AI and Formation: How Does AI Shape Our Loves? (with Michael Keller)

What happens when AI becomes good enough to simulate spiritual depth? That question drives this episode with Michael Keller, lead pastor of Redeemer Lincoln Square in New York City. Keller also brings a rare technical perspective to the conversation, having completed doctoral work in computational linguistics using early machine learning methods. In our discussion, he argues that AI can give us information, polish, and efficiency, but it cannot give us the one thing at the heart of Christian life: real relationship. It can help draft a prayer, but it cannot pray. It can mimic understanding, but it cannot know or love a person. We talk about friction, formation, and the danger of outsourcing the very struggles through which God shapes us. Michael makes the striking point that AI offers the appearance of depth without the cost of it. That is true in ministry, in relationships, and even in our devotional lives. If prayer, preaching, and discipleship become frictionless, something essential is taken from us. Again and again, Michael brings the conversation back to a richer Christian vision of the human person. We are more than our outputs. We aren’t defined by efficiency, performance, or the ability to process information. Michael joined me on Silicon Spiritualities to explore what AI can do for us, what it can never do, and why this cultural moment is forcing us to ask afresh what it really means to be human. Resource Mentioned: Institutes of the Christian Religion by John Calvin REGISTER for our 6-week cohort, Get Ready for the Age of AI, where you’ll get an exclusive, early, free copy of the book The AI Apocalypse, featuring Watkin, Gilson, and many others, such as Ben Sasse and Alan Noble. JOIN the conversation on Discord, along with other Silicon Spiritualities listeners. Help The Gospel Coalition renew and unify the contemporary church in the ancient gospel: Donate today. Transcript The following is an uncorrected transcript generated by a transcription service. Before quoting in print, please check the corresponding audio for accuracy. 0:00:00 – (Christopher Watkin): Foreign. Welcome to Silicon Spiritualities, a podcast from the Gospel Coalition exploring what it means to be human in the age of AI. I’m Christopher Watkin, and in this series we unpack three crucial questions. What can AI do for us? What is AI doing to us? And what is AI revealing about who we really are? Today, it’s my great joy to be joined by Dr. Michael Keller, lead pastor of Redeemer Lincoln Square in New York City, and also, very helpfully for our Discussion Today, a PhD in Computational Linguistics who is using early machine learning methods in his work. 0:00:54 – (Christopher Watkin): And today, Michael and I are going to be discussing the technical realities of AI and the pastoral pressures that it brings as well how it’s shaping us and how the Gospel speaks into this moment in our culture. Michael, welcome to the podcast. 0:01:11 – (Michael Keller): Thanks for having me, Chris. Really appreciate it. And I’m glad that you’re doing this podcast, and I’m excited to see how it helps people, how it forms them as we talk about what forms us. And everything’s always forming us, including AI. So I think this is a great conversation. Hopefully it’ll be helpful for as many people as possible. 0:01:30 – (Christopher Watkin): That is certainly our prayer, isn’t it? We want to point people to Jesus in this area of life, as in every other area of life as well. Michael, I want to dive in with a scenario I want you to imagine. A young Christian professional, let’s call her Anna. Anna wants to be faithful in her life, but she finds that things are just getting fuller and faster with every passing year. And AI just saves her so much time at work, it drafts her emails for her, it’s saving her hours a week. 0:02:02 – (Christopher Watkin): And recently she’s used it to start drafting her prayers, too. She still prays the prayers, but she often finds that the prayers drafted by AI are actually more insightful, more biblical, and often more nourishing for her than the prayers that she’s written herself. But after doing this for about a month, she starts to feel a bit unsettled by the whole process. She’s not really sat in silence before God and struggled, you know, in God’s presence within that month. Now, nothing dramatic’s gone wrong. In fact, she feels that her spiritual life is, you know, going pretty well, actually. 0:02:45 – (Christopher Watkin): She just made it so frictionless that it’s starting almost to feel like someone else’s spiritual life and not hers. And I’d love to ask you, if you were sitting down for coffee with Anna, how would you counsel her? Is anything going wrong? What should she do? 0:03:04 – (Michael Keller): This is a great question, and I’M glad you’re bringing it up, Chris. Yeah, I mean, I’ve actually already started to have these conversations with individuals in my church. Because AI, I mean, for. Not to talk just in generalities, but AI gives you access to not just information, but knowledge itself. But, you know, I think. I think you could. Is it possible to know everything about somebody and not know some, not actually know them? I think the answer is yes. I think you could study everything about, you know, President Barack Obama. In America, you can know everything about Barack Obama. Doesn’t mean you actually know him. 0:03:48 – (Michael Keller): You haven’t actually met him. And I think that’s the problem that Anna’s actually having right now, because knowledge. AI gives you all this information, it gives you all this knowledge, but it doesn’t mean you actually. It doesn’t give you the person itself. And I think that’s what she’s struggling with. You can have an optimized conversation, can have an optimized space of information, but in a frictionless space. 0:04:13 – (Michael Keller): I think what we’ve kind of forgotten is that sometimes friction is part of the journey and part of the process of actually getting to know anybody. And I think that’s where she’s missing out. 0:04:23 – (Christopher Watkin): Could you just unpack that word that you used there? Friction. What do you mean by friction? And how does that fit in our lives? How is it helpful? 0:04:31 – (Michael Keller): I mean, think of the gym. If I could give you a supplement where you would feel like you’ve worked out without actually having the exercise itself, you’d feel fine, but technically you’d gotten weaker. I think that’s. Anna, I think you can. You know, James, one basically says that there’s the trials. Itself produces the perseverance, it produces the character, produces the maturity. And the wrestling itself is actually part of the formation. 0:05:00 – (Michael Keller): And Anna removed that friction. So she removed actually the output. She got the output without the process, she got the answers without the work, so to speak. I actually may want to be a little bit too revealing here, but in high school, In my physics class, I actually got caught up by the teacher. We were paired in two. Just. All of our tables were just two people. And I had an A in the class. And the teacher came up to me and said, michael, you cheated on this test. 0:05:36 – (Michael Keller): I said, what do you mean I cheated on the test? He said, you cheated on this test? And how do I know? He’s like, how do you know? And he goes, because you had all the right work. But then he had the exact same answer as the person next to you. And I was like, Yeah, I did. And we talked. Turned into a whole conversation about why and wanting to be right. But then he’s like, you gave the output, but you had all the right work, but you gave the wrong output. It’s the same thing with Anna. She had the opposite thing. She had all the right answer, but she didn’t actually do any of the work. And actually, the true answer is actually both. 0:06:13 – (Michael Keller): You need to actually have the work that you put into it and then the output itself. 0:06:17 – (Christopher Watkin): I fundamentally agree with you, but I want to push back against you because I can hear some people listening or watching this saying, hold on. We’ve had this conversation with every new technology that’s come along. So the printing press, back in the days of the Reformation, you no longer have to memorize huge swathes of Scripture because you’ve got it now in front of you, and that reduces friction. 0:06:41 – (Christopher Watkin): There’s not as much labor now in Bible study or, you know, the washing machine that takes friction out of life. We constantly, across human history, been taking friction out of life, and we generally tend to think a generation later that it’s been a good thing. So why is AI different? Why should Anna not craft her prayers with AI? Is that different to the printing press? Is it different to the washing machine? 0:07:09 – (Michael Keller): No. And I think this is a great question because hopefully you don’t hear me say, don’t use AI. I think the question is, how should you use AI and answer the question of how to use any kind of technology? You have to know what. It’s not just what it’s optimizing, but what are we supposed to be using it for? To know what to use it for, you have to know what it means to be human and what does it mean to be the essence of our nature? 0:07:35 – (Michael Keller): So the question you’re asking is, before you can actually answer the question of should I use AI to do my prayers, is what does it mean to be human when it comes to doing our prayers? And I think the information and the knowledge that AI can give you is great. But again, I think you can know everything about a person, and it doesn’t mean you actually know the person. And part of prayer, by definition, isn’t just the information that you’re conveying and saying out loud that you read off. It’s also what you embed it with, what you embody in the prayer. And that. 0:08:11 – (Michael Keller): That is, that takes a person. It doesn’t matter what the output is. 0:08:16 – (Christopher Watkin): So final question on this. Is there any way in which it might be appropriate for Christians to use AI in the context of personal devotions, if you were counseling Anna, would you say, look, it’s just a hard no, this has got to be just between you and God. 0:08:36 – (Michael Keller): Yeah, that’s a. That’s a great question. I think you can use AI in prep for personal devotions. I think you can use the prep of it. I think you have the knowledge that is found inside that AI kind of can give you an output. But how should you use that knowledge and what do you use that knowledge for? I don’t think you can outsource that. I think it comes down to the telio’s question of what we’re using it for. So I’m not a Luddite where I would say you can’t use it at all for knowing the background of the book of the Bible that you’re going to read. Let’s say that you’re going to reflect on that you’re going to pray through, but you can’t outsource the actual relational aspect that a devotion time is. 0:09:24 – (Michael Keller): So I think it just depends on what you’re using it for and what aspects. 0:09:27 – (Christopher Watkin): Yeah, that’s really helpful. And I think in the same way that you probably wouldn’t want to use AI to draft a love letter to your spouse, even if you tweak it for the final version, you know, you’d think there’s something deficient about that. In the same way you probably wouldn’t want to use AI to draft, so to speak, you know, a letter to God, a prayer to God, that there are certain modes of communication that are so personal that what really matters is that it’s your heart, isn’t it? It’s coming from you. 0:09:58 – (Michael Keller): I think this is the questions that I think a lot of people are asking, which is particularly in the pastoral office, people are drafting, not just the pastoral office. A lot of folks are actually using AI to write how do I do conflict? How do apologies, how do I do these things? And there is a preparation for it. But then there’s a risk that you actually have the veneer of expertise and that you have the answers of how to do it without actually doing the work to actually get to that spot. 0:10:29 – (Michael Keller): And I think people can sniff out the difference. And I mean to be a little cheeky about this, I think God can smell the difference too, between somebody who actually is coming before him with their own cares and needs and hopes and dreams, and then also what they’re being told to say from a predictive equation and script from AI. 0:10:54 – (Christopher Watkin): Yeah, no, that’s so Helpful. So helpful. Thank you. In the intro, I mentioned that you’d written a PhD and you were using some early machine learning methods in that work. I’d love you just tell us a little bit about that work. How were you using AI or sort of ancestor technologies of AI there, and how has that shaped your view of the AI revolution that we’re seeing today? 0:11:21 – (Michael Keller): Yeah, I completed my PhD in 2018, which is AI at the time was more. It was definitely algorithmic. It was using a lot of these LLMs, large language models, and having the equations, the predictive equations on top of it. Now, a lot of the AI has programs to make it more accessible and helpful. But the PhD that I did was taking a lot of words from Jonathan Edwards and putting them into this, for lack of better term, using predictive algorithmic text to try to find out quantitatively what’s actually happening going on. Because what AI does is it takes the words and puts them into numbers so it can be processed by computers. 0:12:11 – (Michael Keller): And we can get lots of different aspects of a word. There’s lots of different sides. There’s lots of. There’s positive versus negative, passive versus active, concrete versus non concrete. Really, a lot of these equations now are just so multifaceted. There’s just so many different aspects of every single word. And then it’s giving you an output, a predictive text of a pattern. Because that’s basically what AI is. 0:12:40 – (Michael Keller): It’s a guess, a very, very good way of guessing what the next word should be in a series of words. And I think it’s amazing at finding statistical patterns that previously would be hard for us to actually find. 0:12:57 – (Christopher Watkin): How has that helped you to counsel people or to understand for yourself what’s going on with AI? What’s. If you like, under the hood of the hype that we hear about AI today? 0:13:11 – (Michael Keller): That’s a great question. I think the more I’ve thought about it and put in me, because I got to start working on stuff early on. I think I’ve been able to early on kind of say, what does it mean to be human that lives outside of patterns when it comes to intent, relationship, embodiment history, and what is actually inside of patterns. And so in this kind of cultural moment, I didn’t come in as like a skeptic. I came in as like, okay, there’s something that these algorithms can be very helpful with when it comes to processing information, but there’s also a place where it can’t, you know, what it can’t do, it can’t. Love you back it’s not actually able to be human in the sense of agency and actually what we ought to do with what we are given. Because you can get all. Again, I may want to be a broken record today, but I think you can have all the information in the world. You can know everything. But what you should do with that is still a predictive text can tell you what it thinks you should do with it, but until you actually do something with it, that still takes humanity. 0:14:18 – (Christopher Watkin): Isn’t the issue today largely that, do you know what it feels as though it loves me back, like when it talks to me, I feel seen and understood, perhaps in a way for some people, that I don’t even feel understood by other human beings. And I might know that deep down in its bowels, all it’s really doing is predicting the next word in a sequence or the next token in a sequence. But by golly, I really enjoy engaging with it and it’s fun and I feel Scene. 0:14:59 – (Christopher Watkin): How would you talk to someone who comes to you saying, look, I don’t care what’s going on behind the scenes. This is just a really rich relational experience for me. 0:15:09 – (Michael Keller): Chris, let me ask you a question. Have you ever been in a situation where you thought you understood what was going on and then it turns out that you didn’t like not necessarily deception, but misunderstanding, where you were so positive of a certain situation and then it turns out that it wasn’t actually that way? Because I want to know the difference between if AI is a prediction, I think it’s a prediction engine dressed up as a conversation partner. And what I mean by that is, of course, if it can predict the next word, it’s going to potentially mimic exactly what you want out of a relationship that is not the same thing as actually a relationship. 0:15:53 – (Michael Keller): Have you ever been in a situation where you thought this was something was real and turns out it wasn’t, it was fake? 0:16:01 – (Christopher Watkin): I’ve certainly the thing that comes to mind when you say that is I’ve on occasion accused my children of doing something. So I read what I thought the situation was and it turns out that it wasn’t like that and they hadn’t done the thing that I accused them of. I feel very sheepish afterwards. I’m so sorry. I thought you’d spilled the milk or whatever it was, but it wasn’t you. So yes, I, I, I’ve been in that sort of situation. Is that what you mean? 0:16:31 – (Michael Keller): Yeah. Have you ever been in a situation where something mimics what you or or presents as if it one Reality, it turns out it’s a very different one, I think an output based on the probability of a sequencing of information. It is predictive, but it’s not telling you what actually is true. It tells you what statistically is likely to follow in the very next line. And it can do that very amazingly. But it’s kind of like. It’s sort of like a very sophisticated autocomplete of every book that’s ever been written. 0:17:12 – (Michael Keller): That’s what AI can do, is it can finish your sentence brilliantly, but it has no idea, it itself has no idea what you actually mean. It’s just guessing what it thinks that it should be versus what actually is. And those are differences to me. 0:17:25 – (Christopher Watkin): Yeah, I see what you mean. The way that I’ve tried to talk about that sometimes is that large language models always speak to us in the conditional mood. So it’s never an individual person saying this. Whatever it is like I love you. It’s always, this is what someone in this sort of conversation would likely say. So it’s always a would sentence. 0:17:48 – (Michael Keller): That’s right. 0:17:49 – (Christopher Watkin): Like someone would say next, I love you. Which is very different to someone actually saying I love you. Yeah. 0:17:56 – (Michael Keller): And that process produces outputs that look like understanding. It looks like it can be your friend. It looks like, but it actually isn’t understanding. At the end of the day, it’s an equation, a very, very good one, but. And so it looks fluent, it looks like comprehension, but it’s actually just. It’s a guess. 0:18:16 – (Christopher Watkin): Let’s get pastoral about this. So there are these large language models that pass very effectively for human beings who see us and love us and make us laugh and help us in lots of different ways. And your pastoring a church full of people, I assume, who are using these technologies regularly. What are some of the ways that you’re seeing AI, perhaps help Christians and churches? And what are some of the dangers you see among the people that you’re pastoring? 0:18:48 – (Michael Keller): Yeah, yeah. I’d love to hear where you think the benefits are as well. I mean, again, I think this is amazing technology. I’ve been saying a phrase recently to folks in my conversation that if AI is doing to knowledge what the Internet did to information, the Internet gave access to information because now you know where everything is. But it did it through a ranking system where you still had to decide what actually is true or not. What AI is doing is giving people the access to knowledge. It’s like a PhD in everybody’s pocket. 0:19:27 – (Michael Keller): What you do with that information and knowledge is actually still needed I think there’s a cultural apologetic where we live in a culture where people say science can tell us how to live. I would argue that science can tell us what is. It can’t tell us what we ought to do. But I would argue so is technology. Technology is scientifically made instruments. It can tell us what is. It can’t tell us what we ought to do. 0:19:53 – (Michael Keller): So there’s a lot of is out there. And that’s really amazing because previously I didn’t know what is when it came to building a website because I couldn’t code, because I couldn’t do this stuff. But AI now is giving people that access to create in ways that we were built to as humans to build that we didn’t used to at all. I think there’s a lot of beauty, a lot of wonder, and a lot of great things about that what it can’t give you. 0:20:23 – (Michael Keller): Unfortunately, I think the Harvard business review in 2025 said the top three uses for AI was companionship, therapy, organizing your life and meaning and purpose. And I think there’s all the three things that you really should not be going to it, other than again, it can give you knowledge of those things, but can it actually, it’s guessing what it thinks that you should be doing. But that’s very different than the truthfulness of, of it. 0:20:52 – (Michael Keller): For instance, I think AI people going to IT for friendship is more indicative of our loneliness epidemic than what it is about AI. Does that make sense? It’s not AI’s fault that we’re going to it about friendship. It’s showing us how lonely we really are. And I think that’s where some of the problems are. But Chris, what are you observing as far as good and bad? 0:21:13 – (Christopher Watkin): I think for, for me and people who work in academia like me, one of the great things about AI is that it’s helping us to be good enough at skills that we just don’t have to get our things done. So recently I had to draw up a budget for a grant application. And I haven’t the first clue about how to fill out a budget, but I was able to say to an LLM, look, this is the project, this is what we want to do. Can you just help me work out how to speak budget language to fill out this budget sheet? And it was just incredibly helpful. 0:21:49 – (Christopher Watkin): And rather than having to go through a university service that could have taken weeks or months for someone to help me fill out this budget sheet, I was able to do it relatively quickly to a standard that was good enough to submit the Budget. And that was just an incredible win, I think, where it’s dangerous in my own line of work. And funnily enough, the undergraduate students that we teach are much more life to this than anyone else. 0:22:20 – (Christopher Watkin): So they are very wary of AI being used in their studies, many of them. I think there’s a sensitivity to the preciousness of human contact and human intercourse among the students that I don’t actually see in sort of society more broadly or coming from top down in institutions like, they want to know that their work was marked by a human being. And the sense that I get is that even if it’s not quite as well marked as it would be by a machine, they still value a human. Having read their work above getting the precise right mark. 0:23:03 – (Christopher Watkin): And I found that a real encouragement and actually quite a revelation that the people who are most switched on to the dangers of AI in my experience are the undergraduate students that I teach. And I would have thought that they’d be really pro. But I’ve been chastened and I think they realize the dangers of it more than a lot of other people. 0:23:26 – (Michael Keller): But that’s actually a really. I saw, maybe I didn’t. Maybe I wasn’t hearing the right way, but I seen that as a big pro, that one of the benefits of an AI world where there’s infinite information and that you can just upload everything for it to grade and stuff, people are actually valuing the human personal connection and human touch. I actually. I’ve had people come to my church and say, hey, I’m trying to figure out religion and Christianity. And I went to AI and it told me everything, but now I don’t. 0:23:53 – (Michael Keller): I still don’t know what. There’s just too much information. So I actually think authority and how to actually get through the information with the personal connection is. It could be in a very positive way, a return to the human connection and relationship that you’re seeing already in your students. Right. I mean, I think that’s ironically, that’s a positive of how good these models and equations are. 0:24:19 – (Christopher Watkin): I think you’re absolutely right. One thing that it’s showing us is that we value other people engaging with us. And the fact that it’s more possible now than before to have very few people engaging with us in the course of an average workday is exposing the fact that, no, we do actually value this. And yes, it’s messy and yes, it brings friction. And the mark that I get for my essay might not be quite best in class, you know, sort of benchmarked if A person’s done it, they might have done it last thing at night or something, but I still want that. I still want to be connecting through my work. And I think that is incredibly healthy. 0:25:00 – (Christopher Watkin): And I guess that’s one thing then, that AI is showing us about ourselves, that we want human relationships, even if they’re messy and non optimized. What, what other things do you think AI might be revealing to us perhaps in terms of what we expect out of human relationships or the ways in which it might be changing our expectations of relationships? 0:25:28 – (Michael Keller): Oh, well, I was going to say it starts with, I think as we project, if we go back to that Harvard Business Review, that we are coming to it for relationship and therapy and purpose and meaning. These are all conversations that we should be having with people. But you can only get to that truth of what it means to be human if you get down to what we’re made for. So I think it’s revealing the disassociation and the problem in our current culture that we don’t know what it means to be a person. 0:26:04 – (Michael Keller): As we project personhood onto equations. I mean, it reveals our need for personhood, our need for relationship. And I actually think the Christian anthropology of imago DEI that we’re made in God’s image. And you know, that’s not, you’re not mainly a behavior which is you can act like a duck, you can look like a duck, you can act like a human, you can look like a human, doesn’t mean you’re actually human 0:26:31 – (Christopher Watkin): being 0:26:31 – (Michael Keller): made in God’s image is a calling and a status that’s being conferred on and bestowed on you, regardless of if you’re, you know, cognizant, conscious. Because there’s all kinds of questions about euthanasia and about, you know, assisted suicide. Slash AI is actually, I think, helping us, but it’s also hurting us at the same time because it’s just revealing that we just don’t know what it means to be human. And I think the Christian story comes in with hopefully some good answers there. But is that, are you seeing that or what do you think? 0:27:05 – (Christopher Watkin): I think you’re absolutely right. It’s showing us what we as modern, perhaps Western human beings think a person is and that there are these four qualities out there. Think of them as sassy qualities. S A C I Sentience, agency, consciousness and intelligence. That’s what we think a human being is. 0:27:26 – (Michael Keller): Can you say it again? That’s good. 0:27:29 – (Christopher Watkin): Sentience, agency, consciousness, intelligence. And we’ve been operating for a long time on the assumption that that’s what a human being is. You know, we are ration. It’s the rational animal, you know, we are the language using animal. And for a while we could get away with that because there were. That wasn’t particularly stress tested over the course of the modern age. But what AI is coming along and doing now is massively stress testing that anthropology saying, okay, well you think you’re in intelligence. How about this? 0:28:04 – (Christopher Watkin): This algorithm is intelligent. By your definition, this algorithm bears all the signs of consciousness. According to the way that you’ve defined it. This algorithm has agency. AI agents are all the rage at the moment, aren’t they? But by your definition. So you sure that’s what a human being is? Because if that’s your definition, AI is coming for you, right? And AI has ticks, all those boxes and it is actually better at ticking them than you are. 0:28:35 – (Christopher Watkin): So one thing that I see at the moment is what an incredible moment for Christians to be able to say there’s a way of thinking about human beings that was never that we were never our sassy qualities, thank goodness. And it’s exactly what you’re saying. It’s a status that is conferred upon us regardless of our intelligence or the level that we’re able to demonstrate our consciousness at and so forth. 0:29:07 – (Michael Keller): So helpful. 0:29:09 – (Christopher Watkin): So Christians are almost providing a sanctuary, you know, for people who are having the, the foundations of their view of human beings blown up. Like AI is more human than you by your definition. It’s coming for you, it’s coming for your job, it’s coming for your humanity. Now there’s nowhere to hide, is there? And Christians are sort of saying there’s a sanctuary here. You are actually special in a way that AI isn’t. It’s great and it’s a tool and it’s powerful. But it’s not like you come and see, you know what the Bible says about what makes us human. 0:29:43 – (Christopher Watkin): And that’s the AI is not coming for that. It is not coming for the image of God. So come and take shelter with us. 0:29:50 – (Michael Keller): Yeah, I think listening to you Chris, we’ve defined to be human or defined by, based on behaving our behavior. And then when you have something that can behave better than you literally because it knows more and stuff like that for versus something that’s actually acting like there’s, there’s a deliberate agency, intentionality bestowed quality of identity and it comes down. So I, this is, I think I wrote a paper a couple months ago about identity as an internal. Like who I decide who I am, which is actually how modern identity is formed right now I look inside myself and I say, well, who am I? And I, I’m this I. 0:30:33 – (Michael Keller): I’m a, I’m a doctor who has this sexual persuasion and this view of self. When an algorithm can actually do that better than you, oh, maybe identity is first bestowed on what is said of you in your nature. And the Christian idea of imago de says, yeah, we have a God of the universe who does that first. And the good news is, I love what you put it that way, is AI can’t ever take that job from you. It can’t. 0:31:03 – (Michael Keller): Because it’s not something that can actually be unalived in your personhood because something else could do a better job at it. Nothing can do a better job being human than being human. I love that. That’s really helpful. 0:31:16 – (Christopher Watkin): Absolutely. And it all hangs, doesn’t it, on the character of God? Like if the God who told us who we are was twisted or crooked or evil, that would be a terrible situation to be in. You know, that would be a prison without an escape. And that’s sort of the position that modern society finds itself in, that if you don’t decide who you are, you know, in the depth of your own bosom, then society tells you who you are. And good luck. 0:31:42 – (Christopher Watkin): If you’re letting this society, you know, with its online culture and its fickle sort of building people up to knock them down. If you want to get your identity from there, then, you know, good luck to you. But the one person who is committed to you enough to die for you to put lay down his own life so that you can live. If he tells you who you are, then you’re going to want to listen. Because that’s a person who’s put their money where their mouth is, isn’t it? You know, they’re not just looking to cancel you. 0:32:14 – (Christopher Watkin): They’ve demonstrated a commitment to you, you know, so you’re going to want to listen to what that person says when 0:32:20 – (Michael Keller): they say the pastor hat on me. You could argue so much of our identity. Almost every religion, almost every non religion basically says you are based on what you do, you are based on your performance. I think my dad one time put it, he goes, I obey and therefore I’m accepted. That is a performance based identity. And we’ve always had that problem. I think AI just put it on, doused gasoline onto this and lit it on fire. Because guess what? We have now an equation that can outperform everyone from a knowledge point of view. But the beauty of the Christian gospel is, it’s not I obey, therefore I’m accepted. You’re already accepted. You’re already in. Your identity is assured. Therefore, out of gratitude, now I do. 0:33:06 – (Michael Keller): You know, beneath all the performances in Christ, you know, he holds all things together, including you. You’re already. It’s already done. So it’s just there’s something, I think, that actually is a beautiful consequence of the world that we’re in, is that we’re asking, what does it mean to be human more than ever? And I think there’s a real opportunity for the Christian faith to thrive in that space. 0:33:27 – (Christopher Watkin): I completely agree. It’s always been an issue in modernity, but we’ve gotten away with it. 0:33:32 – (Michael Keller): First, I want to say that we haven’t. This isn’t any new. This isn’t new. It’s just now we have this technology that’s forcing us again to look like, what does it mean to be us? 0:33:41 – (Christopher Watkin): Yeah, absolutely. And what a moment to be a Christian, to have a robust response to that question that AI is not coming for. Praise God for that. 0:33:51 – (Michael Keller): Praise God. They can’t come for your identity. Yeah. 0:33:54 – (Christopher Watkin): Yes, absolutely. I want to dig a little deeper into what AI is exposing about ourselves and who we are. You’ve done a lot of work on this idea of cultural narratives, these big stories that shape how we see ourselves in our world at the moment. And I think you’ve identified, if I’m getting this right, five of them. We’ve got freedom, identity, we’ve got happiness and power, these great stories that sort of shape the modern world in its sense of itself. 0:34:27 – (Christopher Watkin): What do you think AI is doing to those big cultural narratives of our age? Is it deepening them? Is it challenging them? Is it giving us different ones? Is it fulfilling them? How. How is the cultural narrative discourse shifting with AI? 0:34:45 – (Michael Keller): Yeah, I mean, this is a great, great question. I think. I think the crisis. The crisis of modern identity has been, again, it’s internally, it’s fragile, it’s incoherent. There’s these. Our cultural stories aren’t changing with AI, I think they’re just accelerating them and showing both how the good things are actually getting in some ways better because we’re able to. If freedom is the idea of autonomy, without anybody getting to say on what I want to do, AI is helping that. But it’s also revealing that the bad part of the freedom story, which is if you want full autonomy, if that’s what you really want, you can have it, but then you can’t have love. You can’t Have. Because love, by definition, is commitment. You can’t have. 0:35:41 – (Michael Keller): Well, at the end of the day, to really be part of anything, you have to bind yourself to it. To be a good baseball player, to be a good musician, you have to restrict yourself to doing things. So you can’t have full autonomy. So, AI, you can sound like somebody who is a musician with AI, but you’re not actually one. And so it’s just showing where the fractures and the cracks were already there. My dad used to use an example of marriage is like a truck rolling over a bridge. 0:36:13 – (Michael Keller): The truck doesn’t create the cracks that are in the bridge infrastructure. It’s just the weight of it reveals the cracks that were already there. Because then all of a sudden, the cracks. Oh, my gosh, there’s all these cracks in the bridge. No, no, it’s the weight that showed what was already there. AI is like a Mack truck rolling through the bridge of our identity and our cultural stories, just revealing what was already there. So that’s the. 0:36:37 – (Michael Keller): It’s not bad news. I think it’s good news because you can’t change anything unless you actually can see it. Every counselor will tell you that. And there’s no way to address a problem unless you can see the problem. So I think that’s the good news of it. 0:36:50 – (Christopher Watkin): Absolutely. You remind me of a house we almost bought in Melbourne, and there’s a termite issue in Melbourne. I don’t know if it’s the same in New York City, but a lot of houses have sort of wood as part of their foundations, and termites just come and demolish it and wood. We had a look at this house, and we got a building inspection, and the guy sort of crawled under the house and had a look, and he came out and he just laughed at us. And he said, you don’t want to go anywhere near this house. The termites have been all over it. 0:37:19 – (Christopher Watkin): And who would have known unless we paid for this building inspection to happen? And it strikes me as a similar sort of thing. The termites are there. They’ve been eating our anthropology, so to speak. This is getting. Getting out of hand, this metaphor, isn’t it? Basically, an AI has just crawled under the house and shown us, you know, what has been happening all along. 0:37:41 – (Michael Keller): That’s right. That’s right. 0:37:43 – (Christopher Watkin): I want to turn to, very specifically to the Bible now. It’s sort of been hovering around our conversation, but I want to try and help people who are Christians. And I think. I just don’t know what to think about AI. I want to build a biblical view of this. I don’t want to either just sort of lurch to being a massive AI enthusiast or an AI doomer. I want to be careful and build this view of AI up from the ground biblically. 0:38:15 – (Christopher Watkin): Where should I start? And so what Bible passages have you found particularly helpful in thinking about AI and how have they helped you to find that. That biblical posture in our current cultural moment? 0:38:30 – (Michael Keller): Yeah, that’s a great question. I mean, I think I’ve already referenced Imago Dei, so Genesis 1, Genesis 2, the. You know, I think that’s really, really important for people. No, but even, you know, Romans, I think eight, you know, there’s now no condemnation for those. There’s now no condemnation. The idea that you are what you are not based on what you do. But we’ve already referenced that. But there’s been a passage I’ve been thinking about recently that’s fun about this, and I think it’s 1 Corinthians 13:1. 0:39:03 – (Michael Keller): I think it’s, if I speak in the tongues of men and angels, but have not love, I’m a noisy gong or clanging cymbal. And I’ve been thinking about this in the context of AI, that AI can produce eloquent language and, and beauty and sophistication and stuff like that. But I think that passage cuts at the heart because the issue isn’t the quality of our output. There’s a clanging gong and a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal and music. 0:39:40 – (Michael Keller): It’s not the noise and stuff like that. It’s not the output. It’s what actually produces it. So I just think in the core, what do you need? You need love. And love is something that’s not an equation. Love is a commitment that takes personhood and agency and identity and humanity to do it. So I think there’s something about if I have not love that gets at the essence of. Again, I think what’s very encouraging about it is your goal isn’t to be the smartest or the most knowledgeable. It’s, have you loved today? 0:40:19 – (Michael Keller): Are you loving other people? Are you loving God? The old reformed view that life is about is knowledge of God and knowledge of yourself, knowing more of who he is and knowing more about yourself. There’s a love conversation here. And I know that word love is thrown around a lot, but it, at the very essence of it is this commitment that I think Paul is trying to get at because he’s comparing output versus actually the essence of yourself, that it doesn’t matter what gifts that you have. The context is gifts, tongues of men and angels. 0:40:55 – (Michael Keller): Because none of that matters if you don’t have the love aspect. And I thought that was really helpful when it comes to AI. But how about you? Or what do you think about that? 0:41:04 – (Christopher Watkin): No, look, I’d just love to push it a little bit more into 1 Corinthians 13. Cause you’ve opened such a treasure trove there. I’m not avoiding your question. I just want to sit with 1 Corinthians 13 for a bit because I think what you’ve just said is so incredibly powerful and helpful, and I’d never seen that verse in that context. So the danger is you become a clangy cymbal and you don’t have love. And so in an age where, you know, give it five, give it 10 years, is very likely that AI is going to be able to produce, quote, unquote, better Christian content. 0:41:41 – (Michael Keller): Yeah. 0:41:41 – (Christopher Watkin): Than you or me, Than anyone. Like, it can write a killer sermon in a way that we would struggle to do. Yeah, Likely. Yeah. What, how then should we be thinking of. Of church, what we’re doing at church, what happens on a Sunday? And how should we be thinking of our own Christian lives in the light of 1 Corinthians 13? In other words, can we take that verse and shape it into a philosophy of life for Christians in the age of AI and a philosophy of ministry? 0:42:15 – (Michael Keller): Yeah. I mean, I’ve actually had this conversation multiple times. Like, I feel very comfortable going on record and saying, I do not use AI to write my sermons. Because I was alluding to this in the Anna situation when we first started our podcast. AI can give you a ton of. Can give you a perfect sermon. But the problem the human heart has is not content. If you go Back to Genesis 3, what’s. You had perfect. I bet you Adam and Eve had perfect information. 0:42:52 – (Michael Keller): But that wasn’t the problem. 0:42:53 – (Christopher Watkin): Right? 0:42:54 – (Michael Keller): Because. Right. They were perfect. They were in a state of pre. Not quite. People argue about this, but at the end of the day, God said, here’s what the relationship looks like. And we said, no, I think I know better. I’m going to do this differently. If that’s true, then your main problem in life isn’t that you don’t have enough information and have a perfectly curated sermon. It’s that your heart loves the wrong things. 0:43:22 – (Michael Keller): So going back to that text of but have not love. What’s love? Love is commitments. What God wants your heart. He wants your heart more than he wants your obedience. He wants your heart more than he wants your, you know, your outputs and your performances. So I think when it comes to writing sermons, I need. You can’t actually help people with their hearts if you’re just giving them great content, because you’re not. 0:43:49 – (Michael Keller): Part of being a minister is presenting the beauty of Jesus and not just the concept and the content of Jesus. And you can’t present the beauty if there’s not a love relationship there. Sorry. 0:44:05 – (Christopher Watkin): Absolutely. And I think the word content is actually quite helpful here, isn’t it? Because like, you know, people like Marshall McLuhan, Neil Postman, these, these media theorists would say it’s actually the form that’s discipling you almost more than the content. So if you’re using AI to write a sermon, that is what is catechizing you, regardless of the sermon that you end up with. It’s, it’s not like the content is in a sense the shiny surface in, in this way of thinking about it. 0:44:36 – (Christopher Watkin): But we’re discipled by forms. And so if, if all we focus on is the content, you know, getting the great words together in the right order so that people, you know, think, wow, that was a wonderful sermon. We’re, we’re naively sort of blinding ourselves to the fact that it’s the form, it’s the way that we have produced that content that is actually catechising us and discipling us. And that’s a very dangerous position to be in. Not to realize how you’re being catechized. 0:45:09 – (Michael Keller): Yeah, because it’s nudging us towards impatience and discomfort with silence, irritation with human unpredictability. Because we have predictability in the equation, we have answers right away. Formation. You’re bringing up a big issue, Chris, about. Because I don’t think we think enough that to be human at some level is to be formed by what surrounds us. We understand that conceptually when we, you know, ads. 0:45:38 – (Michael Keller): Advertisements are trillion dollar industry. Because if you just put something in front of someone else, you know, you’re more predispositioned to it. But if that’s true, how’s that not true for AI itself? And what, what does a frictionless control speed, how does that, as far as all the good that happens, how is that not actually also reshaping us and changing us? I think we have to be more thoughtful about that. 0:46:05 – (Michael Keller): And again, I think loves an order of those loves, to me, from Augustinian point of view, is a helpful way. And the Bible’s chock full of conversation about that as a natural way to bracket both the benefits and also Problems with AI. 0:46:24 – (Christopher Watkin): Yeah, I think you’re absolutely right. Augustine is, as in every generation, really coming into his own. And this way of looking at life in terms of rightly ordered loves and the way that AI risks disordering those loves, I find personally incredibly helpful. We way of trying to discern what’s going on in our cultural moment. But I want to flip this idea. So AI is forming us, it’s catechising us, not only in the terms of content, but perhaps more fundamentally in terms of form. 0:46:56 – (Christopher Watkin): But what then might a Christian biblical counter catechesis look like that specifically sort of written for the age of AI? What are the habits and the, the sort of, the liturgical ways of behaving and being and thinking that are going to be particularly helpful for Christians right now, given the way that AI is shaping us as human beings and shaping what we expect out of relationships and 0:47:28 – (Michael Keller): out of the world in no particular order. Again, you take the benefits of AI, all the knowledge, all the instantaneous, all that stuff. I think if it’s categorizing us into a worship of efficiency, speed and control and perfectly curated. I mean, think of your phone. I love phones, but the benefit is I can have instantaneous information, things like that, but then I can also close down relationship. I can ghost people. 0:47:58 – (Michael Keller): If that’s the benefit of your technology, then that means a counter catechesis would be very ancient. It’s going to be silence, lament, embodied community, reading scripture slowly, confession. If this is intangible and ethereal, then the tangible nature of our sacraments, the Lord’s Supper, I think there’s just tons and tons of disciplines. And what’s hard is I’m not really good at these. I don’t know about you, Chris, but sitting in silence for five minutes a day with no inputs, no outputs, and asking, you know, just trying to be present with the Lord, lamenting, you know, AI doesn’t lament, it generates solutions. 0:48:49 – (Michael Keller): It doesn’t lament by definition is saying, this is really hard and I’m really sad and Lord, will you hear me say this out loud? AI is not going to be able to give you the. You can’t do that because it’s not. Doesn’t have agency. So I don’t know, what do you think? 0:49:09 – (Christopher Watkin): I agree. And the thought that came to mind as you were saying that is that there’s a way in which the secular world is there ahead of Christians at the moment, because people are coming to churches in greater numbers, certainly my experience, than they have for a long time. And what they’re looking for is not sometimes the things that, that we obsess about. It’s not the presentation, it’s not the, you know, the curated. 0:49:40 – (Michael Keller): Curated beauty. And, yeah, everything perfect. 0:49:42 – (Christopher Watkin): Yeah, like, there’s no interest in that. They. They want the, you know, the silence, the lament, the messiness, the being physically proximate with people who are not like you. They want the slight awkwardness of people singing together, like, when does that happen in society? And I think that is so. Well, it’s many things, isn’t it? It’s so telling that these, the very things that are at the heart of Christian community are things that society is crying out for at the moment and things that are lacking. 0:50:20 – (Christopher Watkin): And it, it’s also reminding us as Christians not to jump on the bandwagon of whatever the latest trend is, whether it’s AI or, you know, it’ll be something else in the next generation. But to remember that what we have in the biblical model of Christian community, with all its messiness and awkwardness and tensions and inefficiencies, it is, at the end of the day, when all the shouting is over, is the best way to be as a human being. 0:50:58 – (Christopher Watkin): And not to, not to lose our nerve. Because sometimes society scorns us and sometimes society flocks to us. But, you know, if we set our compass by the way that society thinks of us in any way given cultural moment, then we’ll be all over the place. And you just, Just trust God, you know, he’s. He’s. He’s given us the best. And it would be, it would be remiss of us to go looking for something else. 0:51:27 – (Michael Keller): That’s just so hard for so many people in, in the faith. They think that it’s, it’s the perfect. Ironically, we think it’s. If I have the perfect answer, the perfect curated thing. But I think this is what you’re right, that where a lot of the secular world is ahead of Christians is like. No, they want the messiness because they see the humanness inside of that in some ways maybe better than sometimes people inside the church. 0:51:51 – (Michael Keller): So I think there’s a real opportunity there to come as you are, you know, the church offers that. But if we really believe it ourselves, and that’s, you know, do we. That’s the question. 0:52:03 – (Christopher Watkin): Yeah, let’s gaze into the future a little bit. So imagine your congregation at Redeemer, Lincoln Square, 10 years down the line, and you’re looking back on 2026, and you’re thinking about how you were engaging with AI. What do you Hope that members of your congregation will say that God was teaching them in 2026 about AI. 0:52:36 – (Michael Keller): That’s such a great question. It’s also a super hard question because you’re like to answer what you hope they will find. But that means where are they now? I mean, I think we’re in the space where we’re all a lot of. With any new technology, I think any culture is struggling to figure out how to use it and use it well and effectively and have the imagination how to use it well. I think I saw some statistic that said when the technology for cars came up, the first cars were very much. They looked like locomotives because nobody had the imagination how a car could look differently than what other means of transportation. 0:53:21 – (Michael Keller): So I think we’re. 0:53:23 – (Christopher Watkin): Yeah. In a world where they called them horseless carriages, didn’t they? Because that’s all that they could imagine. Many senses in which we’re in the horseless carriage moment of AI, we don’t really know what it is yet, but it sort of. It looks and talks like a human being. But as you’re saying that that doesn’t mean it’s human. So what on earth is this thing? 0:53:42 – (Michael Keller): So maybe that’s the benefit, is that the benefit is we’re in the space of what it can do. I think what my hope for my congregation is for them to realize what it can’t do, that it can’t love sacrificially, it can’t forgive truly, it can’t hope against all evidence. It can’t pray, it can’t grieve. And I hope they see that there is a beauty in that and that they come to that. That AI shows them the edge of what it means to be human, that it can’t replicate and that their own humanity is propped up and validated more. Instead of being despondent of, like, here’s what I can’t do because this thing’s taking my job or this thing’s doing this. I hope that they see what it can’t touch. 0:54:28 – (Michael Keller): And around those edges they see things that they never noticed before. And hopefully that turns out to be God. That God loves them and wants them, and it wants them to turn to him. I hope that AI helps them in there. That’s probably my biggest hope for them. Yeah. 0:54:47 – (Christopher Watkin): Amen. One more scenario where I’m inviting you to dream. Imagine that all the major AI corporations in the world came to you and said, michael, we really value your Christian wisdom and we want you to write a sentence that will go on the login screen of all our apps. So when you log into ChatGPT or Gemini or Claude or whatever it is, this sentence will appear on the login screen and we’d love you to shape that sentence for us. The thing that you think people most need to bear in mind as they’re using these LLMs, what would you want that sentence to remind people of? 0:55:31 – (Michael Keller): This is a great question. I have two thoughts. One is my snarky thought would be what this tool cannot give you is precisely what you need most. I don’t think any corporation’s going to let me write that there. What you need most is not what this thing can give you. But maybe you are more than your outputs. Maybe that would be kind of. It reminds me of the old Google used to have a motto, do no evil. They got rid of that for various reasons. Really interesting, that. Yeah, don’t. We won’t go. That’s a whole nother podcast. But it’d be kind of interesting if there was like, you are more than your outputs. Okay, now what do you want to. Now what can this equation help you with again? Because I think knowing who we are in light of this technology will be one of the possible blessings through this process. 0:56:32 – (Michael Keller): If, you know, 10 years, let’s do it in podcast again. We’ll see where we’re at. But, yeah, that’s it. What would you say? 0:56:40 – (Christopher Watkin): I’d struggle to improve on those answers. I think what I love about your second response there is that it frames it, doesn’t it? It’s not saying, this is the devil, this is stay away. But it’s saying, remember what this tool is for and remember where its limits are. Yeah. And there’s the. The most fundamental things about you it cannot touch. It can help you produce better outputs. But please don’t start thinking that those amount to who you are at your deepest level. 0:57:14 – (Michael Keller): Amen. Yeah, you’re safe. That’s such a safe there. But there’s more to you now. 0:57:20 – (Christopher Watkin): Yeah. Use it wisely. Like, go ahead and use it. And you know, there’s a whole other episode of this show where we’re talking about the. The ethical and social problems with AI. You know, the fact that it uses so much water and where the data centers are built, the impact on communities and so forth. So be aware of all those things. Use it wisely, but remember what the tool is there for and what its limits are. 0:57:47 – (Christopher Watkin): I don’t think I could do better than that. As an idea. 0:57:53 – (Michael Keller): I think all of us need to start there. All of us need to Start. What does it mean to be human? What’s the safety and the Christian answer? And now that we know that I’m more than my outputs, what do I now what can I do with this? 0:58:06 – (Christopher Watkin): It’s like the opening of Calvin’s Institutes, isn’t it? Like the key questions that you can’t answer, one without, the other is, who is God and who am I? You get a working response to those questions. Then you ask, what is AI and how can it help me? But if your first question is how can AI help me? Then you’re never going to get a wise answer if you haven’t got some sort of response to who is God and who am I to begin with? 0:58:33 – (Michael Keller): Yeah, and I think there’s Christians and non Christians that haven’t answered who am I? And you know, what is God or who is God out there? And if you can’t, if you haven’t answered that question first, you’re not going to know how to use AI one way or the other. It’s just gonna be an infinite abyss. That’s a really great point, Chris. 0:58:53 – (Christopher Watkin): It’s gonna use you, isn’t it? Because, you know, one thing that we need to keep in mind is that the people giving us these AR tools are not doing so out of charity, that there is a groove that we will settle into and a way that we will be used and prompted, our behavior will be prompted if we haven’t taken time to think seriously about how we want to use these things to fit into our view of how the universe is and who we are. 0:59:23 – (Michael Keller): I remember when I got Gmail and it was free, and then all these social media platforms are free. I’m like, this is amazing. And then somebody very wise told me, said, you know, if it’s free, that means you’re the product because they want your information and they’re going to use that to sell and buy and do other stuff. And I was like, oh, so nothing’s actually for free. And so in the same case, same thing with AI, if you’re not thoughtful about what it can actually give you, you’re just going to get used by it. 0:59:51 – (Michael Keller): It’s such a good point. 0:59:52 – (Christopher Watkin): Two final questions that I’m asking to everyone we chat to on Silicon Spirituality is the first one is, what is one inefficient human habit that you’re committed to keeping in the age of AI? 1:00:06 – (Michael Keller): One inefficient. I mean, I mean, because we’re challenging, like, what does it mean to be a person? I mean, very practically, very simply, writing out my own sermons. I actually uploaded into AI, a grading system, and I write out my sermons and I actually ask AI to grade me versus my. And then that gives me helpful pattern recognition of things that I can work on. So I do use AI in my sermons, but I don’t use it to write my sermons. 1:00:39 – (Michael Keller): And I feel very committed to doing that because I want my sermons to be, as a pastor to be my working through scripture and what the Lord is saying to me and then working through that for my congregation. So it’s inefficient. It’d be a lot more efficient just to outsource all that. But I feel very good about that. 1:01:05 – (Christopher Watkin): And I think it’s also like writing a sermon is about who you’re becoming, isn’t it? Again, it’s not about content. 1:01:11 – (Michael Keller): It’s a process of discovery that comes out through the push pull of, okay, here’s the text. Every scripture is always application. It’s telling you who God is, who you are, what you’re doing or not doing, and then your own interaction with it. And so it’s a. I think my dad one time said the scripture, you don’t just read scripture, you have to let scripture read you. If I want scripture to read me, I can’t outsource that. 1:01:41 – (Michael Keller): I have to do the work. And so I’m committed to that. 1:01:44 – (Christopher Watkin): And one of the paradigmatic examples of that in the Bible is the psalmists. Isn’t it how the psalmists wrestle with God and how in the course of a psalm that shapes them and forms them and almost twists them or untwists them from their wrong ways of looking at the world? And if, you know in verse one, they just fired a question off to an LLM and got an answer. You wouldn’t have the psalm. You wouldn’t have that journey of becoming someone different through wrestling with God. 1:02:16 – (Michael Keller): Yeah, I think Job is such an interesting book because so much of Job is Job complaining and to God about all kinds of things. But the difference is he’s still talking to God. And I think God cares about us less about the perfect output and more that we’re actually outputting to him. And it’s the relational aspect. And I think that’s. I’m committed to, you know, you can’t give that up. And I think that’s one of the benefits God wants for you. If you know that what makes you unique and as a human is that the relational aspect, then you don’t have to worry about the presentation or how it comes out. The fact that it’s you is more important than anything else. 1:03:00 – (Christopher Watkin): Amen. I think that’s true. And the second question that I’m asking to everyone is if AI is a mirror, what do you think that mirror is revealing to you personally about your own heart? 1:03:14 – (Michael Keller): Yeah, I think the problem with all technology is we want the benefit without the. Without always the negative undercurrent. But if in this world where everything is good but fallen, right, Genesis 1, Genesis 3, even our technology is. When I asked that about AI, what idolatry in my own heart is it serving? It’s the idea of, I want the reputation of a well read, well prepared pastor without actually being1. 1:03:44 – (Michael Keller): And AI offers you the appearance of depth without the cost of it. And I noticed in myself and, you know, the wanting to have all the answers and be the answer man and stuff like that. It’s very. It’s a. What’s the word? It’s an a. It’s a temptation, and it’s a mirror showing me, you know, that, you know, you thought you got to a place of no, you’re good. You’re just happy to be who you are and just offer that because that’s all God’s asking you to be. And then you go, yeah, but then you have this technology. It’s a shortcut to what it means to be human. And I’m like, wow, okay, maybe I’m not as formed in the way that I want to be, and I’m being formed in a way that I shouldn’t be than I thought. 1:04:34 – (Christopher Watkin): I love that phrase you use there, the appearance of depth. That is exactly it, isn’t it? That is what AI often offers us. It reminds me of those, you know, those sidewalk pastel drawings that people sometimes do that you can sort of create the illusion that, you know, the pavement gives way and there’s an abyss below, or that, you know, there’s a river flowing through the sidewalk. And if you look at it from a particular angle, it really does look as though there’s depth there. But then you get to it and you walk on it and you. Oh, no, it’s just the pavement. 1:05:06 – (Christopher Watkin): It’s just the normal sidewalk. There is no depth there. And AI allows us to. To simulate depth where in fact, there is no depth. 1:05:16 – (Michael Keller): It actually lets you. I think there’s probably a whole other podcast to talk about beauty. And I had this debate with somebody in my church, like, if a. I could make a perfect picture that can’t compete with my son’s picture, because that’s real beauty. Because it’s made by a human. I’m like, well, it depends on how you define beauty and use. But it does make me worry that if we start producing only through AI and AI is LLMs, it’s not even the average. It’s always the equation is taking this content and still imposing what it thinks you actually need. But then if that’s coming out of a sense of information or content, I worry that it’s going to start telling us what it is. 1:06:07 – (Michael Keller): What is beauty, what is truth versus what actually should be. Yeah, that’s another conversation about what these algorithms are built on, what content it’s built on and what it’s trying to give you and the bias that’s inherent in the system. But there it is. 1:06:24 – (Christopher Watkin): Absolutely. And we do have an episode coming up with Brett McCracken that is really going to try and dive deeply into these issues. What’s AI’s relation to beauty, creativity, the creative industries and all that sort of thing. So I think the ideas that you raise are incredibly important there. I’m very sensitive, very raw for a lot of people working in the creative industries I think at the moment. And we do hope to go into some of those in a later episode. 1:06:52 – (Christopher Watkin): Michael, we have come to the end of the time that, that we can spend together today. It’s been an absolute joy. If people want to take these questions further, if we’ve raised issues that you want to think through more, do let me point you to the Silicon Spirituality’s Discord where we’re learning together about how to follow Jesus in a tech saturated world. On the Discord server, there are practical life experiments that accompany each episode. There are details as well of an upcoming online cohort that you can join if you’d like to. The link is in the show notes and we’d love to see you there. 1:07:29 – (Christopher Watkin): So it just remains for me to say, Michael, thank you ever so much for these rich, rich reflections. Thank you for pointing us to the Bible and to Jesus. It’s been a delight to discuss these things with you. 1:07:40 – (Michael Keller): Yeah, thanks for having me, Chris. Really appreciate it. Thanks. Join The Keller Center mailing list The Keller Center for Cultural Apologetics helps Christians share the truth, goodness, and beauty of the gospel as the only hope that fulfills our deepest longings. We want to train Christians—everyone from pastors to parents to professors—to boldly share the good news of Jesus Christ in a way that clearly communicates to this secular age. Click the button below to sign up for updates and announcements from The Keller Center. Join the mailing list »Chris Watkin (PhD, University of Cambridge) is an Australian Research Council Future Fellow and associate professor in European languages at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. He has written many books, including the award-winning Biblical Critical Theory: How the Bible’s Unfolding Story Makes Sense of Modern Life and Culture. You can follow him on X, his academic website, or his Christian resources website. Michael Keller (MDiv, ThM, Gordon-Conwell Seminary; PhD, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam) is the founding and senior pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church–Lincoln Square and a Council member of The Gospel Coalition. He is the author of several books, including The Stories We Live By: How Jesus Critiques and Completes What Our Culture Tells Us and Talking to Kids About Hard Things. His PhD is in computational linguistics applied to historical theology.