“But ye, brethren, are not in darkness, that that day should overtake you as a thief. Ye are all the children of light, and the children of the day: we are not of the night, nor of darkness. Therefore let us not sleep, as do others; but let us watch and be sober” (1 Thessalonians 5:4-6)
The world is about to get weird. I know, you’ve heard me say that a thousand times, but it’s true. The days of Noah were a bizarre age of men communing with both gods and giants, a land of wonders that appeared magical and mystical, a time of great wickedness, when the Nephilim both walked and ruled the earth. The Antedulivian (pre-flood) world was vastly different than the world that Noah and his seven passengers stepped upon when they walked out of the ark of gopherwood. And our world before Jesus’ return, will resemble that one (Mark 24:37-39).
The evangelical church is entering into a world where doctrines like inerrancy or justification are the dividing line between true and false religion. It’s not as though these issues don’t matter - they always have and always will matter - and there’s no Christianity without them. But cultural Christianity died with a whimper in 2020, one of the few victims of Covid-19 that didn’t have multiple co-morbidities. Churches stamped upon themselves the dishonor of “non-essential” when they complied with government edicts, and their (lost) fellow sojourners dropped out of church altogether. The stats indicate that the “nominal” Christians haven’t returned to the church life, no longer feeling the need to carry on the elaborate ruse of pretended faithfulness.
What this means is that those claiming to be Christians, in our current era, are by and large not those faking it, as many were before. Many false converts have already unconverted themselves, and so the regular demarcations of authentic Christianity (like inerrancy and justification) that root out all the fakies are now no longer the battle lines. If they didn’t believe in these essential soteriological doctrines to begin with, for the most part, they wouldn’t show up now.
But another demarcating dividing line is now emerging, and that’s the Doctrine of Supernaturality. This may appear at first to be another skirmish on the issue of Charismaticism vs Cessationism (how the Holy Ghost dispenses his spiritual gifts, or whether some spiritual gifts were reserved only for Apostles). This demarcation, Supernaturality, is much deeper than spiritual gifting. It’s most similar, perhaps, to the controversy of the Socinians several centuries ago. Those heretics adopted a religion without the Supernatural, believing in a God without miracles, faith without the fantastical, and a sanitized spirituality that precluded any hint of oddness.
Similar to Deism, the Socinians searched for a respectable religion, one that either didn’t believe in things like demons or angels or the Virgin Birth or a bodily resurrection, or were too ashamed to admit it, let along talk about it. I suppose this next and final schism of wheat and tares will be most similar to that one. True Christians will embrace the fact that the world is becoming a very weird place, and that Christ is Lord over all the weirdness. For others, who can’t stomach a bizarre God in an even stranger world, they will fall away or ignore it. Many will have their faith shaken, and I pray you aren’t one of them.
In bringing to your attention the news items you might have missed, like the one today, I aim to brace you for the increasing weirdness of our emerging world. I want you to not suffer shock, when you wake up one day soon, and emerge from your home and find one similar to that which Noah left when he entered the ark. I don’t want your faith shaken, when you see the world get so weird around you. We were warned it was going to be a strange ride, and God warns us of things so as to not be confounded or perplexed when they occur, that our faith may maintain its resolve.
SINGULARITY AND SUPER-COMPUTING
I’ve written repeatedly about Singularity, because it’s a term that you need to be familiar with. In a few short years, or perhaps even months, the concept will change your life. In fact, the concept will change the world. You might review my article, Singularity and Babel: Comparing the Oldest and Newest False Religions. But because you’re a busy person, I’ll summarize Singularity briefly.
Singularity was a term invented to describe whatever happens at an infinitely small pinpoint at the center of a black hole. This phenomena exists in Outer Space, and the only thing we know for sure about them, is that we’re sure we don’t understand them at all. These whirling vortexes of nothing, drag everything into them, a whirlpool in space, where light and matter and energy are siphoned down into a vacuum of whatever it is, that it is. All the best minds of men, put together in all their accumulative wisdom, have only determined that the laws of physics do not apply there. That is where the rules of nature, as we understand them, go to die. The black hole is where the wisdom of men are swallered up (as the hillbillies say) by the wisdom of God. The term we use to describe this place where rules do not apply, is the Singularity.
But in recent years, the term to describe a place where rules no longer apply and wisdom no longer understands - where predictions cannot be made - has been applied to technology. The futurists tell us that a Singularity exists within computing and Artificial Intelligence. At a certain tipping point, when the machines develop an intelligence beyond our imagination, the rules will no longer apply. The laws of nature, so far as we know them, will be ignored like physics in a black hole. What the world will look like when this occurs is anybody’s guess, much like what happens to light and gravity when it’s siphoned into an Outer Space suck-hole. We just don’t know.
But we recognize the limits to modern computing, as space-age as it seems to us. Our brains, as God made them, are fantastic machines. Charles Spurgeon once claimed he was capable of having a half-dozen different streams of thought at one time, all worked consciously through his brain. Although most men aren’t as brain-gifted as the Prince of Preachers, the fat-clumps in our head (brains are 80% fat) really are fantastic things.
Modern computers can imitate the power God gave the wrinkly gray matter between our ears, but they are limited in capacity. Computers, you see, can only handle single ideas at a time. Using binary code written out in 1s and 0s, computers ‘think’ by bouncing these 1s and 0s back and forth between ‘switches’ that open or close the computer’s processor and this process continues back-and-forth (like a game of Pong) until correct answers are found to problems given it. This basic design of computers, which is called Basic Language, is how computers have operated since they were invented in 1964. But what this means is that for computers to compute very complex problems, it requires massive computing power.
And that computing power requires actual power from the power grid, not only to light up the machines but to cool them down. Warehouses - giant ones within the Earth, to help maintain constant temperature and minimize power consumption needs - have to be built or carved out of limestone. For nearly a decade, this super-computing infrastructure has been built right in front of us, but most haven’t noticed. In the Bakken oilfield, where I used to live, engineers have been figuring out how to capture wasted gas burned off by oil wells (these are the massive flares you might have seen in photographs) to use as power to maintain the super-computers. The ecological cost of powering up super-computers to reach Singularity has been discussed for several years, and seems to have presented a significant obstacle to reaching the next stage of Trans-human development.
However, the engineers and scientists have had a card up their sleeve for a while now. They’ve been advancing the field of Quantum Mechanics, and applying those principles to create Quantum Computing.
QUANTUM MECHANICS AND QUANTUM COMPUTING
Imagine the world is made of tiny, tiny things—way smaller than a speck of dust. These are called particles, like electrons or photons (bits of light). Quantum mechanics is the rulebook for how these tiny things act. But here’s the wild part; they don’t act like normal stuff, like a ball you kick or a toy car. They’re weird and follow some crazy rules.
Picture a superhero who can be in your room and outside at the same time. These tiny particles can do that. They’re not stuck in one spot until something—like us—looks at them. Before we look, they’re kind of everywhere at once, like a blurry cloud of “maybe here, maybe there.” When we check, they pick a spot. Scientists call this “superposition.”
When you peek at these particles to see what they’re doing, just looking makes them act differently. The act of watching, forces the particle to stop being blurry and pick one way to be.
Now imagine you and your best friend have walkie-talkies. If you push a button on yours, theirs buzzes instantly, even if they’re on the other side of the world. Some particles are like that—linked together no matter how far apart they are. If you poke one, the other feels it right away, faster than light can travel. Einstein called this “spooky action at a distance.” Yeah, he said ‘spooky.’
Quantum Mechanics explains how stuff works deep down—like why the sun shines, how your phone’s computer chips run, or even how atoms stick together to make you. Quantum mechanics is like a game with tiny, magical pieces that don’t follow the rules you’d expect. They’re blurry and connected in ways that sound like magic—because they are. They act outside of understood nature.
Quantum Computing is different entirely from regular computing. A regular computer, like what’s in your phone or laptop, works with tiny switches called “bits.” A bit is like a light switch: it’s either off (0) or on (1). Everything your computer does—games, videos, texting—is just a huge pile of these 0s and 1s flipping super fast in the right order.
A quantum computer, however, uses weirder rules. Instead of regular bits, it uses “quantum bits” or “qubits.” These qubits aren’t just off or on—they can be off, on, or a mix of both at the same time. Here’s the big deal; since qubits can be 0, 1, or both at the same time, a quantum computer can try tons of answers all at once, not one by one like a regular computer. In other words, it’s like Spurgeon’s multi-track brain, but much better.
The particles that are “magically” linked, I mentioned above, are called “entanglement.” Quantum computers use this to make qubits work together like a team. If one qubit figures something out, its entangled buddy knows it instantly, no waiting. It’s like having a superpower team solving puzzles together. In other words, Quantum Computing will bring almost immediate Singularity because it can perform every necessary computing task at once. I used the Pong illustration before. So instead of playing a primitive game like Pong, to compute answers, it mulit-tasks to infinity.
This is why futurists are so convinced that A.I. will provide answers to immortality, the cure for cancer, or time travel. If something can be done, Quantum Computing will be able to tell us how…quickly.
But here’s the catch: Qubits can mess up if it’s too hot, too noisy, or if someone just breathes on them wrong. That’s why quantum computers need to be kept super cold—like colder than outer space—and in special labs. The power necessary to perform this has been out of reach. The hopes of the scientific community were that regular computers, using A.I. technology, can hunt down the solution to this obstacle to quantum computing possible.
Until yesterday.
MICROSOFT DISCOVERS NEW, AND FOURTH, FORM OF MATTER
Humans are very convinced of our intelligence. The so-called “scientific consensus” is believed to hold all answers to every question we could ever ask about God’s design of the universe. Facts believed to have been established are inscripturated as truth. Despite the fact there’s much that humanity admits it does not know, humanity rarely considers that the things we currently do know, could possibly not be true (or be incomplete).
I point this out every time I have an argument with an atheist, who appeals to “science” as an explanation for the universe’s existence. I try to remind them that science, as the arbiter of truth, is insufficient. For no other reason, science has yet to answer how something came from nothing, and hasn’t even yet so much as posited a credible theory for spontaneous creation or bio-genesis. As smart as Neil DeGrasse Tyson thinks he is, for example, and who can explain a good deal about how the universe works, has no idea where the universe came from.
As a case in point, you and I - and everyone else - were taught from second-grade onward that there are three forms of matter; solid, liquid, and gas. These have formed the basis of our physics education, and this fact has been one considered to be absolute truth, as immutable as God himself.
But in what was perhaps the most significant scientific discovery (so far) in our lifetimes, scientists in pursuit of Quantum Computing announced yesterday that an altogether different form of matter was discovered - and created.
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