Opinion : Pastor's Blog - “That’s Impressive”

A couple years ago, I read an article that caught my attention: “IBM supercomputers simulate 4.5% of the human brain, and all of the cat brain.” Reading further, the article revealed a paramount level of human ingenuity required to partially, yes I said partially, replicate our roughly 20 billion neurons and more than 200 trillion synapses that make up the ‘gray matter‘ responsible for our thoughts and body control systems. (I estimate my numbers to be slightly less than these, especially before my morning coffee). Now that’s a lot of ‘stuff’ to replicate- billions and trillions of micro circuits and connections. IBM predicts that by 2019, they’ll be able to fully duplicate the human brain with newer supercomputers that will house nearly 900,000 processors, each processor having as much speed and memory as any modern personal computer. Now that’s an incredible amount of computational power!

But as I reflected on what this article means for me as a Christian, my heart smiled for a few reasons.

Humanity is still progressing, at least in the realm of science. We are conquering what many long ago declared impossible. And the greatest part of this is not the high-tech devices and apps that drive them, but in this: we prove we were made by the Creator God as His sub-creators by progressively dominating the physical realm He has given us to subdue. Jesus Christ receives great glory when humans do what he’s built them to do: learn, create and innovate.

But as far as humanity’s progression is concerned, we are progressing, as I said before, but in the physical realm only. Humanity hasn’t solved ANY of its spiritual problems, even though we’ve had thousands of years to work on them. The darkest sins are still the oldest ones, and they keep coming up again and again. Envy, anger, rebellion, cheating, lying, theft, bitterness, false gods, and the king of them all - pride - still haunt every generation, no matter how ‘proper’ and ‘moral’ they may appear on the outside. The means of hope, of moving upward and onward beyond these aged traps and snares hasn’t come and won’t ever come through science, but through salvation - deliverance, and not by our own selves, but through a great Savior. His name is Jesus Christ. He came to conquer sin, death and the grave, and proved these victories and His Deity to be true by rising from the dead. He freely offers this salvation to all- and to you and me. Anyone may claim this free gift on one condition (it has two ‘sides’): “Repent and believe...” Mark 1:15.

And as far as the debater between computers vs. brains... Well, that’s an easy one. Brains win- every time. They’re WAY more compact, energy efficient, powerful, intelligent, observant, creative- and always will be. Earlier this year, computer programmers made a similar digital simulation of the brain, fed it 17,000 hours of YouTube videos to see what it would learn, and what was the result? It could recognize a cat. That’s right, it learned to visually distinguish a cat. Now I’m sure their programming will improve in the years to come, but it won’t ever be ‘human.’ And do you know what really makes me smile? How many teams of scientists, logisticians, programmers, designers, electricians, assemblers, and UPS deliveries, etc. did it take just to run this test? I’m sure the entire effort represented hundreds of thousands of hours- if not more. But how long did it take God to make us, and our brains? About this long: “Then God said, ‘Let us make man...’” Now that’s impressive!

written by Zach Zajicek pastor of First Baptist Church

all verses quoted from the NLT of the Scriptures