This article might break my website. The latest step in humanity’s technological advancement is Artificial Intelligence (AI). Theology Sketchbook is hosted by Wix, and for the record I have been very pleased by the service since creating my site. This is not a critique of Wix, but rather a fascinating reflection on the nature of artificial intelligence.
Wix, like everyone else these days, is pushing AI and offering suggestions for how to integrate it into my content on my site’s dashboard.
Initially it wanted AI to do things like come up with a snappy title for each article I write based on its analysis of the content of each article or create artwork for my posts based on any description I provide (the artwork above was AI generated from my premise "robot pretending to be a human").
But lately I’ve noticed that it’s taken another step. AI wants to offer suggestions of topics for me to write about, complete with headings and subheadings.
Any high school teacher will tell you that ChatGPT has offered amusing new ways to cheat on papers. The student simply supplies ChatGPT with the parameters of the paper, and it will use complex algorithms to create an essay based on things like linguistic patterns and word frequency which can pass convincingly as the student’s own thoughts.
There are also interesting developments which are arising from AI’s ability to search the internet and create original digital artwork based on patterns and trends (as demeonstratd above). What used to require a professional artist with years of education and experience with specialized software is now available for a few dollars in virtually no time.
The level to which AI can imitate human thought is alarming and its advent has prompted serious reflection on what exactly constitutes a human mind. Are we capable of making an intelligence that is equally as valid, or even superior to our own?
I think the question that needs to be asked is what makes us human?
What Makes Us Human?
According to the Christian worldview, humankind is created in the image of God.
Genesis depicts humanity’s origins like this:
Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.”
So God created man in his own image,
in the image of God he created him;
male and female he created them.
And God blessed them. And God said to them, “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.”
Genesis 1:26-28 ESV
This image of God is something unique to humanity.
Biologically speaking, we are mammals and in that way we belong to the animal kingdom, but Scripture presents humankind as distinct from any of the other animals that God created. We are not simply the latest and best model of animal created by slow gradual modifications, we are distinctly and purposefully set apart from the rest of the animal kingdom.
While there is still some theological debate about what exactly being made in the image of God means, no serious theologian would disagree that God created human beings to rule over God’s newly created world. In Genesis the image of God is closely associated with humankind’s dominion which God gives them over the earth.
One way to think about the image of God is that because we are God’s image bearers in creation, we imitate God in ways that the rest of creation simply doesn’t. God has created human beings to uniquely imitate him in creation. God is creative, so we are creative. God is intelligent, so we are intelligent. God has dominion over everything, so we have dominion over the earth.
Another key aspect of the image of God is that humanity alone seems to have the spiritual awareness necessary for a relationship with God. There is an eternal dimension to human consciousness. We are capable of praying to God and having communion with him in a way that a dog simply isn’t.
Certain species in the animal kingdom are capable of problem solving, but the ability to think in abstraction and to picture a situation which is not presently unfolding is also something that, to the best of my knowledge, is unique to humankind and is part of what it means to be made in the image of God.
Yet another way to think of the image of God is the presence of an eternal soul. We tend to think of ourselves as our physical body which has a soul. A more biblically accurate way to think about it is that you are a soul and you have a body.
Science, for all it’s wonders and beneficence, struggles to explain consciousness in a purely scientific way. It can tell us all about the physical brain and the neurons which fire and which parts of the brain contribute to which aspect of cognition, but there is something mysterious that takes all the physical, measurable aspects of the brain and somehow produces the abstract thing which is human consciousness.
Theologically speaking, the presence of this eternal soul is what makes us human. And it is present because we bear God’s image.
The Uncanny Valley
There is a fascinating phenomenon which is commonly referred to as the “uncanny valley”. The idea is that in attempting to depict the human form, the more “realistic” one gets, the more unsettling the image becomes.
As a graphic artist, this was an important principle to understand. If you’re going to depict a human being, it has to be stylized enough so that it’s obviously not a real person because if you get too close to trying to realistically capture the human form but don’t do it perfectly, it starts to look creepy.
A perfect example of this is the 2004 film “The Polar Express.” The CGI animation, which was cutting edge at the time, came remarkably close to depicting realistic human beings aboard the train to the North Pole. But there’s something subtly “off” about the way the characters look and move that makes them seem dead and hollow (I think it's their eyes). The uncanny valley describes what happens when you create something that comes too close to human likeness while still falling short.
As human beings, we recognize when something is missing; when it’s almost human but not quite. I think this is what we’re finding with the advent of Artificial Intelligence. It is alarmingly good at imitating human thought and communication, and it comes so close to the real thing that it unsettles us. But it's still not quite right.
Look closely at the AI generated artwork at the beginning of this post. I gave Wix's AI the parameters "robot pretending to be a human" and it produced this charming image completley from scratch that looks as though it was created by a digital artist using a painting program. But when you look closer, there is a left hand on the robot imposter's right arm. It's a very realistic hand, but it's on the wrong arm. This happened purely by chance, but demonstrates brilliantly what I'm saying. It gets so close, but it's not quite right.
Feigning Theology
I have followed the development and popularization of artificial intelligence with mild interest, but I never really saw any connection with the Christian faith until my Wix dashboard started suggesting titles and subtitles for topics which it’s AI had postulated as similar to the kind of thing I have written on before. This current article is my twentieth article I’ve published on the site, and virtually everything I've posted has been about the Christian faith, the Christian life, or Christian theology. That is the sample it is drawing from.
Based on that body of work here are a few of the articles that Wix’s AI suggested I write:
Exploring Theological Paradoxes
Delving into the intricate paradoxes within theological concepts.
Exploring Theology Through Art
Unveiling divine truths through visual storytelling.
Unveiling the Ancient Wisdom
Exploring the relevance of ancient texts in modern theology.
As I read the proposed topics I was first impressed (and a little creeped out) at how realistic the suggestions sounded. Those are the kinds of words I would use, and those are the kinds of things I would find interesting. But as I looked closer I was struck at how all of the words sounded like my vocabulary, but the way they were strung together seemed to still be missing something.
It might be my unconscious bias, but the topic suggestions sound like how something without a soul would talk about theology.
The more I reflect on this, the more fascinating it becomes to me. The words seem like words I would be very likely to use, and somebody who doesn’t know theology might be very easily fooled, but there is something subtly different about each of these combination of words. The words are all there, but they're not how I would use them.
We can create algorithms to help us with daily tasks and can apply them in a way that is alarmingly good at impersonating human thought. But the thing that is fundamentally absent is the same thing that makes us uneasy when we see a “too realistic” piece of art. The thing that’s missing is a soul.
The common factor which is missing from all of the suggested theology topics is the fundamental understanding that God is real, and that we have a special relationship to him which makes theology itself something far more personal than a merely intellectual exercise in which we use big words and hear new ideas. AI could likely come up with entire articles on any number of topics from culinary recipes to new engineering principles, but the thing that makes theology unique among topics is that inherently requires a soul to understand it.
AI can use theology words and put them together in sentences that communicate coherent thoughts, but AI cannot actually do theology because AI can only imitate human intelligence and not the human soul.
The nuance is subtle, but it’s there.
A Closer Look At AI’s Suggestions
In Exploring Theological Paradoxes, the inherent idea is that there are intricate paradoxes which appear when we compare and contrast numerous theological concepts, any of which could be valid. It is certainly true that there are different conceptions of Chrisitan theology, and that paradoxes exist simply because God is larger and infinitely more complex than the human mind can comprehend. But the title implies (and the artificial mind behind it assumes) a completely human origin of theology. This is how something which lacks an eternal soul would conceive of theology.
In Exploring Theology Through Art, the idea is that we remove the veil (by employing the study of the art of human storytelling) which has historically concealed divine truths, plural. The underlying assumption again seems to be that religion is a human construct which helps us learn about ourselves and the subjective truth we determine for ourselves through our own artistic expression. In this framework the source of these divine truths is our own human consciousness. By contrast, real theology understands that God alone is the source of truth and revelation, and that there is nothing we can learn about ourselves as human beings that God has not revealed to us through his Word. God tells us who we are and what our purpose is , we do not decide for ourselves.
This makes sense. If you remove the conviction that God is real and that he alone is the source of truth, it is unsurprising that to an artificial intelligence attempting to imitate human thoughtfulness the lines between theology, psychology, and sociology would become blurred.
Unveiling The Ancient Wisdom comes markedly closer to what would feasibly be a real article on Christian theology (I do love reading and studying the "old dead guys") , but the missing element is again the fundamental understanding that ancient texts are the source of modern theology. If all world religions were a man-made method of coping with our existential questions which ultimately had no answers, and if modern theology were qualitatively dissimilar from fields like psychology or sociology, ancient texts would be a fascinating, but ultimately inconsequential look at where humans had been over against where we are now.
The nature of Christian theology, which I would define broadly as the study of God, is actually predicated on the existence of a human soul. An inescapable aspect of salvation is the idea that humankind is fundamentally sinful because of the sin that Adam introduced into the world. Much of Paul’s theology rests on the idea that the Holy Spirit is the one who is responsible for what we call regeneration (the transition from a state of spiritual death into new life).
When one experiences this spiritual rebirth, it is God who is doing the work and drawing the person to himself. Without God's gift of new life, there is no possibility of knowing God in any capacity. The obvious prerequisite of eternal salvation is the eternal soul.
In a very real way, theology is unique in that it requires a soul to even begin to comprehend God in any meaningful way.
When you think about it, throughout human history this has never been a distinction that has needed to be made. Having a human soul was a given for virtually every kind of study because humankind has been the only being capable of rational thought.
The Image of God Versus the Image of Man
Watching AI try to suggest theology topics has offered a fascinating exercise to consider what it really means to be human.
In a strange way, the rise of AI has actually served to convince people of the existence of the human soul because there is something so glaringly absent in anything that AI produces. What we see is a powerful apologetic tool that functions to point people back to the truth that there’s something unreplicable about humanity. We are distinctly set apart among all of creation because God has decided to do so. We alone bear the image of God in creation.
Thinking about Artificial Intelligence theologically, this makes good sense. God has created us in his image, and has given us a soul which only he can endow. God can make us in his image because he’s God. The best, closest thing we can do as humans is to create things in our image.
When we create an artificial intelligence, we can program it and provide it with parameters for it’s actions. We can train it to act like us. We can make it in our own image, but God is the one who has given us our eternal identity. We cannot give that to anything that we create simply because it doesn’t come from us.
The result of AI's conception is sort of poetic. Ultimately, the designs of man cannot help but to point back to our Creator and give glory to God, which has always been the purpose of creation.
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