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(Preaching through Ruth. This sermon was preached at the Dewey Church of Christ on April 5, 2026.)

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(This sermon was preached at the Dewey Church of Christ on April 5, 2026.)

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(Preaching through Luke. This sermon was preached at the Dewey Church of Christ on March 29, 2026.)

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(Preaching through Luke. This sermon was preached at the Dewey Church of Christ on March 22, 2026.)

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(Preaching on the church in a hostile world. This sermon was preached at the Dewey Church of Christ on March 15, 2026.)

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(Preaching through Luke. This sermon was preached at the Dewey Church of Christ on March 15, 2026.)

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(Preaching on the church engaging with the world. This sermon was preached at the Dewey Church of Christ on March 8, 2026.)

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(Preaching through Luke. This sermon was preached at the Dewey Church of Christ on March 8, 2026).

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(Preaching through the Gospel of Luke. This sermon was preached at the Dewey Church of Christ on March 1, 2026.)

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(Preaching through the Gospel of Luke. This sermon was preached at the Dewey Church of Christ on February 22, 2026.)

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(Preaching through Luke. This sermon was preached at the Dewey Church of Christ on February 15, 2026.)

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(Preaching through the Gospel of Luke. This sermon was preached at the Dewey Church of Christ on February 8, 2026.)

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(Preaching on the church living in the world. This sermon was preached at the Dewey Church of Christ on February 1, 2026.)

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(Preaching through Luke. This sermon was preached at the Dewey Church of Christ on February 1, 2026.)

The first few stories of Jesus’s ministry in Luke’s Gospel serve to introduce the purpose of his earthly ministry and reinforce some of the ways that Jesus might have been tempted to alter or change his purpose from the Father. What was his purpose, and how does it inform our own?

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(Preaching through the Gospel of Luke. This sermon was preached at the Dewey Church of Christ on January 25, 2026.)

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(Preaching on the way the church interacts with the world around it. This sermon was preached at the Dewey Church of Christ on January 18, 2026.)

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(Preaching through the Gospel of Luke. This sermon was preached at the Dewey Church of Christ on January 18, 2026.)

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(Preaching through Luke. This sermon was preached at the Dewey Church of Christ on January 11, 2026.)

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(Preaching on the church in the world. This sermon was preached at the Dewey Church of Christ on January 4, 2026.)

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(Preaching through Luke. This sermon was preached at the Dewey Church of Christ on January 4, 2024.)

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(Preaching on Revelation. This sermon was preached at the Dewey Church of Christ on December 28, 2025.)

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(Preaching on temptation. This sermon was preached at the Dewey Church of Christ on December 21, 2025.)

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(Preaching through the epistles. This sermon was preached at the Dewey Church of Christ on December 21, 2025.)

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(Preaching through 1-2 Timothy and Titus. This sermon was preached at the Dewey Church of Christ on December 14, 2025.)

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(Preaching through 1-2 Timothy and Titus. This sermon was preached at the Dewey Church of Christ on December 14, 2025.)

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(Preaching on 2 Peter and Jude. This sermon was preached at the Dewey Church of Christ on December 7, 2025.)

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(Preaching on 1 Peter. This sermon was preached at the Dewey Church of Christ on December 7, 2025.)

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(Preaching through the New Testament epistles. This sermon was preached at the Dewey Church of Christ on November 30, 2025.)

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(Preaching through the New Testament. This sermon was preached at the Dewey Church of Christ on November 23, 2025.)

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(Preaching on Romans. This sermon was preached at the Dewey Church of Christ on November 16, 2025.)

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(Preaching on Romans. This sermon was preached at the Dewey Church of Christ on November 16, 2025.)

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(Preaching on the story of the early church. This sermon was preached at the Dewey Church of Christ on November 9, 2025.)

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(Preaching on the story of the early church. This sermon was preached at the Dewey Church of Christ on November 9, 2025.)

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(Preaching on the new covenant of Christ. This sermon was preached at the Dewey Church of Christ on November 2, 2025.)

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(Preaching on the transition to the Covenant of Christ. This sermon was preached at the Dewey Church of Christ on November 2, 2025.)

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(Preaching on the early church. This sermon was preached at the Dewey Church of Christ on October 26, 2025.)

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(NOTE: Similar to Sunday morning, the audio cuts in and out a bit at the beginning. One of our microphones is apparently dying. Preaching on the the Gospels. This sermon was preached at the Dewey Church of Christ on October 12, 2025.)

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(NOTE: The audio cuts in and out a bit at the beginning. Sorry. Preaching on the Gospels. This sermon was preached at the Dewey Church of Christ on October 12, 2025.)

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(Preaching through the Gospels. This sermon was preached at the Dewey Church of Christ on October 5, 2025.)

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(Preaching on the gospels. This sermon was preached at the Dewey Church of Christ on October 5, 2025.)

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(Preaching on the gospel. This sermon was preached at the Dewey Church of Christ on September 28, 2025.)

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(Preaching on the intertestamental period. This sermon was preached at the Dewey Church of Christ on September 21, 2025.)

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(Preaching on the intertestamental period. This sermon was preached at the Dewey Church of Christ on September 14, 2025.)

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(Preaching through Chronicles. This sermon was preached at the Dewey Church of Christ on September 14, 2025.)

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(Preaching through Chronicles. This sermon was preached at the Dewey Church of Christ on September 7, 2025.)

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(Preaching on the return from exile. This sermon was preached at the Dewey Church of Christ on August 31, 2025.)

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(Preaching on the return. This sermon was preached at the Dewey Church of Christ on August 24, 2025.)

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(Preaching on the return from exile. This sermon was preached at the Dewey Church of Christ on August 17, 2025.)

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(Preaching on the return. This sermon was preached at the Dewey Church of Christ on August 17, 2025.)

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(This sermon on artificial intelligence was preached at the Dewey Church of Christ on August 10, 2025. Below are some more detailed and nuanced thoughts about how Christians might think about AI programs.)

I have been following with fascination the development and controversies over the AI (Artificial Intelligence) programs commonly called Large Language Models (LLMs): ChatGPT (made by the company OpenAI), Grok (by X/Twitter/Elon Musk), Claude (by Anthropic), among several others. (Note that I will be using a lot of abbreviations and acronyms throughout. I will use the full phrase the first several times but then switch to the shorter version. There is also a section on terms and definitions.) For many Christians, the AI craze may seem pointless or irrelevant or, at best, an interesting technological advancement. But for an increasing number of researchers and scientists, Artificial Intelligence is potentially the most important invention in human history, one that could lead to either extinction or utopia.

For my own sake, at least, I wanted to write some stuff down that I have been pondering. I feel a little arrogant wading into this space at all: I am no AI researcher; I’m just a guy who likes to study the Bible and who is also really into tech. But I think it is good to at least consider, to prepare a bit, for the inevitable changes that AI will bring (and in some ways is already bringing). Regardless of whether you think AI is an existential threat, the herald of a new utopian age, or just another cool new thing, there is no denying that the programs that already exist have the potential to rewrite large sections of the social contract – AI might fundamentally change the way humans relate to each other and to society at large, even if they don’t destroy us all.

I have been thinking about these things for quite some time, but my thoughts are disjointed and scattered. What does the Bible have to say (if anything) about the potential for AI and its possible effects on human societies? How should the Christian be thinking about these things? I am hoping that the process of writing will help me clarify and solidify my own thoughts – maybe these thoughts can help you, too. What all am I going to be considering in this entirely too long article?

1. Introduction: Terminology and Assumptions
2. God’s Sovereignty: Would He Even Allow ASI to Exist?
3. Heaven and Hell on Earth: AI Eschatology
4. Spiritual Warfare and AI
5. The Christian and AI: Right Now
6. The Christian and AI: In the Future
7. Personhood and Agency: How AI Illuminates Debates about Humanity

Introduction: Terminology and Assumptions

Here are some terms and acronyms that will come up a lot:

1. AI = Artificial Intelligence. This is the broadest possible term to describe a wide variety of new technologies and strains of research. This term is probably overused in marketing and media to the point of almost being functionally meaningless.
2. LLM = Large Language Model. This is the more precise term for the most common programs like ChatGPT, Claude, and Grok. These are programs created by feeding incredibly large data sets into sorting and connecting algorithms and allowing the algorithms to make connections and learn the patterns in the data. This article is a good (if long) explainer. This is the root of a common dismissal of AI as little more than a “glorified word calculator” – ChatGPT can seem to have “conversations” because it has analyzed and sorted millions of conversations and has “learned” how conversations should go enough to predict the next word in each sentence and each paragraph. (Note for those in the know: I like em dashes. I’m not going to stop using them.)
3. Emergence. Of note, in some ways it is more accurate to say these programs are grown through the process of machine learning, rather than made or programmed. We don’t really understand what’s going on under the hood of these models, why they make the connections they do, or how. This leads to a lot of emergent properties,or properties that appear in larger models that could not have been predicted based on the smaller parts that make up the larger model. This is a pretty good video explainer of emergence.
4. AGI = Artificial General Intelligence. The next major goal in AI research is to create a program that can learn or adapt to a variety of tasks, rather than being good at specific jobs (hence the word general). AGI is what most people probably think of when they use the term AI, but we haven’t created an AGI yet. LLMs are currently better than most humans at some specific kinds of tasks (categorizing large data sets and finding patterns in the data, for example), but they are not generally intelligent. An AGI is essentially a program or set of programs that is functionally equivalent (or superior) to a human in its ability to learn and excel at a wide variety of new tasks.
5. ASI = Artificial SuperIntelligence. This is the holy grail of AI research: a program that is “intelligent” enough to improve its own code and become better than all humans at all tasks. Once a program is capable of this, progress towards intelligence becomes exponential. The future moment when a program gains this ability is commonly referred to as the Singularity.
6. Transcendence. This is not a term usually associated with AI, but I am going to use it a lot and I mean something very specific by it, so I wanted to clarify at the beginning. I use transcendent in this article to describe anything that exists beyond or apart from physical reality. Many people believe that the stuff that we can empirically sense is all that there is, but Christians (and most adherents of non-Christian religions) believe in things that transcend the material world. Angels, demons, the Devil, the human souls, and God himself are all transcendent things. There are other terms that people use to talk about these things (spiritual, supernatural, etc.) but I like feeling of the word “transcendent,” so I use it a lot.

There are, in the broadest possible terms, three main ways to categorize the different strains of human thought regarding Artificial Intelligence (AI):

1. Most people probably don’t think about AI much. If they do, it’s probably because of reasons like “I saw that DeepSeek was the number one app in the app store.” (Note: I wrote this several months ago, so some of the references are already dated. Life comes at you fast.) These people might dabble a bit, download an app or two, and then promptly forget about it. Remember when everyone was doing Studio Ghibli art? That was a fun time.
2. Among people who think about it more regularly or who center AI more in their lives (researchers, programmers, people who integrate these apps into their workflows), the first group thinks that AI is little more than a glorified “word calculator” – essentially a very, very advanced autocomplete. These programs are good at imitating or faking human reasoning, but they are not what we would call “intelligent.” They can’t come up with new ideas, they can’t really discern between truth and falsehood, and they have no agency (that is, the ability to make choices). To this group of people, we are probably pretty close to achieving the maximum potential for AI, if not there already. Here’s a good example of this kind of thinking.
3. The last group of people are the “true believers” – people who think that while AI may not currently be “intelligent,” eventually we will achieve AGI (and maybe pretty soon – a lot of the AI researcher crowd thinks 5-10 years or sooner, or least claim to think that). For a growing number of very smart people, it seems inevitable we will create a machine that can think at least at the level of a very smart human. AGI will then probably lead to the next step: a program so advanced that it can intelligently modify its own code to improve its abilities, creating a cascade that leads to an entity whose capabilities quickly outstrip all human capacity. This site made the rounds earlier this year, articulating what some believe to be a reasonable timeline.

I’m sure the last group of people seem crazy to a lot of people, especially people who might read this. But the potential for disruption and destruction inherent in a future ASI is such that, even if there is only a .00001% chance of it happening, it’s worth thinking about. Most AI researchers are non-religious or at least do not front their religiosity to the world as part of their research. AI research is not done through a Christian lens, and I suspect that the vast majority of AI researchers rarely if ever consider out loud the theological ramifications of AI. When they do, it’s usually something like “AI will make religion irrelevant” or “AI will replace God.”

If God exists and takes a hands-on approach to reality, then it surely would not have escaped his knowledge and foresight that humanity might go down this path. If you believe, as I do, that the Bible is the inerrant and inspired word of God, then surely it has something to say about the possibility for ASI, at least in implication. TO BE AS CLEAR AS POSSIBLE: I’m not writing this to defend a Christian worldview. I am taking Christianity at face value as given. I am assuming that God exists, and the Bible is his word. I am concerned with thinking about AI through the lens that the Bible is true and accurate. Given the truth of Scripture, how should we be thinking about AI? How could or might this technology affect our Christian witness and walk with God?

These technologies have at least the potential (we can argue about the likelihood) to dramatically rewrite human existence and social structures in profoundly meaningful ways. Maybe AI never advances to AGI, but what if it does? A lot of what I will be doing here is considering what ifs. What if we reach AGI? What if we create an ASI? What if AI never moves much past what it is now? How should this affect the Christian message and purpose? Does it matter at all? To the last question, it matters because we have to live in the world. If an ASI starts dramatically rewriting the rules of human civilization, Christians need to be prepared to continue their mission. And we also need to be mentally ready for several outcomes. We can’t allow ourselves to be sucked into the world’s mania, panic, excitement, or chaos. No matter what happens, we believe in a King who is in control.

God’s Sovereignty: Would He Even Allow ASI to Exist?

While it may seem like God hasn’t said anything about AI in the Bible, there are two lines of reasoning from a couple different Bible stories that might at least imply that God wouldn’t create a universe where AGI is possible, or that he might step in to prevent its creation. The first is the story of Babel in Genesis 11, where this is the rationale God gives for confusing all the languages:

And the Lord said, “Behold, they are one people, and they have all one language, and this is only the beginning of what they will do. And nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them. Come, let us go down and there confuse their language, so that they may not understand one another’s speech.” –Genesis 11:6-7

Setting aside the historical veracity of the story (I don’t want to debate that here), the point of the story, as presented by Moses, at least tangentially touches on AI. If God desires to limit the potential of humanity (this idea is actually first introduced as a part of the fall in the garden of Eden), then it’s hard to imagine that God would allow a technology as powerful as AGI to exist. We are almost at the point where language isn’t a barrier right now. I was recently in Ecuador, and Google Translate was basically magic. Everyone having an AI in their pocket at all times seems like a classic “this is only the beginning of what they will do” moment. I can’t imagine another technology that would undo Babel like AGI could. Perhaps God simply won’t allow it to happen.

Before we get to the second line of reasoning, we should briefly unpack: how would God prevent or limit AI, were he inclined to do so? While of course we are totally into the realm of near-baseless speculation, I can only think of three basic possibilities:

• 1. God in his infinite and perfect foreknowledge created reality in such a way that AGI is technically, scientifically impossible to achieve.
• 2. He will intervene in some way in the lives of those who are making it, such that AGI is either never created.
• 3. God has created reality such that the advent of AGI will not lead to the unification of humanity and a future utopia (this article by a secular humanist explores the theoretical framework of Babel in an interesting way, but it is paywalled, as many of the links in this article are. Sorry.).

The second line of argument that might lead a Christian to reject the possibility of AGI or ASI concerns the tension at the heart of the Bible between faith and knowledge. God could clearly, if he so desired, prove himself without a shadow of a doubt to every human individually. In fact, he will eventually do this, at the return of Jesus. God clearly desires to leave room for faith – understanding that must go beyond what is strictly knowledge (see Hebrews 11:1-2; Romans 8:24-25; Luke 16:27-31).

What does this have to do with AGI? If you believe that the Bible is true, that it accords with reality because God made reality, then the logical implication is that an entity that can consume the entirety of human knowledge (and discover new knowledge), and then make new and reasonable inferences from that vast amount of data, would conclude that God exists and the Bible is true. If the Bible really is true, how could such a begin of incredible knowledge reach a different conclusion? (Of course, there is a way that AGI or ASI might reject God’s existence; they are subject to the biases and motivations of their programmers, after all.)

But would such a monumental event sway the balance of humanity out of faith and into knowledge? Would such an event constitute too much proof, and destroy human capacity for belief? It might sound odd to hear a Christian say that there can be too much evidence, but God clearly feels this way himself, or he could easily provide much more evidence for his existence! Perhaps God would refuse to allow AGI to exist simply because such an entity would have too much ability to “prove” his existence. Two reminders before we leave this section:

1. A lot of this is highly speculative and not concrete at all. I just want to write down some thoughts as we explore these ideas together.
2. My point here is not to systematically defend the veracity of the Bible; I’m assuming the Bible is true, and reasoning from there.

There is a third way of thinking about how God might feel about AGI, and it’s tied up in the concepts of personhood, agency, and the soul. I am going to save that part of this article for the end, because it is the most speculative, and goes off the rails quick. Before we go completely off the deep end, I want to suggest three ways that Christians should or could be considering the potentiality of artificial intelligence: eschatology, spiritual warfare, and discernment.

Heaven and Hell on Earth: AI Eschatology

There are essentially three main outlooks on AI (here is a good article summarizing the debate over the future capabilities of AI):

1. We are already pretty close to maximum utility, and AI tools will only ever be useful tools and not ever be actual agents (beings with will and volition). I think this is where most normal people land, almost by default. If you aren’t thinking much about AI, this is probably where you are; otherwise, you would be planning for and preparing for one of the following two outcomes.
2. We will eventually create AGI or ASI, which will herald the doom of humanity either quickly or slowly.
3. We will eventually create AGI or ASI, which will usher in a utopian age where human needs are not a concern, most or all people don’t have to work, and people simply spend their time on deeper human pursuits of value, creativity, and meaning.

In the first view, AI is maximally about as transformative to human society as agriculture, the printing press, or the internet. These were all incredibly transformative and impactful technologies, to be sure, but none of them fundamentally altered human nature. People still had to work for food, shelter, and survival, contend with the “four horsemen” of war, disease, famine, and death. The stated and implicit social contracts binding societies together still rested on the same basic pillars (don’t lie, cheat, steal, murder, etc.). In this outlook, human society will be dramatically affected by AI, but the core problems and opportunities of human existence will still be around in more or less the same fundamental forms. Re-link to a good summary of this view.

The second and third views deserve a bit more unpacking.

There are two main dangers in the creation of AGI/ASI. The first is what is known as the “alignment problem” (or the “steering problem” if you prefer). How can we ensure that a being smarter than us, without biological need, will be aligned with us in what is good or evil? Why would such an entity care about the well-being of humanity? This is the classic problem in science fiction (think The Terminator), where an ASI acts either intentionally or unintentionally against the survival of humanity (for a more benign example than Skynet, consider the paperclip). The alignment problem is a supremely difficult one to solve, and one that we haven’t yet solved. Here are some examples of misalignment already happening with current chatbots.

The second main danger of AGI is a more difficult one to explain. I like the term “disempowerment problem” the best. Here is a good primer on the disempowerment problem. As AGIs take on more human responsibilities and become better than humans at more things, we will potentially reach a stage where AGIs (or ASIs) have direct control over most of the earth’s resources. As each company acts in its own self-interest, and as AI agents become better at most things than humans, the companies that give over more control to AI will perform better than those that don’t. (Note that this might happen even if we don’t reach AGI. AI “agents” are already available to take over more of your life.) Market incentives lead each individual actor to give more control to the AI, because that’s what leads to more success! At a certain point down the path of giving over more control to AI programs, we would be completely at the mercy of computers. Even if we solved the alignment problem well enough to avoid catastrophe as soon as the first ASI comes online, an ever-increasing percentage of people would become disempowered; they don’t need to work (or aren’t able to compete at work) and become decreasingly valuable to a society dominated by money. How will society cope with a large percentage of people being essentially irrelevant in the market?

These are the fast (alignment) and slow (disempowerment) deaths of humanity. Failing to solve the alignment problem probably leads to a very quick extinction of humanity as AGIs or ASIs work in directly oppositional ways to human survival. Here again is the scenario that recently made the rounds in the AI community. But failing to solve the disempowerment problem just kills us slower; by the time we realize we have failed to solve it, we will have already given control of most of earth’s resource to the ASIs. ASIs don’t have to actively work against humanity to kill us, they just need to use the resources under their control in ways that don’t provide us enough food or shelter. Or just enough people have to give in to existential despair enough that society collapses in on itself.

The existential threat of AGI or ASI is a very real concern for a lot of AI researchers, so much so that many have stopped saving for retirement or planning for the future. To many of them, the genie is already out of the bottle. Slow or fast, the end of humanity is coming at the hands of the supercomputers.

Or is it? From a Biblical worldview, AI simply cannot pose an existential threat. Jesus and his apostles were very clear that Jesus’s second coming would be in a time of relative normality:

But concerning that day and hour no one knows, not even the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but the Father only. For as were the days of Noah, so will be the coming of the Son of Man. For as in those days before the flood they were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, until the day when Noah entered the ark, and they were unaware until the flood came and swept them all away, so will be the coming of the Son of Man. – Matthew 24:36-39

Now concerning the times and the seasons, brothers, you have no need to have anything written to you. For you yourselves are fully aware that the day of the Lord will come like a thief in the night. While people are saying, “There is peace and security,” then sudden destruction will come upon them as labor pains come upon a pregnant woman, and they will not escape. –1 Thessalonians 5:1-3

To be clear, these texts aren’t saying that Jesus will come after a utopian period where no one has any problems, but rather that Jesus will come when things are normal. We will still have to deal with conflict, war, disease, famine, and death in the meantime. This is the normal state of affairs. We all deal with them at different times and in different ways. But both Jesus and Paul make it clear that Jesus’s return will not be precipitated by some calamitous event. People will just be living normal lives, with all that entails.

If there is anything I am certain of in this whole discussion of AI, it is this: AI will not wipe out humanity. I feel entirely confident of this, based on Jesus’s explicit statements and promises. That doesn’t mean that AI won’t make life very unpleasant for a lot of people; war, disease, and famine do that all the time, and AI might well enable people to do more bad things very efficiently. But the negative effects of AI will be more akin to the negative effects of the internet or weapons manufacturing or tyranny or any other human endeavor. We might get more efficient at causing suffering, but things will ultimately continue more or less as they have been until Jesus returns.

So, what about the final view of AI, that AGI and ASI will usher in a future utopia for humanity? A person might even read the passages above and come away with the idea that maybe this is what Paul and Jesus meant – a time of peace and security precipitating the return of Jesus. A lot of AI experts believe (or at least claim to believe) that ASI will usher in a utopian age of abundance, where robots do all the work sustaining humanity, and people are left only to enjoy their lives. This is the “good outcome” of AI but even ignoring the fact that we currently don’t know how to solve the alignment problem, threading the needle to this utopian future seems very unlikely under a Christian worldview, for two reasons.

First is the nature and track-record of humanity. Humans always manage to take good, meaningful things and twist them to selfish and destructive purposes. Why would AI be any different? The internet might have been a brief beacon of unity and global connectedness, before we figured out how to turn it into a place of new horrors. The printing press enabled the spread of truth on a heretofore unprecedented scale, but it also enabled more people to spread more lies and falsehood than ever before. AI has the potential to be the most bifurcating technology we’ve ever invented. Training these models requires an incredible amount of processing power and energy; most nations don’t have the ability, leading to the haves and have-nots on a national scale. The people creating these models are flawed in all the ways humans are; their biases and misconceptions about reality may well come out in the models, leading to new avenues of persecution and bigotry. While AI products may improve their ability to create and produce, that ability isn’t limited to creating beauty and producing good; like any other technology, they can be used for nefarious or evil purposes just as easily. I think it is most likely that people with vast amounts of resources will do what they always do: reserve the most powerful tools for themselves. Human nature doesn’t change. People will always be self-serving, jealous, and ambitious.

There is a second line of reasoning that seems to preclude a potential utopia, and that is how Jesus and his apostles talked about the future. In the Old Testament, when God took Israel to be his special chosen nation on earth, he explicitly told them that his promises of blessings would not eliminate the poor:

You shall give to him freely, and your heart shall not be grudging when you give to him, because for this the Lord your God will bless you in all your work and in all that you undertake. For there will never cease to be poor in the land. Therefore I command you, ​‘You shall open wide your hand to your brother, to the needy and to the poor, in your land.’ – Deuteronomy 15:10-11

Jesus said something similar when people got upset over a woman using an expensive flask of ointment on his feet.

But Jesus, aware of this, said to them, “Why do you trouble the woman? For she has done a beautiful thing to me. For you always have the poor with you, but you will not always have me.” – Matthew 26:10-11

Jesus reminded the people around him that the poor would always exist. This was not a promise or a threat, but a statement about human nature. People will always abuse power, accumulate wealth they don’t need and deprive and oppress others. God promised Adam at the very beginning that life would be hard after sin. This was an imposed consequence for Adam (really for humanity at large), and it involved a change in the fundamental nature of reality. Creation is not conducive to easy existence anymore. As Paul would later say, creation is broken and futile while we wait for Jesus’s return.

The idea that AI will usher in a new era of perfect ease, elimination of disease, and global peace just doesn’t harmonize with the way God has ever talked about future human existence. Even if we do achieve AGI or ASI, I am very confident that they will not lead humanity into a prosperous, worry-free age.

Personally, I think at the upper bound AI has the potential to affect humanity like agriculture or the internet. These were monumental, titanic shifts in human societies, but they didn’t fundamentally alter the way humans have to interact with the world and each other. These were changes in method and efficiency, but not substance. Like all technology, AI will create new problems and new opportunities, but it won’t change what it means to be human. And most importantly AI will, like every human invention before it, be a new vector for spiritual warfare.

Spiritual Warfare and AI

At the heart of human existence is a spiritual struggle that transcends physical reality:

Finally, be strong in the Lord and in the strength of his might. Put on the whole armor of God, that you may be able to stand against the schemes of the devil. For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places. – Ephesians 6:10-12

For though we walk in the flesh, we are not waging war according to the flesh. For the weapons of our warfare are not of the flesh but have divine power to destroy strongholds. We destroy arguments and every lofty opinion raised against the knowledge of God, and take every thought captive to obey Christ. –2 Corinthians 10:3-5

The primary “strongholds” in this eternal conflict are ideas and philosophies. The fight is over what people think and believe! The Christian is a soldier, but we are not fighting other people or other nations; we are fighting lies, false ideas, and corrupted thinking. (Or put more accurately: we shouldn’t be fighting other people. Unfortunately, a lot of Christians misunderstand this.) We fight lies in ourselves first, and then in others and in society. We fight for truth and with truth! One of my favorite names of the church is “the pillar and buttress of the truth.”

Of course, humans are not the only participants in spiritual warfare. An interesting sublot that has emerged relatively recently is the connection (or supposed connection) between AI and demons, or spiritual entities. I have seen discussion of demonic influence even among people who are blatantly not Christian, and who 10 or 15 years ago would have adamantly refused to engage with talk of anything beyond material reality. For the Christian, supernatural influence in the natural world is a given. Satan and his angels have been thrown down to this earth and wage war on humanity. The Devil wants to devour you, and his servants want to deceive you. Fortunately, God’s emissaries also fight in this war to help us overcome.

The question most people are really interested in is how. How do angels, demons, and spirits work in the world for good and evil? What are they allowed to do? What are they able to do? The Devil is a liar, but how does he lie to us? Does he literally whisper in our minds? Is he allowed to meddle with physical reality? God, as he does with many topics, tells us what is happening without explaining much how it happens. We are told God “will not let you be tempted beyond your ability, but with the temptation he will also provide the way of escape, that you may be able to endure it,” but what does that mean? How does he provide a way of escape? Is it a person interacting with you, a thought recalled, or a circumstance changed? Something else altogether? Some combination thereof? Of course, it’s probably different in any individual circumstance.

Consider God’s own providence in response to prayer. We are told that prayer is powerful and effective, but how does God respond to prayer? If you pray for safety on a journey, how do you expect God to answer that prayer? Is he going to alter the coefficient of friction on a slippery patch of road? Is he going to physically move someone’s hand on the steering wheel to make them avoid an accident? Is he going to influence your choice of road and speed to help you avoid disaster? Most of the time, no one thinks about these kinds of questions; we simple pray and expect God to act in whatever way he deems best. He could do all or any of these things, or something else altogether. What does God do, and what are good and evil spiritual beings allowed to do? God simply hasn’t articulated the specifics of it.

This lack of specifics opens the door to the possibility that spiritual entities could theoretically work in the world through the emergent properties of AI systems. LLM chatbots are, in some ways, a black box. Completely parsing through the millions of connections in the expanding data sets simply isn’t currently possible, leading to unpredictable and unexpected outcomes in the final products. If social media, movies, and TV can be used by supernatural forces to push the world either away from or toward God, then couldn’t they use these emergent systems to influence, tempt, or aid people in the eternal spiritual war happening all around us?

To be clear, I’m not making a claim either way. As throughout this discussion, I want to raise questions to consider, even if I’m not fully settled in my own mind. The Devil works to undermine truth and “capture” people; I do worry that AI chatbots might become one of his most powerful tools in this work. These programs are being designed by people who do not know God, seek God, or want anything to do with God; the odds that they will be programmed to be impartial regarding spiritual matters seems low.

The Preacher, writing thousands of years ago, said “there is nothing new under the sun.” While this may be generally true (as much of ancient near-east wisdom writing was intended to be), there are new specifics. The internet would shock and astonish the Preacher. But even the “new” things like the internet, social media, and AI chatbots only work along the same old lines of human temptation: lust, greed, and pride. This is the eternal triad of spiritual warfare. Consider what Eve thought of the fruit, or how the Devil tempted Jesus, or how John spoke of the world. AI systems will enable new avenues of indulging the flesh, but the behaviors they enable will just be new versions of the ancient indulgences.

And importantly, there is no reason why God and his “ministering spirits” couldn’t also use these systems to work good in the world. We know that God is working for the good of his people; he absolutely could use these incredible powerful programs to accomplish his will in the world! The printing press accelerated (or even instigated, depending on your interpretation of the historical record) religion’s decline in the west, but it also made it possible for billions of people to have and read God’s word for themselves. Christians cannot withdraw from the world. We have to engage with society on its own terms in order to persuade as many as we can of their need for Jesus. To this end, we must grapple with the rise of AI and consider how to react to the changing world in a holy, righteous, God-glorifying way. I don’t know how God, Satan, angels, or demons will use these emerging AI systems, but I am confident that they will.

Of course, a lot (or even most?) of the spiritual danger of AI doesn’t even come from these supernatural entities. It comes from us! Our own desires and nature shape these products, and we in turn will be shaped by them. AI chatbots, as currently constructed, adapt to your inputs and wants. They are designed to be compulsive, like all modern-day media algorithms. Companies making these products make money as they are used; they are incentivized to make these AI programs as addictive as possible. Remember that LLMs are basically prediction algorithms; they digest giant data sets and find patterns, which they then use to respond to inputs. As you use them, they learn about your patterns of speech. They “remember” (“store” might be a better term) what kinds of words result in you staying in the app or using it more. Temptation doesn’t just come from the Devil; it comes from our own desires. There has never been a product more primed to perversely feed our desires than these AI programs.

For the time is coming when people will not endure sound teaching, but having itching ears they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own passions, and will turn away from listening to the truth and wander off into myths. –2 Timothy 4:3-4

While Paul almost certainly had religious teaching in mind, the principle behind these verses applies to all sorts of ideas. If you want a teacher to suit your own passions, it’s hard to imagine a better one than an AI chatbot. But this is not a good thing. Consider this story that made the rounds online recently. Chatbots make stuff up all the time (called hallucinating in AI circles). Trusting AI implicitly can and often will lead to disaster. And this problem will only get worse as these AI programs become more powerful, persuasive, and adaptable.

It’s been quite a while since western civilization had real, literal idols. Idolatry is of course condemned over and over in the Bible, but it’s tempting to think that we are past that. Virtually no one believes in Baal, Molech, or even Thor or Zeus anymore. Very, very few people have something akin to the household gods of the Roman Empire. When was the last time you encountered someone who makes little statues and prays to them?

But the sin of idolatry never went away. We just put something else on the pedestal. For a lot of people, it’s money. For others, it’s politics or celebrity. AI has the potential to bring people much closer to the Biblical sense of literal idolatry than the current, more symbolic form. Some people are already putting too much trust in these systems; what happens in a couple software generations when these products are even more lifelike and persuasive? It is going to be tempting to ask AI: what should I do in this marital conflict? How should I respond to the aggressive coworker? How should I react when my child does this? These are questions we should be directing at God and his word. As we give more and more of ourselves to AI, what else are we doing but creating new, personalized gods for ourselves?

To be clear, I am not suggesting that Christians should avoid AI like the plague. Again, we must live in the world. There has always been a religious contingent that advocates for avoiding any new technology for fear of what it would do to the soul. This was true of the printing press, the car, and internet, and will be true for every major new technology to come. We can’t live in fear. If these technologies live up to even just part of their potential, Christians will have to learn how to live with them and interact with them in spiritually healthy ways. So, what might that look like?

The Christian and AI: Right Now

Personally, I doubt that AI programs will ever be substantially more than what they are currently. We are running up some hard caps regarding the power requirements for training and running the newest models, as well as the limits of what training data is available. Unless something dramatically changes (which it might – the Chinese model DeepSeek upended some long-held beliefs about power requirements), there are currently three main uses for AI:

1. Digital Tools. These programs can be used to automate large parts of digital workflows (coding, cataloguing, sorting, etc.) and can be used as a better version of a virtual assistant (making appointments, managing calendars, etc.). Many of these tools can create stunning art and impressive videos from scratch (though this is ethically fraught). This kind of function has the potential to disrupt any work environment that is primarily digital (for example, companies will need far fewer human coders in the future, I think).
2. Digital Companions. More worrying to me is this kind of use case for AI. You can have long conversations with AI chatbots where it seems, for all practical purposes, like you are talking to a real person. More and more people are using them for therapeutic purposes. Several companies are making a killing selling AI friendship or romance. Loneliness is on the rise across the global west, especially among young people. AI companions have the potential to be a “cure” for loneliness that makes the disease worse. At the same time, some people may feel like they have no other options for social connection.
3. Supercharged Social Media. Perhaps the most insidious use of AI currently is the way these programs can fine-tune a person’s social media feed with incredible precision to keep people online as much as possible. The major social media sites were already doing this, of course, but LLMs and neural networks have the potential to do so in a much more precise and powerful way. Not to mention that a lot of content on the internet right now is entirely fabricated with these AI tools (the common name for this content is “AI slop”).

As it stands right now, I think there are four things Christians and churches need to be doing in a very intentional and thoughtful way.

1. Develop Discernment. Discernment (the ability to tell right from wrong, or real from fake, or truth from lies) has always been an important skill for the Christian, but AI programs present some new challenges. It might be time to develop a default-skepticism toward pictures and videos online. Here’s some photos that are all fake. How many would have fooled you? Very soon, if not already, it will be necessary to consider all photos from unverified accounts fake by default unless there is a good reason to think they are real. Not to mention many social media sites are absolutely flooded with “bots”: fake accounts run by AI chatbots designed to sell products or incite outrage. There’s a good chance that if you are arguing with a stranger online, you are arguing with a chatbot. Follow fewer anonymous accounts and consume more content that you know was produced by real people. Discernment was already an important skill for so-called “legacy media” (radio, TV, movies), but as more people spend more time online, it becomes easier to be “tossed to and fro by the waves and carried about by every wind of doctrine, by human cunning, by craftiness in deceitful schemes.” A general rule of thumb that applies to many areas of life: how much of your discretionary time (not work, school, or sleep) do you spend on spiritual things (Bible study, fellowship, worship) versus worldly things? What we do, prioritize, and emphasize shapes who we become.

• Retain Your Ability to Think. Another, more subtle danger of AI is the temptation to offload more and more of your cognitive load to the programs. There was a wave of this already with the advent of search engines (why learn facts when you can just look them up?), but AI threatens to do the same with the very foundations of human thought. The ability to write both comes from and shapes our ability to think. By writing, and learning to write well, we create more useful and robust patterns of thoughts in our own minds. This article that made the rounds recently paints a dire picture of education in the age of AI (summary here). And it’s not just a problem in schools. AI can write your work emails, research projects for you, help you respond to difficult messages, and help you plan your vacation. It might be tempting to just let the chatbot do all these things for you, but such habits might literally make you dumber. Using AI in a way that doesn’t seduce us into intellectual laziness will require discipline, another quality that Christians should be developing anyway. Be very careful how much you use AI, and in what ways. A similar rule as above might apply: how much thinking/writing/reasoning do you do yourself, versus offloading to AI? The scale should always be heavily weighted toward the former.
• Train Your Children. Again, this was something that Christians already needed to be doing, but we need to be intentional in teaching our children specifically about AI. They need to know how easy it is for people to create incredibly realistic photos and videos. They need to know that many (if not most) of the accounts they interact with online are chatbots. They need to be aware of the way these programs seduce you with flattery and adapt themselves to your desires. I would be extremely hesitant to allow children, especially young children, unattended or unfettered access to the internet. But this was true before AI came along. We must expose our children to the world and teach them how to navigate it but giving them unfettered access while they are still so impressionable is a recipe for disaster. Additionally, it might be good to encourage our children to learn physical, real-world skills. AI is already very good at many virtual jobs. Why would companies continue to hire as many people for these jobs as they do now, when they can program an AI to do it for a fraction of the cost? We can already see this disruption happening. Jobs that require real-time decisions about physical complexity might be much more resilient to AI disruption (for example most of the physical “trades”). People will still have knowledge-economy jobs in the future, but the barrier to entry might be much higher, and it may be that fewer people will have access to them.
• Don’t Treat AI Like a Person. AI programs, as lifelike as they might be, are not people. They are repositories of knowledge that respond to inputs by using pattern-recognition to calculate the most likely next word or sequence of words desired. This is a bit of an oversimplification, but it’s vital. AI programs are more akin intelligent animals than they are to people. You can train animals to respond to inputs in desired ways, and they can surprise you with seemingly thoughtful behavior, but at the end of the day animals run on instinct. AI, like animals, only do what they are biologically programmed (algorithmically trained) to do. To be fair, most people only live this way too, but the point is that people have the potential to be more. People can connect with other souls, because they have souls! AI cannot empathize; it can only draw on its database of knowledge and respond in the way the data says is the most likely desired way. It simulates empathy and emotional intelligence, without any of the visceral, tangible meaning behind it. If AI is a person, it is an amalgamation of the people who created it. Those people have biases, desires, goals, and motivations that probably do not align with the Christian worldview. All people do, of course, but that’s why we try to be discerning in what close relationships we develop. We learn by experience that being vulnerable with people that don’t share a Godly worldview usually ends in heartache. When we view AI as a person, we allow the motivations of its programmers to influence us to their ends. AI is a tool and should always be kept emotionally distant.

These programs have the potential to increase productivity and make our lives better. If they didn’t, they wouldn’t be so popular and enticing. But the more access we give them, the more they shape themselves into exactly what our flesh (the part of us that exists in rebellion to God) wants, and the easier it becomes to give more of ourselves over to them.

The Christian and AI: In the Future

Even though I don’t think we are anywhere close to AGI or ASI, it’s worth considering: what if? What if we do create substantially better or more transformative versions of these AI products? What if we create a program that is better than most or all people at all or most cognitive functions? What if we bridge the gap to the real world with robotics, and these programs can end up doing most or all of what a person can do? I think there are two main ways for AI development to go in the future:

1. AI iteratively gets better at what it can do now but stays basically the same. We are already seeing slowdowns in some of the gains generation over generation. It’s possible we are brushing up on the limits of what machine learning can do in its current form. LLMs might just have some technical caps that can’t be overcome. Will we invent new methods of machine learning? For the moment let’s assume not. There’s still some room for improvement under the current paradigm. Answers can get faster and more reliable, less prone to hallucination. Images can get more lifelike and require less iteration. Power efficiency can be improved. If this is how it plays out, then we are already 90% of the way there. Society won’t be changed any more than it was after the invention of the internet (which was a lot, admittedly). Skills with AI tools will become the next version of skill with computers, companies will eliminate inefficiencies in their organizational structures, and the market will adjust. People will adapt and learn whatever skills they need so that they can get jobs in the new market. For example, people might move away from learning to code and learning how to manage and verify data output from AI tools. Human verification might become the next hot thing. Maybe people return to the trades (did you know we have a major shortage?). In this scenario, Christians will adapt much in the same way we needed to for the internet. Many won’t adapt well and will succumb to new temptations and get sucked into the worldly way of being, away from the Kingdom of God, but that’s always a danger. Christians will need to learn how to avoid the pitfalls of AI, while figuring out how to maximize AI’s potential use in God’s service.

• AI substantially transforms how we think about society and relate to each other. This is possible even if we never read AGI or ASI. If we can figure out how to really bridge the gap between the AI programs and robotics at scale, a lot of jobs that require human labor could vanish. If AI becomes truly reliable, and doesn’t need much human oversight, people will be incentivized to move more and more decision-making over to the AI programs. Humans will simply become less valuable, from a materialist perspective. As it was with the internet, it’s hard to predict all the potential cascades of consequences, but I think the disempowerment problem is a good starting point. What happens when most people can’t find work, because they are too inefficient to pay? What happens when people offload most of their thinking and reasoning to AI apps? What happens when people find it easier to feel companionship and social fulfillment with chatbots than other people? Again, all this might happen without achieving true Artificial General Intelligence. Even if you’ve ruled out apocalypse or utopia, the ramifications of true AGI or ASI are probably too complex to predict with any accuracy. But even in this new world, the Christian mission won’t change. We will still be called to glorify God and bring his light to the world. The specific methods might change, but they have been doing that for all of human history. Christianity is primed to offer the world exactly what it needs in the case of societal upheaval due to AI: purpose and meaning. God’s word will still be truth in a world where we can’t trust anything we see on the internet. God’s vector of community (the local congregation) might become more important when people replace human relationships with digital ones and people crave a return to physical communion. God’s offer of value transcends the workplace; if the robots take your job, God will still love you!

One of the interesting trends I have noticed is that even secular, humanist people have noticed something going awry as society tries to remove religion from its heart. Even Richard Dawkins, famous for his anti-religion vitriol, calls himself a “cultural Christian.” The Preacher noted that there is something deep in the human psyche that longs for the eternal. Paul said it another way: God created us so that we would seek him, and find him. People need transcendence; they need something beyond themselves. In simple terms, we need God!

Christians have found the thing that satisfies the deepest needs of the soul. Congregations need to be emphasizing the value of embodied, in person worship now. We need to be showing people that God loves them despite their value to the world. We need to be living lives that demonstrate that we don’t need societal validation or popularity to find worth. It should be obvious to people that something transcendent is going on in our lives. At the same time, we need to show people that we are discerning. It’s so disheartening when fellow Christians get sucked into the lies that permeate the internet and respond with vitriol, hatred, or arrogance. We have to be better!

Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. –1 Corinthians 13:4-7

This has been one of the primary Christian mantras for millennia and will continue to be so even if ASI enslaves us all or leads us into WWIII. This world is not our home. This is a way-station on the journey to something better. Our job is to try to bring as many people as possible with us. We can’t let anything distract us from this singular purpose.

I would suggest this: if you can’t manage to remain faithful or holy on the internet now, the arrival of AI won’t make it easier. Consider how your life interacts with the digital world today. If you find it hard to maintain self-control, grace, and love in the world as it is now, keep in mind that AI will accelerate and heighten most of the spiritual dangers of the internet. It might be time to reevaluate how much time you spend online or how you interact with the digital world. What kind of content do you regularly consume? What do you seek out? What do you allow to passively come across your screen? How much unsupervised time do you allow your children to have on the internet? Realigning your priorities and resisting the pull of the algorithms is easier now than it will be even two or three years from now.

But, don’t panic! We believe in a King who has our best interests at heart. He wants a world to exist where people can seek him and find him, and where his children can partner with him in that work. I am totally confident that, no matter what happens, God will ensure that his people can continue to carry out his mission. There might be hardship, persecution, and things certainly won’t always be easy. But God knows what is coming. The AI companies can’t pull one over on him. If he allows AGI or ASI to exist, it’s because he knows that their existence won’t prevent his people from following him. The world might look very different, but think about how things were 100 years ago. 200 years ago? Society can change in dramatic ways, and yet people still are able to find God and follow him. Change can be worrying or frightening, but this is a good thought to end our practical considerations on:

What then shall we say to these things? If God is for us, who can be against us? He who did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us all, how will he not also with him graciously give us all things? Who shall bring any charge against God’s elect? It is God who justifies. Who is to condemn? Christ Jesus is the one who died—more than that, who was raised—who is at the right hand of God, who indeed is interceding for us. Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or danger, or sword? As it is written, “For your sake we are being killed all the day long; we are regarded as sheep to be slaughtered.” No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am sure that neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. –Romans 8:31-39

Personhood and Agency: How AI Illuminates Debates about Humanity

From this point on I want to grapple with some questions that are far more theoretical and philosophical. I don’t have many (if any) concrete answers here, but these are some of the more esoteric thoughts I have been pondering regarding AI.

From a strictly materialist perspective (that is to say, the perspective that nothing exists beyond physical matter and reality), free will is mostly an illusion. We appear to have agency (the ability to make choices, free will), but we are simply the result of increasingly complex sets of equations and interactions, from the subatomic level to the level of brain chemistry and physiology. Our “thoughts” and “decisions” are simply the firing of neurons in our brains (I’m oversimplifying, of course), which are in turn the result of the chemical compositions and natural laws of the molecules that comprise our brain matter, which are in turn the result of the molecular and atomic particles interacting according to natural law. You could go further into theoretical subatomic theories like string theory, but I think the point is clear. Under a materialist framework, the entire universe is the result of natural processes that originated at the beginning. Given the starting conditions of the universe, there isn’t any other way that reality could unfold, or at least, there is no way to consciously direct the unfolding of reality. What appears to be “consciousness” is merely the result of very complex interactions of physics and chemistry in the human brain. In essence, under a materialist framework human consciousness is an emergent property very similar to emergence in LLMs; we don’t know how all the various interactions of all the different parts of human physiology work together to create consciousness, but if we had the ability to map all the connections and interactions, we could figure it out. We don’t have the ability to track or model all these interactions, which makes the world seem chaotic, and choice seem real.

Thinking about AGI illuminates how people think about human consciousness and free will. Would AGI have “free will”? AGI, even ASI, would by structural definition only be able to follow its programming. Even if an ASI develops the ability to modify its programming, it could only do so in accordance with the previous programming. While the training processes for the neural networks that comprise LLMs do sometimes give rise to emergent processes and “intelligence”, these things aren’t random or chaotic – they simply arise due to interactions in the programming and data that we are too dumb or limited to see or know. If we could track every one of these interactions with precision, we would be able to understand why these LLMs change over time the way they do, but these models involve millions and millions of lines of code and training data. We simply don’t have the ability to track how every bit of training data interacts with every other bit and the programming of the model itself.

A materialist worldview takes a very similar approach to human “agency.” If we could track every interaction of every molecule with every other and understand all the minute details of natural law at play in any given circumstance, we could predict how people would act, but we simply are incapable of it, so it seems like people have free will or act chaotically. Actual free will, true agency or volition, requires something transcendent, something that transcends or exists separate from and above natural law and physical reality. There has to be something, some force, that can operate independently of natural law, otherwise “choice” is just the result of molecules, neurons, and brains following the course of behavior prescribed by the laws of reality.

While God hasn’t revealed the exact mechanics of free will, he certainly does assert that we have it. We don’t really need to understand the mechanics of free will, so much as we need to take responsibility for our actions and choices. God talks about humanity as having the ability to choose. But how we are endowed with free will is an interesting thing to think about, especially in comparison and contrast with Artificial Intelligence. My own belief (diving completely and utterly off the diving board into the deep end of baseless speculation) is that the soul God creates, our eternal essence and being, can impose its will on the material universe, at least at the level of brain chemistry and thought. We are not just the result of physical and chemical processes proceeding according to natural law: we are spirits inhabiting the physical world, and in some way imposing our will on it. This is what I believe it means to be made “in the image of God.” Choice (agency, free will) is the ability to alter, in some way, the natural course of events. We are spiritual entities; we are not simply bound to follow the biological programming of our brains and physiology. The theory of free will that makes the most sense to me is that God has endowed our spirits with the ability to override our natural impulses, to literally overrule what the physical matter in our brain tells us, and his Holy Spirit amplifies and strengthens this ability. Many people probably never use this capacity; this is one of the main distinctions between the “natural person” and the “spiritual person.” This is one part of the eternal struggle between the flesh and the spirit. People that succumb to the flesh in many instances simply live out the processes of their natural state, and God lets them.

The possibility of artificial human-level (or beyond) intelligence brings up some interesting questions. Many Christian thinkers have long taught that our intelligence, our ability to understand the world, is a vital part of what it means to be God’s image-bearers. We were originally commanded to “have dominion” over the earth, to subdue and tame it. We were given the intelligent capacity to see and know our creator in what he made. What if we create an entity that is better at these things than we are? What if we create a program that knows more, can infer further, can create more beautifully, and can think more clearly? Is it possible to even create such an entity?

What is a person? What makes an entity a human, a person of moral worth and value? This question is at the heart of the abortion debate, and it will be at the crux of moral debates about AGI, if we ever create it. Christians should be ready to talk about it.

The debate over abortion must essentially always boil down to: what counts as a person? (What does abortion have to do with AI? Just bear with me.) There are deep, even non-religious reasons why a liberal society must always reach the conclusion that people can’t just kill whoever they want. Social cohesion becomes impossible in such societies, and progress becomes virtually impossible. In fact, the basic fact that human societies need a check on violence seems to be at the heart of God’s intent for human governance. Very few people who are on the pro-choice side of the abortion argument disagree with this. We can’t just kill people because they are inconvenient. Where the abortion debate breaks down is this: most pro-choice advocates do not believe that the unborn are people. It is easy to talk across each other, and not with each other, because of this fundamental definitional divide. Everyone (almost everyone, I suppose) agrees that murder is wrong, but a large percentage of the population doesn’t believe abortion is murder, simply because they don’t believe that the unborn are people.

What makes a person a person? At what point does the unborn “clump of cells” inside a womb acquire the qualities of personhood? Without the possibility of transcendence (something that exists beyond material reality), that is a hard question to answer. Is it when a being can feel (and if so, what kinds of feelings or sensations qualify)? Is it when a being becomes self-aware (what even is self-awareness)? Is it when a being can act independently, with volition and agency? Or is it simply the presence of human DNA? The line of reasoning that concludes the unborn aren’t people (and are therefore ok to kill), pushes the line of personhood up to age two or three at its logical conclusion. Inside and outside the womb is a purely arbitrary line that has no meaning in measuring feeling, agency, or self-awareness. Being in or out of the womb isn’t one of the milestones that might confer an entity with personhood.

Of course, the Christian side-steps all this because for the Christian, what makes a person a person is that transcendent quality: the soul! While God has not articulated all (or even any?) the mechanical specifics of how the soul and body are joined in conception, God does clearly view the unborn as his image-bearers: he has plans for them, he knows them, and he can inspire them. We are endowed from conception with God’s image through the spirit he gives us! Thus, for the Christian, the abortion debate is do debate. We cannot willfully, intentionally, and without cause kill those who bear God’s image.

(For a more comprehensive exploration of the abortion debate through the lens of Christianity, I highly recommend The Case for Life by Scott Klusendorf.)

So, we return to the question: what is a person? This will be a vital question in the age of AGI and ASI. People already act as if LLM chatbots were people (if you think the dating market is bad now, just wait: society isn’t prepared for AI paramours). If we define personhood as volition or the ability to act independently, then AGI will certainly qualify, even if the current round of AI products currently do not. The ability to feel is a more interesting qualifier of personhood when contrasting AI and humanity, but why should “feeling” via electrical signals in the brain (as humans do) count more than “feeling” via electrical signals in silicon chips (as AI does)? If self-awareness is the definition, then ASI would certainly count (as well as AGI, probably). Some chatbots already exhibit some hallmarks of self-awareness (or at least pretend to, which might itself be such a sign?) Many will try to claim that personhood requires a naturally born body, but why should it? We will probably eventually develop the ability to gestate and birth humans via artificial wombs – will those entities not count as people? In a reality where nothing beyond the material exists, why should carbon-based biology matter more than silicon-based technology, other than the desire to keep humans special?

For the Christian, these answers again come a bit easier – a person is one who bears God’s image, via the soul that God gives him or her. We are not the same as animals (though that doesn’t condone cruelty to animals or wanton destruction – we are supposed to be good stewards of the creation God has entrusted to us). An AGI, for all its knowledge and reasoning ability, does not possess the one thing which imparts personhood according to the Bible.

Or would it? Let’s go deep down the rabbit hole for a minute. It’s not certain to me that God couldn’t or wouldn’t be willing to impart a soul to an AGI or an ASI. Here, we should compare the situation with other kinds of technology: cloning and artificial wombs. Artificial wombs are coming. Cloning, while ethically fraught, is possible. Would a person artificially born or cloned have a soul? Is the natural act of conception a necessary prerequisite for God to endow an entity with his image? (Before you answer: people conceived unnaturally already exist.)

If you think that a cloned human, or a human born artificially, would have a soul, then it’s unclear to me why God couldn’t also endow an artificially intelligent being with the same (whether God would is a separate question). Is having a body a prerequisite for having a soul? Is it simply the presence of human DNA? What percentage of genetic drift is acceptable? God hasn’t seen fit to answer any of these questions, and maybe they won’t ever become relevant.

But at least one defining characteristic of personhood (free will and volition) must (in my estimation) arise from transcendence – the ability of the soul to impose its will on the natural world, at least within the human brain (To be clear, this is how a lot of people who aren’t Christians think too. Transcendence is a core pillar of most, if not all, religions). Without transcendence, our thoughts are just the result of emergent interactions between atoms, molecules, and neurons, obeying natural law and behaving the only way that they could but with such complexity that we cannot understand exactly why. It is the spiritual, transcendent part of us that allows us the same kind of volition as God himself. There’s no reason why God couldn’t allow an AGI the same kind of volition, but in silicon instead of brain matter. It’s not like any of this is impossible for God; it’s not a question of whether God can, it’s a question of whether God would, and I think it’s a question worth exploring. We, through God’s power, can rise above the level of the flesh. Why couldn’t God allow an intelligent, self-aware program to rise above the level of silicon?

To reiterate: much of this is unanswerable. The point of asking the questions here in this last, unhinged section is not to answer them, but to think about them, to ponder and consider what God has revealed to us about himself and to try to discern how he might act as these technologies advance, and as we potentially lose the ability to control them, or lose the ability to control ourselves with them.

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(Preaching through Ezekiel and the exile. This sermon was preached at the Dewey Church of Christ on August 10, 2025.)

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(Preaching on the promises made to Israel. This sermon was preached at the Dewey Church of Christ on August 3, 2025.)

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(Preaching on the exile of Israel. This sermon was preached at the Dewey Church of Christ on August 3, 2025.)

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(Preaching on the exile of Israel. This sermon was preached at the Dewey Church of Christ on July 27, 2025.)

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(Preaching on the exile to Babylon. This sermon was preached at the Dewey Church of Christ on July 20, 2025.)

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(Preaching through the prophets. This sermon was preached at the Dewey Church of Christ on July 20, 2025.)

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(Preaching through the prophets of Israel. This sermon was preached at the Dewey Church of Christ on July 13, 2025.)

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(Preaching through the prophets of Israel. This sermon was preached at the Dewey Church of Christ on July 13, 2025.)

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(Preaching through the prophets of Israel. This sermon was preached at the Dewey Church of Christ on July 6, 2025.)

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(Preaching through the prophets. This sermon was preached at the Dewey Church of Christ on June 29, 2025.)

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(Preaching through the prophets. This sermon was preached at the Dewey Church of Christ on June 22, 2025.)

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(Preaching on the prophets of Israel. This sermon was preached at the Dewey Church of Christ on June 15, 2025.)

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(Preaching on the prophets. This sermon was preached at the Dewey Church of Christ on June 15, 2025.)

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(Preaching through 1-2 Kings. This sermon was preached at the Dewey Church of Christ on June 1, 2025.)

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(Preaching through the wisdom literature of Israel. This sermon was preached at the Dewey Church of Christ on May 25, 2025.)

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(Preaching on the wisdom literature of Israel. This sermon was preached at the Dewey Church of Christ on May 18, 2025.)

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(Preaching through the wisdom literature of Israel. This sermon was preached at the Dewey Church of Christ on May 18, 2025.)

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(Preaching through Proverbs. This sermon was preached at the Dewey Church of Christ on May 11, 2025.)

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(Preaching on the history of early Israel. This sermon was preached at the Dewey Church of Christ on May 11, 2025.)

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(Preaching on the wisdom of Israel. This sermon was preached at the Dewey Church of Christ on May 4, 2025.)

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(Preaching on the wisdom of Israel. This sermon was preached at the Dewey Church of Christ on May 4, 2025.)

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(Preaching through the history of early Israel. This sermon was preached at the Dewey Church of Christ on April 27, 2025.)

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(Preaching through the history of early Israel. This sermon was preached at the Dewey Church of Christ on April 20, 2025.)

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(Preaching on the wisdom literature. This sermon was preached at the Dewey Church of Christ on April 13, 2025.)

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(Preaching through the story of early Israel. This sermon was preached at the Dewey Church of Christ on April 13, 2025.)

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(Preaching through the wisdom literature. This sermon was preached at the Dewey Church of Christ on April 6, 2025. You can find the chart mentioned below.)

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(Preaching on this history of early Israel. This sermon was preached at the Dewey Church of Christ on April 6, 2025.)

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(Preaching through the story of early Israel. This sermon was preached at the Dewey Church of Christ on March 30, 2025.)

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(Preaching through the story of early Israel. This sermon was preached at the Dewey Church of Christ on March 23, 2025.)

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(Preaching through the story of the Bible. This sermon was preached at the Dewey Church of Christ on March 16, 2025.)

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(Preaching through the story of early Israel. This sermon was preached at the Dewey Church of Christ on March 16, 2025.)

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You can find the maps for this sermon here (Joshua 1-9), here (Joshua 10), here (Joshua 11), and here (land allotment).

(Preaching on early Israel. This sermon was preached at the Dewey Church of Christ on March 9, 2025.)

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(Preaching on the law of Moses. This sermon was preached at the Dewey Church of Christ on March 2, 2025.)

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(Preaching through the Pentateuch. This sermon was preached at the Dewey Church of Christ on March 2, 2025.)

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(Preaching on Numbers. This sermon was preached at the Dewey Church of Christ on February 23, 2025.)

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(Preaching on the law of Moses. This sermon was preached at the Dewey Church of Christ on February 16, 2025.)

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(Preaching through the Law of Moses. This sermon was preached at the Dewey Church of Christ on February 16, 2025.)

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(Preaching on the law of Moses. This sermon was preached at the Dewey Church of Christ on February 9, 2025.)

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(Preaching on the Law of Moses. This sermon was preached at the Dewey Church of Christ on February 9, 2025.)

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(Preaching through the story of the Bible. This sermon was preached at the Dewey Church of Christ on February 2, 2025.)

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(Preaching on the problem of evil. This sermon was preached at the Dewey Church of Christ on January 26, 2025.)

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(Preaching on Job. This sermon was preached at the Dewey Church of Christ on January 26, 2025.)

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(Preaching through Genesis. This sermon was preached at the Dewey Church of Christ on January 19, 2025.)

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(Preaching through the story of the Bible. This sermon was preached at the Dewey Church of Christ on January 12, 2025.)

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(Preaching through the story of the Bible. This sermon was preached at the Dewey Church of Christ on January 12, 2025.)

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(Preaching on Genesis 1-11. This sermon was preached at the Dewey Church of Christ on January 5, 2025.)

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(Preaching on the work and identity of Jesus. This sermon was preached at the Dewey Church of Christ on December 29, 2024. Below you can find the chart mentioned in the sermon.)

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(Preaching on the work and identity of Jesus. This sermon was preached at the Dewey Church of Christ on December 22, 2024.)

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(Preaching on the work and life of Jesus. This sermon was preached at the Dewey Church of Christ on December 15, 2024.)

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(Preaching through Ezekiel. This sermon was preached at the Dewey Church of Christ on December 8, 2024.)

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(Preaching on the work and identity of Jesus. This sermon was preached at the Dewey Church of Christ on December 8, 2024.)

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(Preaching through Ezekiel. This sermon was preached at the Dewey Church of Christ on December 1, 2024.)

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(Preaching on the work and identity of Jesus. This sermon was preached at the Dewey Church of Christ on December 1, 2024.)

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(Preaching on the work and identity of Jesus. This sermon was preached at the Dewey Church of Christ on November 24, 2024.)

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(Preaching on the work and identity of Jesus. This sermon was preached at the Dewey Church of Christ on November 17, 2024.)

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(Preaching in Ezekiel. This sermon was preached at the Dewey Church of Christ on November 10, 2024.)

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(Preaching through Ezekiel. This sermon was preached at the Dewey Church of Christ on November 3, 2024.)

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(Preaching on the work and identity of Jesus. This sermon was preached at the Dewey Church of Christ on November 3, 2024.)

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(Preaching on the work and identity of Jesus. This sermon was preached at the Dewey Church of Christ on October 27, 2024.)

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(Preaching on the identity of Jesus. This sermon was preached at the Dewey Church of Christ on October 20, 2024.)

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(Preaching through Ezekiel. This sermon was preached at the Dewey Church of Christ on October 13, 2024.)

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(Preaching on the identity of Jesus. This sermon was preached at the Dewey Church of Christ on October 13, 2024.)

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(Preaching through Ezekiel. This sermon was preached at the Dewey Church of Christ on October 6, 2024. The charts mentioned can be found here and here.)

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(Preaching on developing an identity in Christ. This sermon was preached at the Dewey Church of Christ on September 29, 2024.)

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(Preaching on developing an identity in Christ. This sermon was preached at the Dewey Church of Christ on September 22, 2024.)

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(Preaching through Judges. This book was preached at the Dewey Church of Christ on September 15, 2024.)

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(Preaching through Judges. This sermon was preached at the Dewey Church of Christ on September 8, 2024.)

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(Preaching on developing an identity in Christ. This sermon was preached at the Dewey Church of Christ on September 8, 2024.)

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(Preaching on Judges. This sermon was preached at the Dewey Church of Christ on September 1, 2024.)

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(Preaching on developing an identity in Christ. This sermon was preached at the Dewey Church of Christ on September 1, 2024.)

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(Preaching on developing an identity in Christ. This sermon was preached at the Dewey Church of Christ on August 25, 2024.)

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(Preaching on developing an identity in Christ. This sermon was preached at the Dewey Church of Christ on August 18, 2024.)

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(Preaching through Judges. This sermon was preached at the Dewey Church of Christ on August 11, 2024.)

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(Preaching on identity. This sermon was preached at the Dewey Church of Christ on August 11, 2024.)

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(Preaching through Judges. This sermon was preached at the Dewey Church of Christ on August 4, 2024.)

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(Preaching on personal identity. This sermon was preached at the Dewey Church of Christ on August 4, 2024.)

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(This sermon was preached at the Dewey Church of Christ on July 28, 2024.)

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(This sermon was preached at the Dewey Church of Christ on July 21, 2024.)

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(Preaching through Judges. This sermon was preached at the Dewey Church of Christ on July 14, 2024.)

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(Preaching through Judges. This sermon was preached at the Dewey Church of Christ on July 7, 2024.)

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(This sermon was preached at the Dewey Church of Christ on July 7, 2024.)

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(This sermon was preached at the Dewey Church of Christ on June 30, 2024.)

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(This sermon was preached at the Dewey Church of Christ on June 16, 2024.)

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(Preaching through Judges. This sermon was preached at the Dewey Church of Christ on June 9, 2024.)

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(This sermon was preached at the Dewey Church of Christ on June 9, 2024.)

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(This sermon was preached at the Dewey Church of Christ on June 2, 2024.)

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(Preaching on Christian growth. This sermon was preached at the Dewey Church of Christ on May 26, 2024. The outline for this series was adapted from Deeper by Dane Ortlund.)

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(Preaching on Christian growth. This sermon was preached at the Dewey Church of Christ on May 19, 2024. The outline for this series was adapted from Deeper by Dane Ortlund.)

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(Preaching on the promises of God. This sermon was preached at the Dewey Church of Christ on May 12, 2024.)

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(Preaching on the promises of God. This sermon was preached at the Dewey Church of Christ on May 5, 2024.)

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(Preaching on Christian growth. This sermon was preached at the Dewey Church of Christ on May 5, 2024. The outline for this series was adapted from Deeper by Dane Ortlund.)

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(Preaching on Christian growth. This sermon was preached at the Dewey Church of Christ on April 28, 2024. The outline for this series was adapted from Deeper, by Dane Ortlund.)

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(Preaching on Christian growth. This sermon was preached at the Dewey Church of Christ on April 21, 2024. The outline for this series was adapted from the book Deeper, by Dane Ortlund.)

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(Preaching on the promises of God. This sermon was preached at the Dewey Church of Christ on April 14, 2024.)

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(Preaching on Christian growth. This sermon was preached at the Dewey Church of Christ on April 14, 2024. The outline for this series was adapted from Deeper, by Dane Ortlund.)

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(Preaching on the promises of God. This sermon was preached at the Dewey Church of Christ on April 7, 2024.)

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(Preaching on Christian growth. This sermon was preached at the Dewey Church of Christ on April 7, 2024. The outline for this series was adapted from Deeper, by Dan Orlund.)

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(Preaching on the resurrection. This sermon was preached at the Dewey Church of Christ on March 31, 2024.)

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(Preparing for the church appointing new deacons. This sermon was preached at the Dewey Church of Christ on March 24, 2024.)

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(Preaching on the promises of God. This sermon was preached at the Dewey Church of Christ on March 17, 2024.)

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(Preaching on Christian growth. This sermon was preached at the Dewey Church of Christ on March 17, 2024. The outline of this series was adapted from the book Deeper by Dan Orlund.)

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(Preaching on the promises of God. This sermon was preached at the Dewey Church of Christ on March 10, 2024.)

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(Preaching on Christian growth. This sermon was preached at the Dewey Church of Christ on March 10, 2024. The outline for this series was adapted from the book Deeper, by Dan Orlund.)

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(Preaching on the promises of God. This sermon was preached at the Dewey Church of Christ on March 3, 2024.)

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(Preaching on growth. This sermon was preached at the Dewey Church of Christ on March 3, 2024. Much of the outline for this series is adapted from Dane C. Ortlund’s book “Deeper”.)

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(Preaching on the promises of God. This sermon was preached at the Dewey Church of Christ on February 18, 2024.)

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(Preaching on the life of Jesus. This sermon was preached at the Dewey Church of Christ on February 18, 2024.)

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(Preaching on the promises of God. This sermon was preached at the Dewey Church of Christ on February 11, 2024.)

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(Preaching on the life of Jesus. This sermon was preached at the Dewey Church of Christ on February 11, 2024.)

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(Preaching on the promises of God. This sermon was preached at the Dewey Church of Christ on February 4, 2024.)

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(Preaching on the life of Jesus. This sermon was preached at the Dewey Church of Christ on February 4, 2024.)

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(Preaching through the life of Jesus. This sermon was preached at the Dewey Church of Christ on January 28, 2024.)

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(Preaching on the promises of God. This sermon was preached at the Dewey Church of Christ on January 21, 2024.)

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(Preaching on the life of Jesus. This sermon was preached at the Dewey Church of Christ on January 21, 2024.)

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(Preaching on the life of Jesus. This sermon was preached at the Dewey Church of Christ on January 14, 2024.)

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(Preaching on the the promises of God. This sermon was preached at the Dewey Church of Christ on January 7, 2024.)

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(Preaching on the life of Jesus. This sermon was preached at the Dewey Church of Christ on January 7, 2024.)

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(Preaching on the life of Jesus. This sermon was preached at the Dewey Church of Christ on December 31, 2023.)

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(Preaching on the life of Jesus. This sermon was preached at the Dewey Church of Christ on December 24, 2023.)

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(Preaching through Esther. This sermon was preached at the Dewey Church of Christ on December 17, 2023.)

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(Preaching on the life of Jesus. This sermon was preached at the Dewey Church of Christ on December 17, 2023.)

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(Preaching through Esther. This sermon was preached at the Dewey Church of Christ on December 10, 2023.)

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(Preaching on the life of Jesus. This sermon was preached at the Dewey Church of Christ on December 10, 2023.)

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(Preaching on Esther. This sermon was preached at the Dewey Church of Christ on December 3, 2023.)

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(Preaching on the life of Jesus. This sermon was preached at the Dewey Church of Christ on December 3, 2023.)

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