Sermon: AI and the Magnificence of Humanity: Glory and Dust
This sermon is the first in our Back to the Basics series called “Living with Courage and Clarity in the face of AI.” Sheri preached it at our worship service during church retreat.
Psalm 8:3-5, Genesis 1: 25-27, Genesis 2:7
One of the podcasts I regularly listen to is Douglas Rushkoff’s “Team Human.” Rushkoff is a media theorist, a writer and professor, a graphic novelist. He actually did a series of graphic novels called Testament that retells stories from the Hebrew Scriptures in a kind of sci/fi cyberpunk way. He’s funny, super smart, quirky and very human.
Several years ago, Rushkoff was in a debate with a Silicon Valley tech luminary who believed in the singularity — the point where AI overtakes human intelligence. This guy was saying that the singularity was not only inevitable but a necessary step in evolutionary progress since humans are becoming an obsolete species that need to be superseded by the next digital phase of consciousness. This is not a fringe view, by the way. Some of the most powerful people in Silicon Valley believe some version of it — it’s called AI successionism, or transhumanism or post humanism — the idea that humanity should hand the world to AI, even if that means our extinction, because AI is a worthier successor.
When Rushkoff stepped in to passionately defend human beings, the tech guy smugly dismissed his argument: ”You’re only saying that because you’re human.” Rushkoff fired back: “Guilty as charged. I’m on Team Human!”
Isn’t it weird that we’ve gotten to the place in the development of a technology we created that we have to now defend being human? Other advances — the assembly line, birth control — have sparked conversations about what it means to be human, but AI has brought the question front and center in a way nothing else has: What is a human? What’s valuable about us, what makes us special, how is our intelligence different from machine intelligence when the latter can so obviously do some things better than us?
There’s perhaps never been a better time to be grounded in Judeo-Christian traditions because they speak to this question in a profound way. And I’m not the only one saying this. Tyler Austin Harper is a self-described “not especially observant Presbyterian” who writes for The Atlantic. He recently argued that most secular critics of AI object to it in utilitarian terms: its environmental cost, its theft of intellectual property, its algorithmic bias, its role in surveillance and warfare, its disruption of labor, its potential to bring about human extinction.
Obviously, we have to talk about these harms and alarms. But even if every one of them were fixed tomorrow, he said, we’d still be left with a technology that questions our basic sense of human dignity and meaning. Secular humanist traditions, Harper says, often struggle to come up with a clear definition of what humanity is, while Christian humanism has a potent language about this. So let’s dive into that language.
Who among us has stood outside on a clear night, away from city lights, looking up at the stars? Jim Lichti’s beautiful call to worship reflects the feelings that come up. The wonder. The vastness — a sky so full and dark and so much bigger than us. We feel its magnificence and also our insignificance next to it. That’s not a new feeling. It’s the oldest feeling in the book — literally. Here’s the passage from Psalms 8:3-5.
“When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars that you have established — what are human beings that you are mindful of them, mortals that you care for them?” The psalmist isn’t asking that question in despair; they’re asking it from a place of awe. And then listen for the answer that comes. After all that vastness, and all that smallness, the answer isn’t “you are nothing.” The answer is “you have made them a little lower than God, and crowned them with glory and honor.”
That’s the audacious claim our tradition makes. We humans are glorious, and we’re glorious not because of what we can produce or optimize or calculate. Our worth is not predicated on having some special capability on a rapidly shrinking list of things machines can’t do yet. We are intrinsically valuable, only a little lower than God, crowned with glory and honor.
The Catholic tradition, from which Pope Leo obviously writes, refers to this as “ontological dignity” — it’s a dignity we have simply by virtue of existing, by, as Leo puts it, “having been willed, created and loved by God.” (Here’s the link to his recent encyclical on AI, which is very good!) That dignity, he warns, is threatened by an “insidious ideology that suggests every person must earn or justify their worth, to the point of attributing greater value to those (people or machines) who are more efficient or effective. From this perspective, persons end up being reduced to a means of achieving results, a resource to be used and exploited” (paragraph 51) or, superseded by digital consciousness. This is a heresy — a denial of our glory as humans, our ontological dignity.
Let’s see what else our tradition says about what it means to be human. Genesis 1:26-27: “Then God said, ‘Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness…’ So God created humankind in God’s image, in the image of God they were created.”
Notice that strange little word: us: ”Let us make humankind in our image.” Scholars have argued for centuries about who God is talking to here — the heavenly council of angels, the Spirit and the Son, even the royal we? But whatever you sense you make of it (or not), something important is being named: God, in God’s self, is already plural. Already, a we. Already in relationship.
So when we’re told we’re made in God’s image, it means we are made for and in relationship, because the God who made us is, at God’s core, a relationship. That’s really why the idea of the Trinity is so cool. God is not a solitary intelligence computing in the void. God is a communion of love, spilling outward into everything that exists. For all the words that have been spilled trying to explain the Trinity, that’s actually what it’s pointing to.
ChatGPT can write you a quite beautiful prayer. It can hold a “conversation” with you that feels warmer than the one you had with your spouse that morning. It can mimic empathy so well it might bring you to tears. But it cannot give itself to you, because it has nothing to give . It has no body that can be hurt on your behalf, no shared history that makes your bond with another both costly and real, no actual other who woke up this morning and chose, again, to love you. As the encyclical puts it, “No computational system, however sophisticated, can create a heart that gives itself” (paragraph 233).
That’s our glory. Not our processing power but our capacity to give ourselves to one another in love, because relationship is what we were built from and for in the first place.
But glory isn’t the whole story. If Genesis 1 tells us we’re made in the image of a relational, creating God, Genesis 2 tells us something more grounded — literally. “Then God formed the human from the dust of the ground, and breathed into their nostrils the breath of life; and the human became a living being.” We were formed, shaped by hand, like a potter working clay. The Hebrew makes obvious what the English does not: we are adam, formed from adamah — the human formed from the humus. We are, quite literally, ground-people. Dirt with sacred breath in it.
That’s not a demotion. It’s the other half of the truth of who we are as humans. We are crowned with glory, a little less than God, and we are dust — limited, mortal, dependent, bound to bodies that get tired and old and have bad knees and eventually stop. We know about this stopping. One of you said to me this week, there’s been so much death in our community lately. Gary. Three mothers connected to our community — Stephanie Kennell-Heilig’s, Stephanie Stevens, Jeff Lehman’s. Judith’s grandmother.
It’s painful to be a human sometimes. But that limitation, as painful as it is, isn’t a design flaw waiting for an upgrade. It’s what makes us who we are. Pope Leo says that our culture increasingly treats any limit — incapacity, illness, old age, suffering — as a defect to be corrected rather than a reality through which our humanity matures and opens itself to relationship. But, he says, “humanity flourishes not despite limitations, but often through them” (paragraph 118). It’s precisely when we can’t fix something or outrun it, that compassion and generosity flourish. In such experiences, Leo says, we might “discover a new wisdom, tangibly experience the closeness of others and encounter the presence” of God (paragraph 119).
The other night people in our Aging Parents Support group were talking about bathing an aging parent, or trimming their toenails or tending to their bodies in ways that, honestly, might have seemed gross before they did it. And they found, when they did it, a new intimacy with their parent. This person who had tended their bodies when they were young — they were now returning this embodied love to them. Illness, old age, grief, vulnerability — these are the thing that excavate our souls, that produce some of the most beautiful art and music, that bind us together in love.
So we are glory: made in the image of a God who created the heavens and all that is in it, made in the image of a God who is, in God’s being, relationship. And we are dust: fragile, limited, mortal. Beware the “insidious ideologies” that try to deny either the glory or the dust— they are eroding the magnificence of what it means to be human.
One the one hand, beware those who deny our glory and reduce us down to dust and nothing more. This shows up in these crazy ideas I’ve been hearing about more and more that we humans are just biological information-processing systems, chemical algorithms, meat computers that happen to be a little less efficient than the silicon kind. If that’s all we are, then there’s no real reason a good-enough chatbot couldn’t eventually replace a friend, a pastor, a spouse because all word-based relational encounters are just pattern-matching in the first place. Forget the “image of God.” We’re just sophisticated machinery, waiting to be out-machined by even more sophisticated machinery.
On the other hand, beware those who deny our dust. This is Silicon Valley’s transhumanist belief, stated outright by the tech luminary arguing with Rushkoff, that our limitations as humans need to be superseded by a more advanced species. Aging, death, the friction of human relationship — all problems to be transcended on the way to becoming “post-human.” This insidious ideology also finds its way into the belief that unless someone is productive and efficient, they are less than. This is a profoundly ableist ideology, that cannot see the dignity in the non-speaking autistic person, the mother with dementia, the friend with a debilitating depression.
Which brings us to the deepest confusion at the heart of this moment, one that Pope Leo names with such compassion for the confused. It isn’t wrong to want to transcend our limits. It’s not a character flaw to want to escape pain, or grief, or the slow loss of a body that gives out on you. Some of the smartest people in Silicon Valley have simply misdiagnosed what do with that longing. Christian tradition has always said humans are called to self-transcendence, but, as Pope Leo puts it, that transcendence comes “not through an escape from reality or a contempt for (our) limitations, but through (our) fulfillment in love” (paragraph 127). The tech bros aren’t wrong that we long to reach beyond ourselves; they’re wrong about which direction we reach. They’re reaching up , toward disembodiment, toward uploading their consciousness to the cloud, to Mars, toward a self unbothered by grief or need or death. The gospel reaches the other way — down, into the mess of bodies and time and other people — because that’s where the love that actually allows us to transcend our small and limited selves turns out to live.
God did not rescue us from the dust. God entered it. This is not a God who helps us transcend our bodies, but a God who is born into one, who gets hungry in one, who weeps in one, who bleeds and dies in one. The Word became flesh, not code. The incarnation was not about becoming a self finally free of all limitations, but a self given away, again and again, to the aging parent whose feet you rub, to the friend you sit with in a hospital waiting room, to the people you’ve never met but for whom you march in the street, demanding that their dignity be recognized.
I believe that AI will keep getting better at sounding like us. But it will never once be in awe of a starlit sky; it will never imitate an earthworm (which had just happened at our church retreat); it will never choose to love us, because it has nothing to give and nothing to lose. We do. That’s not our obsolescence. That’s our glory! So — guilty as charged. I’m on Team Human.