Wisdom in the Age of AI

A few weeks ago, I attended the Wisdom in the Age of AI conference at Calvin University, an event that drew more than 650 people, including scholars from dozens of academic fields and professional industries—all aiming to apply Christian wisdom to artificial intelligence’s transformation of society.

The conference featured deputy director of the CIA’s Office of Artificial Intelligence Izzy Soong, Notre Dame philosophy professor Meghan Sullivan, author Andy Crouch, MIT professor Rosalind Picard, and CNN director of AI innovation Ryan Struyk. In addition to the keynoters, more than 150 presenters spoke in concurrent sessions. The plenary talks were consistently rich in content and, as a whole, successfully delivered on the conference’s premise. The concurrent sessions were hit-or-miss, providing a menagerie of approaches, observations, recommendations, and personal reflections on contemporary uses and abuses of AI within business, education, church, healthcare, STEM, and the arts and humanities.

The conference was well conceived, astutely organized, and seamlessly run. I found much of the content to be helpfully informative. But I also came away with some concerns. If this conference is any indication, it appears that Christian educators and professional leaders are just as sanguine about AI as the broader practicing Christian community, which, as a recent Barna poll shows, is adopting AI usage faster than the general population. While the conference featured a healthy variety of views about the real and potential benefits and dangers of AI, I observed widespread resignation and a reluctance to challenge the normalization of AI use in personal and professional contexts. 

In some cases, speakers and audience members spoke openly about engaging in morally or spiritually questionable practices. One presenter asked a room of about seventy attendees, “How many of you keep [generative] AI out of your writing?” Only seven hands went up—10 percent of the audience. This was a room of Christian scholars and professionals who presumably publish regularly. Many scholarly journals and popular periodicals ban AI-generated or even AI-assisted essays. Still others maintain strict disclosure policies. Given the biblical ethic of honesty and integrity, I was surprised to learn that such a strong majority of Christian scholars and professionals use AI in their writing—assuming the seventy attendees were even a roughly representative sample.

Some of the personal testimonies were even more disconcerting. One presenter talked openly about AI as her “writing partner.” Another presented what she regarded as a balanced view of using AI as a spiritual director, citing recent survey data showing that at least a third of respondents use a chatbot for personal counsel and that about half of practicing Christians trust AI for spiritual advice and direction.

While these presentations and others offered a great deal of food for thought, what I found most striking about the conference was what was absent. First, there was a conspicuous shortage of theologians and biblical scholars. By my count, the event’s more than 150 speakers included just five theologians (with earned doctorates) and no biblical studies scholars. By comparison, there were speakers from virtually every major academic discipline across the sciences, arts, and humanities. 

Why so few theologians and a complete absence of biblical scholars, when the central theme of the conference was wisdom in the age of AI? If Scripture is our inerrant foundation for all life and practice, and Christian theologians and biblical scholars are uniquely trained to mine the sacred texts for wise insights, then shouldn’t these scholars be strongly represented? 

Of course, many of the speakers did their share of theology, as was encouraged by the conference organizers. But, evidently, nearly all Christian theologians and biblical scholars who saw the call for papers decided to stay home and leave this important wisdom work to scholars whose fields are more concerned with AI’s application than with the moral questions raised by its use. I am organizing a similar conference at Geneva College and have noticed a similar lack of interest from theologians and biblical scholars. This is disappointing, as we desperately need these men and women to bring their biblical wisdom to bear on the most pressing issue of our time. 

Also conspicuously absent was any serious attention to the possible spiritual warfare dimension of AI. Some prominent Christian thinkers, including Rod Dreher and Paul Kingsnorth, are genuinely concerned that AI could serve as a conduit for demonic forces. The Christian who is serious about the reality of spiritual warfare should at least consider this possibility. Not to do so is a failure of wisdom. After all, “our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms” (Eph. 6:12). Of course, many mainstream scholars will mock this as kooky fringe thinking, so it is to be expected that even devout Christian scholars might hesitate to voice this concern even in an informal context, much less present the idea at an academic conference. But it is just such anxious reticence that could gravely handicap the Church in our quest for a wise response to AI.

The Calvin University Wisdom in the Age of AI conference was exactly what we need at this cultural moment, even if some of the revelations it occasioned are troubling. Such conferences are useful barometers for current thinking. This one served a double function: making us wiser about AI technology and revealing a void in Christian scholarly engagement. 

Throughout the conference, my mind kept coming back to this biblical promise: “If any of you lacks wisdom, you should ask God, who gives generously to all without finding fault, and it will be given to you” (James 1:5). If ever there was a time in the history of technology that we needed wisdom, this is it.