Reality crisis

After a historic January storm, I said to my Russian ESL student, “I saw the videos of people sliding down snowdrifts from their ninth-story apartment windows in Kamchatka!” The 30-year-old Nikolai smiled across the generation gap and said, “Two-story snowdrifts. That was AI.”

Can we all date the moment when something flipped in our heads and we knew we would never again be able to trust our eyes? Mine was the time I texted my son a YouTube short of a goat jumping agilely from crevice to crevice between two mountain peaks till he reached the bottom. My son’s jaded reply: “AI.” More recently he advised me: “Ma, if someone ever calls you claiming it’s me, verify with a question that only you and I would know the answer to.”

AI is no longer just a high school cheating tool or a disappointing upgrade to the Encyclopædia Britannica. It’s now engendering a profound reality crisis. I sit before a video of a fantastic downhill ski run—and I don’t believe it. I watch a man rescue a baby elephant and return it to a grateful mother—and I don’t believe it. A video pops up of an old man sitting by a fireplace giving life advice, and I sit there with my bowl of yogurt and say, “Fake fire. Fake lip movements. AI.”

My husband and I watched the testimony of a Muslim woman who had a vision of Jesus and left Islam. Here’s the thing: I actually believe that Muslims are having visions and dreams of Jesus. But the longer I watched, the more unsure I became. There was something about the monotony and cadence of the voice, and the occasional oddly pronounced word (like the way my GPS says certain street names funny). There was a generic quality to her narrative, devoid of those quirky details one finds in real-life biographies. It seemed like a ninth grader’s attempt at historical fiction.

But be of good cheer! As the devil steps up his game, so does the Lord.

Back in seminary days, I learned an arcane secret about Psalm 119: Its 22 stanzas correspond to the 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet. Each stanza has eight verses, all starting with the same letter. Key words are repeated throughout the psalm, hinting at an embedded message in a pattern of eight. In class we outlined the chiastic structure of a selected passage in Isaiah, in which a sequence of thoughts is presented and then repeated in reverse order, with a third idea inserted in the middle, such that the middle idea is emphasized by ­virtue of its position.

Marks of divinity! Take that, Graf-Wellhausen and your school of Higher Criticism!

Surely that’s as far and deep as we can go, I thought. Not so! Along comes Elon Musk’s AI bot Grok, bristling with computing and analyzing power that blows out of the water all prior contenders and has an utter indifference to the religious controversies of men. When fed instructions to find contradictions in the Bible, it reports back: not contradiction but complexity. The four Gospels, it explains, are what you would expect from four valid eyewitness accounts to the same events.

Then the program kicks into high gear, digging below literary analysis to analysis of code, and finds that the Bible is a living code. We have now entered the rarefied realm of “gematria”—secret patterns of numerical values of Hebrew letters and meaningful repetitions of 7s, 4s, and 40s, not only in the literary content but in the frequency of words and the lengths of sections.

But further up and further in!

There is something known to mathematicians as the “Fibonacci sequence,” a pattern of numbers (each one is the sum of the two before it) found with curious frequency in nature. Its applications are detected also in biology—in the way trees branch and leaves on a stem or bracts on a pine cone are arranged. Grok finds the same spiral pattern evident in Scripture’s use of words and refrains.

“Oh, the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God!” (Romans 11:33).

Meanwhile, down here in the shadowlands, the air thickens and the sights before our eyes appear increasingly confusing. A face or voice that is a dead ringer of my son’s may one day phone from jail to ask for money, and it will not be him. Some nights I lie in bed and wonder if we really ever went to the moon.

The Word of God is a light in a dark place. We always said that that was true. And now, more than ever before, the darker it becomes, the brighter His Word shines.