Will Artificial Intelligence Change Our World?

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Artificial intelligence is fast becoming a normal part of our lives. I'm Chris Hughes, and welcome to The Christian Perspective, where we look in God's Word in order to develop a Christian worldview and modern culture. This show is brought to you by the Citizens for America Foundation from the Christian Perspective Studios on the campus of Mid-America College and Mid-America Baptist Theological Seminary in Memphis, Tennessee. And I just want to invite you, if you're looking for a college to attend, Memphis has a great offering of a Christian college in Mid-America College. And maybe you're somebody who's already been to college, maybe years ago you went to college. And now you want to look at going to seminary and learning more about God's Word and how you can continue to serve our Savior.

So I just encourage you as you look at different seminaries, pray for God, it's guidance, check out Mid-America Baptist Theological Seminary. Well today we've got an exciting show, and we're going to talk about a topic that I don't know much about, and hopefully you will listen in, take notes, because it's going to be a very informative show. The great crisis of our age is how technology and specifically artificial intelligence and robots are clipping our reverence for God. And the rush to create human helping. Artificial intelligence technologies are making machines that may eventually become our masters. I had the chance a few years ago to go with my son to a technology conference up at Harvard. It's pretty scary what scientists are doing with machines and with computers right now around the world. My guest today has written a compelling and groundbreaking book that we're going to talk about.

Best selling author Wallace Hemley is with me today. And we're going to talk about the impending moral and ethical choices that we'll soon need to make as believers in Jesus Christ. Can we hold artificial intelligence and its creators accountable to the true God? We're going to talk about some of this today. And if not, as you will learn today, our world is going to spin into peril. Artificial intelligence will have a huge impact on our lives, and we need to have an understanding of the worldview and the vision of the future that's held by these people who are creating this technology.

Many of them aren't Christians like you and I are today, and they may not hold a biblical worldview, and so their goals may be a little bit different from ours. And our guest today is Wallace Hemley. Mr. Hemley was born in Alabama, so he's a country boy.

I'm not too far from there. I was born in the Panhandle of North Florida, which they call Lower Alabama anyway. But he was born on December 5, 1941, which is just two days before the attack on Pearl Harbor. He's seen a lot of great things happen in his lifetime, and he and his beautiful wife Irene have been married for more than 53, excuse me, more than 50 years now. And he has a heart for politics like I do.

He didn't know this, and I didn't know until I read his bio, but we both share a passion for being engaged in the public arena. In 1973, he was honored for his coverage of the civil rights movement. He worked in the White House with President Nixon.

And those of you that listen to the show know that one of my great influences and the reason probably that this show started today because of a man named Chuck Colson, who also worked in the Nixon White House. And Mr. Henley was also a congressional staffer, so he's got a lot of experience in the public arena. After he left the political end of it, he became a pastor. He was senior associate pastor in Houston's Second Baptist Church, which, by the way, has over 68,000 members. He served as a columnist for the Christian Post, which is the world's largest Christian newspaper, and he conducts leadership conferences all over the world. He's a member of the board of the Center of Christianity and Business at Houston Baptist University, and he's an adjunct professor in worldview studies, which is really going to help us today at Belhaven University. And he's written more than 20 books.

But today we're going to talk about one of those books in particular, and his new book is called Who Will Rule the Coming Gods? The Looming Spiritual Crisis of Artificial Intelligence. Mr. Henley, thank you so much for being with us today. Chris, it's a tremendous joy to have this opportunity.

Thank you. I'm just in awe. When I read your bio, I couldn't believe all that God has used you in so many areas, and you're such a testimony to what we try to do on this show, because we try to encourage Christians to develop a biblical worldview, and then to take that biblical worldview not just into their everyday lives, but specifically into the arena of public policy and politics. And you've kind of lived that life. You're a living example that Christians can be involved in what's going on in the culture today. So I thank you for the stand that you're taking. Well thank you so much, brother, and I must say we can be and we must be. And can I tell you just a short Chuck Colson anecdote?

Sure. I was pastoring in South Alabama after I left the White House. I went back to the newspaper business, and in the midst of that, God rebirthed a call that he'd given me when I was 15 to preach the gospel. And I had become pastor of a small church in South Alabama, when one day one of my friends from Washington called me and said, Wallace Colson has accepted Christ. And I said, I can't believe it, because I knew him in the White House and so forth, knew he was a real sharp guy. He said, Colson has accepted Christ and what's more, he's in prison on Watergate charges in South Alabama at Maxwell Air Force Base in Montgomery.

And we want you to travel up there and talk to him and just kind of help him along and pray with him. And I had the joy of meeting Chuck early as a different man. I'd known him in the White House, but now I'm meeting him as a brother.

And it was just an incredible experience. I went up there three times, the warden let me meet with him. I think he hoped we would talk about the Watergate and they could tape some things, but they didn't.

They heard us praying and talking about the Lord. So I'm so glad to hear about the influence of Chuck in your life, my brother. Well, I'm going to eat into your time a little bit just here in case our listeners don't know who Chuck Colson was. So many people probably know who President Nixon was in the early 1970s. And of course, he left the presidency in not as good terms as he would have liked. But the Watergate break-in took place and Chuck Colson, and since you worked with him, you probably know better than me, Mr. Henley.

But I kind of relate him to modern day, like Kellyanne Conway was to President Trump. He was a political adviser, if I'm correct, with President Nixon. And he really had a reputation of kind of being cutthroat in the political business, didn't he?

Yes. In fact, there was an old, it was proven to be a myth, but he supposedly said that he would walk over his grandmother for the reelection of Richard Nixon. Thankfully, it was a myth.

He didn't do that. Well, he was supposedly a pretty tough guy politically, but he had a friend. And this is why it's so important for us as Christians to tell other people about Jesus, because you never know the impact you're going to have. And he had a friend who just kept telling him and telling him and telling him about Jesus. And Chuck Colson was, you know, I never had the privilege of meeting, but it was evidently a very intellectual man.

And they would spend time together. And finally, through these conversations over years, his friend just didn't give up. He eventually led Chuck Colson to Jesus.

And I might be messing up the story a little bit, but Watergate had happened along that time. And so he didn't get saved after he went to prison. I thought for years that he got saved after he went to prison, you know, because we hear about these jailhouse conversions, but he got saved before he went to prison and basically did not contest anything. I mean, he basically confessed of his participation, which had to take a tremendous amount of courage.

I mean, because his career, I mean, he was one of the top most powerful men in the entire world. And God radically changed this man's life. And he got saved.

Yes, sir? I was going to say several of his former colleagues who were not guilty of any crimes volunteered to take his place in prison because his father was very sick. And he had a family that he was dealing with. And they volunteered to take his place, but he turned that down. He refused it and served his own term.

Wow, I didn't know that. So what came of that, for those of you that Mr. Haley knows, those of you that are listening, is God just really worked on him and took that time in prison. And he got a heart for the ministry to reach out to prisoners. So when he got out of prison, he formed two organizations. One was, now my mind's going blank, Prison Fellowship, which is, I think, the largest prison ministry in the world today. And then he formed another organization called the Colson Center today.

Now that he's passed away, they've become two separate ministries, and they're both still great ministries. But the Colson Center today is run by a guy named John Stonestreet, who was kind of a protege to Chuck Colson. And they formed an organization called the Colson Fellowship Program.

Initially it was called the Centurion Program, I believe. And so what they do, so if you're listening, folks, this is how it all started for me. I wanted to learn more about having a biblical worldview and how I could defend my faith, so I applied to their program, and it's called the Colson Fellowship Program. And it was started by, as I said, Chuck Colson. And they go through this great 10-month, it's kind of like getting a master's degree, Mr. Henley.

But it's a great program where you study some of the greatest minds and apologetics in the country today, and then learn how to defend your faith. And because of my involvement, that led to me having this national radio show. So what a neat connection.

I had no idea that you knew Chuck Colson and that you were even part of the Nixon administration. That's exciting. These are exciting times, brother, that we live in right now as well. And those were defining times. These are defining times right now. Well, that's a great place for us to take a break. Folks, if you're just tuning in, we want you to stick around because we're talking to Wallace Henley about his new book about artificial intelligence.

Take a quick commercial break, and we'll be right back. Or the causes you care about. and explore Christianity's most treasured religious sites, like the Wailing Wall, the Dome of the Rock, and the Via Dolorosa. Walk with Chris through the winding alleyways of Nazareth's Old City and visit ancient Bethlehem, the place of our Savior's birth. Float in the Dead Sea, visit the Sea of Galilee and the Jewish fortress of Masada. See firsthand where the events of the Bible took place. Touring Israel with Dr. Chris Hughes is a travel odyssey like no other.

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For a free transcript, call American Minute at 1-888-USA-WORD. Welcome back to The Christian Perspective. We have a fascinating guest today. Wallace Henley is an author and a pastor and has served in ministry for many years and in the political world. He's got a great new book that talks about artificial intelligence and the threat that it may pose to the church and to Christians and how we need to understand what's happening with artificial intelligence. What got you interested in that? What spurred you to begin doing all this research to write a book? Well, I've served as a founding member of the Houston Baptist University's Center for Christianity and Business. The director of that center is Dr. Ernest Lee Young, who is a very awesome economist.

He has a PhD from the University of Chicago, but just has a flaming desire to get the gospel into business. So one morning, we were having breakfast, and he began to explain to me what was going to happen in the economic world, the world of finance, because of the expansion of the computers and especially artificial intelligence. And as we talked about this, this was about five years ago, as we talked about this, I just all of a sudden, my mind just exploded and I drove away from the breakfast at a cracker barrel, full of the breakfast, but I was even more excited about what was going on in my mind. I've got to pursue this. And as I pursued it, I began to see more and more and more levels of concern. And one of the levels of concern was who is going to put the value systems and the worldview components, algorithms into these machines? Who are the people doing that? What's going to be the boundary?

What's going to be the limit that the machine will go to? And as I began to pursue it, the book just began to take place, and it took three years to do it. And finally, this year, it has come out. You know, that's such an area that most people don't know very much about. My son is studying to be an aerospace engineer, and he tells me that's happening in artificial intelligence and computers is just kind of mind-boggling of what's going on in the world today. What are current global, technical, social, political, industrial, and other forces that have helped create the rise of machines in our economy today and in our country? Well, of course, the push to be able to do finance and economics and make more money is a compelling issue.

Also, the desire to be powerful. Another thing that prompted me to write the book, a former Google engineer by the name of Lewandowski actually formed an AI church entitled The Way of the Future and began to worship around that particular idea. Another specialist in AI said that the time would come, that we would come to the time of the singularity, which would be about 1945, according to Ray Kurzweil, but the singularity would be able to process, it would be a connection between human and machine and able to process data at 8 billion times a second. So then he said, if a machine can do that, what do you call that machine? He said, the only thing that I can think of that you would call that machine is God. Well, he may have meant that tongue-in-cheek, but the reality is, and this is the case I try to really build in the book, we are wired for transcendence. We human beings are wired for transcendence.

The machines may have great attributes and great organizational elements, but we have the spirit and we can get beyond those things. We are supposed to be able to commune with God himself and because of that we're also supposed to come under the transcendence of God. And one of the tragedies in today's church is that we've lost the message of transcendence and our efforts to be seeker-friendly and our efforts to be understood by the culture and all of these things, we have forgotten the transcendence of God.

The transcendence of God means that we are answerable to God. And when we have people who are programming the machines who are answerable to no one but themselves and the machines, then great danger lies ahead. And I'm standing on the hilltops trying to insert this element into this discussion.

Mr. Henley, before the commercial break you were talking about a couple of things I want to touch on that you said. One, you said that there is actually a church that is an AI church. Were they worshipping some artificial intelligence as God in that church?

Well, that was going to be the direction. The church now, as I understand it, has been disbanded. I don't know whether it was because they got so much joking about it or what, but nevertheless it did reveal what is in the human being, that this is something that he can stand in awe of, that it deserved to be worshipped. And this, of course, has been the entire nature of God. We are to be in such awe of him that we recognize his transcendent majesty. The founders of our constitutional republic understood that. They were not all evangelical Christians, but I can tell you this, they all understood the transcendence of God because they heard that message propounded in colonial pulpits, in two-hour sermons, and in the Great Awakening.

And it was Benjamin Franklin who the left loves to claim, but they can't because it was Benjamin Franklin when the Constitutional Convention came into an impasse and couldn't go forward, who said, let's adjourn this meeting, let's go get some pastors to pray with us and to come back and be with us, let's seek Almighty God. That was the consensus in that age. The consensus has now changed, and the consensus is more toward the mundane, more toward the imminent scale. And because of that change, we have forgotten the transcendence of God, that the computers, the AI machines, will be answerable themselves to something higher to themselves. But who's putting that stream into their algorithmic thinking?

That's my great concern. So it's probably somebody that's not a Christian in most cases. Can you define again, you told us before the break, or maybe if somebody just tuned in, you've mentioned transcendence of God several times. Can you define again for our listeners what you mean by that?

Yes, the transcendence of God is His attribute of being His awesome majesty. When you come into His presence, you do it on your knees. When you come into Him, to facing Him, you recognize that you can't look into His face.

You understand that you're answerable to Him for your behavior, and you're going to give an account at the end of your life for the use of your gifts and what you've done, and therefore this puts restraints on you. The fundamental battle in the universe is between cosmos and chaos. The enemy, the powers of darkness, the spiritual forces in heavenly places are seeking continually to pull us into increasing chaos. Boundaries are the means of resisting chaos, maintaining cosmos. And so the great attack in our time is on the boundaries, the boundaries of family, the boundaries of church, the boundaries of personal behavior.

All of these elements, the transcendence of God calls us to those higher things. So where will the machine get that? And one of the most chilling examples I read about was the technician who was having lunch with a fellow who kept asking him questions about these things. Finally the technician said, these things will come to the point that they can destroy us. And the man who was having lunch with him said, well, what does this mean? He says, oh, this will be good.

And the man having lunch with him said, why would it be good? He said, because it's the obvious next step in evolution. We've achieved biologically the human being, but beyond the human being there's something else. Something else is the great machine that is the transforming machine.

It is the most powerful machine. But our problem is that we are so wired for transcendence. It's like if we were in the Sahara and we were dying with thirst and we would have such a compelling desire for water, we would dive into any old hole that we could find no matter how many camels have wallowed in it. That would be our nature because of the need for transcendence. So when the transcendent one is the machine, then the machine determines our ultimate questions. And we have such a hunger, as Augustine said, the human heart was made by God and for God and only God can fill it. All of those are the things that we must face in this hour, more than just economics. When you're talking about this, the first thing that popped to my mind when you started talking about it is like the time of the Tower of Babel.

People were seeking things beyond God and trying to become God themselves, almost like the evolution that you're talking about here. What do you think is the end goal of this technology? The end goal of this technology, as we know it right now, is the transhuman. Actually what the man was talking about is the dream, that we will come to the point that we can integrate ourselves to the machines and therefore we can live forever, certainly there will be heaven, the heaven we create with our hands, which is not a heaven at all, but nevertheless that we will be so united to the machines that we will function as one unit.

That's the ultimate goal on a personal scale right now. Of course another goal is to rise to the point of omniscience, of knowing all things. Just look at the attributes of God as revealed in the Bible and you will see the unspoken and perhaps even unrecognized goals of those who are developing the machines. Are they talking about, and please forgive my ignorance because I don't know too much about all this, are they talking about creating a being that is maybe part human flesh and part machine?

Is that how they plan to do this? Well the machine aspects would affect the knowing ability of the human being, the knowledge capacity and the understanding of the human being based on the interests, the values, the world views, your guy works on world views so you'll understand this, but will encompass a new world view, the world view of the machine. And so when that happens this is really going to move us further away from God as a culture and as a society I would assume. Yes it will and in fact the title of my book is Who Will Rule the Coming God, the Rooming Spiritual Crisis of Artificial Intelligence. Everybody is talking about the knowledge aspects of this, but no one is thinking about the spiritual aspect of this and the spiritual implications are immense because this will determine whether we live or die at some point down the line and I'm not being sensational about this. People who are studying it understand that this is where we might be headed ultimately. And so this is why I've titled the book Who Will Rule the Coming Gods, with a small g of course, the Looming Spiritual Crisis of Artificial Intelligence. Boy it's just scary to think about all this as we're learning about it today. Well in the book you talk about something called metadata I believe and data mining.

What is that and where is that going to lead us? Well metadata is gargantuan amounts of data that our brains can't even handle, but the machine is being built so that it can. And also another meta is what's emerging right now, it's already here and it's emerging big time and that's the metaverse. And the metaverse enables, the participation in the metaverse enables a human being to enter into this world. As far as their senses are concerned and so forth, even the touch components are being put in place. They can enter this entire new universe and they will have an avatar who represents them and who becomes them. And they spend hours and hours and hours.

They're hooked up to machinery that is able to project all of this but is able to do more than that. It's able to convey the experiential elements in a way that living in reality only has done in the past. But now the metaverse will allow people to enter that kind of false world, a virtual world that they've created for themselves. Well folks if you're listening today I don't want to stick around for the second half of this show. We're talking to Wallace Henley, the author of Who Will Rule Becoming God? The Looming Spiritual Crisis of Artificial Intelligence.

We'll take a quick commercial break and we'll be right back to learn more about the metaverse and what's going on in metadata and data mining. The United States of America has a strong Christian heritage. But most Americans don't know the truly important role that God in the Bible played in the founding of this great nation. This June join nationally syndicated radio host and founder of the Citizens for America Foundation, Dr. Chris Hughes, for four amazing days in our nation's capital. With Chris you'll embark on a journey of discovering the hidden secrets of Washington D.C. and rediscover much of America's forgotten Christian heritage.

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My guest today is Mr. Wallace Henley. He has written a book about artificial intelligence that is just fascinating. I want you to go to Amazon right now, not if you're driving, but if you're home, go to Amazon or wherever you buy your books and purchase today. Who will rule the coming gods, the looming spiritual crisis of artificial intelligence? We're talking about artificial intelligence and how people are going to live in this metaverse that we're talking about before the commercial break. Mr. Henley, this reminds me of in the book of Daniel, the Bible talks about that in the end days that there will be a knowledge explosion taking place. Do you think this artificial intelligence might be a portion of the fulfillment of that prophecy that Daniel was talking about?

Yes indeed, in fact I'm about to start this week at a teaching that I do at our church an entire study on the exponential because we're living in an exponential era when things are moving not just at an average pace but at an exponential pace and that's certainly part of it. I believe that in the book of Revelation that the Babylon symbol or the Babylon idea is the picture of the fallen world system, the Babylonian world system is what I call it. And in that system we're seeing all sorts of things that compare with ancient Babylon taking place.

In fact I wrote another book about the election last year called Two Men from Babylon in which I talked about Donald Trump and I talked about Nebuchadnezzar and certain similarity, positively or negatively between that. But the fundamental quest, as I said, the fundamental warfare is between cosmos and chaos in this world. And what chaos does is drive us into desperation so that we begin to receive whatever some superior thing, some transcendent thing, something that we determine to be transcendent, how that will teach us to respond to all this change. I have a chapter entitled The Idol Factory.

John Calvin himself said that every human being who denies God tries to become an idol factory because we've got to have a God, we're going to create something and this is the great danger of artificial intelligence and all of the movements that are being propelled in the face of it. Now who sets the values? That's the big question. Right now every culture is based on a consensus of ideas. Every cultural stream is feeding at some kind of combined consensual world and those who set the consensus are the most powerful people in that culture. In our culture right now the consensus establishment is the elites of information, entertainment, academia, governance and corporations.

Those form the consensus. That doesn't mean, I'm not suggesting that they have an annual meeting and all come together and say what's the consensus now, but they gravitate toward one another and they themselves come into an agreement about what the culture ought to believe and what the culture ought to accept. And when they begin doing that, then guess what? The information establishment begins promoting that to our minds continually, blasting us continually.

The entertainment establishment makes movies that appear on gigantic screens or in our own homes that show some imagery that relates to this new consensus. The academic establishment confirms it with some kind of academic credentialing. Oh yes, well this must be true. They teach it at Harvard. This must be true. This is what the faculty of Yale is believing now. The governing establishment or the governing elite within that begins to build policy on it and begins to implement and bring into the culture the new consensus based on the law.

Hence what we see happening now in the CT movement and other types of things occurring in our culture. And of course number four, the corporate establishment says, hey this sells. These t-shirts with this kind of slogan, this sells.

These tennis shoes, these sell. And people want to be popular. They want to be accepted. So when this happens, then the consensus has been set and the public is drawn into it. You lose your job if you don't give allegiance to it ultimately. And this is another dimension that we have to face in this AI age.

Boy that's pretty scary. So as these different industries are coming together and they're shaping the view of what we see and really changing culture. I've been torn with writing a book about the sexualization of our children in America today because like you said, they use TV and movies to normalize whether it's the homosexual movement or the transgender movement. When you see it on TV, you read it in books, you see it in magazines, the kids are seeing it on social media.

It's normalizing things that just a few decades ago were seen as aberrant sexual behavior or evil. So I see what you're saying and how they're shaping culture. Well how do you think as they change the culture here, how's that going to affect our view of God as a culture and as a society? Well the consensus of the society is going to embrace some sense of something that is ultimate.

And that's why I talk about the idol factories, use John Calvin's line. We're going to create our own gods and in that metaverse, this is where it will really become a realized kind of thing that we feel like we're really touching. But the problem is, we can touch those things externally, we can touch them with our brains, but what about the human spirit? Spirit, soul, and body. The Bible is very clear that this is the way we're constructed.

God is triune, we're triune. And sadly we're fallen, but these functional dimensions within us are still there and they're still working. So the spirit is at the core of it all. In the technologies there's no room for the spirit.

There's a thinking kind of process, you can build a machine that can think in some measure. You might say it has a soul, a wired in soul. It obviously has a body, a physical dimension, but it does not have a spirit. It can't commune with the ultimate. It can't commune with the transcendent, majestic, holy God. The problem is, if someone can't wire into that machine some boundary of behavior and judgment, then we are, as a human race, we're in a lot of trouble. It's kind of scary when you think about all of it. So if we're in trouble as a human race, how should we as Christians react to this?

Should we accept the changes taking place in technology? Do we need to get involved in that career field to make sure there's more of a Christian and biblical influence? What should we do as Christians? Yes, number one, Christians need to go out to Silicon Valley or wherever that Silicon Valley representation is in their region and get a job there. There's been another recent story about how hard it is to be a Christian in those arenas. This is a mission field.

It's as dangerous as any mission field we've ever been in, but we need to be there. Number two, the church must wake up to the message of transcendence. The pulpits need to recover this message.

Help me get beyond the messages that teach me not to worry and have more peace and joy and more money and gold teeth and all kinds of things. Let's get beyond that and let's get to the real deal, which is the need for transcendence in our lives. We must give an account to God. We must worship Him, not just praise Him, but worship Him.

Praise is thanking Him for His giftedness and what He's done for us, but worship is simply the recognition of the reality of His awesomeness and giving response to that with our very lives. And then in the home, the two places where this battle can be fought most effectively, the church and the home, the biblical church, Bible-based church, and the biblical family. This is where the battle must be waged because the laws are not going to change. This is going to happen. Science will go where science can go. And to say we're going to censor this is totally not realistic.

We're not going to do that. So we've got to teach our children worldview. Psalm 78 is my favorite psalm in this regard. Teach the children your family's history.

Teach them the worldview that drives your family and should drive your family. And then the church is recovering again the sense of the transcendence of God. A mighty fortress is like God. We need to return to that understanding of who He is. This is really great advice that you're giving for Christians and for families and for pastors. It's really disturbing to see that many pastors in the country today don't really preach the whole inspired Word of God. A lot of people that profess to pastors, sometimes I wonder if they even believe that the whole Bible is true. It's scary what's happening in churches today. You mentioned the founding fathers earlier in the show about how at that time it was pastors who really took a stand and helped to steer where the culture was going. Most pastors today, in America at least, have really gotten away from that. So I thank you for that challenge that we need more men of God to stand in the pulpit and to preach the whole Word of God, to not avoid the issues that seem controversial, if you will, in our culture today, but to really take a stand.

And you also gave great advice there on what we can do as families. You were talking about Psalm 78 and how we need to teach a world view to our children and to teach them a legacy and a history of our faith. And Mr. Henley, you know all throughout the Bible God gives examples, particularly in the Old Testament, of where He would have men and women of God to build not just altars, but to build some kind of monument where they could remember the important points of their faith because God wanted them to teach that to the next generation. I've been reading through Judges this week and God talking to His children, the children of Israel, at that time about the importance of remembering the great things that God has done and remembering the main tenets of their faith. And I think that we have failed as a society in many cases, and particularly as a church and Christian homes, to teach our children the great things that God has done for us and to remember that we serve a great God. He's not just some mythical character that we read about in the Bible, but He's alive and well today.

He has miracles today that He still performs. And we don't celebrate these great victories as a church and as a Christian family anymore. That is correct. That's where the battle has to be won. That's where the battle's got to be fought, right there in the family, that godly family and the church. And if you notice where the prime spiritual attacks are in our time, as well as the prime social targets, it is boundary. Whether it's the physical boundary of a nation or whether it's the boundary of sexuality and gender, these are all the things that are under attack in our time because without boundaries, chaos can go and spread anywhere it wants to.

It's just like cancer. It can do anything it wants to do without proper boundaries. And the Bible calls us to that.

What has the consensus establishment told us? They've told us, hey boundaries don't matter. Just do what you want to do, except for the fact that they want boundaries.

They have guards around their houses and they travel on private jets because they can establish their own boundaries in those circumstances. Well the big boundary is holy, awesome, exalted God to be praised by His people and to be praised by all the people of the world and to live by that attitude of praise and worship. You're giving us a lot to think about today, particularly the boundaries we need as a church and as Christians to have boundaries in our lives. Folks, we're going to take another commercial break and we're going to come back and talk again to Wallace Henley. Talk to him about the book he's written about artificial intelligence and I think we're going to touch on this issue of boundaries a little bit more too. So stick around, we'll be right back with more of The Christian Perspective. Or connect with Diggs Design on social media.

Visit mabts.edu and be equipped to light the way. Do you desire to build family relationships that stand the test of time? Does creating a Godly family seem like a daunting challenge?

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For 35 years I have been helping families just like yours build lasting relationships. I'd like to invite you to tune in to Equipped to Be and visit ConnieYaupers.com where I share useful tips and proven strategies to help you navigate the seasons of motherhood, faith, and life with confidence and joy. The United States of America has a strong Christian heritage, but most Americans don't know the truly important role that God in the Bible played in the founding of this great nation. This June, join nationally syndicated radio host and founder of the Citizens for America Foundation, Dr. Chris Hughes, for four amazing days in our nation's capital. With Chris, you'll embark on a journey of discovering the hidden secrets of Washington, D.C. and rediscover much of America's forgotten Christian heritage. Your tour will include an up-close and personal look at the nation's establishment and how it's evolved over the centuries. Learn about the government and the men who helped forge this new kind of republic, one that acknowledged the creator from its very inception. Know the truth about the creation of the United States of America, about the faith of the founding fathers, and how Christian principles were used to establish this form of government.

Visit CitizensForAmericaFoundation.com today and secure your spot to join Chris Hughes in Washington, D.C. this June. Welcome back to Christian Perspective with Chris Hughes. My guest today is Wallace Henley. We're talking about he's written a lot of books. He's written over 20. So I encourage you to go to Amazon or wherever you purchase your books and check out his books. But we're talking today about his book, Who Will Rule Coming Gods and the Looming Spiritual Crisis of Artificial Intelligence. Mr. Henley, do you have a website where they can get that too, or is it just sold on Amazon?

No, it's just sold on Amazon and all the other Christianbooks.com and all the others. Well, I encourage you folks to buy this book. There's so much that's going on today in technology. We were talking earlier about how Daniel talked about a knowledge explosion, and there's really a knowledge explosion going on through artificial intelligence in our world today. And as there's this new metaverse, which is something I didn't really know that much about that we've talked about today, as people are just going to be able to plug in and kind of live in this crazy world. So do you think that video games have paid a part in conditioning the next younger people and the next generation to be more acceptable to have this metaverse or to have artificial intelligence engaging more in their lives?

Well, absolutely. And it's not just video games, but it's the entire output that comes from the consensus establishment I talked about earlier in the program. Because everything that we've been conditioned to do now, I find myself, if my television set goes off and I can't get to it, I find myself almost like an addict trying to figure out how to get my TV set back on so I can watch Andy Griffith again or so I can watch McHale's Navy. But we're conditioned to things worse than that, and so we've got to try to sustain that high we get or that sense of satisfaction we get from that moment. This is the way psychology works.

It goes all the way back to Harvard and behavior modification and all the wonderful ideas, the so-called wonderful ideas, I'm being sarcastic, that have come out of what should have been our best institutions but gave us poisonous ideas. Do you think, you know, we see these movies like Terminator and things like that, do you think there's a point where these machines will be able to think independently and could become a danger to humans as far as turning against humanity or maybe even being under demonic control? Well, there's no question about that in my mind. I think, as I said earlier, that this is one of the major goals of the whole movement. I don't think people are sitting around in Silicon Valley and saying, how can we produce a machine that will hurt humanity or a machine that can master humanity?

I just don't believe they're doing that. I think they're honestly saying, how can we build a machine that can better serve humanity? But if they don't have the boundaries of transcendence in their own minds, then their worldview is going to have a different definition from mine and yours about how that best interest will be served. For us, we would say the best interest of humanity is to open the book, the Word of God, and to recognize that the Bible is kind of like the operator's manual that comes with those big computer machines. It tells us how to function as well as what to believe. It tells us what the values are and what we're to see. And so that is the word that should be imprinted in us.

Now let me say a positive word about all this. I'm not a Luddite. A Luddite was a person who lived in the 16th century in England and worked in a cotton mill. And the Luddites got so upset about all the new machinery that they thought was going to take away their jobs, they began destroying the machines.

I would be an absolute hypocrite if I said that we need to destroy this whole thing. I wrote my book on a very smart machine. And that smart machine was tandemed with other thousands, millions of other sharp machines all across the world. I would much rather have a scan, an MRI, than I would exploratory surgery. So I'm extremely grateful for all of the advances of technology. And I'm not calling us to tear down this whole great structure. It wouldn't be effective if I asked for that anyway. You might go off the air.

We might go off the air right now if we did that. But what we're calling for is a recognition that this has a spiritual dimension to it and that there is a consensus that has been formed that is very secular. And because of that the kinds of values and the kinds of barometers that need to be wired into these machines must be recognized. And there must be an ethical and moral and even a spiritual dimension to the machine.

What if we told a machine about God? One of the most beautiful stories I know came out of Tuscumbia, Alabama. I believe it was Tuscumbia.

You and I both from that region of the world. And it was the story of Helen Keller, the girl, the lady who was blind and deaf and what it was like living in that imprisonment. She had a different attitude. She had teachers who encouraged her and so forth. And finally one day one of her teachers told her about Jesus and told her about God. And her response was, oh I've always known him.

I just didn't know what you called him. She always had the sense that he was there. Well I'm not sure how you put that into a machine but somehow if there could be that understanding at the knowing level, at the knowledge level of that machine that we human beings have something the machine does not have. We have a spirit. And that the machine is to encourage our spirit, our spiritual quest and our spiritual desire. That the machine itself can become a part of then spreading the news of the gospel of the kingdom over the whole world. Look, the end of history, the whole purpose of history in Matthew 24, the Olivet Discourse is when Jesus says, this gospel of the kingdom will be preached in all of the world to all of the ethnics, all of the people groups and then the end or the telos of everything will come.

So the whole purpose of history itself is the proclamation of the gospel of the kingdom in all of the world. And the machine can be a very important and is already a very important aspect of this. So rather than just calling on an atom bomb to come and destroy all the machines let's understand what we're allowing the machine to do to us and let's reverse that by having the machine do something for the gospel of the kingdom.

Well that's a great idea to use. Many times Satan has these ideas of technology or whatever it may be to maybe hurt God's eternal plan but there are ways to use those same things for God's kingdom as well. So probably I'm sure when you were doing research to write the book that you learned about all kinds of advancements. What do you think is coming down the pike? What are some things that you learned will be happening in the world of artificial intelligence that we can be looking for in the coming years? Well I think the most intense advancements are going to come in the area of the metaverse. And I think as we learn more and more about what that means and I encourage your listeners to check that out. Metaverse, M-E-T-A-V-E-R-S-E.

It is a parallel universe, it's a parallel world. And people can enter into it. As I said earlier, they can enter into it. They can't step into that machine, they don't step into it.

They wear a device around their head that is presenting a complete input and they can tap into it. I think the advancements that we're going to see coming in the metaverse is going to be a heightened sense of sensory experience so that one can wire their sensory receptors, their nervous system somehow into that machine. Also, as Ray Kurzweil who is a very important futurist and technology expert says that he expects the singularity to arrive about 2045. The singularity is the merger of human and machine at some level. So these two things, metaverse and the singularity, I think are where we're going to see the greatest advance in terms of quantity, the fastest speed of achievement.

Pretty scary when you think about it. And as I'm listening to you, I'm thinking of movies that have been on in recent years because you talked earlier about how different sectors of the culture come together, particularly in movies and then entertainment industry and then video games, that kind of thing, to condition us. And there are already movies, the superhero Marvel movies already talk about another parallel universe or maybe many parallel universes. So as you were talking about that, I was just thinking, wow, we're already being conditioned whether we realize it or not for this metaverse that you're talking about because we're being told, particularly the younger generation, these movies with superheroes, that these many different parallel universes may exist. And there have even been movies, and I guess the technology is already out there, where you can do virtual.

Like I've seen people be able to put, it's almost like fancy sunglasses, and it hooks to their computer and they're playing golf or they're hunting or running. So that stuff is happening right now and to condition us for what you're talking about. This isn't something in folks that are listening in some distant future, this is happening today. And so we need to prepare ourselves as Christians of how we're going to respond. We're about out of time, Mr. Hanley, but tell them again the name of the book and where they can find it. The name of the book is Who Will Rule Becoming God? And the subtitle is The Looming Spiritual Crisis of Artificial Intelligence.

Who Will Rule Becoming God? The Looming Spiritual Crisis of Artificial Intelligence. And the book can be purchased online everywhere.

Everywhere that sells books online, it can be purchased as well as in what brick and mortar bookstores are still left in our world. Folks, I hope you've paid attention, listen to this again, share it with your friends, because we need to realize what's coming in the world of artificial intelligence and how we as Christians need to get involved. And he told us several things we can do, like we can train our young people to work in that field so there will be a Christian and biblical influence in the Silicon Valley and up in Boston and other areas where this artificial intelligence is being developed.

We need to have godly Christian scientists working in that field. Pastors, Mr. Henley today challenged you, Pastor Henley did, to preach the word of God and to educate your people. And then he talked about how we as families can address these issues in the home to be prepared as we build boundaries around our family and around our churches and our society as a whole.

So the name of the book again is called Who Will Rule Becoming God? The Looming Spiritual Crisis of Artificial Intelligence. Mr. Henley, thank you so much for being with us today. Chris, thank you for having me. Folks, thanks for joining us. I'm Chris Hughes and this is The Christian Perspective. Be sure to tune here at your favorite radio station each and every day to learn how you can develop a Christian perspective. And please subscribe and like our podcast and share it with your friends on social media. Now let's go change the culture for Jesus.