Global risks, apologetics, and abiding hope

In the first article of this series, we looked back on 9/11 and the ways in which that conflict has evolved but never truly ended. However, we also discussed how the threat of violence from Radical Islam is far from the only danger we face today. 

According to Geoffrey Hinton, often called the “Godfather of AI,” there is a 10–20 percent chance that artificial intelligence will lead to human extinction in three decades. He explains: “We’ve never had to deal with things more intelligent than ourselves before,” adding, “How many examples do you know of a more intelligent thing being controlled by a less intelligent thing?”

Among the many risks of AI to our present and future:

• Cybersecurity risks: data sets can be poisoned, altered, or victimized through cyberattacks, leading to data breaches.
• AI models can be reverse-engineered or manipulated to produce dangerous outcomes, including bioweapons.
• Operational risks such as model drift, bias, and breakdowns in the governance structure can lead to system failures and cybersecurity vulnerabilities usable by bad actors.
• Privacy violations and biased outcomes must be avoided by prioritizing safety and ethics when developing and deploying AI systems.
• It is proving very difficult to retrain AI models or make them “forget” wrong information.
• The power needed to run AI data centers presents enormous challenges.
• Humans can develop unhealthy emotional relationships with AI chatbots.
• AI is likely to lead to smaller workforces in many companies and areas. For example, Amazon announced that its workforce will shrink in coming years as it adopts more AI tools and agents. Microsoft is planning to lay off thousands as well.

AI is not going anywhere. It constitutes an advance—and a threat—humanity has obviously never faced before.

Threats at home and abroad

Meanwhile, at this writing, more than seven million people worldwide have reportedly died from COVID-19, though the World Health Organization believes the actual number could be closer to twenty-one million. Six years after the pandemic began, experts say there is a 47–57 percent probability of another deadly pandemic in the next twenty-five years.

Because there is no way accurately to predict the next threat, there is no way definitely to prevent it.

One last threat: Former Brookings Fellow Rush Doshi warns that China is playing the “long game” in its “grand strategy to displace American order.” Its “Belt and Road Initiative” is building railroads across Central Asia and seaports in Africa, part of its plan to buy long-term loyalty across both continents. China had gained control of 70 to 80 percent of the global supply of rare earth minerals by securing mines in Africa, building refining facilities, and forcing companies to rely on its processing. It is funding domestic semiconductor production and giving tax breaks to electric vehicle makers, part of its strategy to take over the global EV market.

The US has relatively few ways to stop China from advancing these initiatives. Without question, China’s “long game” constitutes the greatest threat to the global position and prosperity of our country.

Apagogics and abiding hope

If you think I wrote this section to discourage you, you’re right.

But I can explain.

The great apologist Francis Schaeffer was once asked how he would respond if he had an hour on a train sitting next to an unbeliever. He replied that he would need forty-five minutes to show this person what was wrong with their worldview. (This is known as “apagogics,” exposing the fallacies of unbiblical thinking.) It would then be an easy task to show what is right with the biblical worldview.

Let’s consider this section a form of apagogics. If you are thinking that you can find hope for the future in any human source, I intend to dissuade you. It’s not just that Americans are facing unprecedented challenges combining to form an unprecedented threat.

It’s that the greatest issues we face are all incapable of human solution.

The foundational problem of all problems is that humans are fallen: “Sin came into the world through one man, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men because all sinned” (Romans 5:12). The Fall caused the disasters and diseases that now inflict our fallen planet (Romans 8:22). And every crime, every lie, every act of discrimination and injustice in human history is a symptom of the Fall in every heart.

Just as a patient with cardiac disease cannot transplant their own physical heart, so a person with sin disease cannot transplant their own spiritual heart. The prophet mourned, “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick” (Jeremiah 17:9). What was true at the beginning of history is still true today: “The Lord saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every intention of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually” (Genesis 6:5).

There is only one solution to our greatest problem: God testifies, “I will give you a new heart, and a new spirit I will put within you” (Ezekiel 36:26). This is why we can pray with David, “Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me” (Psalm 51:10).

Choosing hope

Here is the hope we most need to face the challenges we most fear in ways that transfuse our hearts with triumphant joy.

Over the coming articles, we’ll take a closer look at five steps we can take together in order to better embrace such hope. But, for now, let’s conclude by simply asking the Lord to help us not to give up on his work in our lives and in the world. 

As strange as it may sound, there are times where we simply need to embrace the idea that hope is not an illusion or some naïve goal for those who refuse to live in the real world. Christians are just as capable of such cynicism as the lost around us, but the consequences are far more severe when it comes from us. 

So, ask the Lord to help you desire hope today. Then ask him to protect your heart, mind, and soul from the kind of despair that would lead us to give up on God’s ability to fix what’s broken in our world and in our lives.

The same God that has already overcome immeasurably more than we face today is just as capable of saving us now as he’s ever been. 

Do you believe that he will?