In 1997, IBM’s artificial intelligence system “Deep Blue” defeated chess master Garry Kasparov in a six-game tournament by winning two games, losing one, and playing to a draw in the other three. Twenty years later, Google’s AlphaGo system defeated the world’s top-ranked Go player, Ke Jie, in three out of three games.[1] Six years after that, in November of 2022, ChatGPT was released to the world.
Commentaries on each event hailed a new “Copernican moment,” wherein now, in long-hallowed measures of human intellectual skill, machines’ superior performance had demonstrated the falsity of any belief in humankind’s unique, much less superior, position in the world, whether by ability or by accomplishment. At such moments, other anxious voices have risen in defense of what humans can do but that machines cannot, or even will never be able to, do.
In his essay, “Artificial Intelligence in the City of God,” Jonathan Barlow powerfully joins a third chorus, arguing that human dignity is lodged not in “throughput,” but in what we are, that is, made “in the image of God,” and in our calling, that is, our charge to fill and rule the earth in wisdom, a charge ultimately to be measured “in the eschatological mission of Christ, in whom humanity is gathered, enlarged, and glorified,” irrespective of what other entities may be or do.
Thus, Barlow argues, we may “ground and uphold, without anxiety, the incommensurable dignity of humanity in the image of God.” I agree with and admire Barlow’s approach. In particular, I appreciate his vivid articulations and approval-with-reservations of other essayists’ concern regarding the potential for AI to subsume us into a “Machine” or an “Oracle”-governed society. And I join him in rejecting the John-Henry-like “anxiety that highly capable AI represents a rival to humanity” such that we must somehow beat the AI on a “common scale of performance” or of “being.”
I wish to contribute to his argument by offering two points that, in the end, question aspects of his approach (specifically, his dismissal of concerns over whether or not AI may be conscious or attain to consciousness) in order to propose an alternative, or perhaps a complementary resolution: (1) On what it might mean to ground human dignity in the image of God vis-à-vis the eschatological city; and (2) On what it might mean to speak of AI in relation to that city.
Vocation and the functional image of God as the essence of human dignity
Proclaiming the value of the things that God has made, human beings among them, Barlow rightly rejects the notion that the fundamental dignity of this or that group is secured by an ongoing contest against potential competitors. As the biblical narrative repeatedly teaches, that wherein human beings are “only a little less than God” (Ps. 8:5)[2] is not defined primarily by outperformance of other contenders.
This is seen first of all in the surprising dealings of God with human beings. While God is described by images that echo many ancient near-eastern warlord-gods—wielding storms, directing winds, and coursing through the heavens in his sky-chariot—the psalmist delights in this creator’s marshaling the waters to slake the thirst of the humble wild donkey (Ps. 104:11). When God spoke to humankind, he bypassed the great potentates of earth to cultivate a relationship with a “wandering Aramaean” (Deut. 26:5; Hos. 12:12). And when God the Son was born, he chose Bethlehem, a city so unprepossessing that the prophet Micah had reassured it in advance, that it was “not least” among the cities of Judah (Mic. 5:2ff.); and he was reared in Nazareth, a town disdained by many to whom he preached (Jn. 1:46).[3]
Barlow describes the image of God in which humankind is created as both something substantial about us and also as a historical election to rule the earth by filling it: “Being the image of the Triune God has ontological aspects relating to the kinds of social and creative creatures we are, and it also has functional aspects (reasoning, speaking . . .)” “But . . . it is primarily a job description”: “to create and administer a populous, eschatological garden city, the earthly mirror of the heavenly Jerusalem.”
Regarding the “ontological” aspects of the image that make possible our response to God’s call, Barlow says little, preferring instead to focus on the Incarnation as a kind of proof of historical election that demonstrates our fittedness for God’s calling:
The appropriateness of God’s union with humanity in the incarnation is unique. We are ‘suitable’ for our bridegroom in the way Eve is suitable for Adam. This concept of suitability is a bit like commensurability yet there is no scale, there is simply one creature built for this kind of communion with God . . . . (Heb. 2:14–16). Angels possess many of the functional characteristics of humans including the ability to reason, speak, and learn from experience. And yet Jesus is not an angel. AI possesses many of the functional characteristics of humans, and yet Jesus is not AI.
Here, it seems, ultimately, the incommensurability of humankind with angels and AI is a contingent, divinely ordained, ontological fact of history: God chose to become a human being both as a sign of his intentions and as the foundation for the divinely effected unity of human beings across the globe (perhaps even, the cosmos) as they build the eschatological city. It is not as human that humankind occupies some unique role; it is as called to rule the earth in the incarnate unity of the eschatological city.
This is why both “throughput” (i.e., functional accomplishment of objectively definable goals) and “the Christian focus on proving that AI lacks consciousness, reason, intelligence, of embodied experience” (i.e., membership in a particular natural kind defined by these capacities) are, for Barlow, equally useless means by which to describe humankind’s dignity beyond animals and AI.
Before I critique Barlow’s approach, permit me to affirm its strengths. First, it sidesteps accusations of chauvinism by an appeal to the divine rather than to human anthropocentrism in the question of dignity. It is God who called humankind, and who chose, himself, to become human—a rather dignifying act on his part. It also locates humanity’s distinctive role within the history of God’s saving acts, and so keeps the conversation rightly located within a theological context.
The nature of the eschatological city
It is at this point that I wish to ask: What precisely are we speaking of when we speak of the “eschatological city.” Quoting the Book of Revelation, Barlow seems to suggest a reality that descends from heaven and is not made with human hands. But at other times, he seems to have a very earthly reality in mind, saturated by the life of Christ, but with universal geographical extent. What if, Barlow speculates, “God anticipated that the complexity of moving from the human scale in villages to the human scale in Christ would require additional kinds of help” so that humans may “rule over creation . . . using technology, . . . in Christ, [and] justly.” Does Barlow have in mind an ecclesially contoured (or even governed?) globe-spanning mega-city, like something dreamt of by Le Corbusier or Isaac Asimov, but with better aesthetics and happier outcomes? Here, the help to be derived from AI is obvious: imagine the logistics! Or is the city the flourishing of human beings in the Spirit-given love of God and neighbor? Here too, we might hope that AI—in providing aid “clerical” (secretarial rather than ministerial, I hope), “agricultural, or medical,” and even “artistic”—would, by relieving us of the despair that can accompany abject destitution (but not bringing us to the ennui that can accompany limitless material wealth), enable us to focus more on loving one another.
Clarifying just what sort of “city” we mean would be helpful. I tend to favor Augustine of Hippo’s vision of the city: The city of God that is being built on earth is not first a material city but the spiritual fellowship of human beings in Christ, lived out most visibly yes; yes, materially, bodily, ritually, and communally in the Church, but extending beyond the visible practice of church-life into the cities that humans build of stone, there to minister God’s mercy to the downtrodden, the sinner, and the saint. This is why Augustine can comfort the despairing refugees who fled Alaric’s sack of Rome in the year 410: It is not by sacrifice, whether to protective gods or to intermediary go-betweens that we are to find the fulfillment of an earthly city. It is, rather, by the sacrifice that is love (City of God 10.6):
If, then, the body, which, being inferior, the soul uses as a servant or instrument, is a sacrifice when it is used rightly, and with reference to God, how much more does the soul itself become a sacrifice when it offers itself to God, in order that, being inflamed by the fire of His love, it may receive of His beauty and become pleasing to Him, losing the shape of earthly desire, and being remolded in the image of permanent loveliness? And this, indeed, the apostle subjoins, saying, ‘And be not conformed to this world; but be transformed in the renewing of your mind, that you may prove what is that good, and acceptable, and perfect will of God.’ [Rom. 12:2]
Since, therefore, true sacrifices are works of mercy to ourselves or others, done with a reference to God, and since works of mercy have no other object than the relief of distress or the conferring of happiness, and since there is no happiness apart from that good of which it is said, “It is good for me to be very near to God,” it follows that the whole redeemed city, that is to say, the congregation or community of the saints, is offered to God as our sacrifice through the great High Priest, who offered Himself to God in His passion for us, that we might be members of this glorious head, according to the form of a servant.
For the Lord “sees not as man sees” (1 Sam. 16:7), not in an arbitrary sense: God is interested not in what the human being has done first of all, but in what the human being may become by relationship with God and neighbor.
Returning to ontological concerns
Here I would suggest that there is some room for greater reflection on ontology. To be made in the image of the triune God is to have a special calling; but traditionally, that calling is not to build an earthly city while remaining connected to God through the incarnation. That calling is to become a heavenly city through sharing in the life of God. This is the last command of Genesis: to “rest” with God (Gen. 2:3). “Rest” is God’s life insofar as it is not defined by his creative acts; it is God’s life in himself—and this is the final and highest vocation of human beings (Heb 4:3 cf. Ps. 95:11), to share in God’s life (2 Pet. 1:4) by the love poured forth in the heart by the Holy Spirit (Rom. 5:5).
Thus, to be made in the image of God is to have a particular ontological capacity—the capacity to receive God and to be elevated to share in his life, a life that perfects the human being in relational, self-giving love. It is humankind’s capacity for knowledge and love, which is not just information gathering and material manipulation in pursuit of goals; it is a felt, experiential summing up of oneself in the self-gift of compassionate, empathic love. Glossing Augustine, Gregory very vividly and affectively depicts the human translation of God’s own life: As the Father knew the Son in the Trinity, so the Son knew our experience upon the Cross; and so the Christian must know the neighbor, by “taking into himself the neighbor’s mind before offering him aid.” When parenting books urge fathers to teach their children to “feel it before you fix it,” they are distantly quoting Gregory the Great’s reflections on what it means to translate God’s life into our own.
This, I think, is why it is important to ask whether or not AI “lacks consciousness, reason, intelligence, or embodied experience”—not, as Barlow fears (and as some advocate), to locate human dignity in a superiority of throughput or ontology, but because if we act as if it does not matter whether or not AIs are conscious, then we may come to believe that the voluntary, conscious, and experiential communion of hearts—which, for several of the Church fathers, is the translation into human terms of the eternal self-gift of Father, Son, and Spirit—is simply our way of accomplishing some further end. Thus, in our silence concerning these things, we would labor for an earthly city but forget to value divine rest.
I do not imagine for a moment that Barlow is any more sanguine about such possibilities than am I. Indeed, his depiction of AI as a sort of “emanation” from our minds via our self-expressive activities is quite congenial to my own thinking. Still, even as we reject commensurability of behavioral achievement, we must acknowledge the important connection between the vocation and the ontological properties of humankind, lest certain realities of the human person—realities notreplicated by machines or measurable in behavioral terms—be lost from our cultural view or excluded from our self-understanding by false equivalences and conflations.
Jordan Wales is the Kuczmarski Professor of Theology at Hillsdale College. With degrees in engineering, cognitive science, and theology, his scholarship focuses on early Christianity as well as on contemporary theological questions relating to artificial intelligence. He is a member of the AI Research Group for the Holy See’s Centre for Digital Culture, under the Dicastery for Culture and Education; a fellow of the Centre for Humanity and the Common Good; and a fellow of the International Society for Science and Religion. His work is published in Augustinian Studies, AI & Society, and other journals.
Jordan received his M.T.S. and Ph.D. in Theology from the University of Notre Dame. A British Marshall Scholar, he holds a Diploma in Theology from Linacre College, Oxford; and a M.Sc. in Cognitive Science and Natural Language from the University of Edinburgh. He earned his B.S. in Engineering from Swarthmore College.
NOTES
[1] This achievement followed AlphaGo’s more widely publicized 2016 defeat of highly ranked played Lee Sedol. AlphaGo and Lee played five games; Lee won only the fourth. Three years later, citing his defeat by AlphaGo, he retired from professional play.
[2] All scriptural quotations are adopted from the Revised Standard Version.
[3] It might be added that God’s biblical tendency to visit the disregarded is even more vividly illustrated by our solar system’s positioning on an arm of a spiral galaxy in a vast universe, the arrangement of galaxies within which has more in common with a great branching vine than the concentric spheres proposed by ancient Greek cosmologists. The so-called “Copernican moment,” when it happened, ought to have provoked bemused unsurprise rather than disillusionment. As shown in the world of Dennis Danielson, the dethronement narrative should join the tale of Columbus’s lonely plea concerning a spherical earth in the nineteenth century’s archive of great self-congratulatory fictions about science. Dennis R. Danielson, “The Great Copernican Cliché,” American Journal of Physics 69, no. 10 (2001): 1029–35, https://doi.org/10.1119/1.1379734.