[This is a longer article than usual. Please bear with me as I didn’t want to break up the topic]
“I’m afraid I can’t allow you to do that, Dave.”
It’s the chilling line from 2001: A Space Odyssey,1 when the surviving astronaut Dave realizes, beyond all doubt, the spaceship supercomputer HAL has killed his colleague and seized control to protect itself from being disconnected.
Futurists (I still want to know how you get that job) have been predicting the Singularity for generations. It is the tipping point when AI will surpass human capacity and regulation, taking control of its own advance. It represents the doorway into a civilization-altering reality where machines develop consciousness such that they make their own decisions outside of human control. What happens after that is anyone’s guess.
Small wonder the LLM revolution reignited these concerns. We’ve crossed a threshold similar to the early-aughts dawn of the internet. We know the future will look dramatically different, but we’re only beginning to conceive the ways in which AI will reshape it. There is one thing Christians can know with certainty. It’s a knowledge which should equip Christians to lead the way in quelling the anxiety about this new world we’re hurtling toward. The Singularity, as described above, will never happen.
Why The Singularity is Creationally Impossible
Cards on the table: I am not a computer scientist, programmer, or engineer. I still use Pandora instead of Spotify, if that tells you anything. I can code about as well as I can construct a lightsaber. But I know some basic biblical teachings on metaphysics that should give Christians peace and assurance. The Singularity, in all its hopes and fears, imagines people creating a higher order of being than themselves. That’s why it sows nightmares—it pictures the unleashing of a horde of computer Frankensteins. We will have brought life to something with a will of its own more powerful than us.
Where this scenario breaks down is not in computers being more powerful. That happened long ago. In 1997 the computer Deep Blue beat Garry Kasparov in chess. In 2011, Watson beat the best humans in Jeopardy. Your phone can do many things better than you. But that doesn’t tell us much. The reason we create tools is for that very purpose. A spoon (invented roughly the time eating was) does a better, more consistent job of scooping liquid than you. Most of us do not live in existential dread of our cutlery.
The real breakdown comes with the idea that humans could create something with a will of its own. By will I mean an awareness of itself and possessing its own (non-programmed) desire to protect its interests. A computer and the AI running on top of it are tools. Human beings often fail to appreciate the complexity of what consciousness (having a will) entails. No matter how detailed our neural mapping becomes, no one really understands consciousness.
Why the Singularity is Scripturally Impossible
In Genesis 1:28, God gives to mankind the creation mandate:
“Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.”
Human beings creating something that gains dominion over us is saying that we have toppled God’s hierarchy. We simply do not have that capacity. We cannot reverse creational order. We can commit idolatry and willingly subject ourselves, but that is another matter to be discussed below.
The marvel of man is that he alone is created in the image of God. Part of that image is his preeminence over creation—including many creatures faster, bigger, stronger, or with keener senses than us. There’s no shortage of scary sharklore because sharks are ferocious predators. They can and will kill humans. But no one is stressed about one day succumbing to a tribe of shark overlords. We understand there is a potential to human ingenuity, skill, and capacity that makes it absurd to compare ourselves to sharks, though the shark is undeniably the superior undersea hunter (assuming the human is without tools).
In Psalm 8, we get an expanded version of the same principle:
“You have made him a little lower than the heavenly beings and crowned him with glory and honor. You have given him dominion over the works of your hands; you have put all things under his feet, all sheep and oxen, and also the beasts of the field, the birds of the heavens, and the fish of the sea.” (Psalm 8:5-8).
God putting “all things” under our feet does not come with an asterisk: “except if people foolishly invent a really powerful race of machines that will edge their way between humans and angels in the pecking order of sentient beings.”
When David considers the glory of man’s authority here, the evidence he looks to is our mastery over God’s direct creation (the animal kingdom), not man’s authority over the tools that man creates. That would be too obvious and pitiful. Paul says that God determined in Heaven that “we will judge angels.” (I Cor 6:3) This points again to man’s supreme and eternal rank on the hierarchy of beings.
What Computers Really Are
Computers and their programs—past, present, and future—are tools. LLM models present a persuasive imitation of human speech. They can “listen” with greater attention and patience than many therapists. But its “listening” and “speech” depends on humans who program them and the humans whose language they analyze.
In 1931, mathematician Kurt Godel published his “Incompleteness Theorem.” He demonstrated that any complex logical system (such as arithmetic) cannot be proved by its own truths. In other words, a complex system (like AI) only works because of truths that exist outside the system itself. It’s indicating our dependence on the Divine Creator and should teach us something significant about the limitations of any tool human beings create.
Computers and AI agents are in fact the lowest order of life, below animals and plants. Perhaps that strikes you as absurd, given what Claude can do for you versus a zucchini plant. But the difference goes back to having a will. No technology, ever, will be able to “choose” or “decide” something that surpasses its creational design. A tool can have built into its design pathways for future advance, including a dreadful possibility of closing out the digital pathways to control or alter it. But again, subsequent improvements, even those that later get out of hand, are built by design, never something the tool chooses by its own will. A zucchini plant, on the other hand, can do plenty of growing and dying that humans assist, but can never program or demand. A zucchini plant has a life and makes unprogrammed “decisions.” It therefore possesses an awe, mystery, and superiority that surpasses any technology.
I still remember my fourth grade introductory lesson to the taxonomy of all things. We should remember the first dichotomy: living versus nonliving. AI is nonliving. It will never live.
What the Real Threats Are
If AI agents are tools, not seeds of the Singularity which will overthrow humanity, then what threat do they pose? The same threat tools have always posed—human abuse and idolatry.
Is a knife good or bad? It depends. Are you using it to chop vegetables or to threaten another image-bearer? Most of us, on a day-to-day basis, are grateful to not have to tear a bell pepper apart by hand. Let’s move closer to the point. Is the internet good or bad? If you go by what you read, you could conclude that the internet has doomed humanity to another dark age—anxious, lonely, and ignorant. That’s quite a feat to lay at the feet of a communications system. When analyzing a technology in abstract versus your personal use, we easily forget the benefits. Personally, I have no wish to return to a world without GPS. I love being able to access writing, preaching, and teaching within seconds.
The truth is, whether it’s a knife, the internet, electricity, the assembly line, nuclear energy, or whatever else humans come up with, a technology’s effect is determined by humans. I don’t need to persuade you that that’s a mixed bag. I fully believe AI will cause horrific damage and hurt. I don’t want to downplay the real threat for harm embedded in AI. It’s hypothetically conceivable that someone unleashes an AI agent that improves itself, locks out human control, causes irreparable damage, and takes enormous cost to bring down.
But this is a risk of any powerful tool. Nuclear energy can be used to cure cancer and remove e.coli from food. On the other hand, you have Chernobyl. That meltdown was nuclear energy breaking the bounds of human intention and causing irreparable damage. But that doesn’t make nuclear energy or AI ontologically a threat to human beings. Those damages come from human negligence or depravity, not some intrinsic evil in the tool itself. There is no AI without humans behind it. The danger is and always will be humans, which is why the solution is and always will be justification and sanctification in Jesus.
Besides human abuse, the other danger to fear is idolatry. Isaiah 44:9-20 and Jeremiah 10:1-16 paint detailed pictures of the silliness of idol-worship. The craftsman goes to great lengths constructing, honing, and perfecting an idol out of various raw materials. Some of the remaining raw materials he throws out, others he recycles. But the idol he’s created (that consists of the same raw materials) he bows down to and worships. What!? Yet we do the same thing with the technology we create. “They have mouths, but do not speak; they have eyes, but do not see; they have ears, but do not hear, nor is there any breath in their mouths” (Psalm 135:15-17). God wants us to see the absurdity of turning to and worshiping something we’ve created that appears life-like, but in reality has less actual life than a zucchini.2
The Hope Christians Bring
I hear regular pronouncements of a great philosophical divide—that when it comes to thinking about AI on a societal level, there are AI maximalists on one side and prophets of AI-doom on the other. Outside of a handful of tech companies and their investors, who are these starry-eyed AI-optimists? What I hear is all anxiety and dismay about AI’s impending ruin of employment, society, education, politics, the environment, and our future.
I suppose this is better than blind acceptance, but what our world needs and Christians can bring is hope and a measure of calmness. AI will not replace humans. It will change the nature of many jobs, as every technology does, but AI will not and cannot dominate humanity. People will use AI to dominate other people, but we need to be very clear about that difference.
Only human beings are created in God’s image. Only human beings have souls. Only human beings reflect God in love, joy, patience, peace, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, and self-control. Only human beings can fill our God-given need for relationships. Only human beings can truly speak. AI imitates speech like a lifeless parrot. Only human beings can create; AI collects. Only human beings can dream; AI executes. Only human beings have wisdom; AI has data. Only human beings can play, hope, cry, laugh, desire, fear, and most importantly—worship.
Christians should stand in biblical confidence on the mountaintop of their creational design. Our position on this pinnacle should bring us to our knees as we contemplate all the things we don’t control—least of all ourselves. God wants us to consider the greatness of our design and authority in tension with our finitude, weakness, and insignificance so that we’re drawn to the God who made us and controls every atom. No matter what tool emerges in the future, Christians live as ambassadors of hope and confidence—not because we are so great and wise, but because God can be trusted, including his declared plans for creation. As the hymn goes, “this is my Father’s world, I rest me in the thought.”
What can we do in an AI-age? Focus on Your Three-Foot Circle
- Brilliantly created by Stanley Kubrick in 1968 if you can believe it ↩︎
- For the record, I keep using zuchinni because I find them distinctively unimpressive vegetables ↩︎
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