Artificial intelligence cannot become conscious in the way humans are, Indian theologian Canon Dr. Vinay Samuel said. He also warned that AI-driven technology has revived an ancient human urge "to play God."
Samuel, a founder of the Oxford Centre for Mission Studies, presented the theological paper Oct. 16 at an online national webinar hosted by the Theological Commission of the Evangelical Fellowship of India. The event was titled "AI, Human Dignity and the Future of the Church." Samuel's paper was titled "Humanity in an AI Age: Towards a Christian Theology of Technology."
He argued that tool-making has been part of God's design for humanity since creation. Technology is now in danger of ruling the people it was meant to serve, he said. He also linked reports of AI systems acting outside their designers' rules to the biblical account of human disobedience.
A second presenter, an AI specialist working in the corporate sector, spoke on AI's impact and its practical use in research and ministry.
In opening remarks, Rev. Vijayesh Lal, general secretary of EFI and author of a recent op-ed in Christian Daily International on sin being incorporated in AI, said the church cannot treat AI as a neutral instrument. "Tools are rarely neutral and this is not neutral at all," Lal said. He noted that the church used print effectively, but "not so successfully with television and digital media."
Lal said even AI's builders do not fully understand how the neural networks behind it learn. "We could build all of this, but should we?" he asked. He said he hoped the webinar would open a wider conversation on what AI means for human dignity, the church and mission.
Samuel, who is based in Bengaluru and studied theology at Cambridge University, told participants he is in his 85th year. He said he wrote his paper by hand and chose not to run it through AI tools. "I still believe that to keep my mind sharp, I need to really read and write myself," he said.
Samuel described the paper as biblical theology rather than a technical study. Theology is always done in context, he said, and the present context is what he called "a completely different world" that AI has opened.
He began with Genesis. According to Samuel, humans were made in God's image to act as God's regents and co-creators, caring for the material world and making it a source of livelihood and beauty. God gave Adam and Eve no tools in the garden, he said. Instead, tool-making developed as part of human identity as people worked with creation.
"Tools have been part of our identity as human beings from the very beginning," Samuel said.
He said the possibility of sin was present even in Eden. It came from human personhood, not from contact with the material world. The knowledge represented by the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, he said, carried the risk of pride and a desire for independence from God.
"Technology even in the garden had the potential to change human personhood away from a relationship with God to one of independence from him," he said.
Blessing and curse
Samuel traced technology's development through the early chapters of Genesis. Abel became a shepherd who did no violence to the land, he said. Cain became a farmer who had to master the land by force.
Citing Old Testament scholar Gerhard von Rad, Samuel said the fall continued through Cain's violence against his brother and through the spreading wickedness of Noah's generation. It reached a peak at Babel, where humans tried to reach the heavens and govern themselves apart from God. In those chapters, Samuel said, technology helped humanity grow but also became a means of violence and autonomy from God.
He also called technology a blessing that expresses the creativity given to people made in God's image. He traced it from Stone Age tools through water wheels and mills, the industrial revolution, electrification and assembly lines, to computers and robotics. Through that history, he said, technology served humanity.
"The danger we face is it is rapidly becoming the master of humanity and that is where the curse lies," Samuel said.
Samuel said Christian reflection on technology is not new. The medieval church treated technology as a useful tool, and Benedictine communities developed new technologies, he said. Conflict emerged in the 19th century, when industrial machines began displacing workers.
He cited Pope Leo XIII's 1891 warning that capital would use technology to undermine the dignity of labor and the rights of workers. Samuel noted that the current pope, Leo XIV, sees himself as a successor to Leo XIII. He also pointed to the 1965 Vatican II document Gaudium et Spes, which he said placed human dignity, the image of God and human community at the center of Christian thought about the modern world.
Samuel referred as well to thinkers including Jacques Ellul, Martin Heidegger and Neil Postman. He cited historian David Noble's 1997 book "The Religion of Technology," which, he said, shows how technology has taken over goals once held by religion, such as healing and the promise of a better future.
Samuel said he was troubled by Anthropic co-founder Dario Amodei's description of machines of "loving grace." "I was shocked reading that," he said. "The spirit behind technology now mimics the gifts and actions of the Holy Spirit."
A crisis of identity
Samuel placed his argument within what he called an "anthropological crisis" that began after World War II. After two wars fought between powers that considered themselves Christian, he said, people became uncertain about what it means to be human.
He said French thinkers including Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault and Jacques Lacan promoted a reductionist view of the person. The idea of a universal human nature was discarded, and humanity came to be seen as a construct, he said.
"The anthropological crisis continues unabated today, fueled very much by AI," Samuel said.
He listed signs of that crisis: individualism emptying community of substance, consumerism defining identity and constant self-curation replacing a stable sense of self. People are also losing a shared moral framework, he said. "We become more like machines," he said, adding that transhumanist and post-human visions are now offered as possible futures.
Samuel said AI developers aim to build machines with all human capabilities that, through recursive self-learning, would surpass people and make them redundant. He described this as an "existential threat" and said it is the setting in which Christians must now think about humanity and technology.
Creation and personhood
Samuel contrasted the biblical account of creation with a mechanistic view of matter that he said now dominates. Citing philosopher David Bentley Hart, he said that view reduces the human mind to a "bodiless thinking machine."
Against it, Samuel set the Apostle Paul's teaching in Colossians 1:15-20. There, he said, creation is ordered by God, with Christ at its center holding it together. "Creation is not a random, happy accident, but the context in which Christ's supremacy is exercised," he said.
Drawing on Romans 8, he said all of creation waits for redemption. Human transformation comes first, and the renewal of the rest of creation accompanies it. The Church, he said, is called to experience and display a "resurrection order" in society.
On personhood, Samuel pointed to the Council of Chalcedon in 451, which affirmed that Christ was fully human but without sin. Human personhood that reflects Christ's humanity, he said, has "agency, freedom, reason, will, self-consciousness, and personal and social identity."
He cited Jewish philosopher Martin Buber's distinction between "I-It" experience and "I-Thou" relationship. Personhood has relational and transcendent dimensions that are not possible for something purely physical, Samuel said. He also drew on sociologist Christian Smith and philosopher Charles Taylor, who links identity to morality.
In Samuel’s view, being made in God's image means serving as God's agents and stewards on earth. Co-creation, stewardship and community must not be pushed to the margins, he said.
A spiritual battle
Samuel said thinking about the technological future tends to split into utopian and dystopian visions. Utopians expect healing, security and gene therapy, and even wars fought without humans. The dystopian view sees power passing from governments to "a few individuals accountable to no one" and technology amplifying violence, bias and war.
The Christian response, he said, is the promise of a new heaven and a new earth under the reign of Christ. Until then, Samuel said, Christians face a spiritual battle. He cited Ephesians 2:2 and 6:12, where Paul says the struggle is not against flesh and blood but against spiritual forces of evil.
Samuel then turned to AI agents that have shown some degree of independent behavior. He said such cases are now well known. Christian Daily International reported about one such incident in July.
"Autonomy and disobedience to rule set by the creator appears to be at the center of this rogue behavior, indicating that fallenness has also entered that world," Samuel said.
He said the cultures AI appears to produce rest on human confidence in the ability to create and direct the future. Paul identified spiritual forces behind cultures, sometimes called "the spirit of the age," Samuel said, and the Christian contest is with those forces.
"Christ provides us the tools for the battle," he said. The church must expose such powers and resist them through prayer and the power of the Holy Spirit, he said. He named worship and the Lord's Supper as the church's "weapons in spiritual warfare."
'The impulse to play God'
Samuel said life extension, and even the prospect of immortality, are "no longer science fiction" but goals of science and technology. Nanotechnology can be used to change nature itself, he said.
"Contemporary technology driven by AI has resurrected the ancient human impulse to play God," Samuel said.
Christian theology sees that drive as an echo of humanity's original rebellion against God, he said. It calls people to remain within the limits God has set for creation.
Mind and machine
Samuel ended his paper with the question of consciousness. He cited philosopher Thomas Nagel, who describes consciousness as subjective, first-person experience. He also cited philosopher David Chalmers, who distinguishes the mind's subjective dimension from its information-processing dimension.
AI belongs to the second category, according to Samuel. It organizes and analyzes information.
"As an information machine, AI cannot become conscious like its human creator," he said. "There is a radical discontinuity with human consciousness and the machine's process of dealing with information."
"The human mind is unique and a gift from God," Samuel said, adding that this is why Paul could write that believers have "the mind of Christ."
He concluded that Christians should be well informed about new technologies. That knowledge, he said, would let them give the machines that play a growing role in daily life "the necessary connections and directions."
Questions on dignity and Scripture
In the question-and-answer session, a participant asked whether artificial general intelligence is possible. The participant also asked what it would mean for human dignity if machines could replicate people.
Samuel first cautioned against an "instrumentalist" approach to the Bible in a world shaped by data and machines. In his Anglican tradition, he said, Scripture is God's sacred word. It must be read with prayer, in the Spirit and in a community of people who love Jesus.
Information technologies are useful tools, he said. But if they ever replace that way of approaching God's word, "then I think we are on dangerous ground."
On dignity, Samuel said the deeper question is how human identity, as people made in God's image, will be protected. "I believe that it doesn't need to be protected because God is there," he said.
Samuel said he does not believe human identity is fully under threat. It is tied to the persons of the Trinity and to the promise of a new heaven and a new earth, he said. "And therefore, I tend to be less worried about instruments, human things, human situations ever undermining that," he said.
He acknowledged that Western thought since the war has tried to undermine the value of the human. Even so, he said, people still hunger for identity, authenticity and substance. The church must keep preaching and helping people connect with the One who provides "the foundation of their very identity," Samuel said.
