When searching for “God listens to our prayers,” AI came up with three different passages in the Bible.  The third one was from Isa. 38:4-5.  It stated that God heard Isaiah’s prayer and added 15 years to his life.  That sounds great, unless you know what Isa. 38:4-5 actually says.  Isaiah did not pray to God; Hezekiah did.  And God granted Hezekiah 15 years to his life.  This might not seem like a big deal; it was just the wrong person.  But if you didn’t consult the source material(Isa. 38:4-5) or if you didn’t know that the AI was wrong, you would just proceed with the wrong piece of information.  Since this(erroneous information) could happen with any piece of information AI provides, how reliable is it?  And if people are blindly relying on it, how dangerous does that become?

Before going any further, I would like to state that I am not saying that AI is all bad.  Like anything else, there can be good and bad uses for it, just like the internet or books or cars, etc.  Let’s start with the good.

The Good of AI

AI can be a tremendously beneficial resource for us, as individuals.  It can answer questions.  It can provide ideas for those of us who are less creative(like this author).  It can help provide problem- solving solutions and techniques.  It can open our minds to concepts and explanations to things we were unaware even existed.  But there is also the possibility of some negatives as well.

The Bad of AI

As mentioned earlier, I did what I thought was a relatively easy search regarding verses in the Bible about God listening to our prayers.  AI provided an answer, but the answer told me information that was incorrect.  I knew it was incorrect, as I was familiar with the referenced passage.  But I doubt too many people are all that familiar with that passage.  And without taking further investigatory action, most people would have moved forward with the wrong information, genuinely not knowing that the information their information was wrong.  But there is an even deeper problem.

The Ugly of AI

As I see it, there are two very serious problems that the over-reliance on internet searches and AI dependence will eventually lead to, and both are quite troubling.

First, if you are like most people, you do internet searches all the time, looking for answers to factual questions.  And when you receive the answer, you just accept it as correct.  After all, the internet provided it.   It must be correct.  Over the course of time, this will lead to a lack of people who actually know things, and by that I mean people who know things without having to look them up on the internet.  People will become less knowledgeable.  They will know less information(facts).  But this is just the first problem.

Second, AI performs the function of taking facts and distilling them into thoughts and ideas.  This can be helpful, but it can also be destructive.  When people stop using their own minds to take facts and weave them into independent thoughts, they begin to lose the ability to think.  They lose the ability known as critical thinking.

A Deadly Combination

When you combine a lack of actual knowledge with a lack of ability to think for yourself, you create a perfect storm of bad.  People who do not know(because they procure all their information from the internet) and who cannot rationally think(because they have ceded that to AI) will become easy targets for others to persuade . . . about anything.  And in a governmental system like a democracy, an uninformed and unthinking electorate can be led down a very dangerous path.  But there is something worse than that.

Most Important

Let’s apply all of this to the Bible.  What if we, as individuals, do not know what the Bible actually says(i.e. information)?  And what if we have foregone our ability to rationally and critically think about the information in the Bible?  At that point we become dependent on the internet and AI to understand what God wants us to do, about what is right and wrong, about our need for salvation and the list just goes on.

Of course, we do not need to worry about the internet and AI to have this happen to us.  People have been doing this for millennia.  Instead of the internet and AI, they rely on preachers or teachers or pastors or whatever title a person might be known by.  We rely on that person’s knowledge(about information in the Bible), and that person’s ability to take that information and apply it to us.  We have no way of knowing if they are right or wrong, because: (a) we do not have the information ourselves, and (b) we do not know how to put that information together.  This can be our downfall yesterday, today or tomorrow.

Conclusion

Do not put your eternal salvation into someone else’s hands, regardless of how smart, knowledgeable, well-being, nice, etc. you might think that person is.  God has given us His Word.  We can read it.  We can understand it.  Will there be some more difficult parts to it?  Yes.  However, most of it is far more understandable that many people(who do not read it) think that it is.  Can we listen to what others think?  Absolutely!  But we need to be able to figure out what we need my ourselves.  Sometimes that will involve asking questions, but that does not mean that we blindly follow the answers.  We listen to the answer, then see if that fits with what we DO know.  If not, we need to reject it, or re-evaluate what we think is correct. Maybe we are wrong about something.  We need to be open enough to look into that as well, while not just following whatever anyone says about some issue.  Your everlasting soul is at stake.  Your relationship with God is at stake.  Put the time and effort into it.  You can do it.  I think you can do it, and more importantly, God thinks you can do it(Ps. 119:105 states that God’s word is a lamp and a light to help us walk through life.  If we could not understand His word, the lamp and light are useless to us, so clearly we can understand it.).