Gary discusses a recent sermon written and “preached” at a worship service in Germany by ChatGPT.
The culmination of worldview shifts has changed American belief patterns in dramatic ways. The old categories were shot full of holes by new religious assumptions that could not be rationally criticized since pluralism and relativism are today’s reigning worldviews. A common culture with shared religious assumptions has disappeared.
Those who were disenchanted with the materialist worldview and what it brought into existence—atomic weapons, the military industrial complex, perpetual wars—could no longer live with its foundational assumptions. There was a general revolt against the worldview that taught that there is no real cosmic meaning to life, that the brain is an organic machine without true mind-consciousness, that science and technology are true saviors, that man is “nothing but” a highly evolved animal, and that all values are subjective and illusory.
And where was the church during this period of religious, moral, and social upheaval? Nearly silent. When John Lennon made his statement that the Beatles were more popular than Jesus, the Christian response was meager. The counter culture was flooding society with a new set of paradigms, and all the church could do was call for the banning and burning of Beatles records.
The craving for “something more” was not fulfilled by the insistence that the cosmos is all there is or was or ever will be. Some substitute had to be found. The rage that young people felt toward the coldness and impersonalism of materialism led to an anything-goes religious experimentation. Religion had found a new home in a world that often dispensed with logic, reason, and common sense. What had started as a “subterranean” movement in the 1950s by a group of ideological misfits, had become mainstream by the 1970s.
Thinking Straight in a Crooked World
The nursery rhyme "There Was a Crooked Man" is an appropriate description of how sin affects us and our world. We live in a crooked world of ideas evaluated by crooked people. Left to our crooked nature, we can never fully understand what God has planned for us and His world. God has not left us without a corrective solution. He has given us a reliable reference point in the Bible so we can identify the crookedness and straighten it.
Buy NowGary discusses a recent sermon written and “preached” at a worship service in Germany by ChatGPT. When AI is delivering all the information, how will we possibly determine what’s accurate or true? AI can synthesize information all day long, but it cannot distinguish truth from falsehood; it simply takes the various inputs and gives an output based on its programming. Spoiler alert: the programming comes from humans.