Bill Dembski

Freedom, Technology, Education

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Freedom, Technology, Education
Only the educated are free — Epictetus

The Paradoxes of Hell

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Note from author: The Bible’s teaching on hell often gets twisted so that many people dismiss both hell and the Judeo-Christian faith. Indeed, it’s common to see Christian college students struggle with the doctrine of hell almost as soon as they begin college and are confronted with non-Christian worldviews. Fundamentalism is often the problem here, promoting a doctrine of hell so extreme that no one deep down can believe it. This is not to say hell doesn’t exist. It does. But hell is also grossly abused by religious people intent on asserting religious control. Overhyped views of hell bring unnecessary scorn and embarrassment on Christianity.

 

1 Consigning People to Heaven and Hell

Actress Jessica Alba, in a 2015 Vanity Fair article, describes the loss of her faith at age seventeen when she “fell crazy in love with a cross-dressing ballet dancer who had a baby and was bisexual. I was like, ‘There’s just no way he’s going to hell!’” Alba, it seems, reasoned that Christianity consigns a lot of good people to hell, so Christianity must be false.

To Alba’s rejection of Christianity, the conventional Christian response is, “No one is really good. We’ve all sinned. It’s only by God’s grace that we can be saved. Given our present sinful state, hell is our natural destination. It doesn’t matter whether the cross-dressing ballet dancer is a really sweet guy. Without faith in Christ, he and all others are on their way to hell.”

Was Alba familiar with this explanation of hell? Growing up as a “devout born-again Christian,” she surely was. Did she previously accept this explanation? Probably so, since her cross-dressing friend confronted her with an impossible choice: either reject Christianity or think that her friend was on his way to hell?

But what does it even mean to say “someone is going to hell”? For years I’ve watched Christians and non-Christians discuss the topic of hell, and the one lesson I’ve drawn is that we are tempted to think we know far more about people’s ultimate destinies than we actually do, and that includes confidently consigning people to hell, heaven, or none of the above. [Read more…] about The Paradoxes of Hell

Hugh Hefner, Making Sense of His Life

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Hugh Hefner died a year ago on September 27, 2017. For several years now, I imagined I would comment on Hefner’s life once he died. But then my Dad died that October of 2017, and it didn’t seem fitting to address both in the same breath. For a reflection on my Dad’s life and death, see here. I loved my Dad and thought he lived a good life. Hefner’s life, by contrast, struck me as troubled and troubling.

I’m not going to moralize here about Hefner. He’s been widely labeled and insulted, especially by Christians who loathed his lifestyle. Here, however, I’m interested in the man, what drove him, and what made him a prophetic voice of our age, even if a false prophet.

I’m no Hefner scholar (yes, such exist, for instance Steven Watts), though I’ve read a few things about him. Indeed, he was a man who loved to be in the news, so it was hard over the nearly six decades of my own life not to have heard about him periodically, especially when he did something newly outrageous.

Yet if it was just that I had read a few things about him, I wouldn’t be writing about him here. Hefner was born in 1926 in Chicago, my home town. He went to high school in Chicago. My Dad was from Chicago as was his friend G.N., both born in 1923. Hefner, G.N., and my Dad were in the service in World War II. All three went to and overlapped at the University of Illinois in Champaign-Urbana after the war as students. G.N. even remembered Hefner as selling magazine subscriptions on campus. [Read more…] about Hugh Hefner, Making Sense of His Life

Light of the World Bible Memory Course

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Back in the early 1980s, an organization called Light of the World Ministries put out a Bible memory course: Light of the World Scripture Memory Course.

The basic course consisted of five cassettes with 100 Bible verses. The advanced course consisted of fifteen cassettes with 300 Bible verses. The Bible verses were grouped into ten on a given topic, covering such topics as faith, healing, and prayer.

Memorization in this course occurred by repetition—as the old Latin saying goes, repetitio mater studiorum (repetition is the mother of studies). Yet the approach taken in this course was not one of mere rote repetition.

The idea was to hear ten Bible verses on a given topic, with a pause after each verse to give the listener time to review the verse in one’s mind or to say it out loud. Once all ten verses had been presented in this way, then the verses were hammered home by repeating them each three times, with no pauses.

While this approach is certainly useful for meditating on Scripture and internalizing its teaching, this is also an effective way to memorize Scripture. Further, this approach could be applied as a teaching tool for many other texts. [Read more…] about Light of the World Bible Memory Course

The Sidelining of Nike

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Nike’s decision to enlist Colin Kaepernick as a spokesperson and then ascribe to him the words “Believe in something. Even if it means sacrificing everything.” has elicited a large reaction, to which I’ll contribute here.

Speaking for myself, I find it wearisome when companies that make products with no conceivable political implication decide to weigh into politics, take a partisan position, provoke controversy, and then shove their point of view in the public’s face.

ESPN does this, but I will still watch ESPN. Yet Nike has not been content simply to engage in partisan politics. In addition, it has decided to stake out so bone-headed and indefensible an ad campaign as to insult the intelligence of the public and especially its customers.

It’s as though Nike were saying, “We’re going to make completely stupid and outrageous claims, and you’re going to keep buying our stuff, and because you do even though we insulted your intelligence, you’ll be our consumer slaves forever!” [Read more…] about The Sidelining of Nike

Virtual Railroads and West Virginia Back Roads: AI’s Temptation to Theft Over Honest Toil

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AI (artificial intelligence) poses a challenge to human work, threatening to usurp many human jobs in coming years. But a related question that’s too often ignored and needs to be addressed is whether this challenge will come from AI in fact being able to match and exceed human capabilities in the environments in which humans currently exercise those capabilities, or whether it will come from AI also manipulating our environments so that machines thrive where otherwise they could not.

AI never operates in a vaccuum. Rather, any instance of AI operates in an environment. We often think that AI will leave an environment untouched and simply supersede human capability as it operates in that environment. But what if the success of AI depends not so much on being able to rival human capabilities as in “changing the game” so that AI has an easier job of it. The mathematician George Polya used to quip that if you can’t solve a problem, find an easier problem and solve it. Might AI in the end not so much supersede humans as rather impoverish the environments in which humans find themselves so that machines can thrive at their expense?

To see what’s at stake with this line of concern over AI, consider the prospect of automated vehicles. Automated vehicles, we are told, are poised to take over all of human driving. Once the machine learning for the automation of driving matures just a bit more, we are assured that human drivers will be out of a job — the machines will drive so much better than us that it would in fact be unethical for humans to continue to drive. And, of course, as an unfortunate side effect, humans whose jobs depend on driving will all be put out of work (truck drivers, taxi drivers, etc.).

Now the actual progress of automated vehicles has not reflected this rosy picture (rosy if you’re an AI advocate, dismal if you’re out of a job). Recent fatalities with automated vehicles have undercut this picture to the public at large. But the deeper conceptual problem with the automation of driving is that there appear just too many contingencies on the road, contingencies that human drivers can handle without difficulty but for which machines require specialized training. [Read more…] about Virtual Railroads and West Virginia Back Roads: AI’s Temptation to Theft Over Honest Toil

Passing of My Mother

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My Mom, Ursula Dembski, passed away around 11:30am on Sunday, July 15, 2018 at Comfort House, the hospice home in Pella, Iowa. She was 86. My Dad, William J. Dembski, preceded her in death by nine months (for my remembrance of his life, see here). The funeral is scheduled to take place at Oakwood Cemetery in Pella at 10:30am on Friday, July 20th (see Garden Chapel website for details).

As their only child and son, I’m saddened to lose both my parents in nine months, and doubly so in that less than a year ago I still hoped that both would move to Iowa from Arizona, live a few more years, and get to enjoy their only grand kids. My Dad didn’t make it to Iowa. My Mom did in December 2017. But she was diagnosed with an advanced and aggressive lung cancer in February 2018, the oncologist giving her six months to live. He was off by a month.

Even though my Mom was officially diagnosed with lung cancer on February 5, 2018, it’s clear in retrospect that she had it at least six months prior. She had had problems breathing and had three separate X-rays taken of her lungs while still in Arizona. For whatever reasons, the doctors thought it was fluid on the lung or something benign. Even here in Pella, the initial X-rays didn’t prompt any urgency. But my Mom was getting weaker and weaker, having night sweats as well as pain at night on her side while trying to fall asleep.

I pressed my Mom to get to the bottom of this, but thought that she was dealing with some sort of infection. Finally, a CT scan was done, at which point the doctors suddenly started talking in terms of lesions and cancer. But by then it was too late. She was diagnosed with a mesothelioma, and the cancer was no longer confined to her lungs but had spread to her ribs. Dealing with increasing weakness and pain, she was a shut-in the last three months of her life. Fortunately, the neighbors in the apartment next to her were wonderful and did just about everything for her, making it possible for her to stay in her apartment until the last few days of her life.

Ursula Dembski (December 21, 1931 — July 15, 2018) was born Ursula Armbruster to Albert Carl Friedrich Wilhelm Armbruster (1893 — 1969) and Hildegard Armbruster (1904 — 1980). I don’t recall if my maternal grandmother had a middle name, but my maternal grandfather had three and so disliked having so many that he refused to give my Mom a middle name. My Mom also had a brother four years older than her, Albert Carl Armbruster (yes, he did get one middle name), who received a doctorate in veterinary medicine, but left that field to become a professor of Arbeitswissenschaft (ergonomics) at the Technische Hochschule (Technical University) in Berlin. He died April 20, 2006. [Read more…] about Passing of My Mother