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CHAPTER 5

THE WOUNDING OF INTELLIGENCE

and artificial intelligence

Does intelligence suffer wounding ? It is not inconceivable, one could readily consider, in the case of some bright mind dulled by invasion of the follies of the thoughts of others. It probably occurs by the million in many universities, almost being routine, at the level of theosophy, philosophy and para-theology. The gross invasion, intrusion and manipulation which is alas not evidenced as rarity itself, comes in the form of blatant assurance, cultural occlusion and logical lapses the better to worship, directly or implicitly, the gods of spiritual incontinence.

Seizing all things by the scruff of the neck, many tend to make them into some sort of imaginary captive, as if way it goes were the way it came. The fact that nothing co-operates seems to be the merest oblivion, as one when one is drunk, not this time with alcohol or power, but with the beautiful seeming bower and its scents, of dreams, desires and human fires that will know none above, unless of course it is manufactured, constructed and PUT THERE!

There may indeed be Christian universities, as well as  some others blessed with a measure of restraint, and if so, it is delightful. South Korea appears to be exceptional in this, to judge by a Korean Pastor friend, who has shown the author interesting exhibit on the Web. There is of course the Creation Research work in the USA, which specialises in precisely this field, and its Institute which expressly teaches and awards degrees.

One's own experience and reading, howe ver, has revealed but relatively little in this field. The court cases in the USA when someone dares, or the active pursuit as in Britain recently (Beauty for Ashes Ch. 3), when someone cares to present something outside the cultural clique of self-containment has alas done little to increase one's hope for soundness here, rationality and scientific method where, apparently it hurts, in metaphysical and ultimate areas; for it is applicable (cf. ...NO GO, where one chapter deals with this and others focus it).

Intelligence is real enough, but it is a facet of life, and its bruising is mere exposure of ONE PHASE of life, and not at all the whole gamut. The life can be wounded in will, in apprehension, in comprehension, in its own actions, in its guilt and guile, in its contrivance and avoidance systems to distance truth and enable profit in whatever field the heart wishes. Paul speaks at some length on this topic in his inspired exposure of the truancy of man from truth (Romans 1:17ff.), where divine things sent many into fast track survival techniques and contrivance works, lest they should know God. Christ's words in Matthew 13:14ff. are precisely in the same theme, as are Isaiah 28-29 in their delicious wit and dramatisation.

There is nothing artificial about the wounding of human intelligence, or for that matter, about its cure.

As to the former, it is tragic to see young minds captured by desire to pass, fear of retribution if they think freely, conformity conscious or unconscious, thoughtless acceptance, when truth might instead have been their comrade, logic their friend and reality their rearguard. That many DO find it is certain; that many universities distance it is the dreadful reality. That some have like rays of light, either the moderate or the fearless, is a fact; but their percentage ?

How can the world hope to escape a fate worse than that of Sodom and Gomorrah if it proceeds, as it does ? Yet it whines and whinges as it treads its errant path. How many are the mill-stones to be found around necks ? Yet one is sad even for these! (cf. Matthew 18).

As to its cure, we shall return to this in a little.

First let us give some thought to artificial intelligence, the better to see our own vulnerabilities who are anything but artificial, and the cost of our own deliverance by deity.

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

And does the artificial intelligence really compare with the real, given its parameters, given 'ghostly' mathematical guidance (to use Hoyle's term, but not his imaginative excrescences) so that precisely what is FIRST ENVISAGED in principle and practice, is what is done in resultant and slave-like conformity to conspectus and concept in the mind of the maker, in this case, the min-derivative-creator man ?

It is like comparing the work of a student being taught to drive. Her hands are around the wheel, and she steers by will; but about the wheel likewise are the hands of her instructor, who ensures that ... it happens so that they arrive safely.

Let us by no means minimise the grandeur of the creations of man; it is just that by comparison with the creativity of the One part of whose creation was the power to make what is free enough in imagination to be creative in the SECOND place, it is as tinsel and children's balloons. Making THAT sort of mind, that sort of conception-creating facility, this is the work which evokes worship. It is the SPIRITUAL power to make spirits with their entire orchestration of will, conceptual diversification, origin of thoughts of new worlds and new constructions of old ones (even if ludicrous, it is still imagination), to make persons who can worship and who can disdain, who can love and envisage, grasp and conquer, be grasped and be conquered, with the airy loftiness of mind to imitate there what dragon-flies do in the air of space, flamboyantly flitting here and there with hundreds of lenses all integrated in a marvellous facility and mobility in their eyes, nerves, brains and locomotive applications of the same: it is this which is the wonder beyond wonders.

The dragon fly is wonderful enough; the man whose minds flits in comparable facility of thought and conception, in the air of understanding, this is another sphere of marvel altogether. The former is a contrivance of mind; the latter is its arrival.

What then of artificial intelligence, from yours truly, man ? USING this creation with imagination as a feeder unit, this intelligence which is his own possession, to make slaves without it, however many of the static reserves of mental manipulability may be enchained, is impressive. Artificial intelligence objects are notable; yet it is making that power to envisage such things, it is this which is divine.

Seeing the folly of misconception of artificial intelligence as if because it holds a DEVICE of human will, divorced from will, it therefore is comparable to man's endowment: this too is a wonder of the actual spirit of man. It is more profound than mere confusion. It is one more effusion of his inability, so pathological in many, to realise differences when they concern his OWN POWER and PROWESS, and that which he ludicrously seeks to attribute to his personification (or virtual personification - VP) 'Nature'. Is a failure then a wonder ? Yes it is, for the wreckage of an automobile still may reveal what it could have done, and in the midst of its smoking shards and broken parts, there lies the program.

In man, it is more even than this, for it is a personal power which, though it may be harnessed to irrationality and arbitrariness, contrariness indeed, it is yet for THAT VERY REASON the more amazing. How far from program is the wilfully pathological, which may even choose its diseases and call them realism!

This power in man to revoke, reject, review and delete error because it does not meet the criteria, not of the logic imposed, but of the logic critically analysed, this is beyond the work of the artificial and is impossible even in concept without that reality which is, whatever imagination may wish to do with it. What then is the nature of this power ?

It is first of all the spirit of man whose dower from God is sensitive to

	creative realisation in which not mere modest mingling is found, but
	ingenious constructions,
	imaginative innovations,
	attuned to reality,
	while enabled to avoid the antilogisms of misconstruction (cf. Predestination and Freewill Section IV, SMR Ch. 5,  with Chs.  4, 6 and 10; Sparkling Spirituality Ch. 7).

Beyond even this, there is that sequence of inspiration from the  Source itself, when a man may be invested with such a strange increment of power, such an  awareness of things beyond normal insight, such an impetus and such inspiration, so dynamic and equipped with integrative facility, that the great Original of originality being Himself known, through His invitation and way, there is a  free conferring and a consultation. Indeed, there comes at such times with this, an imbuing and a fellowship which so far surpasses our own native powers, as to astonish and fill with awe.

In the Bible, it is direct, propositional and formal, a specific declaration for mankind, truth infallible and invariable; and this is final. Yet even in the Christian in his daily walk and work, at the will of the Lord and the need of the case, the wisdom and understanding which can be conferred is as far above our own musings as the sun above the moon (cf. Ephesians 1:17ff.); and it is even further than this, for there is a difference in kind when God acts in the gifts He bestows in love upon His children. When God acts, it is as unlike anyone else as is the roaring of the sea from the splash of a raindrop in a puddle.

Let us however leave this aspect for the time,  and revert to the sufficiently remarkable operation of man's spirit as a gift in itself. Just as God  towers functionally and in Christian experience, over man, so man over artificial intelligence. Yet the difference is not mere degree. In the latter,  there is no room for fellowship, only for invented parameters which mimic, if indeed they do not mock, what man is in some of his functions. The functionality of the spirit of man is intensively otherwise than this.

 What, in other words, can meet the criteria of actuality which IS as distinct from that which man imposes, as is his power to determine the difference and estimate new ways of construing and expressing it in new categories of thought ? Only that which has the power to RECOGNISE it. Even if some AI were enabled to REACT to RESULTS, this is far removed from that facility. Results can be merely partial, the consequence of superficiality of conception in setting up the tally-room to test, for experiments can be misconceived and jejune. To KNOW this and to relate to reality, not the surreality of mere misconception: this requires a spirit NOT under man's control, the spirit of man himself, one subjectible to constantly assessing light, not imposed by parameters of another's poor programmed product, but eminent to dispel error and to appreciate truth  in realms beyond statistics, but certainly not without relevance to test by them.

To REALISE the nature of the case, and not merely ASSESS it, this is as different as is understanding from test; and indeed the test is likely to be in parameters and within the conceptual apparatus which MAN imposes. Again, what is to be said of such constructions of AI ? this is merely to make what is assessable by, imposed by and tested through the conceptions of man. Beyond this, it has no place to go and no wisdom to find, being man-derivative, man-dependent and man-desolatable. It is man who is required to assess the conditions of the Creator, whatever his own thoughts may be, and this in the methods of science, the matériel of logic and the perceptions of spirit at his own level of life and being; and to change at will the entire conceptual apparatus on which a thousand concepts are based, perceiving NOT ONLY that the test of this or that is a reductionist mess that fails to cover the case, but WHAT IT OUGHT TO BE.

This moreover is done by the insight which the generative power of spirit supplies. You could call it a flash, except that this avoids the point.

A flash... of what ? The speed or the sensation of light is not the point here: it is WHAT speeds and WHAT it is which provides such a sensation that is in view!

It is in other words, in man,  a reality-assessing capacity which is able to create in mind, in concept, in imagination and in worlds of investing consequence of spiritual dynamic, what is not seen. Applying it is child's play compared with CONCEIVING it.

It is the conceptual powers of imagination which illustrate a spirit's power, and the ability to execute what is imagined which is the domain of artificial intelligence is subsidiary, like a typist to her boss. The name 'artificial intelligence - AI' is not bad, so much as inadequate. It is really applied intelligence, but this does not sound so great. One of the consequences of having a spirit is the capacity to have pride, self-assessment, work-assessment in value structures which are not imposed on man. This is one of the fascinating features of man's work, its cohesion, like flesh internally wrongly attached to bone causing impediment of movement, with the worse than irrelevant, the wilfully erratic, and that, by no means necessarily through inadequacy, so much as imperiousness.

AI is not intelligence in the more embracive sense of seeing and conceiving , estimating, imagining and achieving in innovation what is not supplied, in creatively conceived ingredients which are in view, in vision and in construction;  but only that aspect which in the applied sense is able to follow a rule, be it rote or statistical in the most sophisticated fashion you wish to conceive.

If this is clear, there is not so much harm in the term AI, as the danger of NOT realising this artificial limitation on its definition. It is NOT what human intelligence is in one of its essential ingredients. However if you wish to debase the term 'intelligence' to something far below its appreciability in the case of man's actual operation, fine! You can ORDER your connotation, however much it varies from the common conception, however great the profusion of confusion through your academic 'decree'.

Is it likely however that the generality of those who use the term will think of it with these blinkers on their conception of it ? Alas, no.

It is therefore a terminology susceptible to abuse, and so one which in the normal way of science should be delivered from such dangers of ambiguity and uncertainty. To be sure, you can define it in your text book on the subject before you begin, but ... is this done ? It may be in some cases, but this does not remove the dangers of those whose texts do NOT so act. Is not the area in need of accurate and unequivocal definition accepted by all simply in the sense that no one is going to be able to confuse the point except by inexcusable ignorance, who works in the field ?

An easy solution would be simply to note, explicitly, that the term 'intelligence' is not being used in the phrase 'artificial intelligence' to mean a product which is of the scope or nature of that possessed by man, but that by the term 'artificial' it is meant to indicate something which, while it has some points of contact with what we know and use as creations ourselves, intelligence, is not of the same substance.

In us, there is an APPLICATION which is so intimate with the actual intelligence that we may almost tend to fuse the two, but this AI is merely the application, and not the generating power which lies beyond it, and for which it is the servant. This could be made clear.

It would not hurt, at the same time, to indicate that the personal element in man, so that his system of values, ethical, metaphysical, emotional, logical and so forth, indicates something that does not delimit in the way man delimits what serves him, is not present in AI. Thus the base in which the intelligence works, in man, as well as the scope of it in principle, are both diverse from 'artificial' intelligence, which is thereby defined as less in both these aspects than human intelligence, so that the term 'intelligence' is being redefined explicitly to mean that approach to it which human intelligence can form. It means in short what 'intelligence' might be conceived to be in a non-personal and parameter-imposed being at the conceptual level.

It is second derivative intelligence, if you will: the designation of some of the operating features of intelligence, under the guidance of intelligence, so that the man whom intelligence made, makes with his intelligence an object which cannot conceive or imagine as he does, but is apt to perform in a maze of indirection if need be, the formulated functions to which it is by man subjected.

It could be called 'double-derivative intelligence' but this would concern those stuck in that metaphysical mud which is so clayey that it makes motion hard (cf. Spiritual Refreshings Ch. 13). It could be called 'slave-intelligence' but this might concern those for whom the concept of 'slave' is obnoxious because of the misuse of the human spirit in history! It might even be called applied intelligence, but the only discernible objection to this would be one hard to overcome, that it loses the sense of éclat and splendour which man so loves to invest in his works, so that it might be psychically unsatisfying to some who like to talk of their work in terms less real and more appealing. That of course is not a 'scientific' objection; but it is the sort which is culturally likely to prevail where men work!

For all that, this, however, is what it actually is. Of course, someone might say, All that we do involves the application of intelligence. This is not factual, since much of what man does is so unintelligent because of the follies of his often goaded and maddened spirit, that it would merely glorify and mislead all over again. However, the point would be better put, if it were said, Much of what we do involves intelligence without the derivation of a system which is intended to remove from our oversight, some of the features often associated with intelligence. Hence, it might be urged, could we not make a further delimitation of the concept when such systems, often but by no means always in view, were being created by us ?

Why then 'applied intelligence production' would cover it, and AIP would be its acronym instead of AI.

Many would like, no doubt, to turn AIP into RIP, since it is too inglorious. But to seek a glory which you do not have, this is what is truly inglorious, since it even reaches into that unhallowed domain of the vainglorious! Applied intelligence production is very ordinary in sound, but it has all the lustre of the imagination required to form and formulate what it really is, which is by no means dismal.

The point for our own purpose is this, that in using the term AI, one ought not to allow emotion to substitute for thought, as though we actually creating something in the spiritual domain of man, where his spirit and mind and intelligence and understanding and imagination, together with personal discernment and model-creation, and this with his spiritual obeisance in whatever direction it is ... applied.

Why ? It is because the case is otherwise. We are merely showing as derivative creators, how we can appreciate and isolate from our own domain, rich and full of facets, personal and originative even if only within a systematic and personalised whole, one feature which saves us work; so that we can thus use our analytical propensity to reduce what we have to do all the time with our minds. It becomes an advance on tiresome repetition and application of even subtle kinds; but it does not surpass the originative in functionality or even approach him, merely executing, like spectacles for the eyes, tasks in principle covered already, but now aided in special cases by inventive genius.

This exercise concerning AI, however, has had an additional advantage which may be discerned. It forces one to realise afresh that the power of will, to execute vision, imagination and conception, is quite diverse from the power of mind to create worlds  of thought, and of spirit to stew, spew or flame them out (depending on the case), to devise them for grand or foul purposes, and to oversee them with zeal for some glory or another: or even to do it all drably for pay.

The mind, spirit and intelligence of man (the last, a sub-species of mind, and like the rest of it, under spiritual direction as to purpose and value), set in his parti-programmatic body has a scope which nothing he can make can share. The wonder is that we can even seek to assess ourselves, not to mention our power to PRO-create ourselves, at all! That is part of the wonder of this particular creation called mankind, which combines in its massive integrality, such diversified powers, all of which are summable in terms of the overseeing rubric, PERSON.

The liberty to dispense in thought with logic and Lord is part of BEING a person, both its glory and potential shame. Bathed in surreality, persons therefore are able to argue endlessly and to no point, since they do not commence with the rationality they have, but assuming what is unsustainable, they apply by a diverted intelligence (DI) their miscued thoughts, until in every field vacuity of thought spawns its name-sakes, and the time taken to untangle the mess is normally so considerable that people prefer simply to go to hell. For centuries, this seems to have been for its own part in the matter, a fabulously attractive fashion (cf. Matthew 7:15ff., 20ff.).

That is, they prefer to eat and sleep and be deceived by the manifestly absurd, and to argue about applications of absurdity instead of facing it and outfacing it, and residing in reality: alas, they have tended to do this to the point that what they are and are about is subsumed into mere existence, or in the modern mis-terminology, survival, so that what it is that is to survive, for how long, and in what sense, cease to be relevant in the grasping desire to keep breathing. If ever a civilsation needed condemnation for superficiality, surely this is it. How piercing is the word of Isaiah in 2:22:

"Cease from man, whose breath is in his nostrils, for of what account is he ?"

(The NASB has a incisive point: In what should he be esteemed ?)

Where is the glory of the created, the born, the formed, the formatted, the functionally equipped, so that even in learning to walk, there are the legs (made), there are their nerves (presented and growing), there is the brain (new neuron connections abounding, in response to action not least), there is the programmatic facility to make learning RELEVANT to action (a massive production of prodigious significance in its form and formulation), there is the intimately contoured series of apparatus to do the motor relevant work, such as eye, nostril, ear and breath, touch and forming: there it all is and man learns, both here and in later phases, within the facilities and functionalities both supplied and integrated, nay more, correlated into a unitary reality which operates in toto as one person.

Glory ? for its Creator who has formulated, composed and disposed it into system ? of course; but for itself ? Inherent in pride, is this disability to find the source and instead,  this concentration on the particular result. It is all 'me'.

It ruins the grace and confuses the greatness, artificial in kind as the AI man delights to make. It makes of the spirit of man a servant to irrationalism, as retainer of unreality and makes him if an artist, then one gifted in the surreal; and he wars and fights and hopes and hates and does it all again and again, until one might think it impossible to conceive that he would continue to deceive himself, crying in woe at is 'meaninglessness' and shouting his war in his assertiveness, until the whole desecration turns into devastation.

Then like one drunk, he declares, Let us seek it again! and off on his proud and sightless vainglory he goes once again. He makes -isms and suffers -itis, so long as the former is like a prism which transmits light, but does not acknowledge it, and the latter is that of spurious glory.

In the realm of intelligence, alas, it is little different.

Thus we return to the improperly so-called artificial intelligence, an intelligence divorced from its life, immune to its capacities in the main applications so that it merely sustains error or implements what is right, as the case may be,  and provides pap for truth, bemused and inert, as if already in intensive care except in this, that it could not care less. Not to care is to be careless, and not being able to care less! Even contrived 'care' is mere programmatic servitude.

However, man in his engagements in such fields, frequently and almost inveterately does not cease to be a zenith of carelessness. Forsaking the maker of real intelligence (RI), he tends to become immersed in the interstices of his self-directed powers to the point he does not really use them, merely confines them, and so becomes more and more like a simple and sample case of AI itself!

Man's intelligence becomes more analogous to the truly artificial in such a case in this, in that it ceases to deploy its originative power and critical capacity, being programmed increasingly by culture, polluted by desire and so as Christ put it, as sinful becoming the servant of sin. In this way, man loses his freedom and so in his philosophic descriptions, by freedom can even make man-models, free of freedom, since this is his own experience in the parameters artificially set by his own sin. Is it more poignant than pathetic ? The pathos is profound, the more so in that it tends to make him now arrogant, now unhappy because he is as an orphan, bereft, now pressed, now pugnacious, facing a world he cannot and does not understand: such is the wile of will misspent.

His preference for such conduct however is an illustration of the actual freedom involved, and in every purpose, including the purpose to be divorced from or free of purpose, man shows what he is; nor can he cease to be what he is, for in making the plan of himself which he then follows, he has purposively acted, and to his own purpose he then becomes both slave, and subject to sentence.

It is the great mercy of God that man is not however to be condemned ultimately for doing himself such mischief as to become close to AI when he has RI. God has acted not only to create the liberty which we all have in principle, but for the liberation from its artificialisation, which its defilement makes necessary if we are to be persons indeed once more: not mere captives of our own misconceptions, instead of children of God.
 

THE COST OF REMEDY
FOR NON-ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE DEFILED

God has not left our liberty as lord, for the Lord is He; and He has instead produced for us a facility for lordliness which no one admires. It is the obverse of a facility for spiritual functionality which can be both charming and delightful. If the 'coin' could not be turned, then the liberty would not be present. Since it can be, however, alas, it often is.

Playing the lord is a detestable human corruption; but playing God is spiritually insane. It ruins without reason and spoils without profit (cf. Isaiah 55:1ff.). It is apparently paradoxical that when man ceases this spiritual lordliness that he becomes free and when he insists on it, far from lord, he is mere slave. He becomes a self-imposing parameter byproduct of his own spiritual being, so that unlike the spoliation of Africa case, he actually takes captive his own self as slave, by his own will! Such is the wonder of the amplitude of the human will, that only God can create, but in which man is most gifted to desecrate.

Having made man free, however, not as autonomous, since God is eternal and what, like man,  is made into time already and irrevocably lacks this, since history is what it is and not another thing: God does not turn His back on this magnificent thing He has made. Let us at once seek clarity: it is not that man per se is magnificent, but that the CREATION and creative innovation which he represents is truly magnificent. If you were a car, you might conceive yourself magnificent, but actually you are the product of someone else whose power is the magnificence, if there is any! The conception of man is profound, the power is enormous and the silliness potential is both inveterate in this world and almost without limit.

That is the nature of power and will wedded: marvels and horror are its potentials.

What then has God done for what does such damage to His creation ? His action, available for inspection in the Bible which has its unique validity before logic (cf. SMR Chs. 1 -3, 5, 10, TMR Ch. 5, Barbs, Arrows and Balms 6   -7, Calibrating Myths Ch. 6), is amazing. That He should act is not at all surprising, for who would He be who would not deal with such drab misconstructions, distortions and caricaturing lies as man so seizes with such guilt, not to mention his treatment of his fellows, God's property!

That He should provide remedy is certain, for otherwise He would wittingly and willingly suffer the contradiction of what He has done and the principles inherent, and truth itself which is His own being. It would be simple to terminate ...

He is what He is, needs nothing, having no parameters installed, and suffers no diminution of truth to proceed as if His being were susceptible to opposition, or He wanted to be defied, a lack in completeness at the outset, and hence a presence of impartation, as if he were in some mere system.

All this is obvious. There is God, there is defilement, there is remedy, it is one which ALONE covers the case as remedy, the Biblical presentation, without competitor a gift from God which is overruling, not merely demanding on the equipment, and by its nature, cancels at once the defilement that it might continue until the case is deemed complete. The method ? This is the ACCEPTANCE of the defilement, selectively from those who put out their garbage at request, their sin, where it is being collected: in Christ crucified, the picture of sin, its portrayal in its cruelty, its defilement and its defiance, in that here as man, God TOOK what was wrong and cancelled it in condemning it in Himself.

Cancelled for some therefore, and this on offer to all most willingly from God (II Cor. 5:127ff., Colossians 1:19ff.), sin is no more an autonomous dynamic, merely a test condition development, covered in principle while the consequences accrue, while the clouds of information are found and all things are exposed. Here is LOVE with INTELLIGENCE meeting the case with INNOVATION. Christ's resurrection, foretold for a millenium before it came (cf. Joyful Jottings 22-25), is the application of POWER in the innovation, so that its reality is attested and its adequacy as life triumphing over death, man's sentence, is displayed.

There is NOTHING artificial  about the love which took the taunts in order both to demonstrate the truth and to cover and cancel the guilt, taking summary punishment and receiving the deadly misdirected dynamic of sin on Himself (Isaiah 53:1-6). Man often displays artificial love (AL), but this is real love (RL). It practices what it preaches and DOES IT.

Above freedom itself, is love. Without this, freedom - to excuse the vernacular - is lousy. It had been better never to have been. God declares that without love you are nothing! It is ZERO attainment, or if you will, OFFICIAL NULLITY (on). When 'on' is on, life is not on. God is not interested in what is against what He makes, in its proper and due state, and destruction of beauty is not one of His amours! Thus sin cancelled for His RI-gained consortium of people, He instils in them RL, so that they might live and not be the mere victims of their own illicit culture (AC - autonomous culture), but rather liberated beings, children of God.

These are those who are not (because to program love is a contradiction in terms) AL, but RL and this is so  since they have freely come by the power of God, not intrusive or invasive, but well able to detach the obscuration from the spiritual eye and to grant both life and sight.

That HIS power is able to do this rests on His absolute knowledge of all things, so that having made man in His own image, He then delivers him without the defilement of force, so that freedom has its true results ONLY through a power beyond that of defiled man, but NOT beyond the reality which he has as a person. It is like creation in the first place, for only God knows what He is doing, but His principles, they are obvious.

He made man ABLE to have fellowship with Himself, but this MEANT that he could opt out. He now restores man to fellowship with Himself, knowing how to deliver what is His own, without in any way defiling the liberty of what being defiled, though it is automatically set against Himself because of its condition from its assured ouster from Eden. What has defied God is defiled, and it is like bruises in the heart, an inoperable condition for the victim, one requiring  celestial surgeon who by no means shanghais His patients!

With God, perfection is the inalienable condition of ultimate comradeship, and though in this pilgrimage He suffers long with us, yet in heaven imperfection would be merely war, and in the resurrection unrealism would be defective. He has therefore in all things covered the case, now to enable remedy to be a liaison with reality till the time comes, and in heaven, to enable justice to be friends with mercy, and both with truth.

The highest standards of sinful man in his products are as dross compared with those of Him with whom we have to do. What then of His finding His own ?

Child's play to God, it is as far beyond the power of the damaged spirit of man as the most distant star is beyond his car. Yet in His intelligence (RI), and in His knowledge (RK), it is far simpler than it is for an architect to see his building and walk about it (in the lively powers of an imaginative spirit), before it is built.

That is how He even KNOWS who are HIS before the world with its type of time was built at all (Ephesians 1:4).

But someone says, I do not have RL, and do not see how I can get it ? True is it,  if you do not know God, in the first point.  But you can now see how you may get it. You surrender to God as Redeemer in Christ Jesus and sent out your garbage to His cross, the dynamic operative reality (DOR), and so He becomes your door to home.

But, you may say, I do not WANT to do this. Self-taught! If you do not WANT it, what on earth has your being concept of being or not being ABLE, to do with it. Do you repine because you cannot buy an ice-cream, when you do not want the thing! That is irrelevant. If you want it, take it. If you do not, it is not power but will which is in operation, and so be it. You inhabit your chosen realm.

Yet another may add, Yet I WOULD like to have God, but do not quite see my way clear. In what way, however, do you not quite see your way clear ? Is sacrifice for sin, hard to conceive ? Perhaps, you say. In what way ? Is a fine paid by another hard to conceive ? No, you may say, but the love behind it is hard to conceive. Do you then insist on conceiving what is hard to conceive in order to accept what is not hard to receive ? This is mere unbelief, and obviously, if you choose not to believe despite the necessities of logic (SMR), in this love, you are missing nothing from your point of view. Who wants an ice-cream that is not there!

Yet you say, I WANT it but feel it strange. I can CONCEIVE of it, after all, but find it overwhelming. Is  visit to Niagara OUT because you do not want to be confronted with something inconceivable beautiful ? Would you rather have your conceptual power implemented by visual power so that in all you gain ? Or is it merely that YOURSELF is your chosen ultimate and you feel defiled to relate in practical terms to One greater ? That is understandable, the illusion of autonomy where it is not and cannot be actual, is a dream some prefer to God, though the dream goes and God does not, and remains.

This again is a mere act of your will, and why should you feel so bad: after all, if YOU are the object of your own worship, so be it. It is hard to see how a thing born without choice, and able to depart without notice, with equipment not self-made and scarcely even understood, should feel its due to be its own worship of itself, but then that is liberty. It is not necessarily tied to any sort of reality.

Yet again, you say, But I do not want such trivial triumphalism as this, but want God. Then again, there it is, the cross of Christ. Yet you say, I do not see HOW I could possibly be good enough to want it, far less to gain it. Agreed, sin is like that, you COULD not. It is GOD alone who must liberate you, but then He is on record as to His desire for this (I Timothy 2). So you just come, KNOWING that as before God, it is ONLY YOURSELF in the end, who prefers darkness. God has taken all action necessary for your liberation in RL by RI.

WHY do you spend your wages for nothing! God remonstrates. Come, take water freely ! (Isaiah 55 is rich in this).

Redemption is like that. HE pays, you come.

Come then.

You have come ? Rejoice then, for RL with RI has invested in you your proper restoration by redemption, and in this there is the delight of being where you should be, ready to serve your Maker, in the love which He has given to you! (Romans 5:1-11). Now do you have meaning and duty, now is responsibility not some vague feeling but both propositional and personal, to God as Speaker and as Leader.

There is nothing AL about this. Dreams go, reality stays (cf. Jeremiah 23:17-29). Behold, says I John 3, what manner of love the Father has shown that we should be called the children of God! That, it is RL, it is what makes life lovely. Being created is great; being re-created is splendid; and being loved is magnificent, when it is as you are by the One who made you; and then, being enabled to love, this is astounding, for it makes of you not a artificiality of stupour, but a spiritually acute member of the kingdom of heaven, in which instinct is overwhelmed in reality, program and parameter is superseded by understanding, and wit meets its maker in Wisdom. Here lies destiny for man, when he avoids the destiny  of lies (I John 2:22, 4:2-11).

NOTE

See Index on artificial intelligence.