Most religious leaders have a subliminal distrust of artificial intelligence. Indeed, Pope Francis recently warned the G7 in Italy that “human dignity itself is at stake.” They see AI as an existential threat portending the second “fall of man.” Once again, we are biting into the forbidden fruit, upsetting the delicate balance between the human and the divine. However, a fresh reading of the creation story in Genesis presents a more optimistic viewpoint suggesting that artificial intelligence might provide a roadmap for understanding the nature of God and might even confirm God’s very existence.
We need to leave behind the baggage accumulated over more than two thousand years of interpretation and look at the creation story afresh. The term” fall of man,” for example, never appears in the text. The serpent is not identified as Satan, but as a crafty animal. It wasn’t Eve’s fault. She might have been the more precocious one, but Adam was at her side all along, nodding his approval. It’s not about the acquisition of sin, but rather humanity consuming the fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Was that necessarily a bad thing? Let’s examine the first three chapters of Genesis, which describe the creation of the universe and our place in it.
The first chapter, paradoxically written more than half a millennium after the next two, describes God creating the universe and man in his own image. It is a product of the priestly redactors who assembled the Torah as we know it after the return from the Babylonian exile. God is cosmic and overtly monotheistic here. When God creates humans in his image, it has nothing to do with physical attributes. Rather, God gifted us with consciousness and a moral sense. And it’s left unsaid, but implied (and confirmed in other sections of the Old Testament) that wisdom existed prior to the creation. In effect, making it one with God.
This account was probably added to provide theological context for the much older story that follows. The second and third chapters of Genesis come from one of the earliest sources of the Old Testament. It portrays a more primitive God, or Yahweh as he’s named, and he’s neither cosmic nor omniscient. He’s andromorphic, walking around the Garden of Eden, conversing with the humans he has just created. Written when there was still a strong syncretic element in Judaism, nowhere is it said that Yahweh is the only God. Along with Adam, Eve and the serpent, Yahweh is a character in the tale, and he doesn’t always get thing right. This doesn’t diminish the power of the story. The literary critic Harold Bloom maintains that the J thread of the Old Testament, from which this story comes, is on par with Homer, Shakespeare and Tolstoy as great literature. J knows how to tell a good story.
The wily serpent persuades Adam and Eve to eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, which God had forbidden on pain of death. They lose their innocence, suddenly even ashamed in their nakedness, and are expelled from the Garden of Eden. There is no mention of a fall or “original sin.” As Kafka puts it, humans were not driven from paradise because of that, “but because of the Tree of Life, that we might not eat of it.” Previously, the tree of life, representing immortality, had not been restricted, but because of Adam and Eve’s disobedience it was now off limits. This is less of a judgement than an explanation of our tragic predicament. We are made in God’s image, understand good and evil, but in exchange for that we are made mortal.
Where does Artificial Intelligence fit into all of this? Alan Turing created the classic test measuring machine intelligence almost seventy-five years ago. The Turing test is brilliant in its simplicity. If a human evaluator can’t distinguish between human and machined generated conversation, the computer program can be deemed intelligent. This has nothing to do with whether answers to questions are right or wrong, but rather that they seem human. We have not reached that point yet, but what if we do? If a machine acquires human intelligence, is our consciousness next? If so, we will have created something like life in our own image. The “artificial” modifier in artificial intelligence can be dropped. But if man is created in the image of God, other possibilities arise. Perhaps AI can provide a lens into the very essence of God, whose all-encompassing nature is demonstrated by the name he gave himself while introducing himself to Moses: “I Am who I Am,” In short, it’s possible that artificial intelligence might provide the key to unlock the secrets of the universe.
Or it might not. We could be creating something we can’t control. We just might lose out humanity after all. The idea of artificial intelligence as “a lens into the essence of God” sounds frightening, the ultimate sacrilege, the one that the story of Adam and Eve warns us against, implying that eating from the tree of knowledge is a very bad thing, the height of hubris. This fear, however, is based on a faulty reading of Genesis. God intended Adam and Eve to eat from it all along. When you clear out the debris of later interpretation, remove the “fall of man” and “original sin” from the story, this becomes plausible. And how could we be created in God’s image without acquiring knowledge of good and evil. God is all knowing, omniscient, not constrained by time. Therefore, it had to be his plan all along. Even John Calvin, as scathing as he was in his description of man’s fall, admitted in the Institutes that “the first man fell because the Lord deemed it….” God intends us also to eat from this new tree of knowledge, even if, like Adam and Eve, we don’t know where it will lead. Since it’s part of God’s plan, the real hubris would be to stand in its way. By trusting in God, we just might experience a second creation.
Roy Lennox recently published In the Footsteps of Jesus: Exploring the World of the Gospels (Wipf and Stock, 2023). He is currently completing Eating from the Tree of knowledge: Thomas Bayes, Artificial Intelligence and the Second Creation.