It's good to be back under the Dome where I was confirmed into the Church years back as a 15 year old and where some of you may one day kneel, like me, before the Bishop.
I was standing under another sort of Dome in London’s Science Museum two weeks ago. It was a spaceship taking me on a virtual journey. The new Science Fiction exhibition open until 20 August has the sub title ‘Voyage to the edge of the Imagination’ and I commend it to you.
Giggleswick science first got my imagination on the move through Mr Brocklebank and Mr Burgon. It took me to Oxford and a Chemistry doctorate linked to producing lightweight materials that would conduct electricity at room temperature, the components of today’s smartphones.
Years back science fiction imagined alien worlds. Now human imagination and endeavour have achieved discovery of 5,000 planets beyond our Solar System, the so-called exo-planets.
The Science Fiction exhibition gets you thinking about Artificial Intelligence and I thought I’d get some of your views on AI this evening.
I’d like you to start thinking of one benefit of Artificial Intelligence and one concern you have about it. While you’re thinking I wonder whether you’ve talked online to Digital Einstein? To quote ‘[he or it] is a taste of what experiential AI offers people today – a friendly face, a deep conversation and an interaction offering… real human connection’. AI brings Einstein to life again!
Put your hand up if you’ve got those two thoughts, a benefit and a concern about AI, to share.
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Help to learning - don’t need teachers! Phone diaries - can easily fit more into our lives! Yet we know more but don’t apply it - look at addressing climate change… We can send drones rather than manned planes to bomb places - but what if AI decides to turn military drones on its human creators. AI is on the global political agenda because human imagination has created a wonderful yet fearful intelligence.
Well - let’s move our imagination back from the spaceship dome of the Science Museum and land it here again under the Dome of Giggleswick School Chapel.
The Dome is itself the fruit of human imagination built to be a beacon of faith. Our Chaplain has recently been helping us think through the inscriptions inside it. Since Walter Morrison imagined it and Thomas Jackson laid the foundation stone in 1897 and built it, Chapel’s been a sight of the Dales. In my youth it stood out more, with its blue copper verdigris, and that, we’re told, will slowly return after its 1997 refurbishment.
Imagination is the capacity to see what is unseen and sometimes bring it about.
It influences everything we do and it's linked to faith which the Bible describes, in our reading from the Letter to the Hebrews this evening, as ‘the conviction of things not seen’.
The gift of faith provides us with inner eyes that discern what life is really about. The intelligence that built this Chapel and our smartphones is GI not AI - it's lent from God.
We come from God, we belong to God, we go to God. ‘Do not abandon that confidence’ our reading pleads ‘it brings a great reward’.
As a scientist I see faith as a form of wisdom that goes beyond but not against the knowledge accessible to the human mind.
Some things in life can’t be tied down rationally. God is one such thing, and so, to choose just one area, is quantum physics. Contrary to popular perception the revelation of truth in physics relies on the subjective imagination of the scientist as well as the objective truth awaiting discovery. Similarly pursuit of truth in Christianity relies on stubborn historical research to weigh it against other worldviews as well as imaginative thinking and praying. There are analogies - such as the elements of surprise in both fields. Superconductivity in metals at low temperatures breaks Ohm’s law of electrical resistance as surely as Christ’s resurrection breaks the universal law of mortality. The moral in imaginative truth seeking is a healthy distrust of popular belief that what usually happens is what always happens. We come to Chapel on Sunday because Someone rose from the dead!
By faith we welcome moment by moment the evidence of God the Creator's love and truth in the disarming warmth of a smile or in learning something exciting. To have faith is the greatest privilege in the world enabling us to see beyond what meets the eye.
As we leave worship in Chapel for a last time this school year may our imagination and faith continue to reach out in study and prayer. ‘Remember your creator in the days of your youth’ the Dome says and it's a privilege as an Old Giggleswickian to hand on that reminder.
Picture from the Science Fiction Exhibition at London’s Science Museum open to 20 August 2023
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