"If intelligent alien life wherever discovered, then the Bible is all wrong!"
Well, why?
"Because the image of God, that's intelligence, andwe wouldn't be unique anymore.
So Genesis is wrong."
So I wanted to show you a couple of animal examples.
And we could talk about animal intelligence,
again, just... the image needs to be something unique.
If you have one animal of any species who can think, okay,
can problem solve at an even basic level. You know, that's comparable intelligence
like this example to a four or five year old human.
The other end of the spectrum, though, is probably more familiar to us,
and that is artificial intelligence.
Okay. You know, alien life. Of course, it freaks some people out, some Christians I know,
that "if intelligent alien life wherever discovered in the Bible is all wrong!"
Well, why?
"Because the image of God, that's intelligence, and we wouldn't be unique anymore.
So Genesis is wrong."
And it's a really poor reasoning process. But it's one that follows logically,
if you define the image as intelligence.
The artificial intelligence examples, I'm not going to click out there,
because they're probably familiar to you.
But the Deep Blue chess match with Garry Kasparov,
who was the world chess champion at the time.
I mean, he defeated it once and then, I think that the next iteration of Deep Blue beat him.
But he actually said that while he was playing the computer, at one point,
he had always depended on, since it knew every possible iteration of every move,
and every combination and could do it lightning fast.
He would depend on its predictability.
And the match that he wound up drawing and then losing later on,
he said that he made a move, and it didn't do something predictable.
It was like it knew not to do something. So it improvised.
And that just freaked him out. So he was kind of lost at that point.
So it wasn't pure processing power. But it was it was one instance,
and this is years ago. So they're a little further down the road,
of actually sort of, you know, putting circumstances together and making like,
what we would think of as an independent thought. They would never say that
sort of consciousness emerged from Deep Blue or anything like that.
But it was something different in that world.
But this is a world that they're pushing. So if you define the image of God as intelligence,
and someday 5, 10 years down the road or tomorrow, artificial intelligence is achieved
in terms of even something at the level of a four or five year old.
Well, then that definition goes right out the window.
And it would really rattle a lot of Christians. I mean, I tended to do a lot of reading
and, you know, ethics and tech stuff like this.
And it just amazes me that people haven't given it that much thought.
They don't have to be rattled by this, but yet I know they would be
by their own confession, and also because I can follow the thinking,
but it doesn't have to be that way. But it's a weakness of assigning any quality
to this thing we call the image. Now some would say,
what about having a soul or a spirit, you know, soul, spirit or something like that?
Well, humans are said to be "living souls." Let me just turn on the interlinear.
I'm gonna do this real quickly. «Man became a living creature.»
Some translations have «living soul.» It is nefesh over here, down at the bottom,
you can see my arrow move,
right here; Nefesh. And then the next word is Hayah "living creature", a living nefesh.
Nefesh is typically the Hebrew word that many English translations will opt
for a word like soul. So living soul in some translations, this is where they get that.
But that's man, the issue is that animals are described the same way.
«God created the great sea creatures and every living creature»
Here's Nefesh Hayah, exactly the same terminology.
And I mean, this isn't the only example. I'm using some quick ones.
"So, having the nefesh, the soul, that's what makes humans distinct."
Well, not according to Genesis. Again, you run into problems there.
Having a spirit. Humans are described as having a rûaḥ, a spirit.
A couple of verses. Animals also have the rûaḥ. Same word.
What it refers to, really nefesh and rûaḥ are basically
interchangeable in Old Testament.
They are both used as the seat of emotions, the seat of intellect,
the seat of logical reasoning, volition, whether you want to do something or not.
Basically all of the life of the mind, the internal life. Both nefesh and rûaḥ,
are used to describe that.
If you're interested in this topic, you can go to my website, drmsh.com,
and just put in, you know, "soul and spirit" or something like that in your Google search.
I did a whole series on this. But again, to cut to the chase here,
we can't rely on these terms as definitions of the image because they are not unique.
They're not unique to humanity. So what is the image?
Okay. I mean, we kind of know what it's not.
And if you've read the chapter, you're going to know where I'm going here.
The meaning of "in", you know, in the image or beth tzelem, that's actually crucial
to comprehending what it is and what it isn't. So, it conveys function or status.
And believe it or not, these are legitimate translations, «Let us create»...
that should be create, not created.
«Let us create humankind to be our image.» Or «Let us create humankind as our image.»
The Hebrew has «Let us create humankind in our image.»
And you say, "Well, how in the world can you take the word like 'in', which is a preposition,
and legitimately translated as something like 'to be' or 'as'?"
We need to talk about that tonight. I'm going to illustrate first in English.
There are a number of ways that we use a simple preposition like "in."
If I say "put the dishes in the sink", the preposition denotes location.
If I say "I broke the vase in pieces," 'in' denotes some result.
If I say "I wrote the letter in pencil," now I'm talking about some kind of instrumentality,
a tool or something. If I say though, "I work in medicine,
I work in accounting, I work in education. I work in real estate."
What I mean is, I work as a doctor or a nurse or a PA, or an LPN.
I work as a realtor or maybe an appraiser. I work as a teacher, a principal.
In other words, the preposition there actually denotes role or function.
And that's actually what we've got going on in this case.