Machine learning systems can recognize patterns in data that humans miss. They can diagnose diseases from medical images, predict protein structures, generate human-like text, and beat world champions at complex games. They process vast amounts of information and extract meaningful patterns with superhuman accuracy.
Yet for all their pattern recognition prowess, they have no wisdom.
This distinction—between pattern recognition and wisdom—illuminates something important about biblical epistemology and what it means to truly know.
Data, Information, Knowledge, Wisdom
Computer science distinguishes between data (raw facts), information (organized data), knowledge (information integrated with understanding), and wisdom (knowledge applied with good judgment).
Machine learning excels at the first two levels and increasingly handles the third. But wisdom remains elusive. An AI can know that smoking causes cancer, but it doesn't grasp what it means to be human, mortal, and faced with difficult choices. It has information without comprehension, knowledge without understanding.
Scripture makes a similar distinction. "The fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom" (Proverbs 9:10). Wisdom isn't just knowing facts about God—it's living in right relationship with Him. It's knowledge oriented toward proper ends, integrated with understanding of what truly matters.
The Autistic Pattern-Recognition Connection
As an autistic person, I relate to both sides of this equation. My brain excels at pattern recognition—I notice regularities, systems, structures that others miss. This is a genuine strength that serves me well in analytical tasks.
But I've had to learn (often painfully) that recognizing patterns isn't the same as understanding people. I can notice behavioral regularities without grasping the emotional realities beneath them. I can identify logical inconsistencies without understanding why someone holds seemingly inconsistent beliefs.
Machine learning has a similar limitation, but more extreme. It finds correlations without understanding causation, patterns without grasping meaning, regularities without comprehending purpose.
Training Data and Tradition
Machine learning systems learn from training data—vast datasets that encode patterns from the world. But they only learn what's in their training data. Their "knowledge" is bounded by what they've been exposed to.
Biblical wisdom similarly depends on learning from tradition—the accumulated insight of those who've walked with God before us. But there's a crucial difference: Scripture points beyond itself to a living relationship with God. The goal isn't just mastering the text but knowing the Author.
An AI trained on all of Scripture could answer factual questions, identify themes, even generate theologically plausible text. But it wouldn't have wisdom because it can't fear the LORD, can't enter into covenant relationship, can't live before God's face.
Context and Discernment
Machine learning struggles with context. A system might recognize that "bank" can mean financial institution or river edge, but it determines which meaning by statistical patterns in surrounding words—not by understanding the actual situation being described.
Biblical wisdom requires discernment—knowing not just what Scripture says but how to apply it wisely in specific contexts. Proverbs is full of seemingly contradictory advice because wisdom requires knowing which proverb applies when. "Answer a fool according to his folly" and "Answer not a fool according to his folly" are both true—but in different circumstances.
This kind of contextual judgment requires more than pattern matching. It requires understanding purposes, weighing values, grasping what matters in a particular situation.
The Chinese Room
Philosopher John Searle's "Chinese Room" thought experiment illuminates this. Imagine someone who doesn't understand Chinese but has a rulebook for manipulating Chinese characters. Given Chinese input, they consult the rulebook and produce appropriate Chinese output. To outside observers, it looks like they understand Chinese. But they're just following rules—symbol manipulation without comprehension.
Current AI is essentially elaborate Chinese Rooms. They manipulate symbols according to learned patterns, producing outputs that seem intelligent. But there's no understanding, no meaning, no genuine comprehension.
Biblical wisdom requires more than symbol manipulation. It requires understanding reality as God's creation, recognizing our place within it, living in light of eternal purposes. These aren't patterns to extract from data—they're truths to be known through relationship with their Source.
What AI Can Teach Us
Yet studying machine learning has deepened my appreciation for certain aspects of wisdom. Training neural networks requires enormous amounts of data—millions of examples to learn even simple tasks. This highlights how much of human wisdom comes from experience, observation, learning from others.
When Scripture emphasizes learning from the wise, listening to instruction, accepting correction—it's recognizing that wisdom requires extensive "training data" from life and community. We don't become wise by pure reason; we become wise by learning from lived experience (ours and others').
Machine learning also shows how pattern recognition, while insufficient for wisdom, is necessary for it. You can't apply principles wisely if you don't notice relevant patterns. My autistic pattern-recognition abilities aren't wisdom, but they're tools wisdom can use.
The Limits of Algorithm
Here's what machine learning definitively shows: intelligence isn't algorithmic in any simple sense. We can create systems that mimic intelligent behavior through pattern matching, but genuine understanding seems to require something more.
This should make us humble about reductive explanations of human thinking. If machine learning—our best computational approach to intelligence—can achieve impressive results without understanding, how much more complex must actual human cognition be?
And if human cognition is more than computation, how much more is divine wisdom beyond our categories? The gap between current AI and human understanding hints at the gap between human understanding and divine wisdom.
Personhood and Wisdom
Ultimately, I think wisdom requires personhood in a way that pattern recognition doesn't. Wisdom involves not just knowing facts but being shaped by them, not just recognizing patterns but living in light of them, not just processing information but being transformed by truth.
You can't have biblical wisdom without being in relationship—with God, with community, with tradition, with creation. These relationships form us, challenge us, correct us, shape our loves and desires. We become wise not by processing information but by being apprenticed to the wise.
An AI can't enter these relationships because it's not a person. It can simulate responses but can't be genuinely addressed or truly respond. It has outputs but no lived experience, patterns but no purposes, information but no loves.
Practical Implications
This analysis has practical implications. As AI becomes more sophisticated, we'll be tempted to outsource judgment to systems that seem intelligent. But we must distinguish between tasks that genuinely require wisdom and tasks that only require pattern recognition.
Diagnosing diseases from images? Pattern recognition suffices. Deciding whether to use aggressive treatment for a terminal patient? That requires wisdom—understanding what makes life meaningful, what suffering means, what we owe each other, what it means to die well.
We should use AI for what it's good at while recognizing its fundamental limitations. And we should cultivate actual wisdom—the kind that comes from fearing the LORD, learning from the wise, and being shaped by truth lived in community.
Conclusion
Machine learning reveals, by contrast, what wisdom is. It shows that pattern recognition, however sophisticated, isn't understanding. Processing information isn't being transformed by truth. Generating appropriate outputs isn't living well.
Biblical wisdom is irreducibly personal, relational, purposive. It requires not just knowing facts about God but knowing God. Not just recognizing moral patterns but loving what's good. Not just processing Scripture but being shaped by it.
AI can help us in countless ways. But it will never be wise. And recognizing why reveals something important about what we are, what wisdom is, and what it means to truly know.
The fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom—not because God wants to scare us, but because genuine wisdom requires rightly oriented relationship with reality's ultimate Source. And that's something no algorithm, however sophisticated, can achieve.