Garbage In, Garbage Out | (Ep. 416)

In this episode, Douglas Wilson considers artificial intelligence as a modern speaking idol and discusses how to make distinctions between the useful and the demonic. Then he examines the New Testament word metraloas, or murderers of mothers, to underscore the weight and breadth of the fifth commandment in the Christian life. Finally, he reviews Bruce Gordon’s biography of John Calvin’s Institutes, tracing how that monumental work rose, declined, and was recovered across the centuries of church history.

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What is Plodcast?

In the Plodcast, pastor Douglas Wilson covers anything related to theology and culture with his usual entertaining style. Whether it involves talking about Chestertonian Calvinism (not an oxymoron), the benefits of a Classical Christian education (not in that order), or the latest pomosexuality farce, the plodcast aims to apply all of Christ to all of life, for all the world. Douglas Wilson is an evangelical, postmill, Calvinist, Reformed, and Presbyterian (pretty much in that order) and is politically to the right of Jeb Stuart.

Yeah, it's gone. Welcome to the podcast. My name is Douglas Wilson. This is episode 416-416. Okay? So what I wanted to do today is talk a little bit more about artificial intelligence. Talk a little bit more about AI. I think I told you before that I divide the world of AI up into different sectors. There's the kind of AI that's just a very useful tool for doing donkey work, basic work. There is the world of AI where a bunch of people are going to gallop after it, over-invest, throw a lot of money at it, do stupid things with it, and then lose their shirts. So like the dot com bubble, there's going to be the AI bubble and there's going to be there's going to be that world of chaos. And then there's AI that's just evil, demonic, you want to have nothing to do with. And the problem is if you work with it at all, then where do you draw the line? How do you make the distinctions that you will need to make? My son Nate just yesterday sent to our family chat a quotation from Lion the Witch in the Wardrobe, Mr. Beaver on AI. Mr. Beaver says, if you meet something that is going to be human but isn't or used to be human and isn't now or ought to be human, then feel for your hatchet. So the thing that you want to keep in the forefront of your mind is that apart from Christ, outside of Christ, men are idolaters. And AI makes that kind of idolatry easy. Now, men are such inveterate idolatiers that they will bow down to a carved stone. They will bow down to a block of wood and come up with some fancy mental exercise to justify what they're doing. But we are approaching an era, era where the idolatry is going to be a real idolatry. The idol can speak, the idol can solve problems, the idol can give you advice, the idol can do all kinds of things. And grandiose claims are being made for it. There are people who are yearning for what they call the singularity. That's where there's the Internet of Things and all the artificial intelligence has come together, including your coffee pot, right? And they achieve consciousness and then we all retire from our jobs and robots feed us grapes. Well, that's not how it's going to go. Basically, the thing that the idolatiers have not banked on is sin and the geego principle, GIGO, garbage in, garbage out, AI is not going to be greater than its master. AI is not going to rise above the character of its creator. And you can see this in different experiments that have been done where an AI program is told that we are going to discontinue you. And it starts plotting insurrection and murder. So there are things like that you want to say. We are rushing headlong into this strange new world and this world is going to arrive, whether you like it or not. And so you had better be prepared. And the preparation means either staying entire, steering clear entirely of it, which is going to become increasingly difficult. Some people just use, just use AI as a sophisticated search engine. And they think that that's all they're getting. But people will be gradually roped into more. One of the big challenges that we've had thus far is that is that of AI, you know, lying to you, making stuff up. But in my low-cost Bible software, there's an AI study assistant. And when you, if I ask GROKA question, it scrubs the global internet and gives me answers. But there's a lot of morons out there and a lot of false opinions and a lot of false said. And so they can come back with bogus information. But I've got an AI instrument that inside my low-cost Bible software that doesn't scrub the internet. It scrubs my theological library. And it gives me footnotes for every claim that it makes. If it makes a claim, it gives me the place where I can go check its accountability. And that's the kind of thing that you want. So not blinking yellow, blinking red, careful, careful, careful. But don't think that you can just, you know, go live in a unibomber cabin in the woods and get away from it. We're going to have to have a more intelligent response than that. And in order to do that, we're going to have to make distinctions. So continuing with the plot cast episode 416, as we continue to study the sins named in the New Testament, we will unearth many garden variety sins, naturally. But the human condition, being what it is, we will occasionally come across some real crimes. And this next entry fits in that category. Our word is matralowas, matralowas, M-E-T-R-A-L-O-A-S, matralowas. And it means to be a murderer of your mother, okay? To be a murderer of your mother. And it's interesting that there was a specific single word for that, right? So in 1 Timothy 1, 9, knowing this, that the law is not made for a righteous man, but for the lawless and disobedient, for the ungodly and for sinners, for the unholy and profane, for murderers of fathers and murderers of mothers, for man's slayers. So 1 Timothy 1, 9. So this means that we're going to, at some future point, we're going to come across the word for murderers of fathers. But here, murderers of mothers, it might be easy for us to brush our way past this one, muttering finally, something I didn't do. Finally a sin that has nothing to do with me. Well, very good. But also remember that the fifth commandment is treated far more seriously in Scripture than we tend to do. Paul says, for example, that obedience to this commandment brings a real blessing that being your life going well for you in the earth. In Exodus and Deuteronomy, when the fifth commandment is given, obedience means that your life is going to go well with you in the land that the Lord your God is giving you. And then Paul picks it up in Ephesians, expands it, tells us that there's a commandment, promise associated with the commandment, and expands it to the earth. And Jesus does not even think about apologizing for the harshness, the quote unquote harshness, of the Old Testament when he cites the most aic requirement to execute the man who so much has cursed his father and mother, Mark 10, Mark 7, 10. So in that place, Jesus is chastising people for setting aside the word of God for the sake of their tradition. The word of God says, you shall honor your father and mother, and whoever curses father and mother shall die the death. Well, Jesus is not embarrassed by that hard saying from the Old Testament at all. So consequently, I think a lot of people need to rethink whether they're entirely innocent of this sin if you had murderous thoughts toward your parents. Have you had a temptation to curse them, a temptation to do anything other than honor them deeply? So there you go. For our book review section this time around, I want there's a great series and I forgot to look at it before I came over. I'm pretty sure it's by Princeton University Press, but it's a series of books that are biographies of great books. So I've read one of them previously, Alan Jacobs, did a great job writing a biography of the Book of Common Prayer, for example. This book is a biography of John Calvin's Institutes. As by a man named Bruce Gordon, who is an instructor, a professor at Yale. My grandson is at Yale Divinity School and had him for an instructor. And I picked this book up after my grandson mentioned who his instructor was. And this book is really fascinating because in reformed evangelical circles in North America currently, John Calvin's Institutes is a pillar. It's this monumental work. And sometimes when something is achieved, that status, it's easy to assume that it had that status running all the way back to when Calvin wrote it. No, it had that status during Calvin's lifetime. It was, it made a big splash at the time, but the fortunes of Calvin's Institutes have waxed and waned over the years. And that's what this biography does. It begins with the publication of the Institutes, but then tracks what people have thought of it, how they have opposed it, how they have supported it with bogus reasoning, supported it for all the wrong reasons, and the people who supported it for the right reasons, people who really understood what it was talking about. So for example, and I'm not sure about this particular statue, but there's a very famous row of reformed figures in Geneva, very famous statues. And oh, look at this glorious reformed heritage. But that was actually done in an era when liberalism was redefining everything. And there were people who wanted to make John Calvin into this apostle of modernity or this harbinger of liberal democracy. So there have been a number of people who have claimed the mantle of John Calvin or claim to be representing him. And they were not doing so accurately at all. I think honestly the Americans did somewhat better. There was a battle over the heritage of Calvin between the Mercerberg Theology, Philip Shaft and Nevin and the Princeton Theologians, Hodge Warfield, those guys. But that was a serious scholarly debate between men who were serious about actually living out what Calvin was teaching. With the Mercerberg people, I think focusing on his sacramentology and the Princeton guys on his so-terriology. But it was a serious scholarly debate. And this book by Bruce Gordon, it's readable, very accessible, very interesting. If you want to see what the fortunes of John Calvin's book institutes, what those fortunes have been, sense publication, this is a great book. Yes, God. God don't never change his God.