Bruce Charlton ponders how demons might utilize Man’s technology for satanic purposes.
1. The spiritual is primary, and the material is a sub-set of the spiritual.
2. The spiritual world exists as Beings – (is ‘organized’ as Beings) which are living, conscious, purposive entities.
3. A Being can form part of a larger Being, and often includes smaller Beings.
Putting together the above three assumptions, we can see that the agenda of evil might be administered overall by a Being such as Satan, who is analogous to a general directing lower ranks towards a particular strategy. These lower ranks might include demons participating in a hierarchy of organized and specialized functions; the lower ranks also include Men – and other Beings and parts-of-beings such computers, programs, the internet…
While demons are supposed to be wholly committed to evil by their natures; the Men who participate in the System of evil are only partially being used for that purpose.
So a Man might regard his job as ‘just’ digging holes and building walls, or collecting and summarizing data in an office; and this activity might be integrated into an evil-orientated agenda… or a Good and Godly one; and to varying degrees.
Yet the situation is not static, and evil operates purposively to increase itself and corrupt other Beings; so the Man in an evil-aiming organization who digs holes, or the one that deals with ‘information’ – might be confronted-with links between his activity, and its aims and consequences.
So that he will become aware of his participation in evil, and then needs consciously to decide whether to endorse or repent this participation – each of which will have different consequences for how much of himself participates in the System.
If demons can hurl furniture around and turn lights on and off, then there is no reason to believe they cannot interact in a more sophisticated manner with more complicated material objects. While I’m not particularly concerned about AI qua AI, I can imagine how what purports to be AI might be something else merely pretending to be AI and operating in its guise.
This is not a new idea. In THAT HIDEOUS STRENGTH, CS Lewis presented a similar use of the material for interdimensional communication.