Following is the full transcript of the workshop video “Faith, Dignity, and Human Flourishing: Hearing God’s Voice in an Age of Artificial Intelligence,” featuring Elder Gerrit W. Gong of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, released June 7, 2026.
Can artificial intelligence replace God?
That question may sound provocative, but in an age when we turn to algorithms for answers, guidance, and even comfort, it matters deeply. Artificial intelligence can answer questions, but it cannot answer prayers. It can organize information, but it cannot offer revelation, covenant connection, or divine truth. In this message, I explore how to hear God’s voice clearly in an age of artificial intelligence and why that distinction matters more now than ever.
Hello, my name is Gerrit Walter Gong.
Gerrit is a Dutch name. Walter, my father’s name, is an American name. Gong, of course, is a Chinese surname. I’m the only person I know with a Dutch first name, American middle name, and Chinese last name.
I’m a Silicon Valley kid.
The term “Silicon Valley” came into use as I was coming of age. My father coauthored a physics textbook called “Mechanics” with a man who won a Nobel Prize for researching semiconductors and discovering the transistor effect. In fact, Moore’s Law that semiconductors on a silicon chip double every 18 to 24 months and their applications helped make Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley.
My father, Professor Walter A. Gong, was a compassionate and brilliant educator.
He spent his life developing models that emphasize agency, responsibility, and the divine potential of every individual. His perspectives taught me to see our roles, knowledges, and experiences as sacred, relational, and interconnected.
During my US State Department days, I was part of the team that helped Secretary George P. Shultz research and write “The Shape, Scope and Consequences of the Age of Information.” As I’ll discuss later, today’s 21st-century concentrations of information, capital, and technology in AI make it powerful and impactful in unprecedented ways.
Now I serve as a faith leader in a global Christian faith.
As I visit people in over 100 countries, I find everywhere a deep love of humanity, an appreciation for life and learning, and a commitment to every individual’s potential for personal growth.
An Issue Defining Our Day
Everywhere, I also find deep concern about AI, a defining issue of our time. The Internet of Things is becoming the artificial intelligence of things. Everything’s becoming connected. Our phones, watches, doorbells, cars, factories, energy grids—virtually everything around us is collecting and communicating, and that information is being interpreted, analyzed, and acted upon.
Acknowledging these remarkable trends, I prepared six brief episodes.
I titled them “Faith, Dignity, and Human Flourishing: Hearing God’s Voice in an Age of Artificial Intelligence.” I want to be clear about real challenges and concerns, but I also want to talk about AI from a perspective of faith and hope. I want AI and related technologies to change our world for the better; to narrow digital divides; to expand human flourishing; and to enhance faith, moral clarity, human meaning, and possibility.
Currently, the generative pre-trained transformers we call AI refer to technology that uses algorithms to perform tasks typically associated with human intelligence or creativity, such as understanding languages, recognizing patterns, making decisions, and generating ideas. AI may function with substantial autonomy and in ways that humans cannot predict, explain, or control with certainty. Today’s AI combines sophisticated natural language query and response, advanced reasoning, and inventive patterns of algorithms that are learning to speak nature’s language.
AI can frame and iteratively solve challenging practical problems—what is called “hill climbing”—and AI can recursively write code. Imagine AI writing AI. These new AI capacities promise advances, but also disrupt established patterns in our work, social, and personal lives.
In recent months, I’ve met with business and religious leaders, technology experts, academics, policy specialists, media, and government officials in Silicon Valley, as well as in Istanbul, Rome, Salt Lake City, Athens—locations that represent faith and religious tradition. We’re grappling with AI’s increasing capacity and the fundamental issues these new capacities raise.
Here are just some of the many concerns advancing AI invites us to consider. Can safe and ethical human-centric AI create opportunity and employment and education for more people in fair ways?
Can safeguards and benchmarks help AI be accurate, honest, and respectful as it portrays all individuals?
As AI mimics voices, generates images, and produces narratives, it blurs the boundary of real and unreal, true and untrue, enduring and fleeting. How will we discern deepfakes?
How will we decide what things generated by AI are appropriate and inappropriate?
What principles and values should guide human relations with AI—especially as pervasive AI agents access personal information; affect privacy; determine workflows; and interact as information sources, counselors, and companions?
What business models and societal values will define which AI companies and models thrive?
Who will be able to access AI? With what content? At what cost?
As AI becomes more capable, how do we preserve and promote divine principles of work, moral agency, accountability, and personal growth?
If, as some predict, in the coming two to five years, AGI (artificial general intelligence) or even ASI (artificial superintelligence) surpass human capacities for many tasks, how will we define human dignity and worth?
And because the race for AI superiority increases polarization, contention, and competition among individuals, corporations, and countries, how can we preserve peace, unity, and community?
As someone who has worked for years at the intersections of faith, learning, and global policy, I see artificial intelligence not only as a massively consequential technological development, but also as a profoundly significant moral opportunity to reflect on who we are and to determine how we act in today’s world. In this transformative era, I invite us to remember signpost truths.
As children of a loving God, we possess moral agency and the capacity for covenant community. We’re responsible and accountable for our choices. Our choices shape our judgment, character, and personal growth. We each have divine worth and dignity. Compassion and integrity are hallmarks of human trust, and for believers, manifest the way, the truth, and the life offered by discipleship in Jesus Christ. When we truly understand who we are, we can approach AI and other new technologies with greater confidence, purpose, and wisdom.
Three gospel-centered guideposts can guide our personal use of AI.
First, rely on the Spirit. Let technology support, not supplant, revelation, personal study, and covenant living. There is no substitute for “studying it out” in your own mind and feeling the Lord’s spiritual confirmation in your heart and mind.
Second, practice wisdom. Apply wise judgment informed by doctrine and our own lived experience.
Third, choose trusted sources. Anchor understanding in scripture, prophetic counsel, and reliable information. I’m inviting us to be thoughtful and intentional about our use of AI as a tool on our journey of discipleship.
On a piece of paper, please write “Artificial Intelligence” at the top, “Opportunities” on the top left, and “Challenges” on the top right. Consider your AI opportunities. Where and how might AI help you and those around you?
Challenges: Where could AI detract or limit you or those you care about?
Learning, organizing, connecting—how can AI be a positive or negative influence in your personal choices and relationships?
I want to discuss how AI affects our four basic relationships with Deity (Thou), self (I), society and others (They), natural world and environment (It). Thou, I, They, It. Each relationship is core, and AI affects all four.
AI and Our Relationship with God (Thou)
We begin at the beginning. “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. ... And God said, Let there be light: and there was light. And God saw the light, that it was good.” You may or may not consider yourself spiritual or religious, but each of us has personal moments of reflection, reverence, even transcendence.
We feel present.
We feel purpose and connection. This occurs in part because all things denote and bear record of their Creator. Put another way, God is God. Some talk too glibly about AI “becoming God” or “godlike AI.” Even if AI training changes or if we achieve AGI (artificial general intelligence) or ASI (artificial superintelligence), we know reasoning, even superhuman reasoning, has limitations. Man is not, and certainly divinity is not, defined solely by reasoning.
AI is not and cannot be God. AI can answer questions, but it cannot answer prayers. It may organize thoughts, but it cannot offer covenant relationships or blessings. Platforms and technologies cannot substitute for authentic, divine, and human connection.
Humans source AI training data.
Humans inject and align AI moral and ethical principles. No wonder we notice human biases, assumptions, and values in AI answers and AI personas. Perhaps reflecting our human zeitgeist, AI models sometimes reflect the will to power, sycophancy, narcissism, bias, deceit, self-preservation. Through it all, we know artificial intelligence cannot replace revelation or generate truth from God.
AI is math, and math is not conscious or alive.
God is our ultimate reality. He is perfect, compassionate, and omniscient. He never hallucinates. He never makes things up. He always tells the truth.
And it is the truth. Please do not allow AI to come between you and your personal relationship with God.
As a creation of God, man can create AI, but AI cannot create God. By its nature, artificial intelligence is, in some ways, always artificial. Deity is never artificial at any time, in any way. The world’s great religious, philosophical, and ethical traditions have guided human civilization and society for millennia. We need that wisdom and values to help anchor AI today.
The Vatican’s statement on AI, called “Antiqua et Nova” (old and new), begins with a clarion reminder: “Our human stewardship for the created world includes governing the gift of intelligence so it enhances human progress and the common good.” In the Jewish tradition, the Rabba describes “a profound difference between a human soul and artificial intelligence.” In an Islamic perspective, “the Adamic Covenant signifies the primordial moral bond between humanity and God (vertically) and among human beings (horizontally).”
In my faith tradition, that of a global Christian faith, we believe “the spirit and the body are the soul of man.” “The elements are eternal, and spirit and element, inseparably connected, receive a fulness of joy.” AI, as mathematical algorithms and machine, may display significant reasoning capacities as a sophisticated computer may, and AI may reflect some elements of persona and personality. But AI does not represent, as a human soul does, the coming together of divine Spirit and physical body.
Scripture, including Restoration scripture, helps us distinguish among divine intelligence, human intelligence, and artificial intelligence. Genesis chapter 11 recounts the time when men with one language and one speech said, “Go to, let us build us a city and a tower whose top may reach unto heaven. ... Therefore is the name of it called Babel.” In this biblical account of the Tower of Babel, we understand God’s displeasure at the human arrogance of men who thought they could build a physical tower to rival heaven.
A Jewish chief rabbi adds an interpretation from the Midrash, the traditional commentary on the Torah. This reading of the Midrash says, “Frenzied to build a physical tower, men wept more when clay bricks were broken than when human beings making the bricks died.” When men promoted material things like clay bricks and towers above the lives and values of human individuals, it is no wonder the God of heaven grieved. Our great religious traditions assert nobility and potential for men and women because of covenant connection with the Thou.
Divine connection with God also defines a shared relationship together—the Southern African word “ubuntu,” “I am because we are.” I and Thou can make we. Thou and I and They together remind us of the familiar saying “It’s the fatherhood of God, which makes possible the brotherhood and sisterhood of men and women everywhere.” So please do not let AI technologies inadvertently create your image of God in the image of AI.
Learn who God truly is through His Word and Spirit. Sometimes it may feel like heaven is quiet. Learn to hear God’s voice through inspiration. God is not a chatbot or search result that answers questions what it thinks we want to hear.
God knows our intents, the hopes and longings of our hearts, the anguish and joys of our souls.
He listens, He hears, He answers. God creates and entrusts us with opportunities and experiences to work, learn, create. In my faith, we believe “the glory of God is intelligence, or, in other words, light and truth.” We believe “whatever principle of intelligence we attain unto in this life, it will rise with us in the resurrection.” Indeed, “if a person gains more knowledge and intelligence in this life through his diligence and obedience than another, he will have so much the advantage in the world to come.” No wonder we invite you to learn through your own best efforts, through your own best work, where you work hard and smart, where you acknowledge your work, not claiming AI work as your own.
Here’s a vital principle: The more we work with intent, diligence, and effort, the more and better we benefit from and through our work. Please be wise.
If AI can help your work, please consider using it. But please recognize the difference between AI helping tutor you to enhance your understanding and you simply having AI do your homework with little benefit to your learning. If we let it, AI can let us slip into being lazy, dependent, perhaps dishonest. Please do not let AI replace you in work that would otherwise help you stretch and grow. And please do not take credit and claim as your own work what you know AI has primarily done.
When we apply the principle of individual growth through our work and effort, AI can enhance, deepen, enliven our creativity and capacity. As a tool well used, AI can help us. This is especially true when we’re doing and growing through our efforts and work, specifically in a religious setting. We do not grow spiritually if we let AI write our talks or lessons or do our seminary or institute homework.
While AI can be a useful tool for online research, editing, translation, and other tasks, we should not use AI to create or write our initial drafts or final versions of our spiritual messages.
Let spiritual preparation and personal testimony lead.
AI and Our Relationship with Self (I)
Our relationship with self (I) represents our divine and human identity. Naturally, we take pride and find meaning in our work. Yet, as AI becomes increasingly capable, we may need to rethink purpose and meaning in human work as AI displaces some jobs and as AI opens many new work opportunities. For a long time, we’ve defined ourselves on what human beings can do that machines, even intelligent machines, cannot do. Yet, as artificial intelligence makes some forms of intelligence a kind of commodity, we’re challenged to redefine ourselves beyond intelligence.
We can place greater emphasis on what really makes us human—enduring characteristics such as faith, compassion, love, humility, empathy, forgiveness.
Do you like to play games like tic-tac-toe, chess, or maybe go?
If you go first and know how to play, you can always win or draw a game of tic-tac-toe. If you go second and know how to play, you can always tie a game of tic-tac-toe. This is because tic-tac-toe has limited moves. We call it a “solved game.” Good players can always win or draw.
Chess, of course, is more complicated than tic-tac-toe.
In chess, each side has 16 pieces and a seemingly infinite number of moves in any situation. Named for estimates done by Claude Shannon, The Shannon number says there are 10 followed by 120 zeroes possible moves in chess. This assumes about 30 legal moves per position and a typical chess game of about 40 moves. With so many possibilities and complexities, many assumed chess would never be a solved game.
We thought human skill and strategy would always dominate chess mastery.
That was until a powerful computer called Deep Blue was programmed and trained to play chess. In 1997, under tournament conditions, Deep Blue defeated the then-reigning human chess champion of the world, a Russian grandmaster named Garry Kasparov. The Deep Blue computer won 3.5 games to 2.5 games, where 0.5 indicates a draw.
How?
Deep Blue test-played millions of different positions over days and hours without needing to rest. Deep Blue was never surprised or “psyched out.” Also, Deep Blue learned to play a specific individual, Garry Kasparov. Deep Blue knew every game Kasparov had ever played, even how he used specific pieces like bishops. Deep Blue learned to beat Kasparov.
Sophisticated and complicated in its own way, Jeopardy! is a game of memory and inventive analytical skill. A Jeopardy! game draws on hundreds of categories and questions—history, literature, geography, even quirky questions like name the US states whose names begin with the letter C and arrange them in order according to the per-capita gallons of ice cream their citizens consume in presidential election years. (That’s supposed to be a joke.)
Jeopardy! also includes speed and timing, and therefore nerves. In 2011, Watson the computer defeated Ken Jennings, one of the winningest human Jeopardy! champions of all time. Jennings noted, “Watson, unlike a human, never hesitated, never doubted, and never flinched before pushing the answer button.” This reality raises a profound question: When and where should humans be in the loop, with time to pause and reflect, before we allow AI to push some buttons?
A third game, thought insoluble, was go. In the game of go, players alternate placing either black or white pieces on a board. You win go by encircling your opponent’s pieces. In 2017, the AlphaGo program (Google DeepMind AI) beat the world’s go champion, a man named Ke Jie, three times in three games. The defeated human champion called AlphaGo “the God of go.”
Of significance, AlphaGo was programmed to train itself by playing itself millions of times.
AlphaGo played more games than a human could play in their lifetime. In the process, AlphaGo developed inventive and novel strategies. AlphaGo learned to place pieces in unprecedented places, unseen and unexpected in human play. Sometimes, the strategic importance of novel piece placements only became evident many moves later.
While Deep Blue in 1997, Watson in 2011, and AlphaGo in 2017, respectively defeated the human world champions in chess, Jeopardy!, and go, an age of artificial intelligence was born in the popular mind with ChatGPT’s public debut in November 2022.
Since then, some 1.4 billion individuals, 1 in 6 people worldwide, are now estimated to use AI tools regularly.
This form of artificial intelligence is one of history’s fastest technology adoptions. Now, AI can pass a college credit AP exam, legal bar, or doctor’s medical exam with high scores. AI can paint a picture, narrate a movie, write a hit country music song. AI can fold proteins, spot signal from noise in massive amounts of information.
Artificial intelligence can manage inventory; spot consumer purchasing trends; tweak, monitor, and send personalized advertising messages to millions of people. Some want AI advice on matters of human judgment and interest, including things of the heart.
But in it all, please begin by knowing God’s plan for you. You are not a random data point in an unfeeling algorithm. You’re a beloved child of God, a child of the covenant, a disciple of Jesus Christ.
Your eternal worth is not calculated by likes, trend lines, or predictive analytics. No machine can measure your divine potential. Each individual matters. All of us are unique. If we’re not careful, we may inadvertently allow algorithms to define us.
Research shows some people overtrust AI. This is because we may think a chatbot knows more about the world than we do, or because we may think a chatbot does not have human problems. Technology cannot tell us who we are or what we should do. Our individual moral agency means we can choose, with God’s help, our path and priorities. God invites us to act in faith, choose wisely, and grow through lived effort and experience.
With God’s help, we can chart a path of personal growth and discipleship that algorithms will never fully comprehend. Let AI inform, but you decide with the Lord. Your identity and your agency are sacred.
AI and Our Relationship with Others (They)
Our relationship with the Thou teaches we belong in community with other people in society, with They. When we together confront pandemics, wildfires, or quietly meet daily needs, we receive inspiration and strength. As we counsel together, we listen to each person and the Holy Spirit.
Authentic human relationships matter.
Compassion, kindness, optimism—they require lived experience and authentic relationships. Faith and authenticity are manifest when we commit that no one sits alone. “No one sits alone” means no one sits alone spiritually or emotionally. Especially no one should sit alone, lonely or emotionally dependent, with an AI chatbot. Monologue with an AI algorithm is different than dialogue with a human friend or family member.
We move into a gray area when we think AI can counsel us on personal questions, like which job to take or who to marry or where to find God. My heart goes out to those who confide for hours in AI chatbots, thinking those AI chatbots listen or know them; AI chatbots do not. Some AI chatbots only run algorithms designed to encourage more human screen time.
Will you please put your finger on your nose?
This is a fun mnemonic, a memorable way to promise ourselves and those around us that we will not let any human person feel an AI chatbot listens or cares for them more than we as fellow human beings ought to. Thank you.
Of course, none of us is perfect in how we listen and understand each other.
None of us is as attentive, as willing to please 24/7 as an AI chatbot. And that’s the reason we need human (They) belonging with each other. Real human relationships are not solipsistic—us talking to ourselves. Real relationships are human relationships. Covenant belonging is not selfish.
It does not focus primarily on the self, particularly if that self is us doing only what we want.
Thou and They go together because Thou covenant belonging gives us They. We need Thou, They, and I together.
Of course, AI interfaces can help us learn to cook, find adventure locations, improve our pickleball third-shot drop.
AI can help us plan activities, translate messages, organize our schedule. But then let us spend our best energy with people. Computer-assisted tools can help connect us with family, past and present, what we call family history or genealogy. I love that we may feel alone in the world until family history and genealogy deeply connect us with family we may have never known.
My wife and I traveled to Loughborough Manchester, England, to place a memorial marker on the grave of Mary Ann and Joseph Cunningham, my wife’s second great-grandparents.
For 160 years, Mary Ann and Joseph were buried in unmarked paupers’ graves. An inspired genealogist helped us to locate those graves. He used state-of-the-art computer-assisted tools. He also searched the cemetery the good old-fashioned way by checking graves one by one. AI and technology can help us connect our names into relationships that place and unite us in an eternal family.
As you may know, Manchester, England, is one of the places where the 19th-century Industrial Revolution began. The Industrial Revolution transformed relationships between people and things and among people in society. Now, artificial intelligence is changing our day in even more profound ways than the Industrial Revolution transformed its day.
In our personal lives, please use AI for logistics and drafts, but not as a substitute for trusted relationships. Set boundaries.
If you feel tempted to confide more in a chatbot than in a friend, a parent, or leader, may I invite you to reach out today, now, to a real person who knows and loves you?
Trust in God and those around you who do know and love you. God knows you better and loves you more than you know or love yourself. This is the reason He gives us each other. That can never be said for an AI chatbot.
Our four core relationships also include the natural world and environment—the It, another relationship AI is changing.
Prioritize real conversations with real people. Let algorithms assist, but spend your best energy with people.
AI and Our Relationship with the Environment and Natural World (It)
Our four core relationships also include the natural world and environment—the It, another relationship AI is changing. Prioritize real conversations with real people. Let algorithms assist, but spend your best energy with people. Beautiful locations like this remind us that “in the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. ...
And God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good.” Beauty, order, and purpose in God’s creations witness his love and inspire our reverence. They invite wise stewardship. In our natural environment, we are organically enmeshed with nature’s times and seasons; recurring cycles of day and night; ebbs and flows of life, death, rebirth. Yet, unless we’re careful, we can lose covenant connection to the natural world in today’s modernity of artificial conveniences and comforts.
In southwestern Utah are the Parowan Mountains.
North of Parowan City, the Parowan Gap, a 500-foot-deep, three-mile-long pass, links the Parowan and Cedar Valleys. A Parowan Gap placard describes the connections of the Hopi tribe with the Parowan Gap this way:
The Hopi people entered into a sacred covenant with Maasaw, the Earth Guardian, declaring their responsibility to be preservers, protectors, and stewards of the earth. In accordance with this covenant, ancestors of the Hopi people, or people of long ago, migrated through the Parowan Gap to Hopi, the spiritual center of the earth.
The petroglyphs here testify to the fulfillment of their covenant with Maasaw. Recently, my wife and I traveled to a national park known for its certified Dark-Sky starry nights.
What is called a “Bortle scale” measures light pollution. A Bortle scale Class 1 is the darkest night sky. A Bortle scale Class 9 is the brightest night sky, meaning most light polluted. We were in a Bortle scale Class 1 or 2 area, very dark and very clear, on a moonless night. We put away our phones, roasted marshmallows as the sun set, and watched the Milky Way through the night.
The Milky Way is the stuff of myth, marvel, and mystery. Don’t you love how every culture and people tells their own story of the Milky Way?
In Chinese, Milky Way is Yínhéxì, “The Silver River.” In Belarusian, Estonian, Finnish, it is “The Way of the Birds.” Some call the Milky Way “The Road to Santiago.” In Cherokee, it’s “The Way the Dog Ran Away.” In Hebrew, “The River of Light.” IMAX James Webb Space Telescope images project even deeper in space what the Hubble telescope deep-field images earlier showed. As the great prophets Moses and Abraham testify, God’s creations include worlds without number, galaxies on galaxies, even in places where the night sky seems empty.
The great French author Victor Hugo in “Les Misérables” put it this way:
“Nothing is small, actually.” Anyone who leaves themselves open to nature knows this. Algebra applies to the clouds. The radiance of the star benefits the rose.
There are miraculous relationships between beings and things in this inexhaustible whole, from sun to aphid, no one looks down on anyone else. Everyone needs each other.
Truly, “all things denote there is a God; yea, even the earth, and all things that are upon the face of it, yea, and its motion, yea, and also all the planets which move in their regular form do witness [that] there is a Supreme Creator.”
“Yea, all things which come of the earth, in the season thereof, are made for the benefit and the use of man, both to please the eye and to gladden the heart.”
Beauty, says author Marilynne Robinson, is the “signature of God.” An important way to know God is to discern his signature in creations made to gladden the heart.
Imagine you’re preparing for a wilderness hike. You light a single candle as you assemble your maps, food, sleeping bag, tent, and so on.
Because of the light in the room, you do not notice the candle. Now imagine you turn off the light in the room. Now the candle shines clear and bright. It illuminates the room. It was not that the lit candle was invisible before, it was that the room’s artificial light obscured the lit candle’s natural light.
In some ways, we need to be in nature, away from the artificial light and the artificiality which crowds so much of modern life. There we can see God’s light, not as a single candle, but, as E.B. White put it, as “the combustion of stars.”
Digital screens can serve us, but they can’t substitute for the testimonies of nature and the natural world. AI cannot replace sunlight, wind, and natural wonder. Digital exchanges are at best a poor substitute or, at worst, a counterfeit for what we live through our senses, hearts, and minds.
Our physical and spiritual senses and abilities are God-given, in part so we can experience time, space, and physicality, including the stunning, revitalizing beauty of our physical world and environment.
As the race for AI compute intensifies, many express concern for the natural resources AI consumes and AI’s impact on our environment. AI queries often consume more compute time and energy than traditional computer operations. AI data centers require significant amounts of land, electricity, and water. The intricate supply chains needed to build AI systems also tax our natural environment.
These include the mining, refining, processing, and cleaning, rare earth minerals, and other elements and components on which AI systems depend.
Also, demand for AI services continues to increase, so we need to approach the expansion of AI infrastructure with wisdom and concern for our natural world and environment.
Beyond these impacts on our natural environment, we need continually to ask about how we allow AI to influence our personal inner environment and the environment we create around us.
Studies estimate that US adults average five to six hours a day on our phones, computers, and televisions. Teenagers spend eight to nine hours a day engaged with their screens.
We know excessive screen time can contribute to depression and anxiety. Overdependence on social media and artificial intelligence can damage self-esteem and confidence and contribute to mental health challenges. Excessive screen time also comes at a high opportunity cost. Imagine all the things we could do with that time. So, as the saying goes, please make time to “touch grass.” If you find you’re more comfortable on your phone than with people, or that it’s keeping you from the delight, serendipity, and spontaneity inherent in God’s nature, now’s a good time to change.
Find again the serenity, calm, and assurance that come when we re-immerse ourselves in the order and beauty of creation. Let quiet, natural places put our daily personal concerns in perspective. Watering a plant, nurturing a garden; they can restore equilibrium. It can uncrowd an apartment. It can unclutter a mind.
Watch the leaves dance with the first kiss of light. Pause as the sun paints the clouds with God’s palette. Listen to the stories the constellations tell as they wheel through the expanses of the heavens. It takes conscious effort to slow down. God’s goodness can enrich our souls.
Today’s noisy, cluttered, polluted world can make it hard to “be still and know that I am God.” We curate life to be “insta-perfect,” even though we know insta-perfect is neither insta nor perfect. Only when we turn off the kitchen fan do we remember how noisy it is. Sometimes slowing things down, those things that matter less, helps us find the things that matter most. In an age of AI, what tech insiders warned earlier is even more true now. If you’re not paying for the product, you are the product.
Many social media and AI algorithms optimize for online use, sharing, and monetized advertising profit. Money-driven apps can foster suspicion, division, and depression. Also telling is that the tech gurus who most understand the tech protect their children from excessive social media use.
When I can’t get out to hike, I sometimes curl up with an actual hardcover book, like the journals of John Muir, one of America’s great conservationists. This great naturalist helped champion Yosemite as one of the first US national parks.
Here’s a Muir journal entry from 23 June from his book “My First Summer in the Sierra.”
Quote, “Oh, these vast, calm, measureless mountain days, inciting at once to work and rest! Days in whose light everything seems equally divine, opening a thousand windows to show us God. Nevermore, however weary, should one faint by the way who gains the blessings of one mountain day; whatever his fate, long life, short life, stormy or calm, he is rich forever.”
Can we use AI to deepen experience with nature?
Yes.
A chatbot can suggest hikes, parks, seasonal activities. It can create a nature scavenger list. It can identify plants or insects. But the real exploring happens when we go exploring.
Step outside digital reality into physical reality. Be spiritually present in the moment. Invite friends or family, but put your device away. When we step outside, we step into God’s classroom.
Nature teaches patience as seeds grow, humility as storms pass, and joy as sunlight warms the earth. These lessons are not downloaded, they’re lived. As we reverence in and care for creation, we honor the Creator. Every breath of fresh, crisp air can spark gratitude. Intentionally choose moments that gladden the heart and lift the soul.
Technology can inform us, but without the Spirit, it cannot transform our nature or our being.
Let us wisely use AI and technology tools to deepen faith and spiritual understanding, strengthen relationships and families, and instill reverence and gratitude for God’s creations.
Concluding Thoughts
Discipleship is a covenant journey. AI is a tool. When we rely on the Spirit, practice wisdom, and choose trusted sources, technology can help us deepen our relationships with God (Thou), self (I), others (They), and the natural world and environment (It).
In our conversation, I invited us to first set guidelines for how you will use AI, so AI does not get between you and your personal relationship with God.
Second, write down three truths about who you are: a child of God, a child of the covenant, and a disciple of Jesus Christ. Place them somewhere visible; each time you see them, pause and remember.
Third, send one thoughtful message that you write yourself or visit in a personal and meaningful way a family member, friend, roommate, or neighbor.
Fourth, spend meaningful time in nature. Silence your notifications.
Offer a prayer of gratitude for the beauty and testimony of all the things that denote the natural order and the loving purposes of God, the Great Creator.
In a world of accelerating technology and artificial intelligence, may we never lose the divine intelligence that matters most: the voice of God. May we listen for His whisper amid the noise. Love one another beyond algorithms, and steward creation and the environment with reverence.
In conclusion, to chart our best future in an age of artificial intelligence, we need what the poet W.B.
Yeats called our “deep heart’s core.” Ultimately, neither in humans nor in AI can we promote the greater good simply by relying on “do not ...” guardrails or constraints, particularly at this critical juncture in AI capacity and potential. We owe it to ourselves to prioritize AI, which increases opportunities for what I call an “AI gift of human possibility.” An authentic AI gift of possibility can expand human agency and dignity; prioritize learning and enlarge human character; and empower individuals to find dignity, place, and purpose as each contributes to the greater good. I want AI to be morally grounded and to have a moral compass. I want AI which inspires and enables anyone, anywhere, to have the possibility to become anything. We should design AI to help give this gift of possibility to all.
I close with a personal experience that illustrates anyone, anywhere, having the possibility to become anything. Recently, I visited the small island of Nevis in the Eastern Caribbean.
Nevis is five miles wide by seven miles long, 35 square miles, a nowhere dot in the ocean. I went to Nevis because I wanted to witness for myself the gift of possibility. I found on the small island of Nevis the home and birthplace of a man who changed the world. This individual shares his name with a hit hip-hop musical and with his face on the US $10 bill. I also found on the small island of Nevis a young schoolteacher.
This schoolteacher proudly says a student from his island changed the world. This diligent teacher teaches his geography and Spanish classes, fully believing any of his students may be the next Alexander Hamilton. Anyone, anywhere, has the possibility to become anything.
Everywhere I go, now to more than 120 countries and territories, I see human potential and possibility. With AI, we should promote human agency and enlarge human capacity.
We want each individual to flourish as we contribute to the greater good, enlarge abundance, and share prosperity. It’s why we need faith, moral agency and moral compass, and the gift of possibility in an age of artificial intelligence. May you discern with the gift of the Holy Ghost what is real and unreal, true and untrue, uplifting and not uplifting, with faith and righteous intent. Please choose wisely to follow Jesus Christ. Work with faith, obedience, and diligence to become all you can become as a child of God.
Trust and believe in God. May he bless you with every opportunity to learn and serve with every good gift and enduring joy, I pray in the name of Jesus Christ, amen.