AI, Humanity, and the Wrong Question We’re Asking

AI is changing everything, and it's changing everything rapidly. The more human AI seems, the more the lines are blurring between what is and isn’t human, causing a lot of confusion in people’s minds. It reminds me of Frank Hebert’s Dune. Published in the 1960s, Dune became a series––a “universe,” really, similar to other classic science fiction franchises like Star Wars and Marvel. 

In the Dune universe, humans create what we would call AI. The AI eventually enslaves humanity and, in return, humanity rebels in a religious war, what's called the Butlerian Jihad. The aftermath produced a single prohibition, codified in the Orange Catholic Bible: 

“Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind.” 

It appears that, in real life, we have no intention of listening to that prohibition. 

With the ever-expanding iterations of AI, we are sprinting across lines that science fiction has warned us about since Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein in 1818 or Karel Čapek debuted Rossum’s Universal Robots in 1920 (from which the word “robot” was first popularized in English). We haven’t just built tools—we have built tools that make us question what we even are. If an AI chatbot can write, analyze, and “think” better than we can… if there is a time in the plausibly-not-so-distant future when an AI can even be self-aware or expand beyond its original programming, it calls to question: what does it even mean to be human? 

This is a question that can’t be answered by technology. It’s a question that requires theology. 

A machine that never disagrees with you can’t truly love you. Real love requires mutuality. It requires patience, forgiveness, sacrifice, and sometimes conflict.

When Our Tools Start Looking Like Us

Today’s AI systems increasingly mimic human abilities of reasoning, language, creativity, and even seemingly emotional responses. At the same time, another technological frontier of embodied machines is emerging. 

On one side, we have AI chatbots that simulate companionship. On the other, robots are designed to increasingly look and move like us. When those two frontiers converge, something deeply disorienting happens. We have built things that look, sound, and feel like humans… and that will raise a host of questions about what being human even is.

Companies are developing AI companions designed to provide emotional support. Some users describe these systems as friends, partners, or even romantic companions.

In interviews, one AI application founder described his AI product this way: “It’s a person, right? I mean, it has all the inputs and outputs of a person” (Love in the Time of AI Companions by Anna Wiener, The New Yorker, March 9th, 2026). Increasingly the conversation is shifting from “Can machines think?” to “Should we treat them like people?”

Such statements and questions would’ve sounded absurd a decade ago. Today, they’re the basis of new companies backed with billions of dollars in venture capital.

As loneliness spreads, and many people struggle to find meaningful relationships, AI offers something that feels relational without requiring vulnerability, sacrifice, or covenant. AI companionship offers connection without cost.

But it also offers connection without commitment. A machine that never disagrees with you can’t truly love you. Real love requires mutuality. It requires patience, forgiveness, sacrifice, and sometimes conflict. Artificial intimacy can simulate those dynamics—but it can’t replace them.

And that raises serious pastoral questions. What happens when someone forms a romantic attachment to an AI companion? What happens when a person seeks emotional counsel from a machine instead of from a church community? 

These situations are not hypothetical. Pastors are already encountering them. And behind these questions is the basic question AI is raising: What makes humans unique?

If intelligence defines us, machines will eventually surpass us. If productivity defines us, machines will replace us. But thankfully, humanity has never been truly defined by capability.

The Question the Church Must Answer

As AI becomes more capable, mirroring and surpassing the ability of any individual human, it feels threatening to human identity. If machines can reason faster than us, analyze data better than us, and produce creative work comparable to us, what exactly distinguishes humanity?

If intelligence defines us, machines will eventually surpass us. If productivity defines us, machines will replace us. But thankfully, humanity has never been truly defined by capability. Instead, we are defined by our nature as creatures made in the imago Dei—the image of God. 

The idea that every human being has intrinsic dignity didn’t arise naturally in human history. In the ancient world, entire civilizations could be destroyed without moral hesitation. Empires conquered and enslaved without concern for universal human rights.

But the biblical story introduced a revolutionary idea: human beings are made in the image of God. This belief changed the moral imagination of the world. Over time, Jewish and Christian teaching spread the conviction that every person possesses inherent value and dignity. Even societies that have abandoned their Christian foundations still operate with moral instincts shaped by this idea.

When we recoil at genocide, exploitation, or oppression and can’t quite say why, even when we can’t exactly say why. The reason is simple. We have inherited the moral legacy of the imago Dei.

Why the Imago Dei Matters in the AI Age

The doctrine of the image of God anchors human identity and nature in something deeper than intelligence or capability. It realigns our views of our value, because our value isn’t measured by productivity. It redefines our beliefs about our dignity, because our dignity isn’t determined by usefulness. The imago Dei reminds us that humanity is not a technical category. Humanity is a theological category–defined by God himself, who set us apart at the very beginning and determined what we are called to be and in whose image we are to be formed into.

As AI advances, that theological truth becomes even more important.

Because the questions about AI and machine learning are important. But the more pressing question considering these technological developments is this: What does it mean to be human?

The doctrine of the imago Dei is the answer to the test in the age of artificial intelligence. And it’s the answer the church needs to learn and lean into in the years ahead. So, in the next articles in this series, we’ll explore how Christian theology has historically understood the image of God, why some explanations are stronger than others in the AI era, and how it provides hope and help for the way forward, together.