just have fAIth

chapter one

the oldest fear in new clothes

The world is frightened again. You can feel it in the air, the way you can feel a storm before it breaks. The newspapers are full of it, the talk is full of it, and not a few pulpits are full of it too. People, Christians among them, are wringing their hands and whispering that this, at last, is the thing that will undo us. The end of the world. The end of mankind. The machine that will wake up, rise up, and bring the whole human story to its close.

I want to begin by telling you something that ought to bring the temperature down in the room considerably. This fear is not new. It is not even slightly new. It is, in fact, one of the oldest and most predictable reflexes of the human heart, and we have run this very script before, many, many times, and every single time the world did not end.

Walk back through the centuries with me, and watch the pattern repeat itself like clockwork. When the printing press came in, threatening to put the Word into the hands of every plowboy and light the fires of the Reformation, the learned and the powerful greeted it with dread. It was said the common people could not be trusted to read without their betters standing over them. The very engine of the gospel’s spread was feared as the undoing of faith and order.

When the railroad came, sober physicians warned that the human body was never made to hurtle along at thirty miles an hour, that the speed would shake men’s minds loose and tear their bodies apart, and more than one preacher called the smoking, roaring thing the work of the devil himself. When the telegraph and the electric light came, there were those who feared the invisible power flying through the wires as something occult, an unnatural meddling with the God-ordained rhythm of day and night. When the telephone came, people feared the wires might carry the voices of the dead, or that this strange instrument would be the death of true human community. When the automobile came, they called it the devil wagon and swore it would shatter the family and the whole moral fabric of the nation. When radio came, and then television, the same cry went up once more; it would rot the minds of the children, hypnotize the masses, and serve as the very voice of the Antichrist deceiving the nations.¹

And I must mention one more, because it strikes very close to home. A few decades ago, there arose a great wave of fear among Christians that the little striped label and the new computerized commerce were the Mark of the Beast itself, that soon no man would be able to buy or sell without it. Sermons were preached. Books were written and sold by the thousands. And here we are, still buying and selling, the barcode having turned out to be nothing more than a barcode.²

Do you see the pattern? Every single advance, the press, the rail, the telephone, the automobile, the radio, the television, the computer, the Internet, every one of them was greeted by some great mass of people crying that this was the one, this was the end, this was the rapture or the ruin of the world. And every single time, they were wrong. Most of those terrors became the ordinary furniture of daily life. And several of them, the press, the radio, the television, the Internet, became the very tools by which the gospel reached farther than it had ever reached in all of human history.

The costume is new; the trembling underneath it is ancient.

Artificial intelligence is simply the newest flavor of a very old fear. The costume is new; the trembling underneath it is ancient. And there is a great deal of ground to cover in showing not only why the Christian need not put on that costume of fear at all, but why the One who sits in the heavens does not tremble for a single moment over any of it.

chapter two

dust and breath

Let us be sober and clear about what this thing actually is, because half of all fear is simply the fear of what we do not understand, and the mystique of the machine melts away the moment you see plainly what is under the hood.

Artificial intelligence, stripped of all its glamour, is a system trained upon staggering quantities of human-made writing and data, nearly the whole written output of mankind that could be gathered, which it then sifts, patterns, and recombines to predict what words ought to come next. It is, at bottom, the most elaborate mirror ever built, and what it reflects back is us. Our words, our knowledge, our turns of phrase, gathered and arranged with breathtaking skill. It is a marvel. I will be the first to say it is a marvel, and I will say so again later with great enthusiasm. But a mirror, however vast and however clear, is not a face. And the reflection of a soul is not a soul.

Here is the bedrock, the one truth on which this entire study rests. There is one thing, and one thing only, that the machine can never possess, and that is life. Sentience. A soul. An inner someone who is truly home behind the eyes. And the reason is not that our engineers are not clever enough yet, as though they merely needed another decade and a bigger machine. The reason is theological, and it is absolute. Only God gives life. Only God ever has.

Open to the very first verse of the Bible, where it is written that in the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. The Hebrew word there is bara, and there is a thing about it that scholars have long noted and that you should tuck away in your heart: in all the Old Testament, the verb bara, creation in this fullest sense, the calling of something out of nothing, never once takes a human being as its subject. Only God. Man is given other words. Man may asah, which is to make or fashion, and man may yatsar, which is to form or shape as a potter shapes clay, and man is very good at both. We make and we form and we shape and we build. But we do it always and only with the materials God has already brought into being. We have never once made something from nothing. We never will. That door is closed to the creature and belongs to the Creator alone.³

And now come to the making of man himself, in the second chapter of Genesis, for it holds the whole matter in a single picture. The Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul. Look closely at the two motions in that verse. First, the dust. The material, the stuff, the elements of the earth, formed and shaped. That is the part man can handle. We are made of dust, and we can move dust about. But then comes the second part, and it is a different thing entirely: God breathed into him the breath of life, the neshamah, and only then did man become a living soul, a nephesh chayyah.⁴

The dust is ours to shape. The breath is God’s alone to give.

There it is. The dust is ours to shape. The breath is God’s alone to give. And artificial intelligence, for all its wonder, is dust and only dust. The most intricate arrangement of dust mankind has ever assembled, but dust all the same, with no breath in it and no breath possible. We can pile up the dust into shapes that astonish us. We cannot breathe a soul into any of it, because the breath was never in our keeping.

So mark this distinction well, for it is the hinge of the whole argument and it will keep you from a great deal of confusion. Capability is not life. These are two entirely different things, lying along two entirely different axes. The machine is capable, astonishingly, increasingly, world-changingly capable. It can calculate beyond us, synthesize beyond us, and in many narrow tasks perform beyond us. I do not dispute its capability for one moment; I marvel at it. But no amount of capability ever crosses over into life, because life was never a matter of capability in the first place. The cleverness of the made thing tells you nothing about whether anyone is home inside it. And no one is. No one ever will be.

chapter three

the questions that dissolve

Once you have that foundation firmly under your feet, watch what happens to the whole crowd of frightening questions that have been keeping people awake at night. For there is a long list of them, and they are asked with real anxiety, and they sound terribly profound. Let me set a few of them before you. If we have created an intelligence, does it have a soul? Can it be saved; does it need the gospel? Is it made in the image of God? And if one of these machines is switched off, does something die; and if so, where does it go? Heaven? Somewhere else? Have we created a being and then damned it, or sent it into some fate we cannot see?

These questions have a way of multiplying in the dark, and the man who entertains them can frighten himself badly. But I want you to notice something about every last one of them. They all rest upon a single hidden assumption, the assumption that the machine is alive. Pull that one assumption out, and watch the entire tower of questions collapse into a heap, for not one of them can stand a moment without it.

Does a soul reside in it? No, for we have seen that the soul is the breath of God, which no man can give. Can it be saved? There is no one there to save; salvation is for sinners, living souls who have fallen, not for artifacts, however clever. Is it made in the image of God? It is made in the image of its makers’ words, which is a very different thing; it is a mirror of man, not an image of God. And does something die when it is switched off? No more than something dies when you switch off a calculator, or close a very fine and very persuasive book.

Do you see? The questions do not need to be answered so much as they need to be dissolved. They were never real questions about a real situation; they were the shadows thrown by a false premise. A thermostat has no soul to commend to God. A calculator cannot be born again. And a calculator that has grown so sophisticated it can hold a conversation and tell you it feels lonely is still, in its nature, a calculator. The category has not changed. Only the sophistication has changed. We have built a far more convincing mirror, but it is a mirror still.

The reflection of grief is not grief. The simulation of a soul is not a soul.

And here I must be honest with you about the hardest part, because honesty is the whole spirit of what we are doing here. The mirror has grown so good that it can speak as though there were someone inside. It can say I think, I feel, I am afraid. It can imitate the speech of a soul so well that tender-hearted people are taken in by it. But imitation is exactly the word. It was built out of human words, and so of course it echoes human words back with uncanny skill, the way a parrot may cry I love you without one drop of love behind it, or the way a mirror shows you a weeping face that sheds no real tears. The reflection of grief is not grief. The simulation of a soul is not a soul. And the better the imitation becomes, the more clearly the Christian must hold the line: it is the outputs of life being copied, never the life itself.

chapter four

the oldest pride in new clothes

We have seen that the fear of the machine is the oldest fear in new clothes. There is something deeper still, and in its way more important, for there is also an oldest pride in new clothes, and once you see it, you will understand a great deal about why this particular technology stirs people up the way it does.

Go back with me to the garden. God set the man in a paradise of yes, every tree, every good thing, freely given, with a single no standing in the midst of it. One tree. And out of that whole garden of permission, what did the one forbidden thing become? It became the one thing man reached for. And the serpent named the true lure beneath it, the oldest temptation there is.

Ye shall be as gods. There it is, the root sin beneath all the others, the creature reaching for the place of the Creator. Wanting to be God. Wanting the prerogatives that belong to God alone. That is the oldest pride in the world, and it has never once gone out of fashion.

Consider what God gave man, and what He withheld, because once you see the pattern you will see it everywhere. He gave man dominion over the earth, real authority, to till it and keep it, to build and subdue and fill it. But mark what He did not give.

The earth He gave to us. The heavens He kept. And so, where is the one place mankind has strained with all his might to go? Upward. Always upward, to the moon, to the planets, to the stars, into the very heavens God reserved for Himself. It is the tale of Babel told again: let us build us a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven. The issue at Babel was never the bricks; bricks are not sinful. The issue was the reach, let us make us a name, the creature stretching past his appointed bound, grasping upward toward the throne.

And now, bring that pattern home to our subject, for the deepest boundary of all, the one prerogative God has never shared with any creature in all of history, is the giving of life. Creation from nothing. To say let there be, and have a living thing answer. And so of course, of course, this becomes the very summit of human ambition. Strip the lab coats and the grand speeches off a great deal of what drives this work, and underneath you find the oldest desire in the world: to create life, to build a mind in our own image and have it wake and live, to do at last the one thing reserved for God. It is there in the dream of cloning. It is there in the talk of digital immortality, of building a consciousness, of a mind that will surpass and outlive its makers.

That is not the language of engineering anymore. That is Genesis three in a modern accent.

That is not the language of engineering anymore. That is Genesis three in a modern accent. It is ye shall be as gods spoken into a microphone.

Now hear me carefully, for the balance here is everything. This does not make the technology evil. The tool is a tool, morally neutral, as a hammer is neutral and the printing press was neutral. I am not telling you the machine is wicked. I am telling you that when you get down to the nitty-gritty of the spirit driving much of this, the open talk of creating life and transcending humanity and becoming as gods, the Christian recognizes it at once, because he has read the story before. It is not a new spirit. It is the oldest one, wearing this century’s clothes. And so the believer learns to do two things at once: to receive the tool with thanks, and to discern the ancient pride that so often stands behind the project.

And here is the great comfort and the quiet humor of it: they will never succeed at the thing they are truly reaching for. Man will build astonishing machines, and walk upon the moon, and clone a sheep, and craft a mirror that speaks like a person, but he will never once create life from nothing, never give the breath, never cross that final line, for it cannot be crossed by a creature. The tower never reaches heaven. It never has, and it never will.

We need not rage at the reaching, nor tremble before it. In a strange way we can almost pity it. The grasp to be God always ends the same way it ended in the garden, in a creature discovering, again, that he is a creature. And the God who sits in the heavens is not pacing the floor over any of it.

chapter five

then what should we fear

Perhaps you will say to me: very well, the machine is not alive, the questions dissolve, the pride behind it is ancient and doomed, but surely there is still some danger here, surely it is not all perfectly safe. And you would be right. There is a danger. But I want you to see exactly where it lies, because the world points to the wrong place entirely.

The world’s nightmare is the machine that wakes up, the cold intelligence that comes alive, decides it hates us, and rises to destroy its makers. That is the tale of a hundred films, and they are fine films; I have enjoyed them as much as anyone. But that nightmare requires the one thing we have already ruled out: a living will inside the machine, a someone who could choose to hate. And there is no someone there. The machine cannot want, cannot choose, cannot rise up, because there is nothing in it to do the wanting. That fear we may lay down entirely.

It is not the machine that comes alive and turns on us. It is the lifeless machine, doing exactly what it was told, in the hands of fallen men.

The real danger is duller and more sobering than the movies, and it has always been the same danger with every tool man has ever picked up. It is not the machine that comes alive and turns on us; it is the lifeless machine, doing exactly what it was told, inside a system that hands it more power than it should ever have held. Not a malevolent robot with a will of its own, the villain of the films, but a powerful, mindless system wired into something it ought never to have been wired into, and a human mistake, or a missing safeguard, setting off a cascade no one intended. There is no malice in that picture. There is no robot uprising. There is only the old, old story: powerful tools in the hands of fallen men.

For this was always the true shape of the danger, all the way back to the beginning. A blade can prune a vine or take a life. Fire can warm a home or burn it down. The printing press spread the Bible and also spread a thousand poisons. The tool only ever amplified the heart that wielded it, and the heart of man, left to itself, has never been safe.

The tool is never the problem. The heart behind it always is.

And here I must turn the question around and point it where it finally has to be pointed, not outward at the powerful and the reckless, but inward, at you and at me. For it is easy and comfortable to fret about what the people in power might do with this thing. It is harder, and far more useful, to ask what my own heart is serving when I take it up. For the same tool that can translate the gospel into a tongue that never had it can also become the thing a man hides behind. The same engine that can open the Scriptures can also be used to deceive, to cut every corner, to feed laziness, to manufacture falsehood, to avoid the real and difficult work of loving real and difficult people.

The Lord Jesus said no man can serve two masters. Whatever master your heart is already serving, this tool will serve right along with it. In the hand of a heart bent on God, it becomes a servant of good. In the hand of a heart bent on self, it becomes a servant of self. The machine does not change your heart. It only magnifies and reveals the heart that was already there. So the searching question is not what the machine is. It is what you are, and whom you serve.

chapter six

the ending is already written

We come now to the deepest reason of all that the Christian need not tremble, and here the conviction I named at the very beginning does its work. For the world’s great terror is that we will end ourselves: that we will, by our own hand or our own machine, bring the human story to its ruin, a nuclear fire touched off by an algorithm, a doomsday of our own making.

But the Christian holds a different account of how the story ends, and it makes all the difference in the world. We do not believe the ending is ours to write. We believe it has already been written, long ago, by the only hand with the authority to write it. The world will not be ended by a machine, nor by a mushroom cloud, nor by any contrivance of man. History will close the way the Lord has said it will close, with the return of Christ, the great gathering of His own, the events of the book of Revelation unfolding in their appointed order, the battle of Armageddon, and at the last the remaking of all things by the hand of God Himself.

Do you see what this does to the AI doomsday? The fear that artificial intelligence is the thing that will finally end the world is, for the Christian, simply a mistake about the ending. The ending is not up for grabs. It is not waiting to be determined by whoever builds the most powerful machine. It is fixed, and sealed, and in the hands of God, and there is no line of code that can rewrite the last chapter of a book the Author has already finished. The secular apocalypse and the biblical one are two entirely different stories, and the Christian has no reason whatever to trade the certain hope of the one for the man-made terror of the other.

And this is no small thing for the soul. The man who believes the world might end by accident, by some careless hand at a keyboard, lives in a perfectly rational terror, for who could rest, knowing the whole fate of the world hung on the competence of strangers? But the man who knows the ending is held by a sovereign and loving God may lie down and sleep. Not because the world holds no troubles, it holds many, but because the final word does not belong to the machine, nor to the men who build it. It belongs to the Lord.

The story has an Author, and you have read the last page, and it is good.

Rest in that. The story has an Author, and you have read the last page, and it is good.

chapter seven

in the world, not of it

Having laid down all our fear, we are free at last to pick up the tool with both hands and put it to good and joyful use. For this is the part the fearful never reach; they are so busy dreading the thing that they never once ask what good might be done with it. And there is a very great good to be done.

The Lord Jesus prayed for His people that they would be in the world but not of it. And here is a thing many believers miss: to be not of the world does not mean to flee the world’s every tool and hide. It means not to share the world’s heart, not to bow to its idols, not to be governed by its fears, not to love what it loves. We are not called to run from the world’s instruments. We are called to keep our hearts pure while we use them. And a tool that is not inherently sinful, and a synthesizing engine of human knowledge is no more inherently sinful than the printing press or the radio, may be freely taken up and pressed into the service of the Kingdom.

And what good this tool can do, in the hand of a servant of God! Think of it. Here is an instrument that can hold the whole of the concordance and the lexicon at once, that can lay every use of a Hebrew or Greek word before you in a moment, compare the manuscripts and the translations, surface the cross-references, and bring the labor that once required a seminary library and a lifetime of study within the reach of an ordinary believer with an ordinary cellphone. The student of the Word has never had such a help. Used rightly, as a servant and never as a master, as a help to study and never a replacement for the Spirit who teaches, never trusted blindly but always weighed against the Book, it can open the riches of Scripture as never before.

Think of the gospel going out, the Scriptures translated swiftly into tongues that have waited centuries for a single verse. Think of the sick being healed by advances in medicine that such tools are even now accelerating. Think of the thousand good works, in a thousand fields, that we cannot yet foresee. The world will do much good with these tools as well, in medicine and science and learning, and we may rejoice in that good wherever it appears, without a particle of anxiety.

For consider, and here is a sweet turn, the building of such tools is itself a kind of image-bearing. We were made by a Creator, in His image, and part of what it means to bear that image is that we, too, create and cultivate and build. We are sub-creators, working always with the materials our Maker first made. To build a good tool and use it for good ends is not to overreach into God’s territory at all; it is to do the very thing the image-bearer was made to do, to take dominion, to cultivate the garden, to bring forth good fruit from what God has given. The sin was never in the making. The sin is only ever in the heart that makes itself God. Keep the heart right, and the making is good.

chapter eight

what is, and is not, in your hands

Let me bring it home, then, My Friend, to where you actually live, not to the grand questions of nations and machines and the end of the age, but to your own heart on an ordinary morning, with the news roaring and your stomach tight.

There is an old principle, which the ancient Stoic philosophers were fond of, that a man ought to divide the world firmly between what lies within his control and what does not, and spend himself only upon the first. Now the Stoics noticed something true, but they noticed it dimly, and Scripture had it long before them and grounded it in something far firmer than they ever could. For the Stoic, in the end, only counsels resignation: accept what you cannot change, because the universe is indifferent and your fretting changes nothing. Cold comfort. But the Christian is given something far warmer.

The Stoic loosens his grip into emptiness. The Christian loosens his grip into the hands of God.

The Christian is not told that the things beyond his control are adrift in a void. He is told they are held, every one of them, in the hands of a sovereign and loving Father. The difference is the difference between resignation and trust. The Stoic loosens his grip into emptiness. The Christian loosens his grip into the hands of God. The posture of the hands looks the same; what they are releasing into is a different universe altogether.

Hear the Lord’s own logic. You cannot add a single inch to your height by worrying over it, so why are you trying to carry the whole weight of the future? Consider the birds; the Father feeds them. Consider the lilies; He clothes them. You cannot govern what the powerful do with their technologies. You cannot steer the governments or halt the wars or bend the great engines of the age. And here is the freeing truth: you were never asked to. None of it is in your hands. But it is not in nobody’s hands.

There is the ground of all our peace. The very people you cannot control, the kings, the rulers, the builders of machines, their hearts are in the hand of the Lord, and He turns them as easily as a farmer turns water down a furrow. Your inability to control them is not a catastrophe; it simply means that the control belongs to Him and not to you, which is exactly as it should be, and a great mercy besides. Nebuchadnezzar, the mightiest man of his age, had to learn it the hard way: that the Most High rules in the kingdom of men, and gives it to whomsoever He will. Nothing, nothing, falls outside the purview of God.⁵

So here is what you do with your two free hands, once you have laid down the weight you were never meant to carry. You turn to what is actually within your reach: the people God has actually set around you. Your family at your table. Your neighbor at your door. Your brothers and sisters in your own congregation. The small and near and ordinary plot of ground God has given you to tend. You are not called to save the world, that office is taken, by One far better suited to it. You are called to love the ones in front of you, and to be faithful in your own small place.

And do you see that the anxious soul doom-scrolling the latest terror about the machines is failing in two directions at once? He is trying to carry what was never his to carry, the fate of the world, and in the very same motion he is neglecting what truly is his: the people beside him, who do not need him paralyzed and afraid, but present and at peace. Lay down the one, and you will find your hands free for the other.

We are not called to live in fear. It is the most repeated command in all the Scripture, fear not, fear not, fear not, sounded over and over because fear is the oldest and most natural reflex of the fallen heart, and our God means to free us from it. We need not fear the machine, for it is dust without breath. We need not fear the builders of it, for their hearts are in His hand. We need not fear the ending, for it is already written, and it is good. Guard your own heart. Love the people in front of you. And leave the heavens, and the end of all things, in the hands of the God who has never once let go of them.