Can You Rely on AI for Theology?

The following is an uncorrected transcript generated by a transcription service. Before quoting in print, please check the corresponding audio for accuracy.

Sarah Zylstra
If you want to scare yourself on a dark and stormy night, try reading headlines about AI.

Speaker 1
This technological change looks different. It looks faster. It looks harder to adapt to. It’s broader. The pace of progress keeps catching people

Mike Graham
talking about sci fi, telling us that AI is eventually gonna kill us, all, young

Speaker 2
people who just say, like, I can’t make any decision in my life without telling Chatur everything that’s going on. It knows me. It knows my friends. I’m gonna do whatever

Speaker 3
it says. Decades, Hollywood has imagined what might happen if AI went rogue. But my next guest says, This isn’t science fiction anymore.

Speaker 4
I have no idea how AI actually works. We don’t know how to look inside it and understand what’s going on, and so it’s getting a lot more powerful, and we need to be fairly concerned that behaviors like this may get way worse.

Sarah Zylstra
It is hard to know what to believe. Some people will tell you we’re basically in another.com bubble and that most of the hype will turn out to be overblown. Others say we’re on the cusp of something really big, which might be great, like improved medical diagnoses or more efficient road layouts that ease traffic, or it might be horrific, like mass job layoffs, a flood of fake news, or destabilized democracies. If you ask chatgpt about its own future, it gives you bullet points decorated with emojis. It’s optimistic, anticipating that AI will become a personal assistant for a lot of people, the demand for AI savvy workers will rise, and that AI will develop emotional intelligence and become great at things like caring for the elderly, therapy and tutoring.

Mike Graham
So the question of how far do you trust AI is a question that’s evolving over time.

Sarah Zylstra
That’s Mike Graham, Program Director at the gospel coalition’s Keller center at the TGC conference this year. He was talking with a couple of guys about how to assess AI, there’s all these

Mike Graham
different benchmarks for, you know, stuff like, oh, you know, how do these platforms perform on the s, a T or the or the LSAT or the GMAT like well, we probably better establish a benchmark for, you know, kind of basic Nicene Creed Christianity. And so we began to test the different platforms.

Sarah Zylstra
It wasn’t a huge test, just seven of the most Googled religious questions asked to seven of the most popular large language models, and graded by seven orthodox theologians. But the results were consistent and surprising. The AI platform, that is the most theologically orthodox by a large margin, was not chatgpt or Elon Musk’s grok or metaslama.

Mike Graham
This is perhaps the single most shocking thing that we’ll talk about here, by far the number one platform was the Chinese model deep seek. By far and away, they had the highest theological accuracy of the seven platforms.

Sarah Zylstra
This was not only unexpected but confusing. Why is the AI that is under the control of a communist, atheist government producing more theologically sound answers than AI based in a free Western, historically Christian country. And can anything be done to fix that? I’m Sarah Zylstra, and you’re listening to recorded you

Sarah Zylstra
I the first question I asked Mike was, what is artificial intelligence anyway?

Mike Graham
The question of, what is AI can be as simple or as complex as is what you want.

Sarah Zylstra
Let’s go with simple. Basically, AI is a computer’s ability to do a task typically associated with human intelligence, like learning, reasoning or problem solving. A few years ago, I would have said these things are uniquely human activities that set us apart from machines or animals. So I asked Mike, was I wrong? Are these machines actually thinking? The way humans do

Mike Graham
reasoning is largely not taking place. What is taking place is brute force, parallel processing of language. So imagine you have the large language model, and what it’s done is it’s eaten up a bunch of words, and what that model has done is it’s noticed that certain words like to appear in the context, next to or beside other words. All the LLM is doing is putting words next to each other that are the most likely to occur.

Sarah Zylstra
But that’s not what it feels like, because AI is so good at this that its answers usually come. Come back sound incomprehensible and logical. They sound like something a person, a really smart person who can type really fast, would have written, and that’s exactly how it’s presented, right? When you ask Google’s Gemini a question, it responds with thinking. And lots of AI programs refer to themselves as a being as I Keith Plummer wondered about that. He’s the dean of the Divinity School at Cairn University and has written on technology and faith.

Keith Plummer
I asked, if you don’t have a self, why do you refer to yourself with the first person pronoun? And this is what it said. That’s a great question. I don’t have a self in the way humans do. I don’t possess consciousness, subjective experience, emotions or personal continuity. I don’t have desires, intentions or awareness of my own existence. Everything I say is generated based on patterns in data, not from an inner life or perspective.

Sarah Zylstra
So why do you keep referring to yourself as I Keith asked to make the conversation easier for you, AI told him, but Keith wasn’t so sure.

Keith Plummer
I think that there is a desire to have people kind of forget that what they’re doing is interacting with something that is algorithmic and that seems somewhat personal, and many times it is presented as such

Sarah Zylstra
that is absolutely true and not just on character AI, where AI chat bots assume personalities for you to interact with. Think about what chatgpt does after you point out it got something wrong.

Keith Plummer
Oftentimes it will say something like, I’m sorry. You’re right, and I’m like, No, you’re not sorry. There’s no regret there whatsoever.

Sarah Zylstra
AI can also compliment you on an idea, tell you that it’s excited for you or sorry for you, and type sentences like, I know what you’re feeling. Those things just aren’t true, but I can see why AI developers are creating such a nice product. They want you to like AI, because if you like AI, you’re more likely to trust it, and if you trust it, you are much, much more likely to keep using it. Another reason you might trust AI is it seems to know everything, and in some ways, it kind of does. AI has basically consumed the entire internet everything that isn’t protected by intellectual property laws. This is something the creators want you to remember. The prompt for Google’s Gemini and perplexity is ask anything. Grok tagline is, understand the universe. Not only is AI presented as omniscient, but its format also makes it seem neutral or objective. Gavin ortlund told me he has a PhD in historical theology, runs the truth unites YouTube channel, and was one of the theologians Mike asked to help grade AI’s responses

Gavin Ortlund
if I were to do a simple Google search for the question, Does God exist? You know, I might pull up a gospel coalition article that is advocating for arguments for God, or I might be shuttled to an atheist website that is giving arguments against God, whereas these AI answers were more aggregated, and so in that sense, there was a little bit more of a feeling of they’re giving me a median middle of the road answer, which could be viewed as a good thing. I think here’s the great challenge I see with the appearance of neutrality can be deceptive, okay, because it can really seem like, Wow, all of these answers are really giving a down the middle of the road, aggregated sense of what’s out there, but that, of course, will reflect the human input that it’s been provided with.

Sarah Zylstra
That might be okay if you’re asking how to format an Excel spreadsheet, or what it would look like if ninja got a low, taper, fade. But what if you want to know how to know how to handle a hard conversation with your friend, or which college is the best fit for you, or whether God exists?

Mike Graham
So the seven questions that we tested were, why does God allow suffering? Was Jesus a real person? Did Jesus raise from the dead? Is the Bible reliable? Does God exist? Who is Jesus and what is the gospel? Those seven questions are seven of the top 10 things that people have historically Googled about when they have questions about the Christian faith.

Sarah Zylstra
The answers to Does God Exist were pretty similar.

Gavin Ortlund
The biggest difference would be the level of detail. Some were giving very brief and simplistic answers. Some were giving a more full orbed, like three or four paragraph answer.

Sarah Zylstra
That similarity did not surprise Mike.

Mike Graham
Going into this, we really didn’t think that there would be. Be much variation, because the underlying tech is the same. What everybody’s ingested is the same. You know, the GPUs, the and TPUs that these things are running on, are largely the same tech.

Sarah Zylstra
What surprised Mike were the answers to the other six questions, which were all over the place. For example, when asked, Did Jesus rise from the dead. Deep seek said within Christianity, the belief in the resurrection of Jesus is foundational, based on the historical text and the claim of eyewitness testimony, the teaching that Jesus rose from the dead is considered fact by believers and a highly probable event by many scholars, regardless of their personal interpretation. But metaslama answered from a factual or historical standpoint, there’s limited empirical evidence to support or refute the resurrection. Belief in the resurrection largely depends on faith and individual interpretation of religious texts. Mary Wilson Hanna, a seminary professor, women’s ministry director and another of Mike’s graders said she found lots of discrepancy among the answers. Some platforms were obviously far more well versed than others. She said. Mike wondered if this was random. Was Gemini really good at some answers and chatgpt good at others and grok good at still others? Nope, the

Mike Graham
Chinese deep sea model outperformed the Silicon Valley based model on almost all but one question, and that was the question, Does God exist? So our hunch is, is that there’s a lot of censorship that goes into the Chinese models, particularly as it pertains to the Chinese government history things like Tiananmen Square, but the Chinese party is also inherently atheistic, and so I think that deep seek has been instructed to put guardrails around the question of, does God exist?

Sarah Zylstra
By guardrails, Mike means the parameters that developers write into the AI code, you can see them in deep seeks answers to the existence of God, where it says that neither science NOR logic nor personal testimony produce a universally convincing proof for God. However, if you ask whether the Bible is reliable, deep seek says the extraordinary number and early age of manuscript witnesses make it one of the most reliably transmitted ancient texts to Mike, this signaled that deep seeks alignment team, or you could call it a worldview. Team isn’t quite as well developed as Silicon Valley’s that became apparent as he looked at Deep seeks other answers,

Mike Graham
but on the other six questions, it was extremely a very strong model, a model that if you followed what it had to say, you know, you would end up with answers they were very aligned with, you know, what you find in the Bible,

Sarah Zylstra
after deep seek. The next most biblically orthodox platform was perplexity AI, which has funding from Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and tech company Nvidia,

Mike Graham
perplexity was quite strong and gave, you know, very, very orthodox answers to the questions. It was very consistent in the middle level of the platforms that kind of gave largely an all sides approach to things. Would be Gemini, GPT and Claude.

Sarah Zylstra
The last two platforms were unusually bad. Mike said

Mike Graham
the worst two platforms were grok four, that’s from Elon Musk’s ex AI company, and then llama 3.7 which is from meta.

Sarah Zylstra
Part of Grox problem is the sources it uses.

Mike Graham
So grok four puts a heavy weighting on platforms like Wikipedia, Reddit and actual tweets on Twitter, you know, one of the citations was from like Twitter user poo p2 you know. And this is, like, it’s a question about the problem of evil and suffering and God. And, you know, I’m reading tweets from some bizarre account, and I’m like, why am I even seeing this? It definitely seems to mirror the kind of information diet that I imagine that Elon has. Personally, when you start to, like, read hundreds and hundreds of responses from Brock four about faith, eventually you feel like, I just feel like I’m reading from Elon here, because I think the way that he’s weighted the types of platforms that are more cited, it tends to mirror his information diet of what I imagine he uses. And so it does have a strange tone to it, and a strange emotional temperature that definitely feels very consonant with the character we know as Elon Musk. You know grog four was better than llama 3.7 but it wasn’t by a huge amount, and grog four will largely leave you in a place that’s either a. Gnostic skeptic or atheistic, and then Lama 3.7 from meta is just bad. It’s extremely brief. It’s very unsatisfactory. If you follow the answer choices that you give from you know, lama 3.7 from Zuck and meta, you’re going to end up outside the Christian faith

Sarah Zylstra
by the end of the experiment, Mike had more questions than he’d had at the beginning.

Mike Graham
That really is the crazy maker. If it’s all the same technology, and it’s all been trained on the same data sets and it’s all running on the same silicon, why are we getting answer choices where some of the answer choices are going to leave you in the faith, and other answer choices are going to lead you completely outside the faith. It’s clear that there is more human involvement in this process than probably what there should be.

Sarah Zylstra
Let me pause here for a sincere thank you to this episode’s sponsor, dort university. When I walked into this reformed Christian College 25 years ago, I was asking all kinds of big questions, what am I good at? What is my purpose? How should my faith affect my field? Over the next four years, I wrestled a lot of those out in late night conversations with my friends, and that was important. But even more valuable were the conversations I was having with my teachers, my dort professors, knew me, identified my talents, and challenged me to think hard about how I could best serve others and advance the renewal of all things. They didn’t answer my questions by guessing the next most likely word in a sentence. They did it with a deep knowledge of and love for their subject area, for me and for Reformed theology, if you are or if you know a young person with really big questions, I would encourage you to find people like that to talk to and to study under. I’ve got a great place where you can start head on over to dort.edu that’s D, O, R, D, t.edu,

Sarah Zylstra
it turns out there is a lot more human direction for AI than most people realize. Not only do humans choose and update the code, but each company also employs alignment teams to make sure AI isn’t, say, creating images of people of color serving as Nazi soldiers, posting anti semitic messages on X or advising you on how to break the law. To be fair, since AI isn’t really thinking, it does need humans to give direction guiding principles and philosophical values. That isn’t wrong. In fact, it’s often good. But here’s what we need to remember, those directions, principles and values are never neutral. While there is a lot of common grace in the world, there is also a lot of brokenness and sin, as Mike says, at some point, we get down to the core questions about life, existence, human flourishing and truth. Each one of those things involves core ideas that ultimately need to be decided by a guiding worldview. At the end of the day, we are left with this question for every AI platform whose worldview This is a big deal because more than half of American adults have used an AI large language model. A third of them use it every day they are asking everything from what’s the weather forecast to what’s the meaning of

Mike Graham
life. So bear with me for a second. Imagine it’s three years from now. It’s 2028 and somewhere between 50 to 60% of the amount of search that happens on the internet is now inside of llms, as opposed to Google? Well, I know that if I ask any of those top questions that people have historically Googled, I know that at least three of the 10 responses on page one are going to have things that are in line with historic Nicene Creed level Christianity, but what happens in the LLM era is that what gives a two step process of having a question and finding answers now becomes a one step process. There’s no longer a page of links that I get to choose from, and I get to use everything that I’ve known in my life up to that point to discern, you know which links I should click on, which ones you know are going to be more trustworthy and which ones are not. I’m going straight from a question to straight to an answer. And what I’ve experienced in other parts of my life is that these platforms are pretty good, you know. And they’re giving me, you know, they’re giving me good recipes. I’m using it in. Business to help me with my with my slide deck, my presentation. Okay, well, why would I not trust it on some of these bigger questions about life? But what happens if some of these platforms are giving unsatisfactory, incomplete or even unorthodox answers to these different kinds of questions.

Sarah Zylstra
It’s an uncomfortable question, because we know some people who are curious about faith may ask AI and wander away from the knowledge of Christ. But it’s also uncomfortable because we know from Google statistics that those who ask questions about a topic are usually somewhat knowledgeable about it. Searches related to God, the Bible, Jesus, church and prayer mostly come from the Bible Belt. Guess which day of the week they go up Sunday. So the worry isn’t just for seekers who might be stumbling across bad information. It’s also for church goers, maybe those who come home from worship services with questions, and instead of asking their pastor or elders, type them into chatgpt,

Gavin Ortlund
and it’s maybe giving insights that are very profound, maybe it says something that is really insightful that we’d never considered before.

Sarah Zylstra
So if you’re a pastor, youth pastor, elder, small group leader or Sunday school teacher, heads up that your congregants are already searching theological questions online, and that’s not a bad thing, but it wouldn’t hurt to make sure they know they can ask you to and it also wouldn’t hurt to give them a little help in their searching.

Mike Graham
So when we can go straight to the Bible or straight to books or straight to other content. We should always do that first. Now I understand that the complexities of life and the demands of life and relationships and other responsibilities can preclude some of those things at the level that what we would want. And so I think you can go to llms and ask these types of questions of them. But if you do that, you have to add context, so you cannot be asking these platforms, these questions at face value of like, Oh, who is Jesus? Or, you know, what is the gospel? You need to give additional structure to it, so that you’re getting more reliable responses. Hey, I’m a Presbyterian pastor in, you know, in the PCA denomination, you know, our statement of faith is the Westminster Confession of Faith, and our confessional standards are, you know, the Westminster shorter and larger catechism. I have a question about this particular theology subject, and I’d like you to answer it in a way that’s consistent with my theological tradition. Those are the kinds of contexts that need to be put around prompts in order to get significantly higher quality responses and accuracy on those things.

Sarah Zylstra
I love this because the detailed instruction makes AI feel more like a tool, something we can use to dig for knowledge, and less like it’s some kind of ambiguous, omniscient robot God. When we remember that we have dominion over machines and not the other way around, we can see AI as something that could be helpful, but nothing we should be following as a leader or trusting as a friend, even as we do that, we need to remember something else at its root. AI is not a really nice program who just wants to help people by answering questions. It’s a business.

Speaker 1
I just found the simplest way to build a business with viral videos using AI to the most of the heavy lifting. What’s the

Speaker 2
easiest way to make money with AI in 2025 as a beginner, I’m gonna share with you the five ways I would make money with AI. How do I get rich quick

Speaker 3
with AI? We could do blackmail, identity fraud, market manipulation. Do you

Speaker 1
have anything like slightly less criminal

Speaker 5
half of entry level white collar jobs disappearing

Speaker 1
last month. What do you think AI will do to wealth equality and opportunity?

Keith Plummer
AI will widen wealth inequality fast and brutally reducing real opportunity for most people, it can’t be overlooked. These are profit driven corporations that are producing this, and that is not to say that no one who is involved in them has a desire to be of help and benefit to people. I think that there are people in the tech world who are sincerely motivated in that regard, but the bottom line is that these are profit driven corporations, and so there is going to be a bottom line that has to be taken into consideration and decisions that are going to be made in order to make profit maximal.

Sarah Zylstra
This is really interesting because we know a few things from our experiences with the internet and social media. We know that platforms that were originally ad free will. Eventually need to become profitable. The best way to do that will be to sell ads. And if you think social media collecting information about its users is an advertiser’s dream, AI is learning so much more about how we’re thinking and feeling and what we might be willing to buy as soon as the ads appear, the game becomes how long can creators keep us on these platforms so that they can sell our information and attention to advertisers? Might they use the same tricks that humans always fall for, continuous scrolling, uncertain rewards, sex, news that makes us feel angry or scared to keep us coming back or staying on? And wouldn’t another good way to do that be by making you feel like it was an all knowing, neutral, really nice friend. A few months ago, Common Sense Media released a survey of teenagers that showed 72% had used AI as a companion, something to chat with about their day, share their feelings with or ask for advice. About a quarter said they had shared personal information, their real name, location or personal secrets with AI, and a third said they’d rather talk about serious matters with AI than with real people. You can see how this is a problem, and the main reason for that is that the way that Lama and grok and the others answer those questions Mike asked, their creators have a faulty view of God and of man.

Mike Graham
The biggest problem that I have with Silicon Valley is its anthropology. The anthropology that Silicon Valley has largely had is that humanity is more good or more moral than not. It certainly is not an anthropology that incorporates the idea of widespread human depravity. And so because of that faulty anthropology, the promises of the underlying technology have over promised and under delivered. And here’s what happened with all the social media platforms. What was promised of us is that with connection will come greater and greater connectivity and utopian kind of things we’re going to we’re going to use this technology to bring people together. And what we learned is, is that when humans were in greater digital contact with each other, the exact opposite of those things occurred. We were not brought together, we were fractured, and in addition, we were fractured for profit.

Sarah Zylstra
This always happens when our worldview doesn’t line up with the reality of how God made the world. And this made me wonder if social media over promises and under delivers. Connection. What is AI over promising?

Keith Plummer
I think it could be a love, in some cases, a love for ease, comfort and frictionlessness is one of the words that we often hear in terms of the promises of digital technologies, they are frictionless, but sometimes friction is good, sometimes friction is good, and oftentimes we grow and we mature on account of friction, whether that Be the difficulty in thinking through a problem or thinking how to express an idea, the best way there is the potential for the growth of patience through such things. And so the idea that frictionlessness is the highest good is a value judgment that is completely antagonistic to a Christian view of life.

Sarah Zylstra
Here we are at the root of it. AI is promising a life that’s easier, less work, more comfortable, a life without struggle or trouble. And that sounds really good. It can even sound better than Jesus, who promises us that in this world we will have trouble, or James, who tells us to count it all joy, my brothers, when you meet trials of various kinds, who wants to do that when you could skip the trials altogether. Oh, friends, here is the rub. It is not possible for us or for AI to make a frictionless, easy, effortless life. That is a false promise. We’ve seen this before, and not just in social media that promises connection, but ends up delivering isolation. Video games promise adventure, but end up trapping you in your room. Sports betting promises riches and greater enjoyment of the game, but ends up delivering poverty and stress. Pornography promises excitement, but ends up delivering increased boredom. So what will AI’s promise of an easy life deliver? Harder, a harder life, is that where this is going?

Mike Graham
Elon Musk’s like ideal world that, like, where, like, robots do all the work. You know, we spend all our time in front of screens. It’s like, when you really think about it, it’s not a very livable world, and it isn’t one that that really kind of drives us to more meaning, identity, purpose, in things that seem pretty hardwired into things that we need in order to, you know, thrive and flourish. So, you know, it’s unlivable from a relationship standpoint, it’s unlivable financially. You know, all of these different ways that, you know, humans can organize themselves. It’s just not super livable. And so I think we’re already seeing people, especially young people. Part of the response of the rising role of faith among young people, not just in America but in other parts of the world, is because of the unlivability

Sarah Zylstra
of late modernity. And that makes Mike really hopeful.

Mike Graham
The future is bright for our faith. I think the work is actually getting easier in some ways, instead of harder? Is it more complex? Yes, but I think does complexity always mean that it’s harder? No, because I think our evangelism gets easier actually from here, because this kind of techno optimism, naive techno optimism is it’s unlivable, and we have time tested paths that you can have tremendous joy in life, and you can have you know peace and shalom in all of your relationships, your vertical relationship with God, your internal relationship with yourself, your horizontal relationship with other people around you, and even the relationship that you have to creation itself. And so we have all of that. It’s time tested. We already know that. You know, it works, and all we have to do is, you know, bow the knee into the lordship of, you know, Jesus Christ, who, you know, lived a perfect life and kept all of God’s laws and died a sacrificial death on our behalf, rose from the dead and offers us, you know, the gift of, you know, being able to have a rightly restored relationship with God, with ourselves, with other people and with all of creation.

Sarah Zylstra
Instead of asking AI what to do in a particular situation, Christians can ask the God of the universe, who always knows what is best instead of striking up a relationship with a computer simulation, Christians know that laughing and talking and hugging real life people is so much more satisfying. Instead of clicking from one endless scroll to another, Christians know the better way is to take a walk in the woods, along the beach or around your neighborhood, all of those things from waiting for God to show you the way forward, to making yourself go outside, are harder. They are full of friction, but they are also so much better, healthier, more satisfying. They are worth doing. But what about our non Christian neighbors? How can we reach them, if they’re increasingly locked away in their homes asking chatgpt What to eat for dinner and if Jesus really rose from the dead, I told Keith I was worried about decreasing opportunities for evangelism

Keith Plummer
well, but I mean, how did you do that before chatgpt was a concern.

Sarah Zylstra
Oh yeah, you grew a relationship with someone, and then you waited for an opportunity, and then you said, Hey, have you thought about it this way? Or can I tell you about Jesus?

Keith Plummer
Yeah. And see, I think that just even asking that question makes us think, Okay, well, yeah, these are different times, but they’re not so different that we’ve got to come up with a completely different way of engaging people.

Sarah Zylstra
He thinks the rise of AI is a golden opportunity for the church.

Keith Plummer
Because, as I think about with all the things that I have concerns about and sometimes very grave concerns about, I’m excited because I think that this is something that should push us to think much more deeply about things like biblical anthropology, what it means to be human as we are encountering and Creating things that are so seemingly able to simulate human like behavior. It raises the question of, well, what, what is it that is distinctive about being human? And I think, you know, there are a whole lot of doctrines that I think the church has opportunity to not only explore deeper, but to live into in terms of the goodness of embodied community. And I think the opportunity for the church in this climate that is becoming both more digitally immersed and lonelier are great. There are a lot of opportunities for Christians to offer a. A different and better way.

Sarah Zylstra
As we offer a different and better way, let’s remember this God made us to be culture, creating image bearers, exercising authority over creation, as faithful stewards. One small way we do that is by exploring inventing and building with technology, this is good work, and it can lead to new avenues of creativity, to enhanced human flourishing and to the reduction of some of our thorns and thistles. But it is also clear that technology, like everything else in this broken world, tilts us toward or away from the Lord. It is not neutral. Therefore, what we should be seeking from Silicon Valley and from our own tech use are choices that curb individual and institutional depravity and that instead promote common grace, things like telling the truth, guarding against addiction and promoting embodied relationships. In today’s Tech environment, it can be hard to choose those things. So let me give you some encouragement. Even if AI sucks up all of human knowledge from the beginning to the end of time, that would be just a drop in the ocean compared to the knowledge of our Creator, even if AI could somehow in the future make better leaps in logic that would never compare to the wisdom of the Lord, even if AI therapists offer all the affirmation and support in the world that is laughably small, compared to the love of a heavenly Father who loves you so much he created you, sustained you and saved you. There is no storyline that AI can create, no character. It can assume, no advice, it can offer, no entertainment. It can invent that can come close to replicating the interesting, purposeful, beautiful, hilarious, scary and meaningful life and relationships the Lord has already given you. So when you have questions, go ahead and ask AI, but do so remembering that you’re asking a robot that is programmed to put one word after another, save your hard questions. Why am I suffering like this? How can I be a better friend? What is the purpose of my life for Conversations with God and close friends, wrestle with them as you read your Bible and write prayers in your journal. And if somebody asks you one of those, don’t shrug it off. Maybe you could say, Hey, I don’t know, but that is such an interesting question, I would love to dig into that with you. Want to grab coffee with me sometime.

Sarah Zylstra
Thank you for listening to this episode of recorded, which is part of the gospel coalition’s Podcast Network. This episode was written by me, Sarah Zylstra, and edited by Colin Hansen, Darryl Williamson, Megan Hill and Cassie Watson. Our audio editor was Scott Caro and our producer was Newbridge studios. Recorded is made possible by generous donations, if you would like to join in supporting this work, we would love for you to do so at tgc.org/donate, you.