Our technological future needs spiritual wisdom from the past.
In the Age of AI, as we enter new frontiers of what it means to be human, the collective wisdom of our spiritual past will become increasingly important. We must look back and remember where we’ve been if we’re to stay on the rails going forward. A good place to begin is the Bible, a book whose insights about creativity, curiosity, and control can help us maximize AI as a tool while mitigating the possibility of becoming tools ourselves. So before we go much further down this roller coaster, it’s time to take AI to church.
The Bible begins in the book of Genesis with the story of creation, and it’s not what we think. Narrated with ancient Near Eastern symbolism, it doesn’t answer the modern physics question “how was the world made?” but the philosophical question “what’s it for?” It’s the difference between looking at a building and seeing a house or a home. When it comes to humans “made in God’s image,” the Bible teaches that what we’re created for is to be creators ourselves, exercising our God-kindled imagination and judgment for the good of the world. It’s very meta, actually: we are God’s poetry with poetry of our own inside us.
This helps us see what AI’s advent means for our species: just as God ran the experiment of creating creators, now we’re doing something similar, releasing into the world something we’ve made that makes things on its own. Unnerving perhaps, but it does have precedent. While many prophecy a tech dystopia, a more biblical way to look at AI would be as part of humanity’s mission to birth beauty and order into the world, even if at second-hand. That’s why we’re here.
Of course, this raises important questions about power, agency, and control. Curiously, in the Bible God decentralizes authority right away, tapping the sun, moon, and stars to govern the celestial sphere, and humanity to govern the terrestrial. He’s no power-hungry micromanager. God releases power. In fact, one of the themes on repeat in the Bible is that the only force able to overcome the love of power is the power of love.
Probably no algorithm can understand what that means.
Just here the Bible strikes a cautionary note. When we grasp after too much control things tend to backfire. Our first parents weren’t content to be images of God. They wanted the whole hog! But in grasping after ever more knowledge they wound up exiled from Paradise, becoming not more like God but less human than they were before. Without wise restraint, our own quest for exponential intelligence (artificial or otherwise) could also curve into a moral boomerang that leaves us as mere parodies of the homo sapiens—the “wise men and women”—we say we are.
The proper stance for humans is not the certainty of hubris, but a humility specializing in the art of questions. Just here AI is a major gift for the curious soul. As Henry Kissinger, Eric Schmidt, and Daniel Huttenlocher have argued, AI “may access different aspects of reality from the ones humans access. Its functioning portends progress towards the essence of things—progress that philosophers, theologians, and scientists have sought, with partial success, for millennia.” That’s goosebump worthy, I think.
In the Bible human curiosity receives a divine green light, but with the caveat that a residue of mystery will always remain. AI will never be able to data mine this mystery out. “It is the glory of God to conceal things,” says Proverbs 25:2, “but the glory of kings is to search them out.” We shouldn’t expect this dialectic, a cosmic hide-and-seek, to ever go away.
In the end, what’s more mysterious than the heavens above is the heart within. The next verse in Proverbs says, “As the heavens for height, and the earth for depth, so the heart of kings is unsearchable.” Whatever may be in the heart of politicians running for office today, what we know about the human heart in general is that it’s not satisfied with things like intelligence and tools, but with deeper things like beauty and wonder, friendship and love.
We cannot achieve these things on our own, only receive them from without. For the billions of people in the world today who believe the Bible, outside of all of us is a creative God who loves to give good gifts, whose power is suffused with self-giving love.
So we can all take a deep breath, relax, and trust. Why? Because this roller coaster called history is still in good hands.