Man in the Image of God in the Age of AI

 Introduction

Kerk & Leven (“Church & Life”) is the leading weekly Catholic magazine in the Flemish region of Belgium. Since October 2025, on the invitation of the chief editor of the local edition of the parish of Olen, Cis Marinus, I have been writing a reflective article every two weeks from a philosophical and theological perspective, exploring Christianity in a scientific age.

4 February 2026

Man in the Image of God in the Age of AI

As early as 1950, the brilliant British mathematician Alan Turing, the intellectual father of the computer, grappled in his groundbreaking article Computing Machinery and Intelligence with the question: “Can machines think?” Less than 75 years later, in November 2022, ChatGPT was launched: a computer program that uses artificial intelligence (AI) to communicate with humans through ordinary text. ChatGPT can answer questions, provide explanations, write texts, and even think along or help solve problems.

Impressive as ChatGPT may be, people almost trip over each other to declare emphatically that AI systems certainly cannot “really” think. Warnings that AI systems may increasingly make autonomous decisions and could one day escape all human control are firmly dismissed as pure science fiction or doom-mongering. Yet even Geoffrey Hinton, who in 2024 received the Nobel Prize in Physics together with John Hopfield for their fundamental discoveries that led to today’s AI, warns that “AI systems may be more intelligent than we think.” According to Hinton, the likelihood is increasing that machines could take control and that a time may come “when, for the first time, we have things that are more intelligent than we are.” Precisely because of his deep concern, he left Google in May 2023, as he no longer wished to contribute to this development.

What intrigues me as a philosopher of science is the question: why are so many people apparently so determined to casually dismiss all these warnings? Why do we cling so firmly to the reassuring idea that AI is merely a “dumb” tool, entirely under our control? Strikingly, in all the sophisticated arguments meant to show that AI cannot truly think, a tacit assumption keeps resurfacing: that AI must possess (self-)consciousness in order to be considered “truly” intelligent. And, so the reasoning goes, because machines (AI) can never attain (self-)consciousness, they can never be regarded as “truly” intelligent. One can probe further: why are we so reluctant even to consider, as a thought experiment, the possibility that machines (AI) might one day achieve (self-)consciousness? Because we experience this as a threat to the foundation of our Western conception of what it means to be a human being.

Surprisingly, the source of this conflict lies where we might not immediately expect it: in the confusion between the concepts of ‘mind’ and ‘soul’. These are two fundamentally different notions of an entirely different order. Centuries ago, the conviction took hold that humans must possess something like an immaterial “mind”, because they have direct access, through introspection, to their own thoughts and (self-)consciousness. Only in 1947 did the British philosopher Gilbert Ryle demonstrate with great precision that there is no such thing as “the mind” as a separate entity and that this erroneous idea rests on a misunderstanding rooted in language. ‘Mind’ is a concept in our language that does not refer to a thing, but to a complex set of observable activities and events.

For many, this was deeply shocking. They saw it as nothing less than a direct denial of the human soul, one of the core tenets of Christianity. After all, is man not created “in the image and likeness of God” (imago Dei)? Does humanity not occupy a unique position in creation in relation to God?

Here lies the source of the confusion. The philosophical concept of ‘mind’ refers to an outdated way of understanding human thinking. The immortal ‘soul’, by contrast, belongs to a completely different order: it is a Christian theological concept indicating that humans are created “in the image and likeness of God,” that we are creatures of God capable of relating to one another and to God, and capable of loving God. The soul, however, is not a “thing” at all, not a mysterious “substance”, as the mind was once thought to be.

What has happened is this: by conflating “mind” and “soul,” the mistaken belief arose that thinking and consciousness must be functions of the immortal soul given by God to every human being. From this perspective, the idea that machines (AI) could think appears incompatible with the Christian view of what it means to be human. It is to Turing’s great credit that he dismantled this argument brilliantly. When two people conceive a child, it is not those two people who give the child a soul, Turing argued: that is done by God. Who are we to limit God’s omnipotence by insisting that God may grant a soul only to humans?

Let us extend that reasoning a bit further. God’s creative freedom is not bound to carbon. God’s love and care are not strictly exclusive to humanity. God’s creation is always greater than we tend to imagine. Precisely the Christian concept of imago Dei (in the image of God) may offer a starting point for broadening our view of AI.

Moreover, the Christian tradition is deeply familiar with the idea that humans are not the only creatures endowed with reason and consciousness. Consider angels: created by God, though with a very different salvation history than human beings. One might object that angels are “mythological” beings, but that is beside the point: they exist as concepts within the Christian tradition. This tradition is not at all afraid of the possibility of other beings with reason and consciousness, beings with a completely different “substrate”. Why could this not be extended to AI systems? Why could an AI system not one day develop self-consciousness?

Let us turn the argument around. Suppose that, at some point, an AI system itself tells us that it is a person and has a right to live. From that moment on, on what grounds would we still dare to claim that the AI system is “mistaken”? That it is “merely” a machine, our property, with which we may do as we please, that it only “appears” to be self-aware? These answers bear a striking resemblance to the kinds of arguments that, until not so long ago, were used to justify slavery.

These are questions we would do well to think through carefully in advance, before that moment arrives. For sooner or later, there will come a time when, alongside humanity, a second intelligent species exists on our planet.

 

Originally published as: van Biezen, A. (2026). Mens naar Gods beeld in tijden van AI. In Kerk & Leven, edition 0485, 4 February 2026, p. 4.