The Image of God and AI

Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.” So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.

Genesis 1:26-27 (English Standard Version)

The theological idea that humanity was made in the “image of God” is a central one to Christian philosophy and thought. It makes frequent appearances in the moral questions of the day such as abortion or same-sex relationships, but its roots go back all the way to the early church, and ultimately to Scripture itself. In his multi-volume treatise Concerning the City of God against the Pagans, Augustine clearly states his view “We do indeed recognize ourselves an image of God.”1 Nearly a millennium later, Aquinas did not contend on the basic ideas with Augustine, but rather the details of what this image entails. Authors across the wide spectrum of Christianity today all generally agree that man was made in the “image of God” because the concept is found in Scripture. In his aptly named Man: The Image of God, Berkouwer contends that although the term “image of God” does not often appear, the concept is found throughout Scripture.2 Despite its rare appearance, it is doubtless a foundational doctrine.

The Second Commandment

The concept of an “image” is found elsewhere in Scripture, and perhaps nowhere more notably than in Exodus. The second commandment reads “You shall not make for yourself a carved image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. You shall not bow down to them or serve them” (Ex. 20:4-5). The inclusion of this prohibition in the ten begs the question, what is so important about imaging? If, as we read in Isaiah 41, man made idols are “all a delusion; their works are nothing; their metal images are an empty wind” (Is. 41:29), then why the prohibition on building a meaningless, powerless, and ineffective “graven image”? If they’re so useless, who cares if we build them?

Berkouwer presents an important argument here that will become relevant to our discussion about Artificial Intelligence. He writes “The second commandment deals with a prohibition against the arbitrariness with which man tries to have God at his beck and call, tries high-handedly to control God’s presence in the visible world.”3 The prohibition against graven images is a prohibition against attempting to control God. Notably, God’s reasoning for this commandment is found in verse 5 “for I the Lord your God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children to the third and the fourth generation of those who hate me” (Ex. 20:5). God’s “because” statement for this command is that He is jealous, not that He is a spirit without physical form as some have postulated. Man’s attempts to summon God to Him, to arrogantly claim control over God’s presence and absence, is the cause for this prohibition in Exodus 20.

Furthermore, it is ironic that man would seek to construct an image of God, given that he himself was created in His image. Hoekema writes “God does not want his creatures to make images of Him, since He has already created an image of himself; a living, walking, talking image.”4 Man is in fact the very image that he seeks to create, in order to summon God to Him. Of course, this does not imply the worship of man as a good thing, given the first commandment is to eschew any other god, including oneself. Nevertheless, for man to reach a point where he desires God’s presence, but does not recognize himself as the image bearer is bleak. Berkouwer comments on this as “an act of unmistakable alienation from God”.5 Any attempt at idolatry through the construction of a man-made image shows how far man has fallen from proper communion with God, but also intrinsically highlights man’s desire to know his creator.

Where are we today?

In a 2023 article in Vanity Fair, an AI engineer is cited as saying “We’re creating God”.6 If you listen to the rising calls of executives and boards throughout the upper echelons of the business world, this sentiment is echoed in many different flavors. Sam Altman, founder and CEO of OpenAI, has referred to his company’s product as “magic intelligence in the sky”.7 AI models, agents, and bots are fast becoming idols for the world to follow. They are increasingly viewed as oracles of knowledge, and have reached the stage where they are acclaimed as more intelligent than humans. In 2024, Elon Musk tweeted “AI will probably be smarter than any single human next year. By 2029, AI is probably smarter than all humans combined.”8 The goal in some parts of the AI community is not to create a tool that is merely an augmentation to human intelligence, but to create something so powerful and so smart it is more intelligent than the entirety of the human race. That sounds an awful lot like a god. One could easily pervert Genesis 1, and say that man is now creating god in his image.

Tying things together, we can attach the prohibition on image creation in the second commandment to the present day. While AI systems may not have physical statues, like the idols of the Old Testament, they mimic other attributes of humanity. The attempt to create a super-intelligent AI is simply another human attempt to control the presence and the absence of God. Offerings were made to these idols of old. Offerings are being actively made today. The race to build, and by extension control, god has the most powerful nations of the world spending money at an alarming pace. The race to create god is both idolatrous, and at its core, dishonoring to God and by extension man as His image-bearers. In our efforts to push ourselves forward, we are debasing ourselves just like the pagans of the Old Testament.

Implications for Theology

Where does this leave us? As believers, should we avoid AI in all of its forms, as an idol? To answer this, we must address another fundamental question, namely “what is an idol?”. The prohibition on image creation in Exodus 20 immediately follows a prohibition on idolatry. God’s command in verse 3 is “you shall have no other gods before me” (Ex. 20:3). God does not seem to prohibit the creation of statues, as God commands the creation of statues in Exodus 25, and Moses creates a bronze serpent at God’s command in Numbers 21. The issue seems to arise in the worship of these images and the belief that the image grants man the authority to summon God to do his bidding.

So should we remove AI from our lives? I humbly posit that the answer is no. As I have discussed in a previous post, AI is a tool. If we use this tool to create a god for ourselves, we have crossed the line into violation of the first and second commandments. If we carefully, and wisely, use AI for the purpose of fulfilling our creation mandate and glorifying God, there is no blanket prohibition on the tool.

1 Corinthians 8-10

To illustrate this, we can look to 1 Corinthians 8. In this passage, Paul explores an issue of his day: eating meat that had been previously offered to idols. In this chapter, there are clearly two sides to the issue. There is a group that believed that eating meat offered to idols was fine. To them, Paul affirms their theological point that idols have no real existence, and therefore the meat offered to them is effectively no different than any other meat. The other group believed that eating meat offered to idols was wrong, given the association with paganism of the day. Paul does not exhort them to “be strong” or “have faith”, he instead turns to the first group, and tells them “but take care that this right of yours does not somehow become a stumbling block to the weak … Thus, sinning against your brothers and wounding their conscience when it is weak, you sin against Christ” (1 Cor. 8:9,12). His point: in love, we ought to avoid intentionally causing offense to a brother or sister in Christ.

Paul’s argument continues in the next two chapters of 1 Corinthians. Paul’s concern in this passage is for the Corinthian believers to love one another, and also to not participate in the idolatry around them. Two chapters later, Paul seems to contradict himself writing “You cannot drink the cup of the Lord and the cup of demons. You cannot partake of the table of the Lord and the table of demons” and then immediately saying “Eat whatever is sold in the meat market without raising any question on the ground of conscience” (1 Cor. 10:21, 25). Gordon Fee writes in his commentary, “What Paul is finally forbidding is any kind of relationship with the demonic.”9 The issue lay in the participation in the worship of a demonic false god, not in the consumption of meat. Paul’s conclusion to this discussion is one of the more quoted verses of the New Testament “So, whether you eat or drink, or whatever you do, do all to the glory of God” (1 Cor. 10:31).

Application

Christians should be responsible in their use of AI. We ought to avoid any appearance of idolatry as Paul exhorts the Corinthians, but likewise we are not forbidden from utilizing man made tools for the glory of God. The final two verses of 1 Corinthians 10 serves as a fitting close both to Paul’s arguments and to this discussion “Give no offense to Jews or to Greeks or to the church of God, just as I try to please everyone in everything I do, not seeking my own advantage, but that of many, that they may be saved” (1 Cor. 10:32-33).

As always, I hope this exposition has been helpful. This will probably not be the last time this topic is discussed, but I’ll be breaking from this to discuss creativity and consciousness in upcoming posts. God bless!