There are certainly no shortage of opinions on the subject but I find most of them to be somewhat too specific and less of an overview than I would like to see.
Unless you're an avid science fiction fan, you may not have really thought about how computers and humans really are alike or what spiritual topics and controversy it really can drum up.
If you equate us being made in the image of God and therefor us having a need to create in our own image you start to see the "Genesis" of this discussion.
We have a great desire to make and invent things that not only serve us and make our lives easier, but we seem to want a companion of our own creation.
A.I. or Artificial Intelligence has been a topic of serious debate and discussion as long as we've had computers and science fiction. Being an avid reader of sci-fi myself, I've read literally hundreds of them. The one thing they have most in common is the machines turning against us. A bit less common is when they become self aware and still like us. I think that's because as humans, we instinctively understand that we're actually parasites struggling to find justification for our destructive ways and fear that our own creations, because they will know us implicitly, will in fact come to realize this and decide that we don't deserve to live.
After all the warning from the greatest minds our planet has ever produced, still science follows after science fiction like a dog at a butcher's shop. We are getting Sooooo close to bio-computing technology that its really getting scary. We keep making robots and yearn for the day when they can make their own decisions and think for themselves. I wonder if God went through the same process?
Did he work for a couple millennia to come up with the perfect being, only to find that it thought for itself and therefore messed everything up? Is that what our creations will do as well? Are we nothing more than software programmed to believe that everything we do is real? Hmmmmmmmmm
When you start realizing that matter can actually exist in two places in space at the same exact moment, it gives you pause as to the reality of our world. For a better and easier way to understand particle physics, try This great site. It really shows you how particles can be in two places at once and blows your whole theory about the universe.
If that didn't totally blow your mind, then you're in the wrong place and more advanced than I and I tip my hat. I have always been amazed that science comes to pass a few or more years after someone writes it down in a book. You have to wonder if the science fiction writer is giving him/herself over the the collective consciousness/pool of knowledge/mathematical probabilities/God and seeing into the future. Its certainly easier to think that science people love science fiction and follow like sheep towards a social goal, however, I don't believe that's entirely the case.
As far as regular science is concerned, you can only accomplish what mathematics can prove. In other words, You can't make 5 from 2+1. Things can only be what their sum amounts to in whatever combinations are possible and so on.
Believing we could follow Star Trek principals and come up with a transporter would have been thought ridiculous to most all scientists other than Einstein and a few select others at the time. But the time has come and physicists have certainly proved that its not only possible but have transported atoms (?) a few feet. Not only that but combining particle physics with transportation theory, I can see being able to not only transport an item, but also leave a copy at the point of origination someday in the future.
And if a particle can be in two places at once, it would wipe out hunger if we could replicate (another Star Trek Principle) food. If a person could replicate anything, it would destroy the economy as we understand it now. There would be no way to tell between currency and counterfeit. No one would need a loan for a home or for tools of their trade. I realize things never turn out quite the way the writers tell it and my ideas may never come to pass in the way I am speaking, however, we would have to be colonizing planets by that time to keep some countries from replicating nukes and wiping everyone out. Will God step in at some point and stop us? Or will we eventually prove that God is nothing more than the active imagination of the ignorant? Or maybe that we should have stayed ignorant in the Garden of Eden and kept our mouths shut?
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