On Feb 3, 2017, Jonathan Merritt published “Is AI a Threat to Christianity?” in The Atlantic. Merritt suggests that “AI may be the greatest threat to Christian theology since Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species.” Merritt’s argument is built on several, not entirely consistent presuppositions, and it is only their confluence that makes AI an alleged potential problem. These presuppositions are: The idea that a soul is a “component” of a human being. The idea that the defining trait of human beings is our intelligence. The idea that a collection of algorithms could become the same sort of being that humans are if we just make the algorithms sophisticated enough. The idea that “salvation” means the preservation of the human soul beyond death. Presuppostion (1) is one possible interpretation of what a soul is in Christian theology, and even the dominant one during the medieval and early modern periods, but hardly the only one. In today’s theology (and more importantly, since we are thinking in terms of futurology here, tomorrow’s theology) that interpretation is considered dubious at best. Presupposition (2) isn’t a Christian notion to begin with. It’s a modern Western notion, born out of and feeding back into our technologically driven cultural narrative. Presupposition (3) presupposes (2) and adds the belief that the human mind is at its root a complex math equation calculating itself. Leaving aside the question of whether there’s any good reason to think that it is true (I don’t think there is), this idea not only makes intellect the defining human trait, but reduces the human being to the human mind. Finally, presupposition (4) is rejected by many Christian theologians, as Merritt himself acknowledges. And as Merritt appears to recognize, if one understands salvation in terms of the redemptive, eschatological transformation of creation as a whole, AI does not pose a grave theological problem. If a self-aware AI ever became a reality, it would simply be another participating component in God’s overall creation that is to be redeemed. It is worth noting that (1) and (2) are actually inconsistent unless and until one adds (3). If the soul (whatever that is) is a component of the human being, then it isn’t what defines a human being any more than a thumb or a vestigial appendix is, for the very simple reason that it’s a part, not the whole. Adding (3) implies that the human being is “really” just the human mind. That makes it possible to reconcile (1) and (2), but only at the cost of treating the human body as superfluous to the definition of the human being and ultimately something that could be set aside without any significant effect on the “real” human being. Of course, the idea that body and spirit are distinguishable and even separable has a long (and fraught) history within Christian theology. If one treats spirit, soul, and (in a further step) mind as synonymous, then one can open the way for the idea that human mind = human being—although just opening the way is still not enough to justify taking the step. But suppose one does think there is reason to take that step. To reduce the human being to only the human mind in this way is, of course, a reduction. Every orthodox Christian theologian, even those medievals most fixated on the enjoyment of the Beatific Vision by disembodied Christians in the afterlife, still insisted that the physical resurrection of the body had to take place in order for the salvation of the complete human being to occur. Indeed, Christian theology has a word for the idea that the human body is ultimately superfluous to the human being: heresy.1 1 To be clear, I am not calling Jonathan Merritt a heretic. He is just being inconsistent in his ideas and presuppositions. I expect that if pressed, Merritt would acknowledge that the human body is integral to the human being. Rejecting any of (1) through (4) would make AI a non-threat to Christian theology. But in the case of presupposition (3), not only can we reject it, but we must reject it. Christian theology insists that human beings are not just human minds. It might be fun to imagine human minds being swapped between bodies, or “digitally copied,” or, reaching further back, reincarnated, but it isn’t a Christian idea. Since the idea that artificial intelligences could become beings commensurate with human beings in religiously significant ways is based on a concept of humanity that Christian theology would reject—and indeed, already explicitly has rejected—it doesn’t seem that any AI development could ever amount to a threat to its consistency the way Merritt supposes it would. Put simply, Christianity would first need to abandon utterly the concept of physical resurrection before the development of AI could even pose a theological conundrum, let alone a threat.

Often people ask me about the relationship between our bodies and our souls or spirits. The explicit or implicit reason for the question is usually that people are wondering about what happens when we die, but sometimes there are other reasons. The following is an attempt to give an accessible explanation of this profound and complex matter. First, for orientation, it is helpful to describe at least briefly some of the major views that circulate in our culture. The default assumption in Western culture, including for many Christians, is that humans have two parts, the body and the soul. Some Westerners are materialists, believing that there is only the body and that the mind, will, emotions, etc., are simply the byproduct of neurological processes. Others take the opposite tack and say that the material reality is only an appearance whereas the spiritual is the truly real. Some Christians argue that we are made of three parts, body, soul, and spirit, with soul and spirit considered to be as distinct from each other as either one is from the material body. Yet others (including me) take the view that material and immaterial are not two separate parts of reality, but rather two real aspects of one, unified reality. There are all sorts of Scriptural, theological, and practical reasons to consider this latter view the best one for Christians to hold, but the task for now is to describe this view, rather than to explore its warrants and implications. This idea of material and spiritual as a unified reality is a bit difficult for Westerners to understand, so a few analogies might be helpful. This first analogy illustrates some key ideas that will be helpful in thinking about this subject. It isn’t a full-scale model of the relation between body and soul/spirit, and we will need to leave it behind once we’ve used it for its limited purpose. But within this limited scope, it is helpful. Imagine a sheet of paper. You can pick it up, turn it around, fold it, write on it, curl it into a tube, whatever. It’s just a piece of paper. Now pick a number between, say, one and five. Tear the paper in half that many times. Now your sheet of paper is in broken little pieces. This is similar to what happens to us when we die. While we live, we are a seamless whole. There is no division between our bodies and our souls. Instead, the material and immaterial aspects of our being are thoroughly integrated with each other. We will our bodies to move; a soothing touch calms our anxiety; excitement makes our eyes dilate and our pulse quicken; ingesting certain substances alters our mood or thought patterns; etc. There is no barrier, no disconnect, no discernible line between the two. But when we die, this integrated whole is torn asunder. What God intended to be whole is broken, and what remains are only scraps with ragged edges showing where the wholeness used to be. Once a person has been torn asunder by death, it becomes possible to perceive body and soul as separate parts of that person, just as we can see that two halves of a torn sheet of paper were both parts of the whole sheet. But while we can apply that mental abstraction to ourselves and others, it is only an abstraction so long as we live. This is true regardless whether we distinguish into two parts (body and soul), three parts (body, soul, spirit), or any given number of parts (arm, hand, stomach, brain, mind, will, emotion, heart, lungs, spirit, femur, humours, memories, veins, nerves, feelings, impulses, perceptions, etc.). While we live, we are one, integrated whole; only dead things are actually separated into parts. But our paper analogy isn’t enough to fully explain the relation of body and soul. When we tear a sheet of paper in two, the two torn halves are fundamentally the same sort of thing. This is not the case with the material and immaterial aspects of a human being. To go further in our understanding, we need another approach. You have probably seen a building that was partially or wholly demolished for whatever reason. Maybe it was a barn struck by a tornado, or an office tower collapsed in a controlled explosion, or a house that was being gutted by workmen in the process of an extensive reconstruction. What was the difference between the barn before and after the tornado? Simple. It was smashed to pieces. Likewise the office tower was reduced to rubble. The workmen at the half-demolished house carefully and methodically took it apart piece by piece, tossing the scraps into a bin to be carted away. In each case, though, the pieces didn’t stop existing. They remained, but they no longer formed a building. The building, meanwhile, ceased to exist in part or in whole because the structural relationship of its pieces was undone. The difference between a house and a pile of materials is order.1 Order is immaterial. Order can’t be touched or seen or measured—not directly. But order can be discerned through the things we can touch and see and measure. We can even measure order by proxy to a limited degree.2 It takes work to create and sustain order, and the effects of order and disorder on our lives are clearly perceptible. Order is immaterial, but it is a very real part of this world. 1 Long ago, the philosopher Aristotle spoke of this in terms of “matter” and “form.” Plato talked even more about matter and form (or rather, Matter and the Forms), and he did so before Aristotle. But Plato’s thoughts on this subject were pretty far out there, and for the purposes of this discussion they can and should be discounted. I prefer the term “order” over “form” because it has a broader semantic range and more easily suggests dynamic activity and relationships than “form” does to contemporary English speakers. 2 The concept of entropy in thermodynamics is very useful for measuring order in terms of energy distribution in a physical system, for example, though it is rather less useful in the realms of politics and poetry. The relationship that matter and energy have with order sheds some light on the relationship that the body has with the soul or spirit. There is a certain sense in which the presence of spirit within us makes us what we are. In Hebrew, it was having ruach (spirit; literally, breath) that made one a nephesh (a living being) and to lose ruach was by definition to cease to be a nephesh.3 The immaterial aspect of our being plays an indispensable role in shaping our material-spiritual existence. 3 Some older Bible translations tended to render nephesh as “soul” rather than “living being.” In modern English, this is simply wrong translation, which is why modern translations don’t do it. However, this analogy is also limited and potentially misleading if we don’t note some major caveats and qualifications. First and foremost, the spirit is not itself the ordering principle of the body. Rather, the interrelatedness of body and spirit is part of the overall order that makes us whole beings. The relationship between spirit and body has some analogy with the relationship between ordering principles of our existence and the overall structure of our being that includes both our material and spiritual aspects and their interrelation, but there is at least one key difference. Order is about the necessary structures and patterns for a thing to exist. Spirit, in contrast, is about the dynamic impetus that makes a living thing be a living thing. Our spirits are what animate us. Explaining what our spirits are is only possible by metaphorical extension from a description of the role it plays in our being and the literal, concrete effects it has in that role. Spirit is what enables and impels us to live, to move, to breathe, to desire, to respond, to think, to imagine, to choose, to act, to love, and all the other actions that mark out a living creature from an inanimate object. Because we are a single, material-spiritual reality, we can analyze the processes by which we perform these actions—physical, chemical, biological, psychological, social, etc. We can explain the means by which we act, describe the patterns according to which we act, the reasons why we act in one way and not another. Such analysis of how we engage in all these actions is immensely helpful, but in the end we are still faced with the question: Why do we act at all? Why are we not inert like rocks? From where does all the action ultimately arise? In answer we find only the raw and irreducible fact that the spark of life is in us. As a Christian, I believe that God, who is himself the self-existent Source of all Life, all Being, and all Action, gave us this spark of life. Even so, the fact remains that we have in us this fundamental spark, this source of action that’s just there in us and that we can never get around or see behind. This spark of life, this spontaneous source of action, is the core of our spirits. There is much more to our spirits than this—whole ordered structures that shape and form us as the people we are—but this is the key. While we live and our bodies and spirits are one, this spark can be expressed in the world that God has created. At death, our spirits are deprived of the means to act in the world we were made for. And we look forward to the resurrection because then, and only then, we will get our bodies back, which will allow us to become whole human beings again and to engage in the joyous, everlasting, life-giving, spontaneous activity that we were made for.

Maria: Jon, my learned friend, do humans not come from spirit in your books… or is it from a terrible void that we arise… and is the robe of our genetics, animated solely by matter devoid of our eternal spirits or are our eternal spirits housed in the robe of our humanity? Jon: We are entirely both material and spiritual. Our origin lies in the act of God, creator of both heaven and earth, who formed us of both spirit and matter to be the image of God’s own being. Matter and spirit are not two different planes of existence, but one, single, unified reality. Rocks, angels, trees, demons, animals and humans are all part of one cosmos. Spirit cannot be reduced to matter, nor matter dismissed as illusion or whatever. Neither can they be separated. And as with the cosmos, so also with humans. We are utterly material and utterly spiritual. We are not merely spirits clothed in bodies, as if we could set them aside. My body is integral to who I am, and yours is to who you are. To separate body from spirit is to kill us, because to do so is to tear apart what is utterly one thing. What is left when we are torn apart like this is a rotting corpse and a mere shadow, cut off from the world and unable to participate in it any more. What we need is to be made whole, to be lifted out of this shadow state and put back together. This is why people are typically so surprised when they learn what the real hope of Christianity is: not to “go to heaven when you die” (the biblical texts say next to nothing about that), but rather to be resurrected (they talk about this constantly). This is to get our own, unique bodies back, to be reconstituted in wholeness once again, to have reversed the tearing asunder that we call death—and not only temporarily, but forever, so that death will never take us again, nor the powers of evil and chaos wreak havoc and destruction on the cosmos any more. This is important, because it means that this world of flesh and plants and mud matters for all eternity. What we do here and now, in the grit and particulars of real life, is utterly significant. Not just spiritual things matter in this world; so do the things that we think could never be important, because all of it is part of the story of this one, spiritual-material creation that has been made and will be made new and whole. Maria: Beautiful Jon. I’ve always thought that all would eventually arrive at the same place, though we walk different paths. I loved your first paragraph. I have alternative thoughts regarding your second, in that change is constant and the unique body you refer to emerges from the unique causes and conditions arising in our individual lives. It gathers about us, though the genetic tendencies and inclinations of our ancestors, in perfect resonance to the causes we’ve made, and is shed as a leaf in autumn... at least for now... and though imperfect, it is supremely precious, as is all life, and most wonderfully suited to our fundamental nature, and this moment, this now is incredibly powerful, a change in ones heart can transform everything. I don’t doubt that we are eternal and that the causes we make are essential to our joy, happiness, and well being. Ultimately, I imagine all phenomena are contained within one’s life, down to the last particle of dust... we encompass, sun, stars... all, from the eternal past to the eternal future, we are continuous. Our understandings, and fundamental nature can be translated into different cultures and times. I am a cosmic humanist, a fundamental humanist, and value every individual consciousness. I believe that we ourselves are fully enlightened ones... and our journey towards this truth is an endless odyssey into the innermost sanctum of our own lives. Jon: Yet that difference between us is significant, Maria. The first paragraph of what I wrote is the presupposition, while the second is the point for both Judaism and Christianity (and also Islam, albeit with some significant modifications). The world is a dynamic, growing thing, and we are made to be thoroughly part of it. But moreover, we are made to be part of it forever, not only for a time and then no more. When we are resurrected, we shall be part of its dynamic process again and without end. Now, we are clearly agreed that this world is precious, yet there remains a difference between us about that. From what you have said, it seems that for you the world is precious as something ultimately other from you, whether seen as something that gathers around you or as something experientially contained within you. The first image would suggest that the world, and even your own body, is precious to you in a way comparable to a precious stone: indeed valuable, but not ultimately vital to who you are in that you can set it aside without loss to your being. The second would suggest that the world, and even your own body, is precious to you in a way comparable to a meaningful story you have read: indeed valuable, but still something you can leave behind once you’ve experienced it. For me, the world is precious as something that I am fundamentally part of and that is not ultimately other to me, but rather greater than me. A good comparison might be to say that the world is precious to me in much the same way that my body is precious to one of the cells in my body: it is not part of me, but rather I am part of it; I cannot set it aside, for to be separated from it is my destruction. (Of course, this analogy is limited, and pressed too hard it will break down, but I hope it sheds light on the subject, so that we can understand one another better.) Who I am cannot be ultimately other from the rest of God’s creation, and I cannot find my identity by looking inwardly. Rather, I can find my own identity only by looking beyond myself, to the God who made me and the world God made me a part of. The only way to find oneself is to find oneself in the other. This is what is means when we Christians say that love is the ultimate reality and the ultimate truth and the ultimate goal. Indeed, for Christians this is the fundamental story of all. We believe that God literally became that which was other to God (i.e. one of the creatures God loves), and ultimately descended into that which is the very antithesis of God (i.e. death, the Nothing, Un-Being) in order to bring us out of it and so to reconcile all things to Godself. It is the very nature of the Source of all being to go out into the other and thereby increase the fullness of all being. This is love. And we are made, we are told, in God’s image, which means we must do likewise. Only by loving the other as ourself, by abandoning ourself to the other, by giving our life to see the salvation of the other, do we find our own life, receive back our own self, and come into the love that saves us. We must love God with reckless abandon, and therefore love what God loves with reckless abandon. Only thus can we and will we become who we truly are.