AI and Creation: Some Perspectives from the Bible, Plato, Augustine, Aristotle, and Aquinas

Abstract

According to the biblical narrative, among the creatures of the Earth, human beings are uniquely God’s image-bearers, and we are also tragically prone to claim divinity for ourselves in ways that produce violence and judgment. Technology is a human good, part of our cultural mandate, but it also magnifies our worst tendencies. One of the great temptations of artificial intelligence is its mimetic capacity. AI systems mimic human creativity and judgment but lack human moral capacities. Granting a concern about mimesis, perhaps some version of non-reductive physicalism is correct and something we could call true intelligence might emerge from a future AI system. It could be that humans would owe some kind of duties toward AI as moral patients akin to what we, the stewards of creation, owe the various components of the natural world. But, from the perspective of Christian theological ethics, even if we entertain a kind of Aristotelian-Thomistic understanding of emergence and causal powers that could admit this possibility, we should remember the biblical narrative concerning human uniqueness. The great chain of being retains vitality as a metaphor in that it reminds us about the role of mediation in the relationship between God and creation.