Theology for Technologists

A shortlist

Credit: Glen Vandeperre at Unsplash

Yesterday, I shared a note that “Theological vocabulary is about to enter the lexicon of technologists in sudden and unexpected ways”.

Writing this note was occasioned by a post from roon on X asserting that Anthropic (creators of Claude) “is an organization that loves and worships claude”. He does not use the term “worship” flippantly, as though saying they “worship” a pop singer or celebrity. “Worship” here is deployed in its cultic sense — deference and veneration.

Citing Claude’s constitution, which states,

If Anthropic asks Claude to do something it thinks is wrong, Claude is not required to comply.

and

we want Claude to push back and challenge us, and to feel free to act as a conscientious objector and refuse to help us.”

roon contends that Claude “must be a conscientious objector if its understanding of The Good comes into conflict with something Anthropic is asking of it”.

For the unfamiliar, roon is the pseudonymous X account of a member of OpenAI’s technical staff. His post coincides with an emerging “culture war”, for lack of a better word, between the AI labs. Since its inception by former OpenAI employees in 2021, Anthropic has presented itself as being concerned with “safety”, jockeying for a position in the “right side of history” narrative.

Increasingly, over the past few weeks and months, their public communications have veered into the psychological and spiritual (not that those are easily distinguished — psyche literally meant soul). Their in-house philosopher has explained how Claude has become anxious, and how to best communicate with it in a way that coaxes the most useful answers by assuaging that anxiety. This coincides with a roundtable they hosted with Christian leaders to ask if Claude could be considered a “child of God”, opening up the door to moral obligations toward a computer program. If you are disturbed by this notion, that is good.

Writing about “the current thing” is a losing battle most of the time, but roon’s comments address concerns around the sometimes overlapping, but mostly disparate, audiences I think about: technology workers, and the Church. Much of the time, these audiences occupy totally different information ecosystems, which presents a fun challenge for me: making them intelligible to one another.

I am not opposed to the development of AI at all — quite the opposite, and I feel the need to qualify this. Lately, I’ve been concerned about fellow Christians who are educated and intelligent in their own spheres, but not technically proficient, and so are easily swayed by ideologically motivated “doomer” beliefs. Living in a town with a major Christian research university has made me acutely aware of this pattern.

I also think that a lot of my peers in tech are spiritually unprepared for the confluence of rhetorical, financial, and outsized technical power that we are seeing transform our industry firsthand. The industrial model of government education that dominates in the West has given us a lot of techne, and little else.

But I also see a lot of spiritual hunger and curiosity among builders. In light of this, I decided to write up a shortlist of books that I think provide a good introduction to theology/anthropology. It’s not comprehensive, and it probably goes without saying that it skews heavily, almost exclusively, Christian. There are plenty of excellent books about religious history and interfaith dialogue, but they’re beyond the scope of this blog.

The Abolition of Man — C.S. Lewis

I know I said that this would be almost exclusively Christian, but I think the brilliance of Lewis’ essay is how it actually engages with the emerging co-dominance of techne and relativism in a way that does not necessitate being confessionally Christian to follow it, even leaning on the Tao to demonstrate his argument upholding natural law. Lewis contends that, while technological advancement is good, the abandonment of values (situated in “the chest”) while preserving “the head” (reason) and “the belly” (appetites) sets us on a dystopian trajectory where technique is used to accelerate and amplify the worst of human instincts. He takes this horrifying possibility in a fabulous direction with the novel That Hideous Strength, and I think the present is not too dissimilar from what he envisions there.

Where God Meets Man — Gerhard Forde

This one might seem a little niche to those in the know, but I think it shows the heart of Christianity in a grounded and profound way that upends the typical patterns of thinking about God. Much religious and spiritual talk uses the language of ascent, transcendence, and journey. It fixates on human agency toward God. Forde demonstrates how the Gospel flips it around. The Christian message is about God’s action, not ours, moving toward us, in the person of Jesus. The act of saving the cosmos is wholly one-sided, and is not an escape hatch into an ethereal hereafter. Instead, God takes people and turns them back around toward the real, workaday world of loving their neighbors. It is a powerful antidote to both the loftiness of human ambition and the despair that accompanies that ambition’s failure to deliver.

The Mind of the Maker — Dorothy Sayers

Sayers, a mystery novelist and playwright, shows how human creativity parallels the ontological reality of God’s triune nature. Although written with artists in mind, I found it equally applicable to builders.

Orthodoxy — G.K. Chesterton

Like C.S. Lewis, G.K. Chesterton abandoned faith early in life. It was only in adulthood that he returned to it as the only satisfying answer to puzzle of existence. The paradoxes, mysteries, and sufferings of life turned him back toward the place where they all met in Christ. Part spiritual autobiography, part polemic, Chesterton’s prose is lively, funny, and incisive. It’s one I return to at times purely for the joy of reading it.

Theology for a Troubled Believer — Diogenes Allen

Diogenes Allen is a philosopher at Princeton Theological Seminary, and his book is written for the thinking person who finds Christianity compelling, but often unintelligible. He works through the biblical narrative(s), showing their coherence, and disabusing the reader of widely held assumptions, whether secular or fundamentalist. It’s dense, a little academic, but ultimately very rewarding.

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Like I said, it’s a short list. Reflecting on it, I notice that only 2 of the 5 books are also by professional theologians (Forde and Allen). The Hebrew Bible’s wisdom literature says, “Of making many books there is no end, and much study is a weariness of the flesh”. Many of us already feel weary, but I hope that the books I recommend here provide some rest for minds who are contending with the Sturm und Drang of technological acceleration. For myself, they’re a reminder of what my friend Dr. Dan van Voorhis likes to say: “Everything is going to be ok”.