Need to make a menu for dinner Friday, work on my Bible study for today, and make it to bed before midnight, but there are too many things swirling around in my brain. One set of friends is excited over the birth of their baby, another set of friends is mourning their miscarriage. We all know how to handle the happy event, but we don’t know quite know how to deal with the loss, though both are equally as important. Everyone will want to swarm around the new arrival and his happy parents (welcome to the world, Cambell Ray!), but I suspect M and B will have a quieter time of it, though they may need the support of people around them even more than the exhausted new parents.

In both cases, these pregnancies had been long awaited and hoped for. Both couples were ecstatic to find out that they were pregnant. The pregnancy that resulted in a healthy baby boy would have been the pregnancy I’d have counted as higher risk. But biology, science or no, doesn’t always work as advertised, and babies that are loved aren’t always born.

“Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.” (Matthew 5:4) Quoting a verse is an quick-fix comfort, both for me and for our mourning Christian friends. May I be a more tangible comfort, an instrument of God’s promise of comfort, for our dear friends.

Sunday, the day of rest. Too bad my daughter doesn’t appreciate the value of a good nap on a Sunday. Some friends of ours invited us over for lunch today after church: wonderful way to spend an afternoon, eating together and just having a chance to get together and talk. As hurried and jam-packed as the rest of the week always is, and as tempted as we often are to fit some of the overflow from the week into our Sundays, it’s definitely refreshing to just, well, REST on Sunday.

Our Sunday school lesson a couple of weeks ago had to do with resting on the Sabbath. The Sunday school kid answer to why we rest is “because God did”. And why did God rest? “Because he was tired”. The Almighty? Tired? Nah. He rested to show us just how good it feels.

Challenged my Sunday school kids last Sunday (5th graders) to one-up me on memory verses. Each week, they get a new verse they’re supposed to memorize. As a Sunday school teacher and also a Pioneer Girls leader, I’ve given out more than my fair share of memorization assignments. But, being the adult rather than the kid, I’ve usually slid by and just memorized the reference and the basic intent of the verse. Uh, I wouldn’t let my kids get away with that, but somehow I justified it for myself. So, this quarter my 5th graders can stop me in the hall on Sunday, when I’m out in the mall, or wherever, and ask me to recite the memory verse (or any of the ones we’ve learned in past weeks).

To try to learn our verse (Hebrews 11:3), I’ve spent time each evening reading it, rereading it, and reciting it. My problem is that I tend to swap in similar words, or to mentally rephrase the verse and come up with a different spin. Not going to cut it (Proverbs 30:5-7).

I now have a bit more sympathy for my kids. For those in private school, they’ve got the verse I assigned to them, the verse for school, the verse for Boys Brigade or Pioneer Clubs, and then all of their regular school work (spelling tests, geography quizzes, science tests, . . .) on top. And we adults think we’ve got a lot to think about and remember!

By the way, the lesson for the week was about the various theories of how the world was created and how what the Bible says fits in. I’d be interested in hearing from some scientific creationists, if any shouldst ramble ‘cross this site. The kids and I had some interesting discussions. . .

As my husband points out in his comment to my last post, I made an error of omission, describing the tree from which Eve ate as the ‘tree of knowledge’, rather than the tree of knowledge of good and evil. I apologize for the misquote. The Word of God is infallible; I am not.

I actually realized my misquote last night, and had shrugged it off as being defensible in the context of my argument. As I looked at last night, self-awareness would inevitably require some sort of understanding of good v. evil to be able to evaluate threats to one’s self, to evaluate decisions within some sort of context. I’m no longer so sure of that argument. True, there’d have to be some knowledge of ‘good outcome’ vs. ‘bad outcome’, but those wouldn’t have to correspond to what we typically think of as good vs. evil. There seems to be a basic understanding of a baseline standard of good that a self-aware computer system might or might not “agree” with. For instance, most moral systems of the world agree that killing is not moral. Now imagine a system that didn’t agree with that tenet. Whether humans believe that tenet from a humanistic point of view (e.g., humans wouldn’t last very long if we went around killing each other off) or from a divine edict point of view (thou shalt not kill), the end result is that there’s benefit to each of us if we don’t go around knocking each other off indiscriminately, and thus whether one agrees with a divine edict, the end result is that we agree that killing is wrong. A computer system might or might not see such benefit, and I think we’d have a hard time proselytizing a computer to recognize divine edict.

I’m no theologian, so my arguments are a mix of limited understanding, limited faith, and some amount of blind acceptance. (Most things in life that we take as true end up being such a mix, unless something’s in our particular area of expertise.) I believe that man was created in God’s image, and that thus the things we take to be fundamentally true and good are those that He values. I also believe that we couldn’t clearly describe those values, that they’ve been muddied in us. “We know it when we see it”, ends up being our descriptor of what’s truly good. If we can’t describe it, then we can’t teach a computer those values and, more importantly, clearly define their applications. So, we couldn’t program a system to have the same value system embedded within us.

That returns me to my argument that man won’t ever be able to create a truly intelligent computer, because that computer won’t know what is good versus what is not good. (Man didn’t have knowledge of evil until he ate of the fruit, so knowledge of evil must not be a condition of intelligence.) Man can’t teach it, so the computer can’t know it.

If we ever create a computer that we believe is intelligent, beware what power we give it or that it can obtain. Hitler was an intelligent person with a values system most folks would say didn’t match what we understand to be good. If we examined his values, I believe we’d find several that were warped (in very significant ways!), but that his core set still resembled our own. Now imagine an ‘intelligent’ creature with a very different value system. If warped values can achieve massive evil, what could missing/incomplete/diluted values do?