geek with a humanities streak...
A friend asked me what I thought about this article from Vern Poythress: Artificially Intelligent. I wrote back: Thank you for sharing the article. I really respect Dr. Poythress and I like a lot of the article. I don t think he is exactly right in the two sections titled The Ugly and Value of the Continue reading Vern Poythress on AI
Some people have noticed that GPT-4 changes over time and this can be interpreted as a loss of quality in certain circumstances. This is one of the perils of the black-box nature of the OpenAI models. One commentator noted, “Dude I was literally losing by mind over this. I built an agent for my school Continue reading AI, Religion, University Politics, and Other Miscellaneous Topics
Set in New Zealand, Hunt for the Wilderpeople tells the story of a recently adopted teenager s flight through the wilderness with his adopted father to evade child protective authorities and the police. Saying more about the plot would reveal too much, but this is a very humane portrait of an adoptive mother, father, and orphan. Continue reading Hunt for the Wilderpeople
My denomination, the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA), celebrated its fifty year anniversary at a meeting of the General Assembly last month. I attended as a delegate and served on the Overtures Committee, the committee that reviews proposals from sessions (local congregation leaders) and presbyteries (the regional church above the congregational level) for actions, changes Continue reading…
There’s a little bit of controversy right now over the future bodily resurrection of the dead and a future judgment / second coming. In the course of the discussion on Twitter and elsewhere some have made a few claims about the early church, creeds, and councils. To contribute to the discussion, below are a few Continue reading Bodily Resurrection
Each of our senses seems to be connected to a primary metaphor for a type of understanding. Vision is good for making fine distinctions; it’s primarily about judging and classifying. “Can’t you see?” When God sees that things are good or very good in Genesis, he is judging them. Hearing is good for detecting problems Continue reading The Five Senses and Metaphors for Understanding
In Elizabeth Gaskell s Wives and Daughters, the beautiful and confident Cynthia has a deep knowledge of self, akin to the knowledge one gains from taking personality tests. Her half-sister, Molly, hasn’t engaged in much second-level personality assessment and so her responses to people and events are naive and raw both more principled and truer. Continue reading Self-Knowledge and Empathy
We first think of temptation in terms of our tendency to be attracted to committing ethical wrongs. But temptation also has temporal (future) aspects; we are attracted to do good things before we should, important things before we are ready, hard things before we’ve earned the competency. Mastering self-control with respect to these sorts of Continue reading Temptation, Time, and Wisdom
Christians can never be “all in” on anything but Jesus. This puts the reflective person into a dissociative quandary. One’s occupation may or may not survive the refining fire of the eschaton, but it doesn’t make one s job unnecessary. One’s employer may exist only because of the dysfunctions of a society or even due to Continue reading Looking for the Right Kind of All In
God has a good life. He is three persons who mutually submit and glorify one another. He enables our joining that life by creating us in his image and likeness and through the incarnation of Jesus. Then, he unites us to Jesus by the power of the Holy Spirit and we become part of that Continue reading God has a Very Good Life