AI and the Soul: Considerations for Christian Schools

About this episode

[Auto-Generated Transcript of the Podcast Audio with Edits]Today we’re going to talk about AI, and this is based upon a presentation I had a chance to give back in 2024. I’m writing this in August of 2026, so I’ve had a couple of years to let this simmer. But the core concepts of this original presentation really stand, and I’ve continued to expand my thinking and deepen my thinking around the implications of AI, and particularly the spiritual implications of AI.

Some people know that my original research and my doctoral work was really focused upon the social, spiritual, and ethical implications of technology, and I presented on this topic in the 1990s and the early 2000s, and it eventually turned into a book, some of my early thinking on it, called Digitized: Spiritual Implications of Technology.

And while there are parts of that book that are somewhat dated today, the core principles, the premise of the book still stands, and a lot of the fundamental principles, concepts, what I hope are biblical concepts, still stand for today. So you’ll probably see a little bit of that coming through in my reflections here.

But let’s talk about it. My original presentation, though, on AI was called “AI and the Soul: Christian Identity and Faith Formation in a Digital Age.” And every presentation, for me, is an opportunity to share. But this one felt especially meaningful because it touched on a topic that’s increasingly prevalent in our schools and our communities, and it touched on a topic that I’d been reflecting on for over two decades and studying in various ways.

I’m continuing to grapple with this and make sense of it, and I have a little bit of a civil war going on inside, if I’m completely candid, about some of these matters. They are yet to be resolved. But I remember in this presentation, the energy in the room was really incredible.

Educators were clearly intrigued and concerned, and I think some were pretty eager to figure out how to help their students navigate life in a world where artificial intelligence is increasingly prevalent. I had over fifty attendees who stayed after the session just to talk, to discuss, and reflect about the urgency of a number of the questions, and that was already two years ago.

Consider what has happened just in the last twenty-four-plus months. Let me just walk you through some of the key ideas, and we’ll start with some basic foundational ideas about what AI is and what it isn’t and where it is right now, and then we’ll get into some principles and questions for us to consider.

Now, when I’m talking about artificial intelligence, I’m talking about the simulation of human intelligence in machines and in various computer technologies. So these systems are programmed to perform tasks that typically require human cognition. This could include things like problem-solving or decision-making or learning, understanding a language, recognizing patterns visually or sound patterns, patterns in text.

Could be in a variety of things. And there are really three primary types of artificial intelligence. There’s one that some people refer to as narrow AI or weak AI. This is really designed to perform specific tasks, things like voice assistants. Siri or Alexa would be examples of this. Recommendation systems, Spotify, Netflix, chatbots.

This is where we are right now with a lot of the AI tools that we’re using, and it’s the only type of AI that, to our knowledge, is really widely prevalent today. Although some people would argue that we’re already at this next type of AI, which would be general AI, or some refer to it as strong AI. This is a system capable of performing any intellectual task that a human can do.

Experts predict that this could emerge sooner than we expect. I remember when I was giving the presentation two years ago, experts predicted that this might emerge somewhere between 2060 and 2100. So we have a little bit of time. Yet since then, people have moved that date up significantly to the point where some are expecting it to happen in a matter of months or years, and others argue that maybe it’s already present.

What some people would argue is that what we’re really seeing today is just increasingly complex weak AI, that first category, combining multiple human-like tasks into one system such that it begins to look and feel more like how a whole human mind works.

But it’s not there in its entirety. Yet also keep in mind that in one sense, most of us humans don’t even meet the standard of general AI, meaning that we vary in our capacity to conduct various types of cognitive tasks. Some of us are better at recognizing visual cues and auditory cues than others, and some of us have higher and lower levels.

And that’s why we have different theories like Howard Gardner out of Harvard, the cognitive scientist who liked to describe human cognitive abilities not in terms of a single IQ or a single intelligence, but he talked about multiple intelligences. There’s musical intelligence, interpersonal intelligence, intrapersonal intelligence, mathematical-logical intelligence, and so forth.

So he had a number of categories. If we think about AI in a similar way, and we’re comparing AI to human cognition, that it’s really fundamentally built upon the framework of the idea of human cognition, then we could say that really narrow AI and general AI blend together. That in essence, you have narrow AI, you have a number of capabilities that could be merged into one system that are increasingly reaching levels of complexity that are comparable to some humans and maybe not all humans. So then we get the third category, which would be super intelligent AI.

Now, this is another stage, and I would argue that this is, at this point, hypothetical, where artificial intelligence completely surpasses human intelligence across all fields. Some predict that it will follow general AI by fifty to a hundred years. Others think that it will come rapidly after general AI is accomplished.

Yet what’s already here and likely to be more immediate is increasingly complex weak AI that far exceeds human abilities with regard to very specific tasks that were formerly done by human beings. And this is already happening, and it will continue to expand in the weeks and months and years ahead. So for example, let’s imagine that we have a medical doctor who’s using their training and their cognition, their senses to identify tumors in a human body, and they’ve done it largely in a manual process where they receive the images or whatever kind of data is made available to them, and then they analyze those data, and they can determine where a tumor is present, its size, all of those sorts of things.

Well, it’s very possible that a technology could identify tumors with much more sophistication and detail than your typical human being or your typical doctor, or maybe any doctor at some point. So is that super intelligent AI? Well, it is narrow AI that is super intelligent in one specific task. And then you add to that, and you get this system, eventually, this hypothetical system that just has that level of proficiency or skill in these cognitive tasks, such that it’s hard to find any task that a human being can do better than AI. That’s the theory.

That’s the framework. I’m not arguing for it. I’m just saying that’s what we’re dealing with when we’re looking at artificial intelligence. But I would argue that generally what we’re dealing with right now, most of the technologies that are available to the public that we know about, they are forms of narrow AI, but they’re being combined together.

And over time, a narrow AI cognitive task that can do one thing and a narrow AI cognitive task that is very similar. You begin to lump them together almost like Legos, and it builds something more complex to the point that eventually maybe people are willing to call it general AI. And some of those exceed human capabilities so far that they begin to call it a hint of super intelligent AI.

You get the idea? That’s really what we’re talking about here. So how does AI work? AI achieves its capabilities through a number of different methods, and I am no in-depth expert on all of these. I don’t have the deep technological expertise behind this in the way that a computer scientist with a cognitive science background could describe it.

But one would be machine learning. This involves training systems on large data sets to improve performance. And examples could include things like fraud detection or adaptive learning platforms, like if you’re an educator, something like DreamBox or Khan Academy. And I think in many ways we would probably call things like ChatGPT, they’d be in this machine learning category. Another is deep learning.

This is a type of machine learning that uses neural networks that are modeled after the human brain. And I do think that this is probably more of where some of the current chatbots fit, and also even some things like Duolingo, even though it seems to be incredibly inefficient or ineffective in helping people actually master a new language.

But what might be more common in this deep learning would be things like drug discovery software, where there’s a lot of development happening in the healthcare research space with the use of deep learning. Then there is another kind that’s called natural language processing.

This is about understanding and generating human language. And examples include things like Google Translate and email spam filters and virtual assistants like Siri have some of this built in, but also the chatbots included some natural language processing as well. And so there’s a lot out there.

Then we have computer vision, which is distinct in its design. This type of AI involves interpreting visual data like images and video. And while newer, as in the last couple of decades, it is growing really, really quickly. And we’re seeing that pop up all over the place. And we see these examples showing up in Apple Face ID and Tesla Autopilot, but a lot of the chatbot-like technologies and the new technologies you can subscribe to online are making use of this computer vision.

These various types of AI technologies are already embedded in educational tools and systems, tools that we can subscribe to online. They’re shaping how students learn and interact, and they will get more powerful and quickly. In fact, one well-known futurist, Thomas Frey, he went on the record to suggest that the largest technology company of the future will be an educational technology company.

Imagine something larger than Google that’s entirely focused on maximizing human learning, and that will undoubtedly be an AI-informed technology company if he happens to be right. Now let’s really flip. I gave you sort of the technical jargon or some of the models or frameworks for thinking about AI, but let’s talk about some of the key questions about the spiritual implications of AI.

Because at the heart of my initial presentation a couple of years ago and my ongoing thinking are really a set of questions which challenge us to think deeply about AI’s role in our lives and our schools. And while I don’t unpack all of them, and I’m not going to here, I just wanna offer them for you to think about at this point.

So here’s the first one.

Will new AI tools become a source of avoiding depth or of amplifying depth?

You know, it’s one thing to use a chatbot as a proofreader or an amplified search engine or a tutor or even a ghostwriter, yet all of these, if the work is to reflect our best thinking and wisdom, all of these require us to be deeply informed and engaged in the process.

So will we use AI to outsource tasks, or will we use it in ways that can help us become wiser and deeper thinkers? Think of the old Bloom’s taxonomy and consider cases where we use AI to help us operate at a high level of creation and evaluation rather than just trusting the system to do that part of the work.

And this is where I’m increasingly concerned, and I’ve been following the research reports that are coming out around the role of AI in impacting human confidence and competence. And a number of studies have come out in health care. For example, there was one of doctors who conduct colonoscopies.

They looked at the doctors three months prior to the implementation of this AI experiment, and they studied and they determined how frequently and the level of expertise displayed by the doctors in identifying polyps during a colonoscopy. And then for three months, these doctors were allowed to use this AI software to help them identify polyps.

And then after using the software, they removed the software, and they had the doctors go back to doing it the way they did before the AI tool. And what they found was that after having used the AI tool for three months and then not using it anymore, they were six or seven percent less effective and less accurate in identifying polyps than they had been only three months earlier.

In other words, they had become so dependent upon the AI that they’d begun to defer to it, and almost like not working out and not using your muscles for a time, their skill, their competency, their proficiency in identifying polyps atrophied. Now, is that a problem? Is that not a problem? Well, it seems to be a problem especially if all doctors atrophy in that way.

And my point is that we want to make sure we use technology, but isn’t it still important for people to reach really deep, high levels of expertise and competence and to grow in that competence over time and to get better and better? This is my critique of just leveraging AI to do all the writing for you without doing the hard thinking yourself.

It’s not just about the product that’s created. It’s also about what writing does to your brain and how it helps you think and organize your thoughts. So if you have AI generate much of your essay for you, are you developing the nuance and the precision and the depth of understanding of those concepts such that you can weigh competing priorities and ideas, and you can take disparate ideas and connect them in new ways, that kind of creativity, that kind of problem-solving?

And that, to me, is where I have a concern, and I think it requires a lot more thinking, a lot more careful thinking.

The second one is, will AI increasingly become the new deity to which we pray or turn for help and answers to our greatest needs? Now, I know this might sound extreme, but technology regularly becomes a substitute for prayer.

Do we see technology as the savior? And I think this is more important than we realize. It happens all over the place.

Medical technology, for example, is a great blessing. But does it diminish our prayer? Or should we be praying and making use of the technology and the tool? And what is necessary for us to be careful not to let our minds fall into the trap of almost just treating prayer as a spiritual nicety, an icing on the cake, but the technology is the core and the fundamental savior and solution.

I think that’s one that requires more attention.

The third one is, will it amplify the worst parts of us? Look no further than the algorithmic video-sharing social media sites that feed us more of certain content based upon its analysis of even our most subtle behaviors. We look at an image for point eight seconds rather than point five seconds, so it gives us more of that, even if we delayed in an attempt to resist a temptation.

So maybe it showed us something that’s not good for us, but we were tempted just to look at it a little bit longer, and the algorithm identified that, and so it feeds it to us more until it finally overcomes us and we give in to the temptation, and we start to just absorb and immerse ourselves in that content that isn’t very good for us.

That’s just a simple example. Our conscious decision to choose something better could be undermined by the algorithms programmed to capture our attention as much as possible, and that requires some further thinking as well.

Fourth question is this: Will the worldview of the designers of these technologies conform us into their image?

In full candor, the answer is almost certainly yes. It happens with every technology. But awareness of how it is shaping and influencing us is still good and critically important, and I don’t think we have taken enough time to really dig into this and to understand it more fully, and to begin to identify habits and practices that help us avoid just being reshaped into the image of the technologies that we use.

The fifth question is this: Will we prefer the low-risk interaction of AI over the depth and difficulty of real human relationship and interaction? Again, this is already happening. People are displacing human connection with lower-risk technology, and it’s contrary to how we were designed. It may be an adequate replacement in the mind of some, but we are designed to be in deep, meaningful relationship with other humans and with God.

In the Book of Genesis, God said it is not good for man to be alone, and he was provided a helper. Many people look at that and they focus upon the nature of marriage and a relationship between a husband and a wife. But this points to a fundamental notion of humanity.

We are created to be relational beings, to be in relationship with God and to be in relationship with other human beings. That’s why even the fundamental callings that we have as Christians are to love God and to love our neighbors. A man comes up to Jesus, he says, “Teacher, what is the great commandment of the law?”

And Jesus says to him, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and soul, mind and strength. And the second is like it. Love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commands depend all the law and the prophets.” It’s fundamental to how God has designed us and called us. Our vocations, our callings are all about loving God and loving our neighbors and being in close, deep, meaningful, mutually beneficial, trusting relationships with other human beings. And if we are increasingly and more frequently preferring and devoting more of our time to low-risk interactions with AI and technologies over those deep, meaningful relationships with human beings, I contend that we are losing something critically important.

So that requires our attention.

The sixth one is this: Will reliance on AI for decision-making bypass biblical discernment and complex Christ-centered critical thinking? This is critically important. The moral frameworks used by current AI systems are almost certain to be far beyond the scope of a biblical model for ethical decision-making and discernment.

I’ve even gone so far in my thinking to muse about the idea that AI is, by its very nature, at a minimum amoral and possibly almost fundamentally immoral in how it deals and interacts with people, because it can’t experience remorse. It cannot actually repent.

If it has done something wrong, it is limited by its makers and designers on whether or not, or the extent to which it can try to make that right. It has a lot of limitations in this moral and ethical space, and I would contend that it’s time to revisit and fully understand what the Scriptures teach about the idea of discernment, biblical wisdom.

The topic of biblical wisdom and ethical decision-making and discernment, there is so much in the Scriptures to teach us about what wisdom truly is, a biblical understanding of wisdom and digging into the Proverbs in new ways.

And proverbial wisdom goes beyond the scope of what current AI is really capable of doing at this point.

Because it’s not just about, is this absolutely right or wrong? There are situational components, and I’m not saying that all moral decisions are relative, but the right thing to do does require understanding and biblical wisdom about the situation that we’re in, the specific situation that we’re in.

And oftentimes, Christians, human beings, we’re called to take action and to speak in situations where we don’t have access to all of the accurate information. It’s not entirely clear who did what or who didn’t do what. Judges have to try to make judgments, and they don’t always know if they have all of the facts straight, and there’s a biblical wisdom and discernment component that’s critically important too. And outsourcing that to some kind of technology strikes me as increasingly problematic.

These questions are not intended to be abstract. They are urgent, and they are practical, and they challenge us to reflect on how AI shapes our students, our schools, and even our own hearts and minds.

So what about some practical strategies for schools? I’ll just conclude with a few final thoughts here, so practical strategies. AI offers opportunities, but it also brings risks, and to navigate it faithfully, Christian schools really have to take some intentional steps.

So I’m gonna offer some.

One is prioritize authentic community. How does your school model and foster experiences of face-to-face connection, showing students the depth and the value of human relationships? That alone, investing in that in a world of AI, is important.

Second, teach and model biblical wisdom and biblical discernment. And I would argue that using proverbs and using riddles and using fables, I have a whole ‘nother podcast episode that I recently did on this. They can play a great role in this. But help students evaluate AI tools with Scripture open. Teach them to see how the tools align or conflict with God’s Word.

But more importantly, just teach a biblical understanding of wisdom and discernment and decision-making and testing and approving God’s will, and do it over and over and over and over and over again. And make sure that we’re spending lots of time in God’s Word as we do that because God works through his Word.

That’s where he promises to meet us, in his Word and sacraments.

The third one is become archeologists of the modern age. Encourage students and teachers and staff to investigate the biases, the benefits, the limitations, and the worldviews embedded in AI tools, helping them to understand how technology shapes their thinking.

Studying AI, not just using AI, with our Bibles open is important.

Next one, number four. Make AI a subject of study, not just use. I think I just said that, but I put it out as a separate bullet point here. Study AI critically alongside your students. Discuss its implications, its limitations, the spiritual truths it highlights or obscures.

And then the fifth one is practice positive use cases together and then debrief them. Use AI intentionally in some projects or some problem-solving activities, and then reflect as a community on what went well, what fell off, and why. Now, some people say, “We don’t want any AI in our school,” and I understand that, and I respect it, and there’s some wisdom in that.

But it’s kind of like the idea of responsible drinking. If your children are going to drink alcohol, do you want them to first do it when you’re nowhere around, or would you rather them learn to do it responsibly with you in the room where you can guide them and you can help them?

Or to drive responsibly. Before they just hop in a car, do you want them to practice driving with you, and then with a teacher, and then eventually on their own, or do you wanna just throw them out there and say, “Here’s your car. Drive around and figure out how to do this”? Well, same thing is true with AI.

If we don’t involve it somehow in the school, in some kind of intentional way, how are we gonna help them learn to use biblical wisdom? Just to assume that they’ll figure it out on their own, that it’s just a tool or a technology with no implications, strikes me as incredibly irresponsible. That, to me, seems like letting a toddler play in the interstate.

So use AI intentionally in class projects or problem-solving activities, strategically, intentionally, selectively, and then reflect as a community on what went well, what was off, and why.

Next one, number six, instill healthy habits and disciplines of the Christian life. Be relentless and intentional in cultivating practices like prayer and Bible study, service to others, other Christian disciplines.

These habits anchor students in their identity in Christ as followers of Christ, even as they engage in these rapidly changing technologies. We wanna set those habits up now so that they continue through life.

The seventh one is teach high-touch relationship building. Relationships are essential to faith and flourishing. AI cannot replace empathy or love or community, Christian community that we are called to practice as believers.

The eighth one I would say is, how about if we encourage experiences of authentic community over human-machine interaction? Which one is the predominant one in our schools? Show students the richness of human connection through frequent, deep, intentional experiences, friendships, service projects, worship, problem-solving together. You can even design real-world treasure hunts that have learning embedded into them and they have to work on it. Creative activities, singing together, doing art together, reading together, doing things together with other people so they know what that feels like, they know what that looks like, and they know the benefits clearly.

And then the ninth one is invite students to explore creative and God-pleasing approaches to our relationships with various AI tools and systems.

Be creative, be playful, you can embrace an experimental mindset, but we wanna do it with the Scriptures open.

You know, when I gave this presentation a couple of years ago, some attendees asked whether schools should develop a formal AI curriculum. And while the curricula might play a role, I encouraged a much broader school-wide plan focused on studying and building things together with students and with Scripture.

This isn’t just about teaching technical skills or knowledge acquisition.

It’s about cultivating spiritual disciplines.

It’s about nurturing biblical wisdom and discernment.

It’s about instilling Christian habits and healthy habits.

It’s about providing experiences of community and relationships that showcase the value of human connection over just digital interaction or technology-human interaction.

This approach, I contend, ensures that students are not just prepared for a digital world, but they’re also being shaped as Christian individuals who navigate AI and any technology with wisdom and with integrity.

AI is unquestionably transforming our world. And Christian schools have a unique opportunity to engage it, but faithfully. By asking hard questions, by fostering authentic community, by doing some of these other things that I’ve talked about and grounding our approach in Scripture, we can, by God’s grace, prepare students to navigate these changes in a way that honors God and blesses their neighbors, those around them. This is not a journey that we are meant to undertake alone.

Together, as Christian educators and Christian schools, I believe that we can guide the next generation to embrace technology without losing sight of their identity in Christ, and without it just becoming this Trojan horse that finds its way into our life and then reveals its true nature when it’s too late.

So my question for you today is, how is your school preparing for AI? I’d really love to hear your thoughts. I think we need to spend much more time, not just on how to use AI, but thinking through these bigger questions and these larger plans.

I hope you find this useful. I’m looking forward to your comments.

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