When world chess champion Garry Kasparov was recently defeated in a six-game match against "Deep Blue", an IBM computer, people again asked the question: 'Can we artificially create human intelligence? Can we artificially create a human? Are we getting nearer to being God?'

Well, first of all let's remember that our computer's way of playing chess is not the human way at all. In fact, we would call it stupid rather than intelligent. The computer is able in one second to examine 200 million distinct possible states of play on the board In that time, a skilled human chess player might examine just 2. That means the computer is faster. But most of what it is doing is pointless. A 'real' human senses what needs to be checked and just ignores the rest. The computer plods very unimaginatively through every possible permutation - except that it plods rather fast!

(Incidentally if I seem to be savaging computers it is because I have just - very belatedly - got one and am extracting my revenge for its telling me on the screen: 'Your sentence is too long'. Impertinence!)

Part of human intelligence, or human genius, involves the element of risk. A computer doesn't risk anything; it covers everything A human risks ignoring the apparently irrelevant to centre on the essential (even if small). That is where our God-like nature resides.

God can see every possible permutation of human behaviour (including trillions of permutations we haven't even thought of' and including umpteen games other than chess that nobody has yet invented and maybe nobody ever will) but he doesn't zoom in to check whether we are doing them or not. He risks letting creation get on with it - including the most unreliable section of His creation: human beings!

Love involves risk, or it wouldn't be love bet dominance or even tyranny. In an inside-out way, this IBM computer is helping us to see that God must be a God of love, not of tyranny, and the Trinity, which we celebrate today, is a communion of love and not just another computer print-out. DS