One of the Bible’s promised curses is that we become like our idols. “Those who make them are like them; So is everyone who trusts in them.” (Psalm 115:8) Idolatry is formative; we become like what we love.
As the AI technologies burn through the job market, Christians would do well to consider if the AI revolution is, at least partly, the Bible’s promised curse coming true before our eyes. Man has made an idol of knowledge; his idol is now consuming him, and his very experience of life is resembling the idol of knowledge he made.
I don’t mean to say that any particular AI technology is an idol. They are all simply tools, and some are extremely valuable.
But for many years — centuries actually — Western man has been seeking knowledge as an end. Rationalists believed that logical knowledge would lead to truth. Empiricists believed that knowledge was power, and the more knowledge one had about the world, the more power we would gain over it. Knowledge was divorced from wisdom. Knowledge became fact-collecting: as if neutral, value-free facts just littered the universe, and were waiting to be collected.
This took place alongside a conscious apostasy. The writers, philosophers, scientists, musicians, and politicians of Europe placed their faith in human reason and fact-collecting, and began discarding God and His Word as the key to interpreting all the facts of the universe.
From the point of view of the material conditions of humans, they had enormous success. The scientific revolution, the Industrial Revolution, the machine age, the digital revolution brought improvements to the physical conditions of human that were unimaginable in centuries past. From the point of view of valuing actual human beings, it was a catastrophic disaster: more humans were killed in war and crime and abortion than in all the previous centuries combined. Our fact-collecting enabled us to care for and comfort the human body like never before, while forgetting the meaning and importance of the human being.
AI represents the next step in the pursuit of an all-comprehensive grasp of ‘facts’. Our technologies have now consumed (without understanding) all that has been written by humans. Our dream of knowing ‘everything’ is coming true. We now have a tool that has every available fact, and it can be harnessed for more power.
But the ‘knowledge’ given by AI tools is exactly the kind of knowledge idolatrous man sought: knowledge without God. Disconnected, isolated, uninterpreted facts. That means it is knowledge without wisdom, knowledge without insight, and knowledge without love. Large language models (LLMs) have powerful predictive algorithms that allow them to write, perform research, and mimic the cognition of human beings. That doesn’t make them evil, or all their knowledge false and useless. But LLMs, we must remind ourselves, remain without desires, without affections, without a love of the true, good, and beautiful.
In short, AI cannot be wise. Wisdom is the principal thing, and wisdom is not a measure of how many facts you have collected. Wisdom is the very shape of your thinking, the Christlike contour of your judgements, the Heaven-Filtered interpretive lens you use for all of life.
And here is the rub: if you have been pursuing knowledge as an end in itself – what the internet innocuously calls “content” – there will be little difference to you between what AI does, and what a human can do. Soon, AI will do it better. And if “content” is the goal, then AI is the tool.
Christians must know the difference between knowledge and wisdom, between facts and truth, between mimicked cognition and true insight, between predictive algorithms and spiritual illumination. Christians ought to spend a lot more time in the wisdom literature of Proverbs and Ecclesiastes in the years to come, if we wish to know the difference between facts and wisdom.
Those who make them become like them. If life is about consuming digital content, then your source of joy is an algorithm that cannot see, taste, touch, walk, hear, or speak in any real way. And soon, you will become as dull, senseless, and dead to true beauty as your fact-collecting idol. Ironically then, with all this knowledge, you will become a fool.