I believe there is a law or rule in the area of artificial
intelligence that goes something like this. "A construct can never
grow more intelligent than the construct that created it."  In other
words, an AI is only as smart as the rules that define it.

This is sometimes referenced in religion.
If God created humans, the intelligence required to create humanity
precludes us from ever fully understand God, no matter how smart we
become.

I am looking for the name of this law or rule and some material
briefly describing it.  I am not looking for a book or an explanation
that requires a significant AI background to understand.

It is possible that I have this all wrong, and such a rule does not
exist.  If you have made a good attempt at it (or only find a rule
that says the very opposite) I am still willing to pay.

Please let me know if you need further clarification.

If you do not on insist the  religious explanations
than there is a counter example to the AI rule, you
described.
 I hope you will accept that as equivalent to the
'rule that says the very opposite',
since existence of a counter-example proves that
the rule limiting AI does not exists.

Here is the counter-example:

 People evolved from animals, and are more intelligent then animals.

  And animals evolved from -  lower life forms, etc

One can point out that animals did not intended to evolve into
more intelligent beings - but 'intent' was not specified and has
no obvious meaning in the AI context.

In the process of evolution, the smarts tend to increase.

This applies not only tothe natural evolution but to AI processes.

There is an algorithm which simulates the natural evolution 
on a computer. 

See e.g.
www.cs.cmu.edu/Groups/AI/html/faqs/ai/genetic/top.html

It does evolves more complex (intelligent) computer constructs from 
the simple ones.

One may argue that a person who came with GA algorithm  provided the smarts
but there is no theoretical limit to what IQ can be achieved by this process.

hedgie

This might interest you:

"Many people think that a machine cannot be more intelligent than the
one who created it. How can a student be better than his teacher,
then? Well, many people thought that it was impossible for men to fly,
or to go to the moon, or that a machine will ever play chess better
than men. It is possible, indeed, to create machines more
intellectually capable than a single man. And, there are several ways
to achieve this. For example, a multi expert system can contain
knowledge of many experts of different areas (e.g. González, 1995).
Perhaps it will not know more about a speciality than each expert
which knowledge was used to create the system, but it will have a much
more general vision of a problem because of the knowledge of the other
experts. So, by aggregation of knowledge, a machine might be more
intelligent (and more conscious) than a single human.

If we 'teach'(program) a machine to learn, it could learn its way to
be more intelligent than the ones who 'taught' it to learn, the same
way as a child learns his way to (perhaps) be more intelligent than
his teachers (of course 'one could not send the machine to school
without the other children making excessive fun of it' (Turing,
1950)). This would be learning of knowledge."

http://homepages.vub.ac.be/~cgershen/jlagunez/asia/thesis/1.htm

There may well be a law that declares this. If there is, I don't believe it.

There are those who would say that it is possible for artificial
intelligence to outstrip that of its creators. There are also those
who would go further still and claim that this is inevitable.

You may well find Vernor Vinge's views on the Singularity particularly
interesting. in this respect.

Vernor Vinge on the Singularity
http://www.ugcs.caltech.edu/~phoenix/vinge/vinge-sing.html

Another version, phrased as a question: 

"A fundamental question is: Can man hope (or fear) that he can create
machines which will become more intelligent than he? The traditional
answer of philosophy is that machines, indeed, cannot be more
intelligent than people simply because man is the creator and the
machine the created. They supported this view with the proposition
that only humans have 'original intent' while machines can only have
'derived intent.' Only time will settle this question; but, hopefully,
man still must be the judge."

http://www.umd.umich.edu/dept/armenian/papazian/robots.html

It's also quite possible for AI constructs to become more intelligent
than their creators through emergent properties. Many difficult
problems have been tackled by training neural networks to recognize
patterns by association. Generally, it's not possible to figure out
what general "algorithms" these neural net programs are using to solve
problems assigned to them.

Real world experience with neural net backgammon programs is an
excellent example of this.

Neural net backgammon programs learn to play backgammon by playing
millions of games against themselves, while training neural nets to
predict the probability of winning from given positions. In this
particular case, the author of the program does nothing much other
than to hook the neural network up to the board. After that, the
programs teach themselves.

When first written, these programs outplayed world champions. In fact,
human backgammon theory has been completely rewritten based on lessons
learned from how neural nets work. It's not currently known whether
the best current-generation neural networks are better than
world-class players or not.

Whether they are better at playing backgammon or not, they are
certainly better at playing backgammon that the people who wrote them.

Interestingly, it's really not possible to extract general rules of
strategy for backgammon from the data that these neural net programs
use, other than that the programs learn associatively what winning
positions look like. Interestingly, associative learning is technique
that world class players now use now to study backgammon. Before a
world championship, top players spend several months memorizing
positions and their winning probabilities as assigned by neural
network programs. I spoke with one top player who said that, when
preparing for major tournaments, he would literally papered his walls
with thousands of positions with net-assinged probabilities, and would
browse through them on a daily basis.

Beenthere, if your seeking God`s view on his relationship to us, then
how about Isaiah 55; 6-9. 9 says " For as the heavens are higher than
the earth, so my ways are higher than your ways, and my thoughts than
your thoughts". Men will never know all there is to know about the
things God made. And thats a big list.