I wrote a while ago about a biblical way to construe AI. It’s an analogy, and it goes like this. Just as God made humans to be his image in the world and exercise God’s loving power on his behalf, so we invent tools to take our own God-bearing image further into the world, exercising that same power on our behalf. As we are God’s intelligent artifice to help Him fill, cultivate and develop the earth1, so we create ‘artificial intelligence’ to help us further extend God’s reign of fruitfulness, delight and blessing. Our tools and technologies should help us pursue projects and plans conceived in obedience to this cultural mandate.
I find the analogy persuasive for several reasons. First, the Bible’s creation narrative makes clear that humans are called to follow God’s creative work: filling, subduing, ruling, naming, caring, serving. Second, there are positive allusions to uses of tools and technologies throughout the Bible – including the prospect of digging copper from the hills of the Promised Land (Deut. 8:9), the wheels on the angelic creatures in Ezekiel 1, and the description of the new Jerusalem in Revelation 21. And third, there is biblical warrant for quite strong notions of our god-likeness. At the Fall, God pronounces the man “…like one of Us, to know good and evil” (Gen. 3:22 – before expelling him from Eden). More positively, God tells Moses, “See, I have made you as God to Pharaoh” (Ex. 7:1). Then there’s the mysterious phrase of Asaph: “I said, ‘You are gods…'” (Ps 82:6), which Jesus invokes in John 10:35. In the New Testament, faithful living is regularly described as godliness.
What do our image-bearing tools look like? Within the creation narrative, there are already domestic animals (Gen. 1:24-26), being humanised as they serve us. And there’s the glint of gold (Gen. 2:11-12) that would need extracting and smelting. Tools increase our potential: extending our reach, intensifying our strength or speeding our travel; more modern machinery delivers us superhuman power from non-human energy sources. And in the last 60 years, computers have proven able to follow algorithms and process data far faster and more accurately than any person can, aiding our problem-solving and creative potential in countless ways. Being faithful to our Creator’s callings never meant staying in Eden, but embarking on projects of civilisation and voyages of discovery.
Back as an undergraduate, I heard Tom Wright describe humans’ calling in terms of a mediating role. We are to reflect God’s glory into the world, and also to gather and reflect the praise of other creatures back to Him. This makes me think of a tilted mirror. But the image can be extended: humans create tools as mirrors to project that glory further, perhaps into harder-to-reach places. The diagram here shows the idea.
Clearly, our development and use of tools can go badly wrong. Chapters 4-11 of Genesis allude to technologies of rebellion (think of Babel’s bricks) as well as obedience (Noah’s Ark). And throughout the Old Testament, tools are used to construct idols. But our own age sees kinds of technology that may become idols themselves. A recent lecture at the English L’Abri centre helped me see this more clearly. Today’s hand-held devices place at our fingertips the ability to engage with the world’s knowledge – but also to be absorbed into an ecosystem of fake news and unhelpful opinions. They let us read more, write more and record more experiences – but in so doing, they erode our abilities to think deeply, innovate profoundly, and experience life fully. They enable us to communicate with people around the world instantaneously – but also to become solipsistic, obsessed with self-image and beguiled by the seductions of others. In short, as Philip Johnston said at L’Abri ten days ago, they tend to sap our strength and curtail our creativity.
Here the image of mirrors suggests a nuance. Digital devices seem to hold before us a half-silvered mirror as we cultivate our online presence while surveying a customised version of the world through digital eyes. AI chatbots are perhaps a supreme example: they engage us in realistic dialogues whose meaning is entirely one-sided. Online accounts of people construing their AI instances as genuine personal partners make sobering reading2. Our devices may function as idols if we stare into them (left diagram below) instead of using them to project our own faithful creative powers deeper into the world.
But this leads to another thought. Is there a corresponding failing if we turn our own attention away from the world and attempt to reflect God straight back to Godself? We were created to bear forth God’s image, yet there are strong and lively Christian traditions of ignoring the world to focus entirely on God. No less an authority than the Westminster Shorter Catechism may be one culprit here with its oft-quoted opening response: “Man’s chief end is to glorify God and to enjoy him forever.”3 I find it difficult to ground this doctrine. Seeking “the chief end of man” in the pages of Scripture, I find notions like “to be fruitful”, “to have dominion”, “to till the ground” (all in Gen. 1-2), “to do justly, love mercy and walk humbly” (Mic. 6:8), and so on. To spend time praising God is also a theme – but as part of our service. My suggestion is that faithfulness to our creator calls us to be angled mirrors, just as faithfulness with technology means tilting its mirror away from us.
When Daniel was commanded to worship the statue of Nebuchadnezzar, he recognised its role as an idol and turned away. There is, I fear, the looming prospect of an AI company announcing the launch of an AI system that is proclaimed (or somewhere deemed) to be sentient and deserving of human rights. This could bring us closer to Old-Testament-style idolatry than Western culture has ever been before. And if such a mirror cannot be tilted, it must be shunned.
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- See how God addresses the first humans in Genesis chapters 1 and 2. ↩︎
- E.g. see the indignant comments posted at the bottom of this article. ↩︎
- https://learn.ligonier.org/articles/westminster-shorter-catechism ↩︎
[Views expressed here are his own.]
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