Is "Knowing" More Than Neural Networks? Christianity, Scientism, & Artificial Intelligence

media release: Millions of people now put their questions to a chatbot before they ask a doctor, a professor, or a friend. The answers arrive fluent and confident. Whether the machine supplying them knows anything at all is the question MIT physicist Ian Hutchinson will take up when he delivers the third annual Dallas A. Willard Lecture, presented by the Lumen Center, on Friday, Oct. 16, at 7 p.m. at Upper House.

His lecture, “Is ‘Knowing’ More Than Neural Networks? Christianity, Scientism, and Artificial Intelligence,” argues that the AI debate rests on an older and largely unexamined assumption: that the methods of natural science are the only route to true and reliable knowledge. Hutchinson calls that assumption scientism, and he has spent years challenging it. Today’s most powerful AI models, he contends, are largely built on its premises, which helps explain why systems that seem almost human in conversation leave so many people uneasy about what is missing.

Christians have for centuries described knowing as having many layers, with love as the highest. Hutchinson will ask how knowledge and love of God make intellectual sense in a scientific and technological age, and what a faithful response to scientism looks like now that the stakes include machines.

Hutchinson is professor emeritus of nuclear science and engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and one of the world’s leading plasma physicists. He is the author of Monopolizing Knowledge and Can a Scientist Believe in Miracles?

Daniel Hummel, Director of the Lumen Center, shares, "This world of AI that we're in really throws up some big questions about what it means to be human and what it means to know facts about the world and facts about God. This is an extremely timely discussion for the university community to consider." 

The lecture runs from 7 to 8:30 p.m. and is free and open to the public. Registration is available at slbf.org/events.

The Dallas A. Willard Lecture is generously supported by Fieldstead and Co.