This month my brother died in a motorcycle accident. Death brings about a certain clarity. It clears away the smoke of triviality and casts a cold light on the path in front of us. It reminds us what is real, what hurts, and what is vanity. God has the same effect. If he exists, then his existence separates light from darkness, what endures from what fades.
I’ve built my professional career on twin pillars, distinct yet equally weighty. The first is cognitive simulation, that is, artificial intelligence and machine learning. I have spent more than a decade trying to understand what makes artificial learning work. I’ve probed its capabilities and proven its limitations. As a pillar of support, it has given me a decent living. It’s bestowed accolades.
Distasteful Questions
The second pillar has not. Its unpopularity stems from its subject matter: design detection and natural theology. This focus is equally mathematical and just as rigorous, but far less prestigious. My persistence in asking distasteful questions related to intelligent design and natural theology provokes opposition in my workplace and among my academic peers. Yet I continue to ask these questions. I answer them in principled ways.
Why do I persist?
Because I have a strong sense of what ultimately matters. While comfortable questions about AI limitations provide for my family, uncomfortable questions about the limitations of unguided processes challenge both materialist dogma and my career progress. Two sets of questions. My brother’s death reminds me that the latter matters more than the former.
If there is empirical, mathematical, and logical evidence that humans are more than unintended byproducts of unguided physics, how could that not compel me? How could it not compel you? If nothing is eternal, and we die and are forgotten within three generations, then whether I beat the latest AI benchmark matters little. It’s trivial. Personal success and laurels wither in the fires of cremation. We can create our own meaning and purpose locally, but temporary meaning and purpose perish with us. Nothing lasts.
Death burns this truth into the bedrock in front of us. If my brother died and was nothing more than the atoms that comprised him, then his life didn’t really matter. Nor does mine. In that case I’ll never see him again. I’ll never get to share my stories with him. I’ll also die and we’ll both be forgotten.
A Mind Behind the Cosmos
But if there is a mind behind the cosmos then there’s something beyond it. Someone beyond it. Your story would not end with your obituary. Knowing whether this is the case — whether some features of the universe and life are better explained by an intelligent cause than by unguided processes — has profound consequences for our outlook and future.
My brother’s death hit me as my professional life was ascending. I held a prestigious visiting fellowship at the University of Cambridge. I was giving talks at research universities, one of which went semi-viral on YouTube and drew over a quarter of a million views. I was writing and making my voice heard in the AI space. Then my brother — my biggest fan and encourager — was gone from the earth. Suddenly, success mattered less.
What Remained
What mattered was what remained. The hope that there is life beyond this one. My faith in the resurrection of the dead. My love for God and family. My ability to investigate whether there are signs of intelligence embedded in the fabric of nature. My drive to ask whether love and community are just emergent illusions caused by chemical reactions, or are eternal aspects of God himself.
Of all creatures, human beings are the only organisms capable of asking these questions and seeking their answers. Intelligent design matters because we matter — our origins, whether providential or accidental, deserve to be known. My brother’s death gives me a boldness I lacked. I know what matters.
Through my tears I now see clearly.