The era and error of Big Data

Recently I read an article entitled "Big Data, Google, and the end of Free Will." It was quite lengthy, detailed and very persuasive to millennials. The article basically announced the entrance of a new source of authority on what is true. While we are entering a new era, a world being transformed by computing power and the access to vasts amounts of data, the question of whether this is a new era of authority should be challenged. But a bigger question than this, and even a question that is bigger than big data, is - "where is the error in the era of Big Data?" If we think secular humanism has become the cultural enemy of the Gospel, the article makes a case for how "Dataism" pushes aside secular humanism as the authority on truth - on what is good and what is right!

How will this new era, filled with error, shape the minds of the emerging generations? How will the church find a way to penetrate a cultural influence that places authority, not in the Bible, not in human reasoning, but in the algorithms swimming in a sea of data?

When you read the article, and here it is if you are so inclined,

 http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/50bb4830-6a4c-11e6-ae5b-a7cc5dd5a28c.html?siteedition=intl

you can be easily impressed by its organized, rational arguments, It starts with the assumption that secular humanism has already replaced religion and mythology as the source for authority about truth. The author says,

"Humanist thinkers such as Rousseau convinced us that our own feelings and desires were the ultimate source of meaning, and that our free will was, therefore, the highest authority of all.... For the past few centuries humanism has seen the human heart as the supreme source of authority. From infancy we are bombarded with a barrage of humanist slogans counselling us: 'Listen to yourself, be true to yourself, trust yourself, follow your heart, do what feels good.'"

The author then asserts - just like humanism replaced religion, the era of humanism is over and is being replaced by Dataism.

"In its extreme form, proponents of the Dataist worldview perceive the entire universe as a flow of data, see organisms as little more than biochemical algorithms and believe that humanity’s cosmic vocation is to create an all-encompassing data-processing system — and then merge into it."

This is just the beginning of the author's presupposition about reality and man's place in it. There are thousands of more words building this argument. How can the minds of our young people compete with just the defense, "but the Bible says..."? Just like the arguments of secular humanists attacked the role of faith and the authority of Scripture, Worldviews of Dataism is a tsunami of assault on Christian worldviews.

While the arguments of Dataism can be complex and seem mind boggling, the era is quite simple. In fact the era is the same as it was in secular humanism. The error is in the core assumption. Humanism and Dataism both assume that truth about something is determined by knowledge gained rom inference observers can make about it. This core assumption places a priority on eido knowledge over gnosis knowledge. In fact faith, which is unobservable evidence that something is true, is marginalized and discounted. This is and always has been characteristic of the secular argument for finding truth.

There is another core assumption about finding truth that is in direct contradiction with the core assumption of humanism and Dataism. Truth is the disclosure of the qualities of an object to an observer by the originator of the object. In this assumption, authority is not determined by the capability of the observer, but the trustworthiness of the author.

While the era of Big Data ushers in a powerful statistical inference capability to predict behavior, the error of Big Data and humanism is that these worldviews miss the "author" in the word authority.

That is, one thing humanism and Big Data cannot do, is reveal the purpose and intent of the originator of an object. While Big Data may appear to add objectivity to finding truth, the product of Big Data still relies on biased algorithms of observers, not the will of the originator. Dataism cannot find truth about an object until the originator chooses to reveal it.

Oh, and Dataism cannot prove which core assumption is right, faith will always be preeminent, even in science!!

On a side note for the author of this article, "free will" also involves a false assumption about the human condition, but that's another blog.

Probably a lifetime of pondering here .... we need to get our millennials started, don't you think?