Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?
The cycles of Heaven in twenty centuries
Bring us farther from God and nearer to the Dust. (T. S. Eliot[1]

I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Wonderful are your works; my soul knows it very well. (Psalm 139:14)

Your hands have made and fashioned me; give me understanding that I may learn your commandments. (Psalm 119:73)

As you do not know the way the spirit comes to the bones in the womb of a woman with child, so you do not know the work of God who makes everything. (Ecclesiastes 11:5)

Not Just Tools: What Must Christians Do to Navigate AI?

Jacques Ellul, who spent his life studying the subject of technology, gives this helpful definition from the “Note to the Reader” in The Technological Society: “Technique is the totality of methods, rationally arrived at and having absolute efficiency (for a given stage of development) in every field of human activity.”[2] The phrase “absolute efficiency” is intentionally pejorative. Efficiency is one of the principal gods in the pantheon of modern technology. Ellul goes on to say, “We are conditioned by something new: technological civilization.” Fatalism regarding technology is not inevitable unless each person

abdicates his responsibilities with regard to values. . . . Awareness of the dangers and divine intervention offer the only hope for mankind. . . . At stake is our very life, . . . each of us, in his own life, must seek ways of resisting and transcending technological determinants. . . . We must look at it dialectically, and say that man is indeed determined, but that it is open to him to overcome necessity, and that this act is freedom. . . . In the modern world, the most dangerous form of determinism is the technological phenomenon. It is not a question of getting rid of it, but, by an act of freedom, of transcending it.[3]

In sum, we must resist the new god of “efficiency” along with the instrumental materialist assumptions of modernity which began with Enlightenment genius Francis Bacon (1561–1626). The more we worship these twin gods the more our humanity is eroded and threatened.

So many commentators, Christians and others, refer to LLMs (large language models) as just tools. Media ecology forces us to ask, “But is that all they are?” No, they are extensions of man altering our relationships, our social spaces, and in different ways changing our ways of seeing the world, our perceptions. “The ‘message’ of any medium or technology is the change of scale or pace or pattern that it introduces into human affairs.”[4] Joshua Meyrowitz points to the sociological “situationist” paradigm of Erving Goffman: “The situational analysis offered here describes how electronic media affects social behavior—not through the power of their messages but by reorganizing social settings in which people interact and by weakening the once strong relationship between physical place and social place.”[5]

Just as human language understanding requires context, so all media are imbedded in the context of human culture. The data used by AI is ultimately embedded in human thinking and living, not computers. How does AI change us in the case of LLMs? The modern world makes idols out of technology. This is precisely what Psalms 115 and 135 address. “Those who make them become like them; so do all who trust in them” (Ps. 115:8; Ps. 135:18). Why do we do this? Because we seek solutions to life’s problems without the true and living God. This is the would-be independence of autonomous man invoked in Eden by our father Adam.

Various Assessments

Within the past few years, we have seen a wide range of opinions about the value of AI. They appear within the spectrum of dystopian and utopian. Given our fallen situation, the nature of humans, and the fact that the world in which we live is God’s, he is in sovereign control of history, including the creations of man and their use. It is remarkable that the most ardent dystopian voices have come from some of the creators of AI. They remind me of a verse a techy friend sent me: “So Joshua burned Ai and made it forever a heap of ruins, as it is to this day” (Josh. 8:28).

The utopian cheerleaders have been as ardent as the naysayers. They range from the general category of those who believe that technology can solve every human problem to the narrower group of transhumanists who believe that technology can transcend human nature in its present state. At least the latter acknowledges the imperfection of humanity. But they deny the historic fall of Adam and have a soulless materialistic view of human nature. A faulty anthropology is the main problem with both the dystopian and utopian assessments. C. S. Lewis understood this problem as evidenced by his famous critique of the English educational system in The Abolition of Man (1947). His Christian doctrine of man reflected the centrality of biblical ethics as universal attributes to human nature.

One of the texts in question, The Green Book (a book promoting relativism),

and its kind is to produce what may be called Men without Chests. It is an outrage that they should be commonly spoken of as Intellectuals. This gives them the chance to say that he who attacks them attacks Intelligence. It is not so. . . .You can hardly open a periodical without coming across the statement that what our civilization needs is more ‘drive’, or dynamism, or self-sacrifice, or ‘creativity’. In a sort of ghastly simplicity we remove the organ and demand the function. We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.[6]

Lewis enjoined followers of Christ to live as people with chests, hearts filled with God’s truth.

Are There Benefits, Liabilities, and Limits to Artificial Intelligence?

Independent consultant and adjunct professor of Engineering at George Mason University, Thomas Fowler, concludes his article exploring the lack of self-consciousness in AI systems:

Newer computer systems will tackle more complicated but still well-defined tasks, which will likewise displace some types of workers. AI is suited to tasks that can be narrowly defined and implemented algorithmically. Tasks that require spontaneous decision-making in uncertain environments—in other words, most tasks—are very ill suited to it.[7]

I was intending to look at four areas in which distinguishing between the benefits and liabilities are important: education, healthcare, finance, and intellectual property. There is too much to be said to cover these in this article. To the extent that the human element and personal presence is diminished in each of these areas it constitutes serious liabilities. That being said, well-defined tasks may be considerably aided by limited and well-crafted ASI (artificial special intelligence) databases. In this way they can enhance human experience. But I will briefly consider education, especially creative writing.

In the discipline of creative writing there is a tendency for AI to create major problems like plagiarism, which diminishes human thoughtfulness and creativity. In the most recent Fall 2025 bulletin of Phillips Exeter Academy, Tim Horvath, an instructor in English, made a very important and telling experiment with his students. The course “What Artifice; Whose Intelligence? AI through a Literary Lens” challenged students to determine which one of three stories was written by a human being. Sam Altman, CEO of Open AI, boasted that they had created a new model that was good at creative writing. The story from the Altman AI used the amazing phrase “a democracy of ghosts.” It was discovered that this phrase came from Vladimir Nabocov’s Pnin. While this proves one of the great weaknesses of AI, giving the illusion of human creativity, it also undermines the initiative for human actual creativity. The students responded to the difficulty they had discerning the purely humanly written story: “If AI can write like this, we’re doomed.” The instructor concluded, “The algorithms and I are no strangers. And yet, as we hurtle into the Brave New World, I wonder if the most underrated technology is the brake. . . .When it comes to writing and making art, we’re talking about the making of meaning itself.” [8] AI can discern words but it can neither perceive nor create meaning.

Cybergnosticism

In chapter 1, “Idolatry as a Critical Paradigm,” of my 2001 book The Word Is Worth a Thousand Pictures I deal briefly with a Cyberspace version of Gnosticism in a section titled “The Gnostic Tendency: An Escape with a Twist.”[9]

Gnosticism (with a capital “G”) of the second century represents a specific kind of philosophical religion with specific concepts that perverted historic Christianity. Webster’s New World Dictionary and Thesaurus gives a succinct definition:

an occult salvational system, heterodox and syncretistic, stressing gnosis as essential, viewing matter as evil, and variously combining ideas derived especially from mythology, ancient Greek philosophy, ancient religions, and, eventually, from Christianity.[10]

What I shall call the gnostic impulse is the more general tendency characterized by the immanentism of post-Kantian thought. In his idolatrous propensity, post-Kantian man seeks transcendence by creating a mental pseudo-transcendence. The quest to escape reality as well as the quest to redeem it by the imposition of a utopian scheme are both the outworking of the gnostic impulse. While the results of the escapist version, such as the Heaven’s Gate cult, may be troubling, it is the latter expression which affects us more pervasively. The self-anointed seek to impose schemes like Marxism on the benighted masses. The quest for perfection through a plan other than the historical plan of salvation revealed by God in his Word is the tendency of Gnosticism. This is a quest to overcome the finite limits of creatures in space-time history. Never was a technology more suitable to such aspirations than Cyberspace.

The Electronic Revolution displays a strong tendency toward what Os Guinness calls “Cybergnosticism.”[11] McLuhan feared that the great tendency of the global village would be “discarnate man. . . .The discarnate TV user, with a strong bias toward fantasy, dispenses with the real world . . .”[12] In Understanding Media McLuhan observes:

Language as the technology of human extension, whose powers of division and separation we know so well, may have been the ‘Tower of Babel’ by which men sought to scale the highest heavens. Today computers hold out the promise of a means of instant translation of any code or language into any other code or language. The computer, in short, promises by technology a Pentecostal condition of universal understanding and unity.[13]

There are recent examples within mainline Protestantism, as well as in the general culture, of the resurgence of ancient Gnosticism, with the “re-imagining” of God in the form of a woman and the popularity of the writings of Elaine Pagels’s The Gnostic Gospels.[14] I do not think it is accidental that The First Church in Cyberspace founded in 1994, and still on the Internet, is an invention of the Presbyterian Church in the USA, in which much of this re-imagining is going on. Pagel’s latest book Miracles and Wonders: The Historical Mystery of Jesus[15] will be reviewed in Ordained Servant in January 2026 by Shane Lems. The title of his review tells it all: “No Miracles, No Wonder: Review of a Recent Rationalist Critique of the New Testament.”

Conclusion

The quest for AGI (artificial general intelligence) is a dangerous chimera as we have seen. But the waste of money and talent is secondary to the reductionist anthropology that it assumes. The real usefulness of AI is in specific applications of ASI. Perhaps after the AGI superintelligence hype proves less than advertised, a renewed appreciation for HI (human intelligence) will emerge. Why do computer scientists wish to supersede human intelligence? Because they sense that we are imperfect. Excellent point—we are. But how can the imperfect create the perfect? AGI seeks the impossible whereas ASI deals with real world problems.

Well designed, focused applications (ASI) with carefully curated large language data seem to be the best way for AI to benefit humanity. But the hubris animating the quest to duplicate and then supersede human intelligence will live on until the day of judgment.

When using AI we should remember that the data all came from imperfect human intelligence (HI); AI is, in a highly complex way, remixing data from large sources. Once we think that AI has a soul or is a person we have been seduced by a dangerous illusion. This, as we have seen, has been a problem since the early history of AI. It is mimicking human speech. Weizenbaum was shocked to observe how people became emotionally attached to his ELIZA program over sixty years ago.[16]

We must also remember that some of this information is copyrighted; so intellectual property is being stolen if the thoughts and quotes are not in the category of fair use. Hopefully this problem will be sorted out over time.

The novelist David Foster Wallace, who committed suicide in 2008, told Rolling Stone during his book tour for his landmark novel Infinite Jest:

As the Internet grows, and as our ability to be linked up [grows] . . . at a certain point, we're gonna have to build some machinery, inside our guts, to help us deal with this. Because the technology is just gonna get better and better and better and better. And it's gonna get easier and easier, and more and more convenient, and more and more pleasurable, to be alone with images on a screen, given to us by people who do not love us but want our money. Which is all right. In low doses, right? But if that's the basic main staple of your diet, you're gonna die. In a meaningful way, you're going to die.”[17]

Wallace said that Infinite Jest was essentially about loneliness. Loneliness is an epidemic created by our technologies. The greatest problem with AI and the entire electronic environment is its tendency to dehumanize, to remove human presence from our culture, our lives. It will never completely succeed but will continue to do great damage.

Meanwhile, we can enjoy the benefits of limited AI.

These practices of hope depend on the recognition that although textual technologies are not neutral, neither are they determinative. As Neil Postman reminds us, “no medium is excessively dangerous if its users understand what the dangers are. . . . This is an instance in which the asking of the questions is sufficient. To ask is to break the spell.” Asking these questions breaks the aura of inevitability that surrounds powerful new technologies and enables us to maintain “an epistemological and psychic distance from any technology, so that it always appears somewhat strange, never inevitable, never natural.”[18]

A peopleless world is no world at all. Christians must be alert to ways that our inventions are a liability to our humanity as God’s image-bearers and employ the ways in which they may enhance it.

Endnotes

[1] T. S. Eliot, “Choruses from the ‘Rock’ I,” in Collected Poems 1909–1962 (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc. 1963), 147.

[2] Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society (emphasis in original) (Alfred A. Knopf, 1964), xxv; first published in French in 1954 as La Technique: L’enjen du siegravecle, “the stake of the century.”

[3] Ellul, The Technological Society, xxviii–xxxiii.

[4] McLuhan, Understanding Media, 8.

[5] Joshua Meyrowitz, No Sense of Place: The Impact of Electronic Media on Social Behavior (Oxford University Press, 1985), ix.

[6] C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man (Macmillan, 1957), 16.

[7] Thomas Fowler, “AI Doesn’t Know What It’s Doing,” First Things (April 2025): 35–36.

[8] Tim Horvath, “Artificial Intelligence,” The Exeter Bulletin (Fall 2025): 16–17.

[9] Gregory Edward Reynolds, The Word Is Worth a Thousand Pictures: Preaching in the Electronic Age (Wipf & Stock, 2001), 56–58.

[10] Reynolds, The Word Is Worth a Thousand Pictures, 56.

[11] OS Guinness, Fit Bodies Fat Minds: Why Evangelicals Don’t Think and What to Do about It (Baker, 1994), 129.

[12] Marshall McLuhan, “A Last Look at the Tube,” in Marshall McLuhan: The Man and His Message, ed. George Sanderson and Frank Macdonald (Fulcrum, 1989) 197.

[13] Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (McGraw-Hill, 1964), 80.

[14] Elaine Pagels, The Gnostic Gospels (Vintage, 1989).

[15] Elaine Pagels, Miracles and Wonders: The Historical Mystery of Jesus (Doubleday, 2025).

[16] Weizenbaum, Computer Power and Human Reason, 6–7.

[17] http://eriklundegaard.com/item/in-1996-david-foster-wallace-already-knew-the-dangers-of-the-internet

[18] Jeffrey Bilbro, Words for Conviviality: Media Technologies and Practices of Hope (Baylor University Press, 2024), 228. Quoted from Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985), 161, and Technopoly (1985), 185.

Gregory E. Reynolds is pastor emeritus of Amoskeag Presbyterian Church (OPC) in Manchester, New Hampshire, and is the editor of Ordained Servant. Ordained Servant Online, December, 2025