Silicon Valley’s push to define the moral status of artificial intelligence has run into an old theological objection: humans have been here before, and it did not end well.
Writing for The Daily Wire, Andrew T. Walker, dean of the School of Theology at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and a fellow with the Ethics and Public Policy Center, argues in a new essay that AI represents merely the latest entry in humanity’s long history of idol-making — a tendency he traces from the Tower of Babel in Genesis to the golden calf in Exodus to Nebuchadnezzar’s statue in Daniel.
Walker cites John Calvin’s description of the human heart as a “perpetual factory of idols” and places AI squarely on that assembly line. The essay arrives as questions about the technology’s moral and religious status move from philosophy seminars into corporate boardrooms.
Anthropic’s outreach to religious leaders
According to Walker, that shift is visible in reporting by The New York Times on Anthropic, the AI company behind the Claude chatbot, consulting with religious leaders about the moral status and religious implications of AI agents. Walker describes the story as showing that tech figures who largely operate from a materialist view of reality are pressing religious thinkers to consider the outer boundaries of their own assumptions about whether AI could count as a conscious being.
He pairs that development with darker rhetoric emerging from some corners of the AI accelerationist movement, quoting the sentiment that if a superintelligence is built, humanity “will first fall in love with it. Then we will worship it. Finally, we will make sacrifices to it.”
Not everyone building the technology shares that fervor. Walker praises OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman for pushing back on religious framings of AI, quoting Altman’s statement that he is “very uncomfortable about people trying to ascribe religious force or a surrender of human judgment to AI models, and think it is a real safety issue.” Walker calls that restraint “a welcome chastening.”
A theological case against machine personhood
Walker acknowledges he can find few, if any, serious religious leaders willing to treat AI as a morally responsible person or a conduit for the divine. He points to a sprawling encyclical released by the Vatican earlier in the year insisting on the unique status of humanity — a status he says no machine can replicate.
He also notes his own involvement in a 2019 statement by Christian scholars and leaders denying that any part of creation, technology included, should be used to usurp or subvert the dominion entrusted solely to humanity by God, or be assigned a level of human identity, worth, dignity, or moral agency. What read as far-off speculation then, he writes, is now the topic of the day.
The essay lays out a series of categorical claims: AI is not conscious, lacks self-awareness and any capacity to conceptualize self-transcendence, possesses no moral free choice, is not alive in any sense resembling organic beings, cannot feel, and has neither soul nor body. Whatever rationality it displays, Walker argues, was first programmed.
Central to his case is what he calls the body-soul unity — the belief that human personhood, created in the divine image, requires both. A disembodied system running cognitive simulations, in his telling, does not meet that threshold.
He also seizes on the industry practice of “alignment,” the work of training AI systems toward proper moral parameters. The very need for such training, he argues, demonstrates that machines are not innately morally responsive, contrasting that with what he describes as the innate moral awareness of humans.
Walker draws on philosopher Christopher Tollefsen, who he says argues that AI may perform the information-processing functions of a mind while still lacking consciousness. On this view, AI mimics cognition rather than possessing it — producing what Tollefsen calls an “illusion” of consciousness that allows predictions to follow from inputs.
Tollefsen’s framework, as Walker relays it, requires three qualities for consciousness: the ability to reason about universals, to choose freely, and to hold intent. AI, Walker contends, may appear to do all three, but the appearance is materially produced. That distinction, he writes, makes the comparison between humans and machines an apples-to-oranges affair about differences in being rather than a contest of reasoning ability.
The stakes for human dignity
The essay argues there are concrete human costs to treating AI as human-like. Walker warns that assigning worth based on function edges out the cognitively disabled, the comatose, and those with dementia from what qualifies as “humanity” — a logic he says will ultimately confer human agency on machines at the expense of safeguarding human dignity.
He contrasts how humans and machines come into existence: a human embryo, he writes, carries within itself all the qualities needed to develop from its own internal nature, while AI has no internal propulsion and directs itself only insofar as a human controller imposes direction. He quotes Tollefsen’s argument that getting something metaphysically different — the phenomenal properties of consciousness — from non-conscious physical reality would violate a fundamental principle of reality.
Walker also flags an irony: materialists who deny the existence of the soul, and whose framework he says cannot adequately explain consciousness or selfhood, now seek to attribute soul-like capacities to machines. He calls this “worldview chaos.”
For Christian theology, he writes, the incarnation is decisive — Christ became flesh, not code, tokens, or compute. He argues that outsourcing or uploading humanity to machines mirrors a gnostic dualism that separates body from self, the same paradigm he says licenses transgenderism. If people are not their bodies, he warns, the groundwork is laid for equating personhood with non-bodily reality.
He closes with Psalm 115, in which the psalmist mocks man-made objects that cannot speak and declares that those who make them become like them. The lesson of biblical idolatry, Walker writes, is perpetual disappointment for those who equate human artifice with excellence and ability — and when people forget God, they do not stop worshipping; they simply redirect that worship to something that can never satisfy.
Walker concludes that the now-common warning against “cognitive surrender” — offloading one’s critical thinking to AI — applies equally to surrendering human or divine agency to the technology.
Source: www.dailywire.com — https://www.dailywire.com/news/why-ai-is-our-latest-golden-calf