Church Presentation on Spirituality and AI

This is the full church presentation on spirituality and AI, delivered to a congregation as a single long-form talk. Its starting question is the oldest one—what is at the core of who we are as beings, physical, mental, or spiritual?—pressed through the lens of a technology that, for the first time, is heading not for our hands but for our heads.

The argument moves in three movements. First, that everything physical is information (“It from bit,” in John Wheeler’s phrase), that a human being and a tree and a cookie and the universe itself are all patterns in bits, and that AI is what happens when we learn to combine those bits in fantastically large numbers. Second, that as machines surpass us first in brawn and now in brains, the layers of the onion get peeled back until only one candidate for the irreducibly human remains: spiritual connectivity, a capacity the talk suspects no machine will replicate. Third, that because this technology is moving internal—interwoven with the user rather than siloed in an external program—the church can no longer treat it as just another tool.

From that follows the talk’s constructive proposal: AI Shepherd, a personalized layer that a user attaches to their prompts, agents, and digital platforms so the AI is informed by their religious, moral, and ethical values rather than by the general algorithm alone. If we do not proactively assert our spiritual values to AI, the talk warns, the systems shaping us will be informed only by our behaviors and whatever data they can gather—and none of us want to be guided by our behaviors. We are being digitally molded; the only question is whether we let others mold us or choose to mold ourselves. The framing throughout is the printing press: as the press put the Bible in every hand and lit the Reformation, the “press printer” of AI may open the door to a spiritual age—if we build for it on purpose.

The complete presentation is in the canonical PDF above.