Should Christians Use AI?

Make yourself an ark of gopher wood. Make rooms in the ark, and cover it inside and out with pitch. This is how you are to make it: the length of the ark 300 cubits, its breadth 50 cubits, and its height 30 cubits. Make a roof for the ark, and finish it to a cubit above, and set the door of the ark in its side. Make it with lower, second, and third decks.

Genesis 6:14-16 (English Standard Version)

When I was a young child, my family and I traveled overseas to Ukraine to adopt my two younger siblings. At the time, I was just a toddler, but I was fascinated by airplanes. For several years after coming back to the states, I wanted to become a pilot. There was an airline pilot in our church that I spent a lot of time talking to, and he graciously gave me some small models and books. I’m fairly certain that my kindergarten answer to “what do you want to be when you grow up” was a pilot. As I grew, I eventually found other things to focus on, but my love of aircraft and eventually spacecraft stayed around.

When you really think about it, the fact that my family and I could travel from our home in the United States, to Ukraine in about a day, is pretty crazy. At no point in all of human history, up until the 20th century, could this have been done. Transcontinental travel took months or even years for most of history, and now I can hop on a jet to Europe or Asia and be there within the day. For a period of time, there were supersonic flights from New York to London that took about as long as a single movie.

Aircraft, and other innovations in travel, have also dramatically affected the way the church does mission work. No longer do missionaries spend their entire lives in the field, never once returning to their sending church. We can effectively send mission teams on “short-term” trips to assist missionaries, and it’s not absurd for those trips to be a week or two long. Kids can do a couple of these trips within the span of their summer vacation from school and participate in the work of spreading the Gospel in foreign fields.

This brings us to our passage today. Genesis 7 follows God’s condemnation of the sin of mankind prior to the flood. This particular set of verses is often overlooked or merged in readings with those after or before, but there are a few interesting pieces here that are relevant to our question. Working our way through the text, we first see that God commands Noah to build an ark. The text does not give us much in the way of a blueprint, but it’s clear that boats were a thing that already existed. God does not have to explain to Noah what a boat is. Nor does God have to tell Noah how to make pitch, a tar based sealant used in sailing vessels for thousands of years prior to modern metal boats. God does not have to tell Noah how to measure things, it’s assumed in the command. He also does not have to tell Noah how to do carpentry, or do the engineering work required to support a multi-floor boat. It’s worth noting that presumably God did not create Adam and Eve with this knowledge. Adam and Eve are not created sailing the waters of their created world, so clearly someone at some point, invented these things so that Noah could use them.

Perhaps you can see where we’re going here. Invention and innovation are not, in themselves, bad. Have people used these inventions implied in the text of Genesis 7 to do awful things? Absolutely. Does God forbid the entire use of these inventions because of this? It does not appear so. In fact, it’s fairly safe to assume that these inventions were already being used for sin at the time of Noah. Genesis 6:5 notes that “every intention of the thoughts of his [man’s] heart was only evil continually” (Genesis 6:5). God does not forbid Noah from the use of these inventions, He simply commands that they be used appropriately in His service.

Just like the invention of the airplane, the boat, pitch, measurement theory, and structural engineering, Artificial Intelligence is another innovation from minds that God created. It is a tool that can be wisely used in the service of God, or unwisely used in the service of sin. In future essays we will explore more of the nuance between wise and unwise use of AI based on Scripture, but out of the gate here I want to reassure you. There is no sin simply in the use of a tool. How the tool is used is what matters.

I hope this essay has been helpful. Coming up in the next week or so will be on the lookout for a longer essay delving into the crossover between the biblical doctrine of the Image of God and innovations in Artificial Intelligence. If you found this essay valuable, you might also find the first reflection in this series, on whether people of faith should pay attention to AI helpful. Additionally, I have written a basic primer on AI in 2025 that might be helpful as well. God bless!