Jimmy Stephens:

A necessary condition of being a person is knowing God.

Computers cannot possess knowledge – full stop.

So computers cannot be persons.

Isaiah:

What would be the necessary condition for knowing God?

Jimmy Stephens:

The definite article “the” suggests to me you’re looking for the necessary and sufficient conditions. I anticipate here we aim to break down God-knowledge into finer concepts which are thought to have some relevant degree of distinctness from bare personhood or knowledge. Maybe priority is a concern – what has to take place or obtain prior to God-knowledge in order for it to then occur and mark something as person. Maybe the goal is more to look for the cluster of descriptors of a person such that you’ve cut away a universal and can now enter any conversation with sufficient background information on personhood to manage anything new with confidence.

Whatever the case, it’s hard to answer that question without either aiming to broadly or missing the question for a narrow point. If I say, the necessary condition is that God creates them that way, you’re probably looking for something more specific, but I wouldn’t be wrong. If I say, laws of thought have to exist, that seems specific to the point of remoteness.

All to say, I don’t know how to answer that question without more context.

Isaiah:

I guess my question more specifically is about why computers cannot know God or know anything at all.

Jimmy Stephens:

I suspect maybe there’s a loss of the ontological vs epistemological track.

One of the reasons to doubt that computers know anything is that they have a distinct origin from human beings (not to mention other persons like angels and other living things, like animals).

So earlier I said something like, humans go back to being created in God’s image and being procreated in parental image. The genetics of computers is a story about unliving manmade objects becoming machines, then becoming more and more sophisticated machines.

Whatever, therefore, is the difference between a rock and a man is the difference between a mind and a computer. The point of the argument is not to cash out the ontic specifics, but to argue from background beliefs universal to Christians.

Someone could, theoretically, then try to make the move of calling this into doubt, but without even needing to do much ontology, I will just hold them to differentiating rocks and men (etc) without dividing men and computers, or vice versa, unifying men and computers without reducing men to rocks.

The abortion issue is illuminating on this subject. We have reasons correlated to human nature to suspect mind of fetuses. It may be the expectation of a mind or it might be the actual presence of a mind, whatever. (The case for personhood is even stronger, if like me you think personhood is more basic than mind.) The same case is importantly missing for computers.