive in the best sense of the term, at different points in our history, and that we are at a unique crossroads with this, where we dare not just simply throw our hands up and say, this is the devil’s playground, and we can’t have anything to do with it. And we’ve seen this across the board with other aspects of our culture.

Charles Roberts (15:45)
And this is why Dr. Rastuni’s teachings have been so profoundly important for people who want to follow and believe the Bible is the infallible, inherent, absolute, total word of God, because it applies to every area of life. And we don’t just sit by and let the devil’s people run everything. I mean, that’s what’s been happening over the past 200 or 300 years, at least in the United States. Because of bad theology, Christians have been in retreat. And thank goodness there have been some, like Steoney and others who have said, no, we need to be on the forefront and reclaim all of this for Christ in his kingdom.

Andrea Schwartz (16:23)
So I was thinking the whole concept that there’s nothing new under the sun.

Charles Roberts (16:28)
Right.

Andrea Schwartz (16:29)
So The sin in the garden was Adam and Eve deciding that they really didn’t need to conform to God’s law, to God’s mandates as creatures in terms of God being the creator, that they were going to determine that for themselves. A lot of our arguments in terms of why certain things are wrong, be it abortion, in vitro fertilization, euthanasia, is that the image of God in man is to all men, whether we like them or not, the image of God is there. Well, when we move to computers, then to me, it seemed like the image of man’s view of himself given over to the machine that he programs the machine, and so he’s going to be the God of this. We’ve already experienced it, whether we know it or not. Just put in a Google search and you start typing something, and then all of a All of a sudden, something else comes up and finishes your sentence. Well, during the 2020 election, apparently, you put in certain things, and even if you were looking for something in particular about a person, that result wouldn’t come up. You would have to be pretty determined to find something.

Andrea Schwartz (17:51)
A lot of the information that comes in these searches, in these algorithms, are curated by people who more than likely don’t all share the same world and life view, except maybe the humanistic view is what’s predominant. I think that’s what Torba is talking about, using the technology, but recognizing it, it’s only going to be as good as the worldview that inputs into it.

Charles Roberts (18:21)
People need to realize that this distinction or conflict between, say, typing in something into a Google search it finishes it for you in a way that it wants you to have or doesn’t want you to have. I mean, that’s an example of how there is a source of knowledge and authority, and it is thoroughly humanistic. But you don’t escape that. In the long run, there are only two choices. It’s God’s law word or man’s word. One of them is divine, and it is perfect. The other is corrupted and leads inevitably to destruction and tyranny. And that’s an example, the type of censorship that goes on. But from the very beginning, and Torbert talks about this, and you just alluded to it in the early part of the book about how this goes back to the question of knowledge and man’s word over against God’s word in the Garden of Eden. You don’t escape ethics. You don’t escape the responsibility, morally, for knowledge and belief. These are not neutral realms. Knowledge is either they’re God honoring and recognizing that the source of all truth and all reality is what God’s word says in Holy scripture, versus what any and everything else is.

Charles Roberts (19:40)
You have to have a point of embarkcation. You’ve got to start somewhere with something in terms of building a worldview, in terms of building a philosophy of life, in terms of, well, thinking about medicine, for example. That’s a big topic for everybody. What is the starting point about what makes people well and whole? What exactly is a human being? There are a variety of answers to these if you’re going to step away from God’s word, the Bible. But in terms of what God says, it is given to us in scripture, and this is the starting point, and this is the place we go forward from what his law word tells us. And again, it’s not a question of being backwards and backward versus progress and shiny new metallic things and that thinking. It is a of what is the source of all knowledge? And if your source of knowledge is claimed to be something other than God’s word, how can you justify it? And can you prove and give people some assurance that the future of that type of knowledge and the society and the culture that you will build on it doesn’t lead to anihilation, death camps or soylent green.

Andrea Schwartz (20:53)
In my preparation for this, I started just going for definitions of words: artificial, authentic, real, fake, in terms of what do we actually mean? How do we determine what’s real? If we have an artificial intelligence, then what would real intelligence be? Then I was just reading through Paul’s letter to the Philippians, where he tells them to think on what things are true, what things are pure, what things are right. That goes to what you said. If we don’t have a standard to judge that, then maybe, for example, having weaponry that drones can go out and kill people indiscriminately because somebody said to do so. I mean, do people who manage those drones, do they have any ethical responsibility as to the death of image bearers of God? Or have we gotten so into being so, quote, unquote, knowledgeable about everything that’s going on when we really know very little, because a lot of what’s presented to us on media, social media, in a lot of ways ends up being theater than truth.

Charles Roberts (22:16)
Yeah, and it goes back to the issue of, in spite of the appearance of technological progress, of advancement in science or knowledge or whatever, the one thing that has ever changed and will not change apart from God’s divine intervention is the corrupt fallen nature of man. And that’s why you can have technological progress that turns into and is sinful. From a purely philosophical, theological standpoint, if a person does something that’s good, but they’re not doing it for God’s glory, if they’re a rank atheist and deny God, then in the larger metaphysical sense, it’s not good what they’re doing, because they’re it purely for the glory of humanity, and they’re not honoring God in their action. And I think we have the same issue going here with the idea that we can create something that’s greater than anything that’s ever been seen before. It’s hard for us, given the cultural distance, to try to imagine what it would have been like to enter some of the great cities of ancient Egypt in all their grandeour, or Rome. You get some smattering of this, perhaps, in motion pictures that try to be realistic in their portrayal of these things.

Charles Roberts (23:32)
But just from the artifacts that we have left over, the archeological remains of something like the pyramids or the Sphinx, or something like that, it’s hard to imagine what ancient people would have thought of these massive structures that were built by human hands to glorify man. Well, they may be shiny objects, as I said before today, and they may come with an artificially contrived human-sounding voice, but the motivations are the They haven’t changed, and they eventually lead to the same place, which, again, as I said, is a sad dystopian, the loss of all of what it means to be human. And if people don’t know what it means to be human anymore, then they won’t keep a grasp on it. The only way they can know what it means to be human is by following what God’s law says.

Andrea Schwartz (24:22)
You mentioned the innovations of the microwave and the cell phone. Of course, the microwave, look at how much time it saves and how quickly it prepares your food or the cell phone. Now you can be in touch with anybody at any time, as long as you know their number or they know yours. But there are also some negatives associated with both of them in terms of radiation and proximity to the human body. I imagine that there was some really significant and sophisticated building techniques that were implemented in the Tower of Babel. I mean, I imagine it was like, wow, we can do this with that. We can cut the time in half or whatever, never realizing that God was going to thwart the effort. I think that rather than being afraid of the tyrannical one-world government who are trying to replace humans with machines, and we can get into a discussion of transhumanism here in a second, but is that as a consistent believer, we must say that God will only allow things to goes so far before he judges it. And then what are we supposed to do as the people of God? We’re to be faithful in the midst, have nothing to do with the deeds of darkness, but to expose them.

Andrea Schwartz (25:43)
And so there’s the line between using technology for the glory of God, which you and I are using right now. You’re in South Carolina, I’m in California. We’re having a conversation that we’ll be able to share with people. Technology has a lot to do with this. It would be impossible without it, but to how to use the technology for God’s glory and never outpacing an examination with the word of God.

Charles Roberts (26:10)
Yeah, it’s interesting with the development of personal computers and hand Intel devices that pack more power than some of the computers we used 30 years ago. Many people perhaps don’t realize it, but Christians have been on the forefront of, if not manufacturing some of these things, but the software in particular, Bible software programs have been huge sellers and sources of income for people who market computer software. And there may be a few people around today, I’m not one of them, who handwrite their sermons or their Bible studies, and they use a strong concordance, and they surround themselves on the floor with 100 different books. Most people don’t do that anymore. They pull up the Bible software program, and in a flash, you can pull up Romans 8, and Genesis 3, and all the rest of it. And that really is a great blessing, a great help. But I think that’s an example of how Christians can use this type of technology to the advancement and the glory of God. Like the Chalcedon website, for example. That’s an astounding portal of information, not only of Dr. Rushdoony’s writings, but the current people who write and work for Chalcedon, other types of things, audio, video.

Charles Roberts (27:27)
So that’s only one of many, many of those types of resources, mission organizations that spread the gospel all over the Earth. They use this type of technology. So it’s something that I think this is one of the thrusts of Torba’s book. This is important material. This is an important technology. And we, of all people, Christians, ought to be on the forefront of using it for God’s glory.

Andrea Schwartz (27:55)
And I don’t disagree with you. You know that. But what happens when the electricity goes off? What happens when you can’t exactly remember where on your device to find things? I mean, your house probably has bookshelves. My house has bookshelves, lots of books on them. I’ve actually shared and given away a number of them. But the question becomes, what gets lost? I remember hearing that until Christopher Columbus, everybody thought, if he sailed one way, he would fall off. I think it was Dr. Rushdoony who pointed out that there were many people who understood what the world looked like and that, no, they weren’t going to fall off. But because when the printing press came into resistance, only so much got transferred into print from scrolls that had been kept as archives and records. There’s a tendency for every generation to think, We know everything there is to know. But as I think you pointed out earlier on, you put in a search and the results you get, the conclusion is, I guess that’s all there is. But there’s more that maybe hasn’t paid to be on the first page of a search, or maybe some things never actually were digitized.

Andrea Schwartz (29:19)
So the question becomes, is everything we have that’s digital the only information that ever existed? Just like some got lost when we went scrolls to the printing press. Some also got lost when we went from paper or printed material to digital. So it’s important, and not everybody’s called for this, but to preserve the past, because sometimes you’re going to discover the answer to a problem has already been thought through but never made it onto the new platform.

Charles Roberts (29:52)
Yeah. And I think once we reach the point in the population where there aren’t any people with book shelves in their and there are a majority of people whose interaction with writing and literature and printed material is on their phone or on their tablet, and the power goes out, like you said, that’s going to create a real interesting scenario. But even if the power never goes out, there are enough of us alive today who do still use real, quote, material, like books and magazines, and we write things out, rather than entering into into an app on our phones. But some of that, I think, is unavoidable on the part of people who have bought into the worldview that what the Lord has created for us is not something that he has any sovereignty over. It’s completely up to us to reshape everything. And people are very ingenious. If they get to a point where everything relies on electricity or some form of power, well, they’re going to come up with some means of at least making a good stab at at keeping it going.

Andrea Schwartz (31:01)
I remember the whole idea of how you had to learn your basic arithmetic facts, and yes, once you learn them, that’s how I was with my kids, then you could use a calculator. You had to know how to do it, but to speed it up. I remember having a perfect example. One of my children was with me. We went to the post office, and the person had to consider how to make change by inputting something into the computer, and she was lost. I knew, You owe me 31 sense. She’s, No, I have to do it this way. We waited and we waited. In other words, my child could do it in his head, but this person had so relied on it. Who knows if this person ever knew how to do it in the first So there’s a lot of skills that are lost when you don’t learn the foundation or the fundamentals. I know people right now who actually find it hard, Charles, to read material on a piece of paper.

Charles Roberts (32:00)
Yeah.

Andrea Schwartz (32:01)
Who ever thought there’d be a time where you’d be at a church where you heard, open your Bibles or find on your phone and then give a Bible reference?

Charles Roberts (32:12)
My wife works at a Christian school where she is the Librarian. When she started working at this school, the library was not very big and not very well organized. She pretty much put the whole thing together and gave it a really good form and has made sure that it’s stocked with very good printed material. But where I’m going with this, and what was interesting, when she was in that process, she was seeking input from other Christian schools in the area and around the country that she was aware of. And there was one school in particular, a Christian, I think they were, junior high and high school, a pretty big Christian high school in junior high school. They were getting rid of all of their upper school books, I believe it was, because they were making everything digital, everything everything was going into E-Format for that particular class and age level. So they weren’t going to keep a library of hardbound and paperback books anymore. And there are, I think, it’s been a long time since I’ve been in university, but I think a lot of the textbooks now are in digital format. And this is another thing that we maybe have alluded to before, but there’s one particular manufacturer of electronic books where you buy this from them and people think, Well, that’s mine.

Charles Roberts (33:31)
I can read it on my device. But technically, you’re just leasing it from the person or the company you bought it from. And the fact that they have absolute authority over your supposed property was borne out how Was it maybe five, six, seven, 10 years ago? They just overnight went into people’s, electronically people’s devices and removed a particular book, even if you paid for it. I think maybe they gave you a refund. So there are some interesting problems problems associated with technology like this. And I mentioned to you earlier that in preparing for this, I was experimenting with a couple of different artificial intelligence platforms. And you can see where you go to the one we’re talking about Andrew Torba in his book. I mean, his company, Gab, his social media, they have their own version of artificial intelligence. And you can enter a term like, say, theonomy into that, and then you go to some of the other big well-known ones and you enter the same term, you are going to get dramatically different answers or explanations as to what that means. You could put in something, some politician’s name or some great historical figure, and you’ll see an example of that.

Charles Roberts (34:43)
What is the truth? What is the real answer or the real portrayal of this particular topic or issue?

Andrea Schwartz (34:49)
I think you see that played out, at least I do, when you venture into the world of having a political discussion with someone. It becomes very obvious that people go to one source or one type of source for their information. You have person A arguing with person B, and person A knows person B is wrong, person B knows person A is wrong. They never quite get that on whatever social media tracks they are or whatever their computer or their search engines feed them, are actually dementing them to be at odds with each other. And Torba talks about this in his book as well. In other words, you would think like, well, why would humanists want to have Christians only see Christian sources of things? We’ll Because then the conflict will remain. When you get rid of person to person, face to face relationships, people can be very uncivil and inhumane to each other because they never have to see each other. So living in a virtual reality, even though they get up in the morning, they have breakfast, they have lunch, they have dinner. But so much of their interactions deny the person to person interchange.

Andrea Schwartz (36:14)
And it’s truly like these people are talking separate languages.

Charles Roberts (36:18)
I recall in a previous ministry I was involved in, a young man in the church said he wanted to talk with me. He needed some counsel and guidance about a relationship he had with a girl. I don’t remember the specifics of the issue, but the thing that struck me as we sat down in my office to talk about this, after 15 or 20 minutes, I had to stop him and I said, Let me ask you a question. Have you actually met this girl? No, we’re friends online. And he was talking as if it was, I guess, what I would call a, quote, real relationship, when this is somebody he would only interacted with in chat boxes. But to him, that was the real thing. That was the real reality. And I think this is another thing that we have to be cautious of and recognize. And I think, again, this is something that Torba is trying to call to our attention and help us to think about is the role of truth in our way of thinking about things. And it’s not something that’s malleable. If it is, then we’re doomed, because if there’s no real absolute truth, then you can get up and create a reality every day, and that leads to total chaos.

Charles Roberts (37:32)
But the same thing in terms of human relationships and what constitutes genuine human affection and interaction.

Andrea Schwartz (37:39)
How does this lead into the idea of transhuman humanism. Explain what that is and how this virtual reality plays into that.

Charles Roberts (37:52)
Well, as I understand it, and this is something else that’s not new, but it is the fusion moving beyond what what humanists would call merely human, the fusion of man and machine, the inclusion of, say, being able to consider the human brain as a type of computer. And just like, I can take the hard drive out of one of my computers and put it on the other computer, and it continues to function, where you can do the same thing with a human brain, either by transplant, or you can figure out some computerized way of actually, quote, downloading the content of a human brain and put it in another brain, creating artificial limbs and basically changing the whole structure of the inside of a human being to be something far more advanced and super intelligent. This is a humanistic dream that really goes all the way back, like Torbus says, to the Garden of Eden. And artificial intelligence plays that role, and that people don’t have to… Well, like the movie The Matrix. There’s the scene where Neo, the main character, is strapped in a chair with this thing stuck into his head, and they’re uploading how to do self defense and martial arts.

Charles Roberts (39:02)
At one point, he wakes up and he looks at the guy and he says, I know kung fu, because it’s all been uploaded into his head. That’s an example of the transhumanist dream.

Andrea Schwartz (39:13)
Instead of man looking at his problem as being sin, he can then say, Well, my problem is I’m just human. You hear people say this all the time, I’m only human. Well, on the sixth day of creation, God looked on all he had made, including human beings and called it good. The fact that you say, Hey, don’t blame me, I’m only human. God thought it was good that you were human. The problem is sin. But in the area of technology and computers, can you say a computer has sinned? Can you say an algorithm is sinning? Can you say that the answer to a question is untrue if whatever produces that answer that is just pulling from the data. So as soon as we move away from God created mankind in his own image, and that because of the rebellion and sin that we all inherit, that the Son of God took on human flesh. So anytime you want to demean humanity, in essence, you’re also demeaning the work of Jesus Christ.

Charles Roberts (40:25)
Yeah, there’s a sense in which we could say, look, if this group of people over here, they want to go off and start a society that’s purely based on artificial intelligence and transhumanist values, fine, go ahead and do it. We know that the ultimate future of that thing is failure and destruction because they have turned away from the only source of absolute truth. And we’ve had, for people who still have the memory of it in the lifetime of many of us, an example of how something like that, perhaps not quite as an advanced technological scale, but the impetus and the motive was the same. And that’s what we had in the Soviet Union and the major Communist countries. They wanted an entirely scientific society where religion, superstitions were all banished Everything would be done according to scientific detail. Well, 70 years of that in Russia and Eastern Europe showed where that eventually led. There were, of course, Christians who suffered horribly at the hands of these people who said, even in their suffering, you were doomed. You were never going to defeat the message of Christ, Jesus, our King. But they didn’t have to be proven right, but they were right because God has set into his creation immutable laws that You can dress them up in all kinds of fancy technology, but if you violate them, the consequences are the same.

Charles Roberts (41:51)
You will surely die.

Andrea Schwartz (41:53)
To carry the idea further of what is real, what is not, I think a lot people in our generation are discovering that things that we were told when we were growing up with further investigation and certain revelations coming out that just weren’t true. Right now, the whole idea of JFK files being released. Well, for a long time, people didn’t believe the narrative. The same is true with 9/11, the same is true with Vietnam, the same is true about various administrations in the US. So instead Instead of being overwhelmed by all this information, and I don’t know what’s real or what’s not, and taking the course that says, I don’t care. It doesn’t matter to me. What is what is. I’m just going to try to live my life. The Christian response, and this is something that Torba refers to, is setting up a parallel economy. And by that, I think he’s referring to that it may seem like a David and Goliath moment before Goliath goes down, but that it doesn’t even matter if we see how being faithful is going to produce God’s blessing, we can’t sit by and let the enemies of God overtake all the information systems, et cetera, so that we do have to have parallel economies.

Charles Roberts (43:20)
Yes, that’s very much what he’s talking about. He began talking about this when he created GAB, and during the lockdowns from 2020 up until just a year or two ago, and that these are examples of humanistic-based ideas about how to control people and how to control societies. And the early Christians faced something similar in the Roman Empire of the day, where they found a means by which they could flourish as Christian communities while the other was collapsing around them. I mean, not like in some cataclysmic overnight event, but when societies collapse, it’s not like a bomb going off. It’s a slow, degrading, downgrade process. And all of a sudden, one day you look around and, Hey, wait a minute. What happened to civilization is not here anymore. Where did it go? But people who take seriously what Jesus said, being his disciples, and that he has all authority on heaven and on Earth, that we are to go out and make the nations his disciples. And he’s promised to bless miss that effort. And I think what Torba has talked about in this book is a part of that. I would like to mention, too, before we wrap everything up, another book that I think it’s available online and also from the Chalcedon store.

Charles Roberts (44:44)
It’s part of the Chalcedon monograph series that was published some years ago, but it’s called The Church as God’s Armory. And there’s a lot of good information there about how we need to be, not so much concerning artificial intelligence, but the general program of being God’s people in the world and the things that we ought to be thinking about and preparing for, because we’re in a battle. And if you aren’t ready for the battle, you’re not going to win, or you’re going to be hugely disadvantaged. I think Torbus book is a good example on this particular topic of Reclaiming Reality that we need to be reading and thinking about and encouraging others to do so.

Andrea Schwartz (45:18)
Exactly. So the name of the book, again, Reclaiming Reality with a subtitle, Restoring Humanity in the Age of AI. I believe it’s… I mean, I got my copy on Amazon. I guess that’s where you can get it, or maybe he has a website that you can do that there as well.

Charles Roberts (45:36)
I think so, yes.

Andrea Schwartz (45:38)
I don’t know that we’ve exhaustively covered this. I imagine in future discussions, there’ll be more to add to it. But I thought his book was helpful in at least getting you to think about things. I did ask my grandson this one question. I said, Can you tell when you’re looking at something that’s AI or something that’s generated by a person? He says, Well, now it’s easy, but you can imagine in the future it’ll get harder. But he says, I always know it’s something that’s produced by artificial intelligence when the word tapestry is in it. He says, Boy, oh, boy, AI ChatGPT loves the word tapestry. He says, So as soon as I see the word tapestry, I know this is artificial intelligence.

Charles Roberts (46:18)
Okay. It’s a good thing to remember.

Andrea Schwartz (46:22)
All right, folks. [email protected] is how you reach us. And Charles, thank you, and we’ll talk with you next time.

Charles Roberts (46:30)
Thank you. Thanks for listening to Out of the Question. For more information on this and other topics, please visit Chalcedon.edu.