Technology and Truth

We carry in our pockets the greatest tool of free expression ever invented. All information, data, knowledge, and ideas are at our fingertips—entire libraries, complete datasets, and worldwide connections are possible to access in just seconds. 

But do we have access to the truth? 

Perhaps a more important question is this: Does all of this technology bring us closer to the truth, especially the truth about God? Or is this technology a tool primarily for undermining truth? 

In his book Writing on the Wall: Social Media – The First 2,000 Years, Tom Standage traces social media back to Roman times. This was a time when information passed horizontally, from person to person, by word of mouth along social networks as they existed in those days. This is in contrast to information delivered vertically from an impersonal central source of distribution, such as a king. The fall of Rome changed all of that, as the horizontal distribution of information was replaced for the next millennium by a vertical distribution of information from the Roman Catholic Church and the landed nobility. 

Telling everybody what to think was a key part in keeping the priests and the princes in power. This era became known as the Dark Ages. Vertical control held until the printing press was invented by Gutenberg in 1440. Printing was the original information revolution. Once again, information began to flow more horizontally. It stimulated thought and debate. Hypotheses and counter arguments flourished. The results fired the Reformation, spread the Renaissance, and set Europe ablaze in war. People went from being told what to think in the Dark Ages to not knowing what to believe in the Reformation. 

In 1545, almost 100 years after Gutenberg’s breakthrough, Swiss scholar Conrad Gessner attempted to put his arms around the cacophony of conflicting information by cataloguing all the books that had ever been published. The preface of his collection (called the Bibliotheca universalis) eerily sounds like what we might hear today. In a world awash in confusing information enabled by new technology Gessner warned about “the confusing and harmful abundance of books.” 

The arrival of the telegraph about 400 years after Gutenberg set off another round of concern about the abundance of information. In 1848, in order to share the costs of telegraphic reporting from afar, the major newspapers of New York City founded the Associated Press. At the same time that it expanded the flow of information, the Associated Press also created new concern over centralized control of information. During the Civil War, in fact, the Associated Press became the Lincoln administration’s de facto censor, dispatching only news that the government approved. 

There was also concern that the telegraph and the Associated Press would spread fake news. In 1925 a Harper’s Magazine article entitled “Fake News and the Public” (sounds like it could have been written today) warned about the power of the Associated Press and observed that “once the news faker obtains access to the press wires, all the honest editors alive will not be able to repair the mischief that he can do.”

In Genesis 11, we see an even earlier story of technology and truth. It’s a well known story, the story of the Tower of Babel: 

Now all the earth used the same language and the same words. And it came about, as they journeyed east, that they found a plain in the land of Shinar and settled there. Then they said to one another, “Come, let’s make bricks and fire them thoroughly.” And they used brick for stone, and they used tar for mortar. And they said, “Come, let’s build ourselves a city, and a tower whose top will reach into heaven, and let’s make a name for ourselves; otherwise we will be scattered abroad over the face of all the earth.” Now the Lord came down to see the city and the tower which the men had built. And the Lord said, “Behold, they are one people, and they all have the same language. And this is what they have started to do, and now nothing which they plan to do will be impossible for them. Come, let Us go down and there confuse their language, so that they will not understand one another’s speech.” So the Lord scattered them abroad from there over the face of all the earth; and they stopped building the city. Therefore it was named Babel, because there the Lord confused the language of all the earth; and from there the Lord scattered them abroad over the face of all the earth. (Genesis 11:1-9) 

The Tower of Babel is a metaphor for religion, and the quest for truth about God. The Tower was intended to reach heaven—in other words, to reach God. Religion (as we perceive it) is about our desire to penetrate the habitation and tap into the power of God. Religion is conceived and constructed by us, and we employ technology in its construction—bricks and mortar, chisels, papyrus, printing presses, and now the internet. 

But it seems as if God perceives that religion is not about Man seeking God but is about God seeking Man. God came down to Babel down to find out what was going on with all the tower building. But he did not sow destruction as he had done with the Flood. Instead, he sowed confusion, to destroy the unity of the Babelites by forcing them to speak different languages and dispersing them around the globe. In this way, he undermined humankind’s ability to build a Highway to Heaven—to learn and to weaponize God’s power and to learn his truth. 

Dispersing humankind geographically, linguistically, and culturally dispersed the truth. We seek to understand, from the fragments of truth that we retain in our dispersed cultures, what God is like and what God wants us to know about him. 

If we cannot in principle know the truth then what is the value and the role for the future of religion and its doctrines? A recent research finding that millennials are generally not as religious as baby boomers suggests that the future of religion is in some doubt. As well, there is evidence of a significant and growing increase in religious shifting among generations, notably in the United States, away from the mainstream Protestants and Catholics towards evangelical and “Nones” (people professing no religious affiliation). 

Doctrinal truths define who we are in terms of the truth about God—what holy books we read, what prophets we follow, how we worship, what rituals we perform, and what we think and do in this life and what we think about the afterlife. Shared doctrine unites, different doctrines divide. Despite man’s best effort to reach him by building an ever taller Tower of Babel, God remains an infinite way off. 

Sscripture says God had to go “down,” implying that the Tower was nowhere near to reaching heaven. God did not want a gang of sinful fallen men and women, united in a common language and purpose, infiltrating heaven. He wants us to rely on him to reach out to us and take back those of us who humbly accept him and his offer. We wish to know God, we wish to penetrate his secrets, to harness his power and to speak and to act on his behalf, but he does not want that. Like Colonel Jessup (played by Jack Nicholson in the movie A Few Good Men, in response to the prosecutor’s demand for the truth, God is yelling: “You can’t handle the truth!” 

That is pretty much what God was yelling at Job, who asked him why bad things happen to good people. As usual, God turned it into a question: “You think, little man, that you can handle the truth?” 

In his so-called “high priestly prayer” in Gethsemane on the eve of his arrest, Jesus prayed that his disciples would be united around the truth—the truth of their mission, which was founded upon love. We want to make truth to be about what we believe about data and about information, but God wants to make it about loving one another and about the Golden Rule. 

Is it possible that the truth lies in the questions of God and not in the answers? We’ve spoken much about how we wish that the Bible was a simple book of answers. What we find, however, is more questions—hundreds of questions, of which precious few are associated with direct answers.

In the garden of Eden, God was decisive and directing. He set the agenda and created everything with intention and deliberation and purpose. Adam did not know that he needed a helpmate, but God gave him Eve anyway. But after they ate the forbidden fruit, God’s plan and his modus operandi seemed to change. He was no longer the God of command and instruction. He became the God of questions: “Where are you? Who told you that you’re naked? Did you eat the forbidden fruit? What have you done?” 

Why did God not simply tell them that he knew what they had done? Why all the questions? Ever since the fall, God’s questions have never stopped coming. To Cain, he asked: “Why are you angry? Where’s your brother? What have you done?” To Abraham and Sarah: “Is anything too hard for the Lord?” To Moses: “What is that in your hand?” To Gideon: “Have I not sent you?” To Isaiah: “Who will go and who can I send?” To Jacob: “What is your name?” To Jonah: “Do you have reason to be angry?” To Job, who was threatening to sue him in court for answers to his questions of life, God responded with 77 thundering existential questions about Man’s standing before God and his place in the universe. 

The list goes on. Jesus in the New Testament relied on questions even more than the God of the Old Testament. His first recorded words were two questions: “Why are you looking for me? Did you not know that I had to be about my Father’s business?” he says to his parents; and his last recorded words, uttered on the cross, were also a heartbreaking question: “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?” 

In the New Testament, Jesus asks 307 questions, and is himself asked 183 questions, of which he directly answers only eight. Isn’t this frustrating? In a world where knowledge is rapidly changing, the knowledge base from which we draw answers changes rapidly as well. What we know about the Earth and our bodies and our universe is accelerating. How will answers keep up? They will surely change as knowledge expands. 

Is it possible that the end product of doctrinal discovery is the journey, not the destination? Christopher suggested something to me last week I thought worth sharing: Maybe God deals in questions rather than answers for a reason. Artificial Intelligence (AI) traffics in big data, extensive knowledge, and complete information. If God simply provided answers, then—through the wonder of technology and artificial intelligence—could not all the data that God answered be accumulated so then it could be processed and regurgitated as answers to any question? 

If God only provided answers, then AI could become God. But AI doesn’t traffic very well in questions. Even simple questions are not very well done in AI, and deep existential questions not at all.

It seems that the God of the Bible values existence based not on the cause and effect that we value but on questions about ambiguity and ultimately on grace—the ultimate suspension of cause and effect, since it saves us from the damnation that we deserve. We cannot bestow grace upon ourselves and we cannot save ourselves. 

In the garden of Eden the two trees illustrate this point. The forbidden Tree of Knowledge is the tree of uncertainty, of reason, of discrimination, and of cause and effect. “Eat the fruit,” Adam and Eve are told, “and your eyes will either be opened or you will die, depending on who you listen to.” But the Tree of Life is certain, unambiguous, and secure: “Eat the fruit and you will live.” 

When Adam and Eve ate the forbidden fruit they heralded the beginning of a new paradigm based on questions rather than answers. In the immediate aftermath of the Fall, God asked them four questions: “Where are you? Who told you that you are naked? Did you eat from the forbidden tree?” and “What is this that you have done?” 

These questions are the pattern for God’s subsequent questions throughout Scriptures and throughout the ages, and in many different ways—sometimes partial, sometimes complete—but in all places and everywhere these are the great existential questions of life, pertinent throughout all ages. 

• “Where are you?” is a call to assess where we stand before God: Are we standing in God’s light or are we shirking into the shadows of the bushes? 

• “Who told you that you’re naked?” is a call to reassess our own self evaluation. It questions our belief that we can reliably and accurately judge ourselves. With this question, God established eternally that he is the judge of Humankind and we are not the judge even of ourselves. 

• “Did you eat from the forbidden fruit?” is designed to elicit confession and acknowledgement of our failed human condition and of our need for God. 

• “What is this that you have done?” is a call to reflect upon all the previous questions, and on the consequences. The consequences are that everything has changed—our standing before God has changed, our self assessment has changed, and our standing before our fellow Man has changed as well. 

By definition, an omniscient God knows the answers to all questions. He cannot ask questions for his own enlightenment because he cannot be further enlightened. But he asks questions in order to enlighten us. In essence, he built a doctrinal paradigm from these four fundamental questions. All the subsequent questions that he poses—to Abraham, to Sarah, to Moses, to Jacob, to David, to Job, to Jonah and the like, all the way down to the questions that he asks you and me—are just variations of these. 

We ought not to fear a virtual world, in my opinion. God and his angels already inhabit a virtual world, where the colors are brighter, the sounds are sharper, the tastes are stronger, and the feelings are more intense. Any of our technology advances that take us toward a more virtual world is, I would argue, an advancement toward God, not away from God. 

We long for a new heaven and a new earth where the experiences are more vivid and the truth about God is clear. Capital T Truths are rooted in acquaintances, in relationship, and questions, not in data. Only life and death, birth and existence are timeless, ageless, cultureless and eternal. Only questions never change; answers do. Who then will point the way? Who has the courage to speak out? Who will declare that the truth is not to be found in data, information and knowledge? Who will affirm the superiority of questions over answers? 

How have we wandered so far from the truth lane? Why do we cling so to the scientific method and to the ideas of cause and effect? Why do we value certain error over uncertainty? Why are we attracted to technology and to the Highway to Heaven to know more about God? 

What are your thoughts about truth and technology, truth in the virtual world, God in the virtual world, truth and uncertainty, and the timeless existential questions of God that he has been asking from the very beginning and he asks of you and me today?

C-J: We sit where we began, with “What is truth?” but we’re seeing it through a different medium, or considering it through a different medium. It depends on if we see our existence as being a spiritual one, in this time and place; or if we see ourselves as transcendent beings, that this really is just an illusion anyway. But if we go back to the importance of questions: It is to drive us into a place within ourselves, that we can come back from doing that experience to having a context, a foundation. “How am I going to cope in this nonsense?” Because this is such a time limited reality and everybody’s reality is so different—if you’re very poor, if you’re very privileged, where you live in terms of climate zones,… 

David: A not insubstantial portion of humanity (Daoists, like myself; Zen Buddhists; maybe others) has from the very beginning had religions focused on questions—questions such as: What is the sound of one hand clapping? I think such questions point to the futility of answers. That’s basically what Zen Buddhism and Daoism are all about. 

The one piece of knowledge we just know, inside us, to be true is that the Golden Rule is the way to live. We all know we should live according to it—whether we do or not. We know what the Truth is. 

The effects of the cause of technology makes me wonder: When it was first invented, what was the market for writing? Who was the audience? Where were the readers? Nobody could read when there was no written language. Of course the market was there—it just didn’t know it. Now, here we are with Zuckerberg’s Metaverse and other virtual worlds. We still don’t really understand what it is for. It has plenty of naysayers, as did print and television, with people saying they were evil. The fact is, we just don’t know what this new medium will lead to, but it will surely lead to something.

Michael: It has been proposed here that God lives in a virtual world and that we’re moving closer to it, and maybe that’s helping us move closer to God. How would that happen? 

Don: It is happening via the agency of technology. It simply occurs to me that God lives in a virtual world as seen from our perspective, so the movement toward a virtual world where the experiences are more vivid and the taste, the sounds, the smells are sharper, should not (I think) give us much fear.

Donald: It is a bit shocking to hear that God lives in a virtual world, but given the description of what a virtual world is, I think it’s fair to say that that is an accurate statement. But we try immediately to make it real. We take something we know is virtual, we have prayer, and are saying our thoughts in a pretty much one-sided conversation. But we try to make that a very real experience. 

CJ mentioned Thanksgiving, where we sit down to a meal of a vast variety of foods. The meal is the gestalt, but you have all these individual parts. And if we go back to the concept of truth and belief: I struggle with the idea that we form our own reality. “This is reality the way I see it, and if you don’t see it that way, you should, because that is the reality. My reality should be your reality.” Then we build a church and a religion and then we pray to the Spirit—to God, 

There’s a billion different birds, there’s a billion different trees. Thank goodness for all this variety. We sit down to a Thanksgiving meal, we have all these different tastes, and colors, and textures. God has granted us the variety of life, but we say: “No, this is what a Thanksgiving meal looks like. If you do something different you’re doing it wrong. 

So my bottom line is: Does God look down and think: “That’s an interesting way they form their religion!” He actually likes the variety in which religion is constructed by human beings, as opposed to thinking, one religion is the religion.

C-J: Language is scaffolding essential to communication, unless you want to just be constantly pointing; but concepts have to be on a scaffolding of agreed meaning when using language. Finding the truth in that language?—You can take one word and use it in different contexts and its meaning, purpose, and intent changes or has the potential to change. 

I like the idea of vertical and horizontal communication. In the movie Doom some people enter a cave where a ritual is taking place. One of them was unfamiliar with the ritual but it was recognizable as something to do with a faith. He asked what they were doing. Their guide said: “They are a simple people with a simple religion.” I have thought about that many times, in terms of how I practice my faith. Does God want to keep it simple or does he want to make it complex? 

The responses of Jesus were very limited, but they were a question that would lead you to a profound understanding if you were willing to examine it. Many people have very simple faith, a simple religion, and it’s enough. There are others who are never satisfied. They want more.

Bryan: I’ve often been frustrated with the lack of answers in religion in general. As has been pointed out, even in the garden of Eden, God asked questions instead of supplying answers. It seems to me that if you are supplied an answer, it doesn’t require a whole lot of reasoning. Basically, if you’re given data, if you’re given an answer, you have two choices: Accept it or reject it. But if you are asked a question, it requires an answer, which requires thought. It requires you to reason and come up with the reason why you provided that answer. Questions require thought, whereas answers just don’t.

So as CJ said, I think the whole idea behind religion in general, or the Bible, or Jesus’s life on earth, is in supplying more questions than answers. The point is to lead to understanding. Reasoning through your answer to a given question hopefully provides more understanding than just swallowing a given answer.

Don: Does that trouble you, to be given a question instead of an answer? To ask a question and be asked a question in return? 

Bryan: Yes, it does. I don’t like it. I have had an issue with it for a long time. I would much prefer, if I have a question, to look for an answer. But as you said, we can’t stand the truth, we can’t handle the truth. In our limited capacity, maybe it’s the question we need to look for an answer ourselves. No, I don’t like it, but there are lots of things I don’t like. Maybe that’s the reason behind it: It requires reasoning, and hopefully that leads to understanding.

Donald: Answers have to come out: “That one’s right, that one’s wrong.” Yes or no? True or false? Those are the easy ones. The subjective questions are: “Okay, I’m going to have to read your answer a little more carefully.” That was my point about the multiple ways in which we come to God: Because of different backgrounds, different environments, and different cultures people construct different ways in which they attempt to reach God. But we are not terribly satisfied with saying: “That answer is okay for them, but I have a different one.” 

Tolerance, I guess, is my question. If I’ve got a question for my doctor and he comes back with another question, that would not go well. I want to answers from doctors. This is a matter of life and death, so let’s not play around with non-answers!

David: We have learnt from Job and other stories that there is no answer, that we cannot know the answer. So the notion of reasoning—using human reason and analyzing a situation—is fruitless. We cannot get that kind of understanding through reasoning, It is just not possible. That’s the message I hear God giving Job. 

What is possible is enlightenment, which I would define as understanding without reason. Plenty of religions/faiths/philosophies have subscribed to that idea for millennia, so it’s not a new thought, not even to Christianity. The Bible stories of Job and Jacob show that their talks with God helped them achieve enlightenment. But Job could no more explain God after his enlightenment than he could before it.

C-J: I think we need to be mindful of time and place. The military has a phrase: ”Situational awareness.” Depending on the situation, your awareness of where you are, and your understanding of what is happening and your part in it, if you don’t have situational awareness, you will not have success, you will be like a cork bobbing on the water, tossed to and fro. 

I think we’re warned of that in the scaffolding of the Bible there. This is a good foundational place to begin, but I don’t think it’s because of the questions that are asked in the Bible to humanity, to examine, to consider, to evolve and transcend into. I agree with the premise that we were never meant just to say: “That’s a really pretty sky.” There’s a lot going on. So if we don’t know where we are in time and place and the purpose and intention of their place, we’re stuck in that place.

David: But the point of the Eastern religions is to lose situational awareness. Situational awareness is what gets us into trouble. The idea behind meditative practices is to forget your situation, to enter into a state of nothingness. In that situationally unaware state you will find enlightenment. You will not find it in any state of awareness. 

My Cantonese instructor was a great player of mahjong. He used to play with his friends every week, and always won money from them. It’s like poker here. Before every session, he would find a quiet corner somewhere, lie down on the floor, and try to empty his mind of all thought. It is very difficult, but it is enough just to try, as I discovered when I used the technique to achieve a record-breaking score in the Cantonese interpretership exam. I wasn’t really that good—except on that day, after emptying my mind (or trying to). It brought about some kind of enlightenment that made me more fluent in Cantonese than I actually was.

So to me, we have to get away from looking at this as an issue of human reasoning and human awareness because we’re not up to the task, and I think God has told us that clearly enough in the Bible.

C-J: Decluttering is one thing, but when I’m around people who are empty headed it infuriates me, because they take no responsibility for time and place. Life happens to them, they aren’t engaged. It’s like, “Well, if it’s meant to be, it will; and if it’s not, it won’t.” And I’m like, “Get a grip!” I think we are accountable to one another. I’m not living (and I don’t think I’m supposed to live) in that transient life. I think I can go there, to help me, regroup, empty out, clear the clutter. But I am here, and I have a purpose for here. 

For me, the Bible is a very important scaffolding. I filter things through it. But when it comes to my relationship with God, I’m more inclined to do what you do. But I use that language through my real life experiences to say, “Help me understand through this medium, this reality.” But I don’t like people who take absolutely no responsibility for what was meant to be. 

Pick up that paper! Mow your lawn! Go to work!

Robin: There’s no doubt that advancements in science, medicine, and technology bring about wonderful results. I could be wrong, but it seems to me that when we start to think that what we can do will give us greater spiritual experiences… I mean, I know that the Bible lists many times where God answers a question with a question, but there are statements as well, which are answers to questions. 

When the rich young ruler asked Jesus “What must I do to inherit eternal life? What do I lack?” Jesus gave an answer. It might not have been a simple, childlike answer. It’d be an answer to make you think, but it’ll be an answer. The Life of Christ is an answer to the question: “How  are we supposed to live?” 

I’m an extrovert. I’m very relationship oriented. I, unfortunately, do not have the gift of a technological mind. I’m an emotionally driven person. I know there are people who are the opposite of me, and we each have a place. But it really scares me what we’re talking about now with thinking that we can enhance our own spiritual experience. No, no, no! 

We aren’t going to live in a virtual world until we get there. This is what sin is. Sin is the separation from the virtual world. Dr. Mengele thought he had all kinds of wonderful ideas about how to improve, how to understand, and in Proverbs it says “There is a way which seemeth right unto a man, but the end thereof are the ways of death.” 

I am not saying to throw out all technology, that it’s a bunch of hooey. But we had better be careful when we’re trying to marry the technological advances that men have made and consider that spiritual. They are not related. This is my take, my experience, my opinion. It doesn’t mean that It needs to be everybody’s.

Victor: Listening to these comments, it occurs to me that technology, religion, even answers have the same downfall. They are mankind’s attempt to control our own environment. It puts us at the center of our universe—and if we believe the story of Lucifer, wasn’t that his downfall? He wanted to write the rules. He wanted to be in charge. If we learn anything from the Bible, it should be that we are not in charge. 

To me, there seems to be a huge dichotomy between religion and spirituality. I think there’s one universal Truth that we all know to be true, and that is the Golden Rule. So to me truth, and the answer to answers and questions, relies in relationships. It is only as we learn to deal with each other that we learn how to deal with our Heavenly Father; and as we build relationships, that’s where we can find truth. 

Everything else—technology, news, politics, science—can all be manufactured and made to say whatever the maker wants it to say. But it is only when we have a heart-to-heart relationship with each other, and with our Heavenly Being, that we really begin to find truths and the answers that we seek, because those answers come from outside of us. As Robin said, they’re not coming from inside of us. We can’t create that. When we’re out of control, we’re probably the most in control.

Dewan: The Great Controversy between Satan and Christ is the story of two sides. Before sin, all of God’s creatures were with him. There were no sides; there was only one side—God’s side. After sin, there were two sides: God’s side, life; and Satan’s side, death. Good and Evil.

Reinhard: God is spirit. We worship him in spirit. But remember, the disciples asked Jesus to show them Father. He replied: “If you see me, you see the Father.” The important thing is that what God wants in his followers is not a concern with his physical presence. Remember in Moses’ time the Israelites did not want to see or hear God—they wanted Moses to mediate for them. 

In the spiritual world, we don’t need to see God. We don’t have to see his physical, visual, presence. Scripture has all the information we need to get closer to God and to behave as God wants us to behave in our lives. In real life, modern communication technology—letters, phone calls, now video calls—doesn’t make any difference. Only the relationship matters, especially our relationship with God and understanding what he wants. I think that’s important for Christians, to help them grow closer to God, to grow in faith. 

We don’t have to see a physical manifestation of God because he is already present in our minds and in our hearts. God is spirit, so we worship God in spirit and the Holy Spirit will lead us to what we need to do in our lives on this earth.

Don: Next week, we’re going to go back to the discussion of prophets. What makes a prophet? How does one tell if a prophet is a real prophet? 

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