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)

What Is Human Intelligence?

Human intelligence (HI) is essentially embodied intelligence and thus distances itself qualitatively from AI. Many proponents of AI treat human intelligence as an inferior version of computer intelligence. They seriously underestimate the giant distance between the two. Princeton philosopher Alexander Englert articulates this well,

Regarding the incompleteness theorem’s philosophical implications, Gödel thought the results presented an either/or dilemma (articulated in the Gibbs Lecture of 1951). Either one accepts that the “human mind (even within the realm of pure mathematics) infinitely surpasses the powers of any finite machine,” from which it follows that the human mind is irreducible to the brain, which “to all appearances is a finite machine with a finite number of parts, namely, the neurons and their connections.” Or one assumes that there are certain mathematical problems of the sort employed in his theorems, which are “absolutely unsolvable.” If this were the case, it would arguably “disprove the view that mathematics is only our own creation.” Consequently, mathematical objects would possess an objective reality all its own, independent of the world of physical facts “which we cannot create or change, but only perceive and describe.” This is referred to as Platonism about the reality of mathematical truths. Much to the materialist’s chagrin, therefore, both implications of the dilemma are “very decidedly opposed to materialistic philosophy.” Worse yet for the materialist, Gödel notes that the disjuncts are not exclusive. It could be that both implications are true simultaneously.[2]

Mathematician and philosopher Kurt Gödel (1906–78) stood against the majority of the mathematicians and scientists of his day, who tended to be materialists. This is where biblical anthropology can help us. It will put AI in its place and help us discern the benefits and liabilities of this powerful technology. Human intelligence (HI) involves the whole person, the highly complex embodied being that we are. I asked ChatGPT, “Do you have a soul?” It responded, “No I don’t have a soul. I’m just a program to process language and information. I can talk about souls, philosophy, or anything else on your mind.”[3]

Joseph Weizenbaum reflects on the mechanistic pressures of our highly technologized society in 1950,

Of course, the introduction of computers into our already highly technological society has . . . merely reinforced and amplified those antecedent pressures that have driven man to an ever more rationalistic view of his society and an even more mechanistic image of himself.[4]

AI is at once amusing and alarming. Ken Meyers of Mars Hill Audio, at the second annual Granite Seminar in 2006 on biotechnology, was asked, “Will scientists be able to duplicate human beings?” I shall never forget his answer, “No, but they will do a lot of damage trying.” As philosopher Thomas Nagel demonstrated in his 2011 book Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False, materialist evolutionary science cannot adequately account for human consciousness, cognition, or conscience (value). Computers process data but they do not have a spirit; they only imitate one aspect of human intelligence. Using linguistic probability enables computers to seem like they have human intelligence, but there is no human person there. They are mere material digital realities—humans are much, much more. As Nagel pointed out, the materialist, in his case Darwinians, are unable to account for the invisible aspects of human intelligence: consciousness or self-awareness, cognition or reasoning ability, and conscience or the knowledge of right and wrong. This along with the embodied nature of human intelligence puts AI in its place, and it does have an important place, but not as a replacement for human beings.

I would like to propose a reversal of the Cartesian rationalist axiom, “I think, therefore, I am,” cogito ergo sum, with, “I am, therefore, I think,” ego igitur cogito. By reversing the philosophical realms of ontology and epistemology the conception of the human moves from the radically subjective to the objectivity of the created realm (being) in which the Creator rather than the creature takes precedence. I am a mysterious mixture of body and soul, a created, embodied, finite being, made in God’s image, imago Dei. The proper understanding of artificial intelligence (AI) requires a Christian theology, especially an anthropology rooted in the incarnation and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Pioneer media ecologist and Roman Catholic Marshall McLuhan observed:

After three thousand years of explosion, by means of fragmentary and mechanical technologies, the Western world is imploding. During the mechanical ages we had extended our bodies in space. Today, after more than a century of electric technology, we have extended our central nervous system itself in a global embrace, abolishing both space and time as far as our planet is concerned. Rapidly, we approach the final phase of the extensions of man—the technological simulation of consciousness, when the creative process of knowing will be collectively and corporately extended to the whole of human society, much as we have already extended our senses and our nerves by the various media. Whether the extension of consciousness, so long sought by advertisers for specific products, will be “a good thing” is a question that admits of a wide solution. There is little possibility of answering such questions about the extensions of man without considering all of them together. Any extension, whether of skin, hand, or foot, affects the whole psychic and social complex. . . . The need to understand the effects of the extensions of man becomes more urgent by the hour.[5]

In my 2001 book The Word Is Worth a Thousand Pictures: Preaching in the Electronic Age[6], I provide several quotes revealing McLuhan’s anthropology: “And no matter how many walls have fallen the citadel of individual consciousness has not fallen nor is it likely to fall. For it is not accessible to the mass media.”[7] “Christianity definitely supports the idea of a private, independent metaphysical substance of the self . . .”[8] Sounding like Jacques Elluls he asserts: “There is absolutely no inevitability as long as there is willingness to contemplate what is happening.”[9]

Marshall McLuhan’s Christianity caused him to hold to an irreducible soul within man characterized by the imago Dei, which is not subject to perception, but has the power to interpret and even withstand the percepts of experience, especially the mass media. “At the speed of light all the physical factors disappear. Naturally churches tend to become extremely spiritualized places. The theology of discarnate man, I should think, is going to be extremely transcendental and gnostic. It’s not going to have much place for the human being as an incarnate spirit.”[10]

As we saw above, consciousness, cognition, and conscience—the trinity of human intelligence (CCC)—cannot be accounted for in materialist philosophical terms, which makes up a large part of STEM academia. Cal Newport says this about the uniqueness of human consciousness:

The idea that programs like ChatGPT might represent a recognizable form of intelligence is further undermined by the details of their architecture. Consciousness depends on a brain’s ability to maintain a constantly updated conception of itself as a distinct entity interacting with a model of the external world. The layers of neural networks that make up systems like ChatGPT, however, are static: once they’re trained, they never change.[11]

McLuhan alludes to an equal but opposite error of the materialist philosophy—he asserted that cybergnosticism is a philosophical nightmare disavowing the reality of our embodied existence. The goal of transcending our humanity ignores the imperfection of our humanity embedded in the historic fall of Adam. It ignores the realization of human potential in the good news of the biblical account of the Lamb of God, the Logos, in whom all things consist, and in whom salvation from sin, death, and hell is found. The original sin that both left and right seek to conquer cannot be thwarted by human effort. Ours is ultimately a moral problem that places each of us at the center of what needs fixing. Our problem is not embodiment, our physical natures, but our fallen condition, overcome only through God incarnate.

Another utopian technological problem can be seen in transhumanism. It apotheosizes the possibilities of technological transcendence of human beings. In chapter 5 of Jacob Shatzer’s 2019 book Transhumanism and the Image of God: Today’s Technology and the Future of Christian Discipleship, AI is explored as an aspect of transhumanism. This is a portion of my summary of that chapter in my 2020 review:

This technological development is distinct from the biological and seeks to alter and replicate human thought. . . . Breathtaking is the existence of the Christian Transhumanist Association, which claims “the intentional use of technology, coupled with following Christ, will empower us to become more human.” Christian transhumanists, like Jeanine Thweatt-Bates, tend toward open theism and process theologies, which see God as developing. Shatzer wisely responds, “We must resist liturgies of control, not because God is open and risky but because God is in control and we are not.”

The belief that software minds can be created by mindfiles, a digitized database of one’s life, in order to create a mind clone, involves a serious misunderstanding and underestimation of human intelligence. But such is fallen man’s quest for immortality apart from the Christ of Scripture. Shatzer’s critique focuses on the danger of reducing human intelligence to digital technology. Transhumanism “and its views on artificial intelligence are built on materialist approaches on what it means to be human.” AGI assumes materialism and is thus doomed not only to failure but to causing much damage. To ignore the invisible or spiritual aspect of human intelligence guarantees that human intelligence can never be duplicated by AGI. Furthermore, depending on artificial intelligence, like Paro the robot companion for the elderly, and Siri, will tend to disengage us from real human interaction.[12]

The Wonder of Human Nature

My son during his early years in college once challenged me to distinguish between being present virtually and face-to-face. I responded that because something is difficult to exhaustively define doesn’t mean it is not real. The human person is like that, “fearfully and wonderfully made” (Ps. 139:14). However, there is much that we can say to describe the uniqueness of human beings. Weizenbaum observes that modern man has “an utterly irrational confidence in the calculability of reality.”[13]

Scientist and philosopher Michael Polanyi’s (1891–1976) concept of “tacit knowledge” was the knowledge that people have that cannot easily be put into words. It is intuitive, like the knowledge of riding a bicycle. Interestingly, that example involves embodied existence as well as invisible sensibilities mediated by physical nature. In skiing and other sports, we refer to that as muscle memory; but it involves the whole person, something impossible for computers or even robots. Scientific knowing is not the only way of knowing. It is empirical (assuming physical reality and human observation) and hypothetical, always subject to alteration. The personal touch is something that can never be replicated by AI, a computer, or a robot—they have no soul. No computer or robot can hug a grieving person.

Going peopleless is a very dangerous trend in the modern West. We regularly see proposals that advise going peopleless. The common ones replace the cashier with self-service check out. We recently went to a new fast-food store where there was only a manager, but everything was done through electronic ordering. More extreme proposals have asked if mothers can be replaced by robots or doctors by bots. The face-to-face presence of human beings is irreplaceable. We underestimate the importance of the simple human encounters with people at the bank and store.

Thomas Fuchs, the Karl Jaspers Professor of Philosophy and Psychiatry at Heidelberg University in Germany, calls for a “new, embodied humanism.”[14] The subtitle of his article is “Why Modern Man Yearns to Be Replaced, Fantasizes of Being the One to Do It, and How We Can Stay Human Instead.” He offers three principles to realize “How We Can Stay Human Instead.”

The first is, “You Are Not a Computer.” Stop thinking of yourself in mechanistic terms. Unlike artificial systems, we have relevance, meaning, significance, and self-awareness. “Artificial intelligence is not superior to us at all, because its performance is limited to narrowly defined tasks. . . . So there is no reason for Promethean shame or feelings of inferiority in view of our machines.”[15] As Christians we counter the mechanistic anthropology with our being made in God’s image and in our new identity in Christ.

Second is, “The Bodily Presence of Others.” “We learn empathy only in bodily contact with others. . . . Only with the sense of touch do we literally enter into contact with the world and with others.” The touchless society of the Covid-19 shutdowns was disastrous, exacerbating the already serious epidemic of loneliness. Virtual presence is an illusion.[16]

Finally is, “Life Among the Living.” This involves our embeddedness in the larger life of the world of humans. Conviviality must be our condition. “Bodily presence and communication do not only consist in the exchange of information, as in the digital world, but in alert listening with the visible expression of attention, expectation, or confirmation.”[17] The Christian chiefly realizes these last two principles in the church of the living God.

“Face” is used 382 times in the English Standard Version. In the Bible, the face is most often referred to as a synecdoche representing the most intimate level of personal presence. The face is a revelation of the person, a window to the human soul. “Who is like the wise? And who knows the interpretation of a thing? A man’s wisdom makes his face shine, and the hardness of his face is changed” (Eccl. 8:1). The absence of face-to-face presence may cause grief similar to death. This is evident in the departure of Paul from the Ephesian elders, “being sorrowful most of all because of the word he had spoken, that they would not see his face again. And they accompanied him to the ship” (Acts 20:38). Were the apostle John alive today, I imagine him writing 2 John 12 in this way, “Though I have much to communicate to you, I would rather not use email or my smart phone. Instead, I hope to come to you and talk face to face, so that our joy may be complete.” [18]

The goal of redemptive history involves Christ’s and our personal presence. The consummate reality for the Christian will be seeing the face of Jesus Christ in resurrection glory. The transfiguration foreshadowed the coming glory reflected in the face of Jesus, “And he was transfigured before them, and his face shone like the sun, and his clothes became white as light” (Matt. 17:2). Paul looks forward to the final glory, “For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known” (1 Cor. 13:12). John reflects the same hope, “They will see his face, and his name will be on their foreheads” (Rev. 22:4). There is no better antidote to the electronic dispersion of our day than the counter-environment of the church created by the Word of the good and great shepherd.

In Part 3 we will explore the benefits and liabilities of AI.

Endnotes

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

[2] Alexander T. Englert, “We’ll Meet Again,” Aeon (January 2, 2024), accessed January 6, 2024, https://aeon.co/essays/kurt-godel-his-mother-and-the-argument-for-life-after-death.

[3] Accessed February 22, 2025.

[4] Weizenbaum, Computer Power and Human Reason, 11.

[5] McLuhan, Understanding Media, 3–4.

[6] Gregory Edward Reynolds, The Word Is Worth a Thousand Pictures: Preaching in the Electronic Age (Wipf & Stock, 2001), 169.

[7] Marshall McLuhan, Counterblast (Rapp & Whiting, 1969), 135.

[8] Hubert Hoskins, “Electric Consciousness and the Church,” in Marshall McLuhan: The Man and His Message, eds. George Sanderson and Frank Macdonald (Fulcrum, 1989), 165.

[9] Marshall McLuhan, “McLuhan Probes,” in Marshall McLuhan: The Man and His Message, eds. Sanderson and Macdonald (Fulcrum, 1989), 219.

[10] Marshall McLuhan, The Review of Books and Religion, vol. 3, #9, Mid-June 1974 (Belmont, Vermont).

[11] Newport, “What Kind of Mind Does ChatGPT Have?”

[12] Gregory E. Reynolds, “Imago Hominus: Our Brave New World,” Ordained Servant 29 (2020): 150–154, https://opc.org/os.html?article_id=846.

[13] Weizenbaum, Computer Power and Human Reason, 14.

[14] Thomas Fuchs, “Narcissistic Depressive Technoscience: Why Modern Man Yearns to Be Replaced, Fantasizes of Being the One to Do It, and How We Can Stay Human Instead,” The New Atlantis (Spring 2024): 88.

[15] Fuchs, “Narcissistic Depressive Technoscience, 90.

[16] Fuchs, “Narcissistic Depressive Technoscience, 91–2.

[17] Fuchs, “Narcissistic Depressive Technoscience, 93–4.

[18] Gregory E. Reynolds, “The Importance of Personal Presence in Ministry and Life,” Ordained Servant 21 (2012): 20–26.

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, April, 2025.