Technology and Resurrection

Artificial Intelligence (AI) & Immortality 

I am sure by now you are aware that all types of data is being collected on each person everyday.    The news is rife with stories of privacy issues, data breaches and eavesdropping.  Every time you visit a website, purchase products online (or just with a credit card in a store),  rate or write a review of something, or click that harmless looking thumbs up button on Facebook or Pandora that data goes somewhere.  On top of that wearable tech such as Google Glass and the Samsung Dick Tracy watch are in their prototype stages.     Will these be collecting other types of data?  Could they be used to capture emotions and reactions to events and record them with the images the camera is collecting while tracking your location?   If so, could someone then collect all his or her data and use it to create a realistic profile of her or himself.    Could that profile then be combined with a process of artificial intelligence to create a newly regenerated virtual person?   Can this person then be downloaded into a piece of tech that can communicate and interact with the world?  If the answer to these questions is yes, have human beings found a way to be immortal through their own devices?

Not yet, but people are actually working on these very types of things.

Hell 

The whole problem with this is, that if we can construct an immortal life through our own efforts we would be simply carrying our broken pasts into a dark future.   The traumas lived through would be carried on into eternity.  There would still be pain, there would still be loss,  there would still be evil.   These experiences of our sinfulness wear us down and tinge our lives with sorrow.   As we carry these burdens forward, time itself would loose all meaning,  there will be no urgency to do anything, experience would pile upon experience.   We would find that we were not damned to hell, but that we had created it ourselves for all eternity.   It is the reason why the Bible portrays God as expelling Adam and Eve from the garden of Eden. (Genesis 3:22) Then the LORD God said, "See, the man has become like one of us, knowing good and evil; and now, he might reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life, and eat, and live forever"--  (NRSV)  This was not done out of spite or punishment, but as an act of grace so that no person would be condemned to unending suffering.


Forgiveness and Hope

While we may know the hope we have from a life of faith is an eventual eternal life,  it is not the first hope we have.  For the hope we have in Jesus Christ is first and foremost grounded in forgiveness.   Forgiveness breaks the cycle of evil that has been built up in our lives over time.   It heals the relationships we have with God, others, and the division within our own hearts.   If not forgiven, we can not be healed, if not healed we are not prepared for eternal life.   It is why when God sent Christ to the Cross it was first and foremost and act of forgiveness.   Jesus would show his wounds to his disciples to prove that he had forgiven them.   That the pain of Good Friday could be reconciled, proved that God can reconcile any division imaginable.   If you don't think that one really needs forgiveness to live eternally,  do this experiment.   Review the major news stories of the last week,  count how many are tragic or even evil.   Then take that number and multiply it by 52 and get an idea of how much pain just one year exists in an broken world.  Then think about that going on year after year with out end.   Unless the cycle is broken there will be no hope; it is the ultimate blessing for us that God has chosen to break the cycle of sin with the cross of Christ.

Living out that hope in tangible ways is what we call discipleship.  True disciples don't wait for the forgiveness to appear in some distant future, they work on it now.   By advocating for the vulnerable, feeding the poor,  encouraging the downtrodden, we provide signs of hope that point people to a God who wants to heal, restore, and forgive.  In a life of Christian discipleship the best way to use technology going forward will be to use it as a tool of discipleship to do Jesus' work of being there for the least of the world.


Isaiah and the LORD's Mountain

One of the earliest references to resurrection in Scripture is comes from  the prophet Isaiah.   He gave us this vision of hope:  (Isaiah 25:6-8) On this mountain the LORD of hosts will make for all peoples a feast of rich food, a feast of well-aged wines, of rich food filled with marrow, of well-aged wines strained clear. And he will destroy on this mountain the shroud that is cast over all peoples, the sheet that is spread over all nations; he will swallow up death forever. Then the Lord GOD will wipe away the tears from all faces, and the disgrace of his people he will take away from all the earth, for the LORD has spoken.  (NRSV)  Notice that God does not just give the eternal life alone.   The promise is for the removal of tears (pain) and disgrace (shame).   Before these gifts are mentioned, Isaiah destroying the shroud.   The removal of the shroud or sheet is the removal of the division between God and people, it is this removal that makes a blessed eternal life possible.  It is forgiveness that gives us hope.    So as we live out the greatest three days in history, perhaps it is most healthy to move beyond a childlike desire to merely live forever to mature faith that hopes for forgiveness.

May all have a happy and blessed Easter

Pastor J. David Knecht