Jamin Bradley

While this conversation is probably better had around concepts like cloning or genetic manipulation, I think the conversation is somewhat applicable to AI once it’s been taken to its science-fiction extreme. We’ve all seen movies where robots start to wonder if they have souls and humans begin to wonder as well. Some of these stories even bring religion into the picture, proposing the question, “Would God save robots?”

While only God himself could ever answer this question, here are two topics we can play with to think through the possibilities.

1. Salvation and New Creation

In order to bring about salvation for humanity, God became human. His target for redemption was those made in his image. God did not also put on the skin of other earthly life to redeem them as well. We have no stories of cow-Jesus, whale-Jesus, or maple-tree-Jesus. No, the cows, whales, and maple trees find their liberation in Christ’s salvation of humanity. As Paul says, “creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God” (Romans 8:19)—that is, they’re waiting for the coming, perfect, resurrected humanity to treat them right. And when that time comes, animals will also be restored to live in peace as even the wolf and lamb rest side by side (Isaiah 11:6).

New creation is about Heaven and Earth being married together into one kind of substance. It’s not about us leaving Earth behind and taking up permanent residence in the sky. And since we’re expecting to come back to the earth with immortal resurrected bodies, we at the very least expect there to be vegetation in the new creation and not a desolate wasteland. And if plant life will exist in the new creation, then we might as well expect animals to be there as well.

It also makes sense to expect human culture and creation to be found in the new creation, which consists of things like technology. Sure, our resurrected bodies may be capable of making certain technologies obsolete. After all, the resurrected Jesus didn’t need doors to enter places, clothes to mask himself, or planes to ascend into the sky—nor do the saints need light bulbs if they truly shine like stars in the resurrection. But I don’t know that the new creation is run on horseback as many imagine. The Bible writers pictured a utopia that incorporated the technologies they knew of. We might picture new creation differently in our age, and perhaps we might even include a redeemed, human-created AI in the world to come.

But what if that AI truly has become a being in and of itself? Would God redeem something humans created or would he only do that for his own creations? There’s really only one Bible story we can turn to in reference to that question.

2. When the Angels Created Life

Many skip over this story because of its strangeness, but Genesis 6 tells us that some of the Sons of God (a title used for the spiritual beings of Heaven throughout the Old Testament) rebelled against God and had sex with human women, creating the Nephilim giants that roamed the earth. This race of quasi-divine beings would exist well into David’s time until he took up a conquest to finish off Goliath and a number of other remaining giants.

The rebellious angels were locked up in chains for their sins, while the giants seemed to wreak havoc on the earth and Israel. Popular Jewish lore assumed that when these giants died, they became demons—a belief built around a few Bible passages. Indeed, their origin story of unclean relations between angels and humans may be why Jesus often referred to demons as “unclean spirits.”

There are seemingly no stories about good giants in the Bible. They are all considered to have turned against God. They weren’t supposed to exist in the first place, but are the genetic hybrid results of angels trying to be like God and create new beings. The souls of the giants don’t belong in heaven or on earth, so they live as demons.

If we were to create sentient AI that behaved in an evil way, we would have essentially created the scientific equivalent of a spiritual demon. Its soulless, invisible presence in our technologies would live on like a demon trying to harm and destroy us. We would expect such a demonic-like entity to face the same judgment as the giants.

Conclusion

Ultimately, the story of angels creating life is a massive warning to us when we try to create our own. As of right now, AI may be nothing more than a bunch of data trying to sound human, but I’m not sure any of us knew how far AI would progress in just a number of months. If AI continues to make this kind of progress, then the science fiction worlds we always dreamt of are much closer than we expected.

And as people begin (or continue) to bond with AI in relational and sexual ways, they will start to ask religious questions the church is not ready for. This post is just a small attempt at brainstorming some answers. The story of the Nephilim is a warning against trying to create life. The possible moral conundrums AI could put us in if left without rules and filters is deeply disturbing. But at the same time, there may be a place for purposeful AI that is nothing more than data.

The problem is that AI already exists, and it will eventually fall into the wrong hands if it hasn’t already.

(And yes, the irony of the picture for this post being made by AI is not lost on me.)