Editor’s note: Baptist and Reflector editor Chris Turner sat down with Scott Rae, professor of Philosophy and Christian Ethics at Biola University in La Miranda, Calif., last month. They discussed Artificial Intelligence (AI) and how Christians can ethically approach this fast-changing technology.
Baptist and Reflector: As a Christian educator seasoned in apologetics and ethics, how do you see AI aligning with and/or challenging Biblical worldviews and values?
Rae: I’d put it in this kind of framework theologically that any technology in a fallen world is likely to be a mix of beneficial and harmful effects, which should keep us from summarily dismissing it or uncritically accepting it. Television, movies, the internet, and then social media — there’s the capacity for using it for building up community and informing. As we unfortunately have seen a lot with social media, the capacity use it to fragment and separate. The difference is, I think particularly with AI, it’s pretty clear that they’re dulling our critical thinking skills and making our brains slow down. The more extreme claims for what’s called strong AI, which is that AI basically is going to have things like consciousness, and you can have a real relationship with an AI bot. But if you’re reducing a human person to ones and zeros, the problem’s even more acute.
B&R: What guidance would you give church leaders who are trying to make wise decisions about incorporating AI into their ministries?
Rae: There are a couple ethical guidelines if you’re going to use it. I use it — with full disclosure. AI is probably okay if you’re using it to generate ideas or summarize articles or books to help you read more effectively. Writing bulletins or announcements, that’s probably a no harm, no foul case. But for preaching, pastors need to do the hard work of studying the scriptures. Last time I checked, the Holy Spirit doesn’t fill ChatGPT; it fills a person. So, the stuff that’s got substance to it — I wouldn’t want AI writing a mission statement for our church or statement of values for our ministries. AI can’t give you good application because AI doesn’t know your people. You walk through life with them. You’re the one who should be applying the text to their lives.
B&R: From your perspective at a Christian university, how should we prepare the next generation of believers to engage with AI?
Rae: I’d say resist any kind of coercive pressure to use AI if you don’t feel comfortable with it. It depends on your work. Again, I think there’s some stuff it can do, like mindless emails that you have to respond back to and priming the pump to generate ideas about things. In some respects, AI is just glorified Google, but with a very large language model. It’s not a great loss that people do their research online instead of going to a library or looking at an encyclopedia. But when you stop thinking critically, when you just uncritically adopt, then you got to be a little bit worried about short-circuiting your critical thinking abilities.
B&R: What are the most significant ethical concerns Christians should be aware of regarding AI, and how can we address them from a Biblical perspective?
Rae: Misuses of AI can turn pastors and students into plagiarists. Large language models are really nothing more than large scale plagiarism without attribution or compensation to the contributors. And then, DeepFakes, the sex extortion that’s being done, and soon we’re going to have AI companions, sex robots. Porn does enough already, but this is taking it and putting it on steroids. So I say anything that substitutes for the real thing — whether it’s a relationship or critical thinking or just reading — we need to be careful of.
B&R: As families in congregations navigate AI use at home and school, what principles should guide their decisions about technology adoption?
Rae: Have an age restriction and a time restriction. There are some good things about screens. I like being able to connect with my kid whenever I need to. But if I had to do over again, I would not give a kid a smartphone until they got to high school. I’d be very supportive of schools that require that they lock phones up during the school day, and I would definitely have a time limit on it. AI is going to require parents to be significantly more engaged with their kids during these years than maybe they were before. It’s going to be incumbent on parents not only to enforce those limits, but also to be there to be a substitute for them.
B&R: How do you respond to concerns that AI might replace or diminish the role of humans (or the view of humans)?
Rae: Anytime there’s economic disruptions, resources move from unproductive sectors to productive. Nobody lost any sleep when Henry Ford put the horse and buggy industry out of business. The difference here is that these are well-paying, high-powered jobs that are getting replaced. And people who have done all the right stuff — gotten the education, gotten the degrees — some of those are going to and will be replaced in the future. What I worry more about is diminishing some of the things that make us distinctively human — compassion, relationships, vulnerability, the way we care for each other in an embodied way. Or, the way we substitute being satisfied in a relationship as opposed to being loved. Those are two vastly different things. Sex robots might leave you satisfied, but they’re not going to leave you loved.
B&R: How do you envision AI impacting spiritual formation within the next five years?
Rae: That’s a great question. Like it or not, we’re always looking for shortcuts for things that are hard, and this will be no exception. I haven’t seen anybody yet using AI to write their prayers, but that doesn’t take a lot of imagination to see that. I don’t have a problem with AI being used to summarize blocks of scripture. But that shouldn’t become a substitute for your regular direct reading of the text. The Holy Spirit illuminates the reader as he or she reads the text; the Holy Spirit doesn’t indwell the AI bot. So be wary of any kind of shortcuts to spiritual maturity, because last time I read the scripture, there weren’t any. That maturity comes from real relationships, not fake ones. And it comes from the way you deal with real adversity in trials, not sitting in the comfort of your home connecting with God through an AI chatbot. All those that are in the AI space are further down the road. But for most of us, especially in the local church, we are standing on the dock and some are deciding whether to get on the boat at all or not.
B&R: What’s one or two things you might tell people just as a caution as they board that boat, as they set out on that journey?
Rae: Well, I’d say you’re on the boat, whether you know it or not. Everybody’s already on the boat. The question is how fast are you going to roll away from the dock? Conscious discernment, I think that is the order of the day. Just because something makes things easier, be careful that it doesn’t undermine things that sort of inherently take hard work, energy, effort, and time — to produce good sermons, good scholarship, spiritual maturity, good relationships. AI can augment some of these things; we can use them to summarize stuff that’s already out there and use it to prompt us for ideas. But if you want to use it to actually write things for you, do it with full disclosure.