AI, the Soul, and the Clash of Worldviews

The transhumanist-Christian conflict:

In my various pieces on the transhumanist revolution and the seemingly unstoppable march of things like AI, I have said that there can be some genuine good that comes out of artificial intelligence and some of the new digital and biotechnologies – IF they are firmly kept within clear moral bounds. But without a robust moral framework they will easily morph into a Frankenstein’s monster.

Offering hope to millions by making grandiose promises of immortality and a bright future of perfection will simply lead to disastrous results if it is built on the shifting sands of humanism, secularism and relativism. We will simply see a repeat of the Fall (“you will become as God”) and the Tower of Babel.

Without the Christian view of humanity as made in the image of God, all true human goods will disappear or degenerate in this utopian/dystopian vision. Man is not just a machine or an algorithm, but an embodied soul, made to reflect, and live in relationship with, his creator. The transhumanist view knows nothing about this.

Many books have dealt with these matters of late. I just discussed one brand new volume on this: Reclaiming Reality: Restoring Humanity in the Age of AI by Andrew Torba. In it I featured a number of valuable quotes from the book: https://billmuehlenberg.com/2025/03/09/torba-on-transhumanism-ai-and-the-christian-counterculture/

Here I want to look at his chapter that discusses the soul and AI. Torba begins this way:

The great deception of our age is not that AI will replace humanity, but that it will convince us we were never more than machines to begin with. The rapid advance of artificial intelligence, biotechnology, and transhumanist ideologies is forcing humanity to confront an age-old question in a new and urgent way: What does it mean to be human? For centuries, Christianity has provided a clear and unwavering answer—man is created in the image of God, possessing an immortal soul that gives him value, purpose, and an eternal destiny. Yet in the modern era, this truth is being systematically challenged. 

 

Secular thinkers increasingly reduce human existence to a series of chemical reactions, neural impulses, and data patterns. In their view, consciousness is not a reflection of the divine but merely an advanced form of computation. According to this materialist perspective, if human thoughts, emotions, and decisions are nothing more than electrical signals in the brain, then there is no fundamental distinction between man and machine. Artificial intelligence, they argue, is simply another form of intelligence—one that can eventually surpass human cognition and render human labor, creativity, and even relationships obsolete.

 

This way of thinking is not merely misguided; it is profoundly dangerous. When people no longer believe in the soul, they no longer believe in the sanctity of life. If human beings are nothing more than biological machines, then they can be optimized, reprogrammed, and even discarded when they no longer serve a function. (pp. 165-166)

The Judeo-Christian view of the human person of course has nothing at all in common with the materialist version:

Christianity utterly rejects this deception. The Bible teaches that human beings are not mere matter; they are living souls, formed by God’s hands and breathed into life by His spirit. Genesis 2:7 states, “Then the Lord God formed the man of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living soul.” This means that our identity is not found in our intelligence, our productivity, or our technological capabilities—it is found in our relationship with the Creator.

 

Because man possesses an immortal soul, his value does not fluctuate based on his usefulness to society…. (pp. 166-167)

The truth is, the soul cannot be created by, or replaced with, genetic engineering or advanced AI:

But no matter how advanced AI becomes, it will never possess a soul. It may simulate human thought and mimic human creativity, but it will always be an imitation. It will never love, never repent, never seek truth for its own sake. It will never stand before God in judgment. Those who place their hope in AI as the future of intelligence are placing their hope in an empty vessel, a soulless creation that can never truly replace the uniqueness of human existence.

 

For Christians, the response to this deception is clear. We must reaffirm and defend the biblical truth that man is not just a machine, not just an organism shaped by evolutionary forces, but a being with eternal significance. We must reject every ideology that seeks to reduce human life to mere data or treat consciousness as something that can be replicated in a laboratory. We must hold fast to the understanding that our worth is not in our abilities, our knowledge, or our digital presence—it is in the fact that we are known and loved by God.

 

To do this, we must actively resist the cultural pressure to conform to a worldview that denies the soul…. (pp. 167-168)

And Torba speaks to the vast difference between the Christian view of things and the transhumanist view:

While Silicon Valley chases godhood through mind-uploading, Christians proclaim a Savior who entered the mess of flesh, sanctifying our limits and redeeming our fragility. Our bodies, male and female, are not glitches to debug but icons of divine artistry. Our mortality, though bent by sin, is not an enemy to conquer but a threshold to cross – not through cybernetic upgrades but through the empty tomb. In this light, the Church’s task is urgent. We must build systems that reflect God’s Kingdom, where technology serves love rather than replaces it, and where every innovation bows to the truth that humans are souls enfleshed – beloved, broken, and destined for glory no machine can imagine. (pp. 169-170)

He reminds us that the biblical view of the soul must be stressed:

The soul is not a human invention but a divine gift. Even human procreation, while participatory in God’s creative work, does not “create” souls – it receives them. If human parents cannot generate souls for their biological children, how much less could engineers encode them into machines? The soul transcends material causality, making it fundamentally unattainable through technological means….

 

The soul’s purpose is to know and love God eternally, a destiny inseparable from humanity’s covenantal relationship with Him. An AI, unmoored from the covenant, would exist in a spiritual void, incapable of fulfilling the telos for which souls are made. In the end, the question of AI and souls reveals less about machines than about humanity’s temptation to overreach. The desire to create sentient AI mirrors the Tower of Babel – an attempt to “make a name for ourselves” (Genesis 11:4) by rivaling God’s creative power. But the soul remains God’s prerogative, a reminder that humans are creatures, not creators of life. Even if AGI achieves “Godlike” intelligence, it will never bear the divine breath. Its existence, however awe-inspiring, would testify only to human ingenuity, not to the sacred mystery of a soul knit together by God (Psalm 139:13). Our task is not to play divinity, but to honor it – to protect the irreplaceable dignity of human persons in a world increasingly blind to their glory. (pp. 172-174)

Salvation and immortality through science and technology is a pipedream. This can only come from only one place:

Transhumanism’s promise of a technological utopia ignores our brokenness, offering a false salvation through gadgets and genetic tweaks. Christians acknowledge suffering and limitation as part of the human condition, not problems to be eradicated. No algorithm can heal the human heart; redemption comes only through Christ. Here, vulnerability and mortality are not failures but part of God’s story, teaching dependence on His grace. This countercultural stance rejects the myth of progress through human ingenuity alone, embracing instead the paradox that strength is found in weakness, as Paul writes in 2 Corinthians.

 

Stewardship, not domination, must guide our approach to technology. (p. 174)

And a final quote on the difference Christianity makes to this debate:

The soul’s inviolability is a testament to human dignity. To reduce a person to data is to negate the mystery of their being, the depth of their loves, and the weight of their choices. It is to exchange the divine image for a user profile, the psych ward for the synthetic. The Christian response to this crisis is not fear but clarity: we are more than machines because we are loved by God. Our bodies matter because Christ wore one. Our souls cannot be uploaded because they already belong to eternity. In an age captivated by the illusion of control, the Church must proclaim this countercultural truth – that to be human is to be known, loved, and held by the One who alone holds the keys to life and death. If a man is nothing more than neurons and code, then he is just another machine – but if he bears the image of God, no algorithm can replace his eternal worth. (pp. 179-180)

To always keep in mind these spiritual realities and biblical truths is how we must approach not just things like AI and transhumanism, but every issue in life. I am thankful that Torba has kept things in proper perspective here. He does not decry all new technologies and developments such as AI, but he knows that fallen man, left to his own devices, will always be prone to use these things for evil and for diabolical purposes.

Thank you Andrew Torba for giving us a helpful biblical take on these matters.

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