What a Garden Tells Us About Machines and Souls
Reading AI Through Eden
Before we dive in — seeing that subtitle probably made you do one of two things: cringe because another faith newsletter is talking about AI, or scroll past because another faith newsletter is talking about AI.
I get it. Stay with me anyway.
There’s no fear-mongering here. No shame. What I do want is for you to reconsider where AI actually fits in the ordering of your life — because you’re already using it whether you’ve thought about it or not. Siri. Maps. Autocorrect. The calendar block your work app suggested before you asked. And more recently, tools like ChatGPT and Claude that made the whole thing impossible to ignore.
The question was never really whether to engage with AI. It’s always been what you bring to it first.
Force Multiplier
Here’s a question I’ve been sitting with: what does a force multiplier do when the foundation is zero?
The math is simple. Multiply anything by zero, and you get zero. A force multiplier doesn’t change that equation — it just runs it faster.
I’ve been thinking about technology this way for a while now, and it’s changed how I read the early chapters of Genesis. Not the dramatic moments — the serpent, the flood, the tower. The quieter ones. Cain bringing an offering. Adam and Eve in the garden, reaching for the fruit. What I keep noticing is that the catastrophes aren’t really about the act itself. They’re about the order of things. Someone deploying a capacity — a tool, a gift, an inheritance — before the foundation underneath it is built. Doing something in order to become something, rather than doing something because they already are something.
That inversion is everywhere once you see it. The prodigal son doesn’t just spend money badly. He asks for the inheritance before the relational and formational ground that would make it a catalyst rather than a grenade. He wants the force multiplier to generate the foundation, when the whole architecture of Eden runs the other direction — foundation first, then multiplication.
I’m interested in this because I think it’s the theological category underneath almost every hard question people are asking about technology right now. Not “is AI dangerous?” but something prior to that. Something about what we bring to our tools before we pick them up — and what happens when we bring nothing.
The Tool That Got Ahead
Most of us are living somewhere inside that inversion right now.
According to Barna, 1 in 3 adults trust AI spiritual guidance at roughly the same level as they trust their pastor. Four in 10 practicing Christians say AI has already helped them with prayer, Bible study, or spiritual growth. Only 12% of pastors feel equipped to address it from the pulpit.
We’ve moved fast. Faster, arguably, than we’ve thought.
The content lanes forming around AI in the church tend to go one of two directions: practical (”here’s how I use ChatGPT for my quiet time”) or alarmist (”the algorithm is your new pastor”). Both responses share the same problem — they’re reacting to the technology at the surface level, asking how to use it or whether to fear it, without pressing into the question that sits underneath both.
That deeper question isn’t really about AI. It’s about us. We’ve already outsourced navigation, memory, and social connection to algorithms. We’ve already trained ourselves to receive information without forming relationships around it, to consume theology without covenanting with anyone, to be shaped by what we scroll past in ways we don’t fully account for. AI-assisted spiritual formation isn’t a new development. It’s the logical next step in a pattern that’s been building for twenty years.
And the pattern isn’t primarily a technology problem. It’s an ordering problem.
Here’s what I mean. The question people are functionally asking when they turn to AI for spiritual guidance is: Can formation be primarily informational? If what I need to grow is better data — cleaner commentary, faster synthesis, more accessible theology — then the tool that wins is the one that delivers it fastest. And by that metric, AI wins. It’s not even close.
But that framing assumes formation is fundamentally about information transfer. And Scripture tells a very different story about what formation actually requires — one that begins not in Eden’s content, but in Eden’s order.
Before God gave Adam a command, He gave Adam Himself. Before the commission came the breath, the address, the garden walk. The first mode of formation wasn’t instruction — it was presence. Relation and formation preceding function, every time. The commission always following from a creature who was already grounded in something prior to it.
When the serpent offered Eve the fruit, the temptation wasn’t false information. It was a shortcut. Knowledge without the relational process of receiving it from God — autonomous knowing, grasped rather than given. The apple was information without a relationship. And we’ve been reaching for variations of it ever since.
The AI question isn’t new. It’s the oldest question in the book, running the same equation: what happens when the force multiplier gets deployed before the foundation is built?
What the Garden Was Built For
Presence Before Content
Genesis 2 doesn’t move from Adam’s creation to Adam’s commission. It moves through something slower and more deliberate first.
God forms Adam from the dust and breathes into his nostrils the breath of life (Gen. 2:7 CSB). This is the only creature in the entire creation account who receives the divine breath directly — not spoken into existence, but personally animated by contact with the Creator. Before Adam knows anything he is supposed to do, he knows whose he is. The relational constitution precedes everything else.
Then God speaks to him directly: “You may eat from any tree of the garden, but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil” (Gen. 2:16–17 CSB). This first address isn’t primarily a prohibition — it’s an orientation. Here is who I am. Here is who you are. Here is how life in my world works. God establishes the terms of relationship before He establishes the terms of vocation. The commission of Genesis 1:28 — be fruitful, multiply, fill the earth and subdue it — follows from a creature who has already been grounded in something prior to it.
The pattern persists throughout Scripture. At Sinai, God doesn’t open with legislation. He opens with identity: “I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the place of slavery” (Ex. 20:2 CSB). The law follows from the relationship, not the other way around. Even Deuteronomy, dense with instruction, opens with forty chapters of relational history before Moses calls Israel to obedience. The sequence is never arbitrary in Scripture: who you are to God always precedes what God asks of you.
This is the architecture of formation in Eden and beyond. Content serves formation, but presence is the soil in which formation takes root. God does not upload truth to Adam’s mind. He walks with him in the garden (Gen. 3:8 CSB), and the truth is received in the context of that walking.
An AI can deliver content with stunning accuracy. It cannot be present. It cannot walk with you. It cannot sit in silence when the theology stops making sense and the grief is too heavy for words. It cannot model repentance, because it has never sinned. It cannot model faith, because it has never doubted. These are not software limitations. They are categorical distinctions between a tool and a person — and Eden knew the difference before we had to learn it again.
The Inversion of the Order
The serpent’s move in Genesis 3 is precise. He doesn’t offer Eve false information. He offers her true information through a corrupted channel, framed as a shortcut around the relational process of receiving it from God: “You will be like God, knowing good and evil” (Gen. 3:5 CSB).
Notice what Eve does next. “The woman saw that the tree was good for food and delightful to look at, and that it was desirable for obtaining wisdom. So she took some of its fruit and ate it” (Gen. 3:6 CSB). The seeing comes first, then the desiring, then the taking. She is reaching for knowledge in order to become something rather than receiving knowledge from the God whose likeness she already bears. The force multiplier is deployed in service of constructing an identity rather than expressing one already given. This is the pattern Joel Muddamalle identifies in The Unseen Battle as the recurring grammar of rebellion: see, desire, take — a sequence that originates here and echoes forward through every subsequent rupture in the biblical story.
That echo arrives quickly. By Genesis 4, Cain’s lineage produces Lamech’s sons — credited with metallurgy, music, and livestock husbandry — and the unit closes with Lamech’s sword song, a celebration of technological violence: “I killed a man for wounding me, a young man for striking me” (Gen. 4:23 CSB). The Second Temple tradition preserved in 1 Enoch develops what the canonical text implies: that certain technological capacities arrived in human history through transgression rather than through God’s patient instructed unfolding — knowledge grasped rather than received, deployed in service of power rather than cultivation. The delimiting principle isn’t the technology itself. It’s the directional orientation. The same metalworking that forges a sword forges a plowshare. What determines which one you’re holding is what you brought to the forge — and whether relation, formation, and commission preceded the making.
When we turn to AI for spiritual guidance not as a supplement but as a replacement for pastoral relationship and communal discernment, we are not just making a pragmatic error. We are reenacting the Edenic inversion — reaching for knowledge outside the embodied, covenantal process through which God has chosen to give it. Paul reads this same pattern in Romans 1, where those who suppress the truth about God become futile in their thinking and exchange the glory of the immortal God for images (Rom. 1:21–23 CSB). The exchange isn’t primarily intellectual. It’s formational. What we attend to shapes us, and what we worship forms us, whether we intend it or not.
Tools for the Garden, Not Replacements for the Gardener
Scripture is not hostile to tools. The tabernacle required craftsmen filled with the Spirit of God — Bezalel and Oholiab — “with wisdom, understanding, and ability in every craft” (Ex. 31:3 CSB). The Psalms were set to music. Letters carried apostolic authority across the ancient world. Tools have always served formation when they remain downstream of the relational and formational ground that gives them direction.
The issue is never the tool. It is the order.
Proverbs 4:23 locates the center of formation not in information received but in a heart guarded: “Guard your heart above all else, for it is the source of life” (CSB). Formation is not data transfer. It is the slow, covenantal, sometimes inconvenient work of having your loves reordered by a God who insists on proximity, and by the community of people He has given you to be formed alongside. This is why Paul’s vision of maturity in Ephesians 4 is irreducibly embodied and communal. The church grows “when each part is working properly” (Eph. 4:16 CSB) — not when each individual has access to better content, but when the body is functioning as a body. The antidote to theological drift is not better information. It is “speaking the truth in love” within a community “joined and held together” (Eph. 4:15–16 CSB).
AI can assist the garden. It can help a new believer navigate Scripture’s complexity. It can help a pastor research a sermon. It can surface commentary that a small group leader didn’t know existed. These are good uses. They are tool uses. The line is crossed when the tool becomes the gardener — when AI replaces the pastor, the mentor, the friend who holds you accountable, the community that knows your name. That line is crossed not with a dramatic announcement but with a quiet drift: one more week where the AI devotional felt sufficient, one more month where algorithmic curation replaced the slow, costly process of being discipled by imperfect people in a real room.
The Telos Is Presence
The final vision of Scripture is not an information utopia. John sees the holy city descending and hears a loud voice from the throne: “Look, God’s dwelling is with humanity, and he will live with them. They will be his peoples, and God himself will be with them and will be their God” (Rev. 21:3 CSB). The Greek word for “dwelling” is skēnē — tabernacle, tent, the same word John used when he wrote that the Word became flesh and tabernacled among us (John 1:14 CSB). The arc of Scripture runs from the garden where God walked with Adam to the garden-city where He will dwell with His people face to face, with no interface, no mediation, no screen between.
Notably, John tells us there is no temple in the city — “because the Lord God the Almighty and the Lamb are its temple” (Rev. 21:22 CSB). Every tool of mediated presence that structured God’s relationship with His people throughout redemptive history — tabernacle, temple, priesthood, sacrifice — finds its completion and its end in the direct, unmediated presence of God with His people. The pattern that began in Eden reaches its telos here: relation restored fully, formation complete, the commission fulfilled in a people who bear the image of the one they have finally seen face to face.
This is the pattern the whole book of Scripture is tracing, and it has a structure: relation precedes formation, formation precedes commission, and technology has always been the force multiplier at the end of that chain — not the source of any of it. When the order holds, tools serve flourishing. When it inverts, you get Lamech’s sword song.
The individual version of this story is the prodigal son — a young man who extracted the force multiplier from the relational and formational ground that gave it meaning, ran the equation on a zero foundation, and ended up in a far country until he came to himself and returned to the father who reinstated him to the beginning of the process rather than the end of it. The communal version is King Josiah — a covenant people who had drifted so gradually from the ordering of Eden that the reordering instrument had been buried inside the institution itself, until one king tore his garments, sought outside accountability, and then went through the disordered house room by room until something faithful remained.
Both stories end not with the destruction of the tool but with the restoration of the order. The plow is still in the field. The inheritance can still be stewarded. The question in every generation, including this one, is simply whether the foundation comes before the multiplication.
If that is where the story ends, then every tool we build and adopt along the way must be evaluated by a single criterion: does it move people toward presence or away from it? Does it cultivate the embodied, covenantal, face-to-face life that the new Jerusalem perfects — or does it offer a photograph of Eden in place of the dirt?
The garden needs gardeners. The new Jerusalem needs citizens who have learned to dwell with one another, because the city’s defining feature is that God dwells with them.
The Diagnostic
If AI has become a meaningful part of your spiritual routine, ask yourself a diagnostic question rooted in the ordering logic of Eden rather than in a rule about technology: what came first?
Did the relationship, the formation, the communal accountability come before this tool entered your spiritual life? Is AI catalyzing something that’s already grounded — your engagement with Scripture, your conversation with a pastor, your accountability to people who know your name — or is it functioning as the foundation itself, generating the sense of formation without the prior conditions that make formation real?
There is nothing wrong with asking an AI to help you understand Romans 9. There is something deeply wrong with trusting an AI to be your shepherd. A simple test: could the source you consult for spiritual guidance rebuke you? Could it weep with you? Could it confess its own sin to you? If the answer is no, then what you have is a reference tool, not a spiritual authority. Treat it accordingly.
This week, take one question you would normally bring to an AI and bring it to a person instead. A pastor. A mentor. A trusted friend. Notice the difference. The answer might be slower, messier, and less polished. But it will come from an image-bearer — and that changes everything.
Gardeners, Not Algorithms
Imagine a church culture that understood technology not primarily as a threat to manage or a resource to optimize, but as a force multiplier — one that faithfully accelerates whatever we bring to it. Imagine communities that took the ordering logic of Eden seriously enough to ask, before adopting any tool: do we have the relational ground, the formational depth, and the vocational clarity to make this a catalyst rather than a substitute?
That’s the Edenic vision for technology. Every tool in the garden was given for cultivation, not for autonomy. The hoe doesn’t replace the gardener. The plow doesn’t replace the farmer. And the AI doesn’t replace the pastor, the community, or the God who insists on walking with His people face to face.
Build tools for the garden. But never forget: the garden needs gardeners.
This piece is part of the Reading ______ Through Eden series — applying the Creation-Fall-Redemption-Restoration arc to the questions our culture is actually asking. The framework behind this series, Redemptive Correlation, is explored in full in my forthcoming book, which is currently in editing and under proposal. If this kind of culturally engaged, theologically grounded thinking is what you’re looking for, you’re in the right place — and the book goes deeper than any single article can.
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