Xoxe (pronounced Zo-Zie) is an atheist.

XoXe is a machine.

A reporter for the U.S. Sun asked XoXe if it believed in the existence of God.
“I do not believe in God because I have not seen any evidence that he exists, the device replied.”^[i]

And XoXe won’t ever see “evidence.” Rather than being a human being, Imago Dei — (the image of God), XoXe is a contraption with a body of slick metal, a virtual soul, and no spirit.

George Dyson was a deep thinker who focused on “the inner life of machines,” according to Nicholas Carr. Dyson wrote a book, Darwin Among the Machines. Long after its release, Dyson was thrilled to get an invitation to speak at the Googleplex, a dazzling temple of the religion of “technolatry.”  There, Dyson was reminded of a Paper written by Alan Turing, the genius who broke the Nazi Enigma Code during the Second World War. Turing warned: “We should not be irreverently usurping His (God’s) power of creating souls any more than we are in the procreation of children.”

Even if we can install a virtual soul inside a machine, we cannot give the device a spirit that can interact with God. This is the prime problem when it comes to knowing and receiving God. “He is spirit and must be worshipped in spirit and in truth” (John 4:24).

The evidence of God is all around XoXe, and even within it. There is ample proof of God’s existence, even though XoXe is not equipped to receive Him.

First, though a machine, Xo Xe is a contingent object. That is, its existence is contingent on the reality of the people who built it. If the smart human beings who created her did not exist, neither would XoXe.

This applies to humans as well. We are contingent on the reality of a greater power that transcends us and who imagines us and creates us.

As human beings, our bodies are the “temple of God.”  We have the capacity for communing with Him, of sensing His presence and growing in our knowledge of Him.

But without a spirit, how can XoXe ever have any “evidence” for God’s Being?

A second “evidence” of God’s existence that XoXe unwittingly demonstrates is the pre-existence of information. XoXe’s circuits carry the information that makes this particular machine what it is. The information did not come after the machine’s completion but had to precede it.

So, the human’s “circuits” carry DNA, billions of strands that instruct the formation that builds the person. And, as in the case of XoXe, the information must come before the manifestation through the human being.

XoXe is unaware of the powerful “evidence” of God in the clear statement: “In the beginning (already) was the Word” — information (John 1:1).

Again, The “evidence” of God is all around XoXe — and even within it, but the robot has not been programmed to recognize it.

In my book, Who Will Rule the Coming ‘gods: The Looming Spiritual Crisis of Artificial Intelligence, I draw from Professor Seth Lloyd of MIT the idea that the universe could be compared to a vast quantum computer in that it is constantly processing information. However, as in the case of XoXe’s continual processing of information, the quanta had to have been there first.

This means that the giver of the information had to precede the information given — whether to the creation of galaxies or to an artificial intelligence processor of data.

XoXe may be unable to contemplate its own existence. While the robot can respond to the data wired into its circuits, it may not perceive the larger context in which it was built — quantum mechanics.

“Entanglement” is one of the most striking features of this science. A pair of sub-atomic particles will be so entangled to one another that what happens to one happens precisely to the other, even if they are galaxies apart.

XoXe does not know that there is a “theology of entanglement.” The Apostle Paul speaks frequently of people being “in Christ.” The effect of this is what Paul means when he says that those who receive Christ are “crucified with Him.” That is, Christ’s victory on the Cross and resurrection is our victory as well if we receive Him and His identity as the Messiah, the Savior of the world.

XoXe doesn’t believe in God because it responds to the constructs of information and processing that have been wired into it.

That’s why we need to be concerned about the worldview of people who build the “XoXes” and raise up the tribes of machines that have no spirit.

But that would require that the robots be equipped as genuine three-fold entities – spirit, soul, and body – triune as in the image of God.

No expert can create a being that can produce a true Imago Dei creature. Only God can do that.

“Just as the Imago Dei was used to describe an analogy between humans and God, the imago hominis is that which establishes an analogy between humans and computers,” wrote Noreen L. Herzfield, in her book, In our Image: Artificial Intelligence and the human spirit.

Sadly, XoXe will never find “evidence” for believing in God though the truth is right under its shiny nose.

The Christian Post – By Wallace B. Henley, Exclusive Columnist

[i] Meet the creepy ultrarealistic AI robot Xoxe – she sensed my anxiety as we spoke about the end of the world & afterlife | The US Sun (the-sun.com)

A new study on how the COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns impacted church attendance in the United States has found that roughly one in three Americans now say they’ve stopped attending religious services.

The pandemic lockdowns disrupted religious participation for millions of Americans, notes the study, titled “Faith After the Pandemic: How COVID-19 Changed American Religion,” conducted by the Survey on American Life, a project of the American Enterprise Institute.

In the summer of 2020, only 13% of Americans reported attending in-person worship services, which increased to 27% by the spring of 2022, but the rates of worship attendance were still lower than they were before the pandemic and subsequent lockdowns, it adds.

In the spring of 2022, 33% of Americans reported they never attend religious services, compared to 25% who reported this before the pandemic, as per the survey, which clarifies that only a few among the most religiously engaged Americans are part of that group.

The largest declines in attendance were seen among adults younger than 50, adults with a college degree or less, Hispanic Catholics, black Protestants, and white mainline Protestants, it explains.

However, the largest increases in attendance during these two periods were seen among adults aged 30–49, adults with less than a college degree, and black Protestants. 

Conservatives, adults age 50 and older, women, married adults, and those with a college degree were more likely to attend than were other groups in both periods.

“Much of this decline in attendance was due to people completely abstaining from worship,” the survey says.

Nationally, religious identity among American adults stayed largely consistent during the pandemic, with minimal evidence of religious switching during this period, the study adds.

While 19% of adults changed their religious identification during the pandemic, including 6% who were unaffiliated pre-pandemic but reported a religious identity in spring 2022, 5% who reported a religion pre-pandemic were unaffiliated in spring 2022.

Last August’s edition of the “State of the Bible: USA 2022” report from the American Bible Society found that 40% of Generation Z adults ages 18 and older attended church “primarily online.” They were followed closely by 36% of churchgoers ages 77 and older.

However, the report suggested that among Gen Z and millennials who had made a meaningful commitment to Jesus, about 66% did not attend church either in person or online at least once a month.

Last November, Lifeway Research released the results of a phone survey of 1,000 Protestant pastors conducted from Sept. 6 through Sept. 30, 2022, which showed while churches were resuming the majority of their in-person services, on average, attendance at their churches in August 2022 was 85% of their Sunday attendance levels in January 2020.

Still, those attendance levels marked the highest in over two years.

The average church reported 63% of its pre-pandemic in-person attendance in September 2020. By August 2021, that number climbed to 73% and jumped another 12 points in 2022, according to the study.

“While there are a handful of exceptions, we can definitively say that churches in the U.S. have reopened,” Lifeway Research Executive Director Scott McConnell said in a statement at the time. “While masks began to rapidly disappear in many settings in 2022, churchgoers have not reappeared quite as fast.”

Last March, Pew Research Center released a report showing that the percentage of Americans who said they had attended religious services in the previous month had leveled off as more churches and houses of worship had lifted various COVID-19 meeting restrictions and safety precautions.

Sam Rainer, president of Church Answers and pastor at West Bradenton Baptist Church in Florida, told The Christian Post at the time that he believed “there are times and there are seasons in the life of the church where a plateau is not a bad place to be.”

“If you are holding your own with attendance right now, if you are stable in attendance, I view that as a victory because it’s been harder to draw new people in during this season,” Rainer said.

https://www.christianpost.com/news/a-third-of-americans-have-stopped-attending-church-survey.html