Perhaps you have noticed among your co-workers, friends, or even faith community that people have increasingly strong opinions about AI. Perhaps you have noticed that even you, yourself, have increasingly strong opinions about AI.
This conversation is getting stuck and I want to try to get it unstuck a bit. Bear with me as this week will be a little less conversational and a little more classroom like in its orientation.
Based on last weeks piece on Top 10 AI Risk Scenarios, I was going to write about why it is increasingly difficult to talk about AI and how AI can function like a Rorschach’s Test. I am still going to do that but I think I want to push that until maybe next week. Before we do that, I think we actually need to zoom out for a minute and look at some foundational theology first.
I am an unabashed nerd and have been my whole life. I recall my older brother was reading Asimov in first grade and talking about science fiction regularly. Sometimes technology can move so fast that the only touchpoints and analogs we have are science fiction. Those imaginary futures are about all we have to go on when the cone of uncertainty is so wide. We have whole genres of science fiction that trend utopian and whole genres of science fiction that trend dystopian.
When I think about technology, I try to get back to first principles about what I really know about the world. I am unashamedly a Christian. That faith not only informs but is the very foundational bedrock of every aspect of my life. With the Christian tradition, I am Protestant and think the reformed tradition makes the most sense in articulating what the Bible teaches and also how we think about the intersection of the church and world. What I know from Christian theology in my tradition is that there are at least seven key doctrines (this isn’t meant to be comprehensive and is very back of the napkin) as it pertains to evaluating this new AI era:
Imago Dei - all humans are made in the image of God and this means we are meant to image/mimic aspects of God and His character as we bring order to the world. This includes things like creating culture, having families, and our spiritual and moral formation. This is where we refer to things like the cultural mandate (culture creation, family creation, and work/vocation). It also means that our work has dignity and inherent worth.
The creator-creature distinction - there is an infinite chasm between uncreated God and created reality (which includes everything else) and this gap is ontological in nature. God possesses being in Himself and relies on nothing else for being, knowledge, purpose, or meaning. However, all creatures are contingent. Every quantum particle or creature in the universe is upheld by and contingent upon the creator. This also means that God’s knowledge is archetypal, namely, that it is exhaustive, eternal, and original. In other words, God doesn’t learn new things. This also means that man’s knowledge is ectypal, namely, that our knowledge is finite, revealed, and derivative.
Total depravity - the Fall of man was pervasive, meaning there is no aspect of humanity or creation that isn’t touched by the implications of our Fall. It doesn’t mean that every human is corrupted to the fullest extent logically possible. It does mean that our will, mind, and heart have all been corrupted and that we need the Holy Spirit to come and give us a new heart, renew our minds, and change our wills to see redemption take place. The corruption that has taken place even corrupts our reasoning and thinking, which leads us a second important doctrine:
Noetic effects of sin on the mind - the Fall has a significant and negative impact on our ability to think and reason. This does not mean that our actual brains are unable to make syllogisms, do math, design things, or other things of a natural order. These effects of sin on the mind mean that the fallen human mind wishes autonomy from God, actively suppresses evidence of God from the created order, and willfully allows the heart to be deceived by what is plain from creation (namely that God exists and has revealed Himself). This also means that our moral reasoning is corrupted. This results in man finding intellectual justification(s) for the worship of whatever he has replaced or substituted instead of God.
No intellectual or ethical neutrality - every human thought, action, or emotion is rooted in either worship of God or rebellion against God. While this is blunt and perhaps an uncomfortable pill to swallow, this isn’t meant to be harsh. Essentially, we either live for ourselves as we see fit or we live for God as He sees fit. This leaves every single human on earth in a place of zero intellectual or ethical neutrality. If God exists (and I believe He does), He is the only being in the universe with an objective and immutable intellectual and ethical position and standpoint. If God doesn’t exist, then there is no objective or immutable intellectual and ethical standpoint (and Nietzsche is right).
Common grace - God restrains sin, maintains the created order, and allows for for cultural development in spite of the Fall and total depravity. The created order in the universe is therefore discoverable by all humans regardless of whether they worship God or not. This means that even the most pagan human on planet earth can create things that are a tremendous benefit to culture, society, and humanity. Those civil goods are able to be done even though they possess no ultimate saving power. Common grace helps to preserve order in society so that we do not devolve into pure nihilism, radical depravity, or insanity. This also means that people who don’t worship God can create unbelievably incredible technology.
Divine providence - this is sovereign work of God through which He upholds, preserves, and directs every single particle, event, or action in the universe towards His ends as set forth in eternity past. This means there is nothing that happens in history that is a surprise to God or occurs outside His will. That doesn’t mean that evil won’t occur, it will. That doesn’t mean that every technological or historical development is good, it is not. But it does mean that everything that happens in history will ultimately serve God’s purposes in the redemption of all of creation through the work of Jesus’ substitutionary life, death, and resurrection.
Doctrines like total depravity and the noetic effects of sin on the mind give us pause about new technologies. AI is of particular concern because LLMs are trained on human generated content and that human generated content came from minds that have been pervasively impacted by sin and whose moral reasoning has been corrupted.
Doctrines like common grace and divine providence give us pause on reflexively rejecting all new technologies. They do so because we have confidence that God is good, He is in control, and He uses all humans in redemptive history.
It is good for us to zoom out here theologically so we can reframe the conversations surrounding AI. We need to be more careful in our thinking. You will continue to hear me say that our AI future is both utopian and dystopian simultaneously.
To my friends who see a very utopian future, I want to caution you with respect to the doctrines of total depravity and noetic effects of sin on the mind. Why do we need so much post-training and alignment? We need so much of it because humans can be pretty messed up and all our flaws are in that pre-training data.
To my friends to who see a very dystopian future, I want to caution you with respect to the doctrines of common grace and divine providence. God is good. He is in control. That doesn’t necessarily mean all this technology turns out well, but some of it might and that is worth considering.
It is very difficult to ascertain to what extent the utopian and dystopian elements will manifest. We will get to some analysis on that hopefully with the next piece on the AI Rorschach’s Test. I truly understand where my friends who come down more utopian and more dystopian are coming from. I think both are actually looking at these things with actual evidences in mind. The question will be what is the balance of utopian/dystopian are we looking at here.
We need to be able to have more robust conversations about these things and I would like to turn down the temperature in the conversation so we can have more productive dialogue and avoid having the conversation get stuck in unhelpful binaries.
It’s refreshing to read an article on AI that is primarily about Christian doctrine and how it applies to various perspectives. Thanks for putting this out there!