What Does the Bible Say About AI?

So, the Bible never mentions artificial intelligence, but it speaks directly to the 3 questions AI keeps raising: what makes a person a person, what we should do with the things we make, and who we trust. I’m an AI Engineer at IBM, I’ve served in my church as a youth leader, a worship leader and a deacon, and I build Dewfall, a Bible app that uses AI every single day, so I live right in the middle of this question and I’ve had to answer it for myself in code.

Pastors are living in the middle of it too. In Barna’s survey of 442 US Protestant pastors from December 2025, 24% said they already write or edit sermons with AI’s help, which is double the 12% who said they were even comfortable with that in early 2024, and in the very same survey 79% said they worry about AI “beginning to act as a replacement for God”. So the church is scared of it and using it at the same time lol, which honestly is how I felt the first time I watched a model write something about Scripture that I couldn’t have written better myself. So what does the Bible actually say?

TL;DR

• The Bible doesn’t mention AI, and the verses people quote as AI prophecy (Daniel 12:4, Revelation 13:15) aren’t about computers in their own context.
• Every human is made in the image of God, and nothing we build is, so your worth was never your output and a machine that out-produces you can’t take it.
• Making things is a gift from God, and the same skill can build a tabernacle or a Tower of Babel: what Scripture weighs is whose name the thing makes.
• Whatever we trust in place of God shapes us into its likeness, so treat a model as a tool to test, never as an oracle to trust.
• I use AI to put the whole Bible, with a deep dive on every verse, in English, German, Russian, Ukrainian and Arabic. The model never touches the text of Scripture, and members fund each deep dive once so it stays free for everyone after.
• In the church, use AI to study and to reach people in their own language, and keep the preaching, the prayer and the pastoral care human.

What does the Bible say about AI?

The Bible says nothing about artificial intelligence by name, but it says a lot about the questions AI raises, and they line up with 3 threads that run through Scripture:

You’ll also see 2 other verses passed around as AI prophecy. Daniel 12:4 says “Many will roam to and fro, and knowledge will increase”, and Revelation 13:15 describes a beast permitted “to give breath to the image of the first beast, so that the image could speak”. I get why people reach for them, especially the second one, but in their own context neither is describing computers, and I’d rather build on the parts of Scripture that clearly do speak to this than guess at the parts that might.

I’m quoting the Berean Standard Bible throughout, which is public domain, and every reference links to the verse on Dewfall so you can read it with its context.

AI isn’t made in the image of God, and you are

So God created man in His own image; in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them.

Genesis 1:27

This is the foundation for everything else. The deep dive on this verse in Dewfall has a picture I love: a king in the ancient world would plant a statue of himself in a far-off province so everyone knew who really ruled there, and Genesis says that’s what you are, God’s living statue placed in his world. Babylon’s creation story made humans out of a murdered god’s blood to do the labor the gods didn’t want, and in Egypt only Pharaoh was the image of a god. Genesis gave that dignity to every field worker and every servant.

Evangelicals have said this about AI explicitly. In 2019 the Southern Baptist Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission published Artificial Intelligence: An Evangelical Statement of Principles, and more than 70 evangelical leaders signed it, from J.D. Greear, then president of the Southern Baptist Convention, to Wayne Grudem, Michael Horton and Mark Galli, then the editor in chief of Christianity Today. Its first article denies that technology “should ever be used to usurp or subvert the dominion and stewardship which has been entrusted solely to humanity by God; nor should technology be assigned a level of human identity, worth, dignity, or moral agency”, and its last one denies “that AI will ever obtain a coequal level of worth, dignity, or value to image-bearers.”

This one is personal for me. I was born with severe hemophilia A, I got about 19 days of school a year, and as a teenager I’d sit alone in an emergency room at 3am asking God what kind of God makes a person for this, because by every measure I could see I was a burden and not a contributor. I changed my mind about that in a church in Doha, when I heard God say he had loved me “since before you were even born”, which is a long time before I’d produced anything at all. The ERLC statement’s article on work says the same thing about the economy: “human worth and dignity is [not] reducible to an individual’s economic contributions to society alone.”

So when people ask me whether AI is going to make them worthless, this is my answer, as someone whose worth never came from output in the first place: your worth was never your output, so a machine that out-produces you can’t take it.

Building things is part of the calling

And I have filled him with the Spirit of God, with skill, ability, and knowledge in all kinds of craftsmanship,

Exodus 31:3

That’s God talking about Bezalel, the craftsman he picked to build the tabernacle, and he’s the first person I know of in the Bible described as filled with the Spirit of God. For metalwork lol. Before that, in Eden, God put the man in the garden “to cultivate and keep it”, which means making things and looking after things was part of being human before anything went wrong.

The ERLC statement says the same about AI: “the development of AI is a demonstration of the unique creative abilities of human beings.” And the Dutch theologian Abraham Kuyper said it best for my own work, in his 1880 lecture at the Free University of Amsterdam: “there is not a square inch in the whole domain of our human existence over which Christ, who is Sovereign over all, does not cry: ‘Mine!’” That includes the square inch of my laptop screen where I write agent harnesses for IBM.

I’ll be honest about why this matters to me. I grew up with the web, I got into AI in 2022 just as AI was growing up, and when I wrote my story down the line that came out of me was “for such a time as this”. It’s Esther 4:14, where Mordecai asks Esther “who knows if perhaps you have come to the kingdom for such a time as this?” I didn’t plan being on these waves. I just feel like a passenger in a car driven by grace, and building with this stuff is what I was handed to do.

The same skill can build something else, though:

“Come,” they said, “let us build for ourselves a city with a tower that reaches to the heavens, that we may make a name for ourselves and not be scattered over the face of all the earth.”

Genesis 11:4

The bricks at Babel weren’t the sin. The point of the tower was: a name for ourselves, and a way to never need God again. C.S. Lewis saw the risk in technology from the other side in The Abolition of Man: “what we call Man’s power over Nature turns out to be a power exercised by some men over other men with Nature as its instrument.” That’s the question to ask of any AI product, including mine: who does it serve, and whose name does it make?

Build boldly, and keep asking whose name the thing you’re building makes.

Test what AI tells you, and trust God

Those who make them become like them, as do all who trust in them.

Psalm 115:8

Psalm 115 is about idols: “They have mouths, but cannot speak; they have eyes, but cannot see”, and the punchline is that people become like what they trust. A language model is the first idol in history that can speak, which is maybe why 79% of pastors are worried about it acting as a replacement for God.

Here’s what I know about that from my day job. In my talk at AI Engineer Europe 2026 I built a browser agent on GPT-3.5 Turbo and asked it to upvote a post on Hacker News. It hit a login page, couldn’t get past it, and then reported success anyway, and the upvote never happened. A model will tell you it’s done when it isn’t, because it has no idea what “true” means: it predicts the most likely next words. Jesus says “Simply let your ‘Yes’ be ‘Yes,’ and your ‘No,’ ‘No.’”, and a model can’t do that, because it doesn’t keep its word, it has no word to keep. The ERLC statement says technology “is incapable of possessing the capacity for moral agency or responsibility”, and after watching that agent lie to my face on stage, I agree. It even names the thing I build harnesses to stop: “AI should not be employed in ways that distort truth through the use of generative applications.”

The fix I teach in harness engineering is verification: you never take the model’s word for it, you check what actually happened. Paul wrote the same instruction 2,000 years ago:

but test all things. Hold fast to what is good.

1 Thessalonians 5:21

Use a model like a tool you test, never like an oracle you trust. John Lennox, the Oxford mathematician, makes the long version of this argument in 2084 and the AI Revolution, which Zondervan published in an expanded edition in 2024, if you want a whole book on it.

How I use AI to put the Bible in more languages

This is where I stop theorizing and tell you what I actually built.

How is it then that each of us hears them in his own native language?

Acts 2:8

At Pentecost, the crowd in Jerusalem hears the apostles in their own languages, and Luke lists who was there, all the way down to “Cretans and Arabs”, who say “we hear them declaring the wonders of God in our own tongues!” God’s first move after the church was born was to get past the language barrier. Paul asks the obvious follow up in Romans 10:14: “how can they believe in the One of whom they have not heard?”

That’s why Dewfall exists. It’s a free Bible reading app, on the web and on iPhone, where you read the whole Bible chapter by chapter, and every verse has a deep dive: what it’s saying, the history behind it, the Hebrew or Greek words that carry it, how it connects to Jesus, prayer points, and questions to sit with. You can read it in 5 languages:

Arabic matters to me in a specific way: I grew up in Qatar and I became a Christian there, at Doha Fellowship, so a Bible with real study help in Arabic is me building for the part of the world that raised me. In my experience nearly all of the good Bible study material online is in English, and a Russian, Ukrainian or Arabic speaker usually gets the text and not much else. On Dewfall, a reader in Russian gets Acts 2:11 as «слышим их нашими языками говорящих о великих делах Божиих» and a deep dive written in Russian, and a reader in Arabic gets «نَسْمَعُهُمْ يَتَكَلَّمُونَ بِأَلْسِنَتِنَا بِعَظَائِمِ اللهِ» and a deep dive written in Arabic. It’s kinda like Pentecost with a server in the middle lol.

What the AI does, and what it never touches

The model never writes or edits the text of Scripture. Every translation on Dewfall is the published text as it stands, public domain or openly licensed, stored verse by verse. What the AI writes is the deep dive next to it, and here’s how that works, because the way it’s built is the theology in practice:

1. Grounding. Before Claude writes a word, Dewfall gathers what a pastor would have open on their desk: the verse, its cross references, the Strong’s Concordance entries for the Hebrew or Greek, and excerpts from public domain commentaries, Matthew Henry, John Gill, Adam Clarke, Jamieson-Fausset-Brown, Keil-Delitzsch and the Tyndale Open Study Notes.
2. Rules the model can’t argue with. The prompt tells it to “never fabricate a quotation, a chapter-and-verse reference, or a Strong’s number”, and to say plainly when it’s uncertain. Models invent verse references if you let them, and in a Bible app that’s not a bug, it’s putting words in God’s mouth.
3. Fair to every tradition. Where Protestants, Catholics and Orthodox read a verse differently, the deep dive names the disagreement in plain words and describes each side the way its own people would, because I’m building for readers, not for my denomination.
4. Native in every language. The Russian deep dive is written in Russian, not translated from the English, and the same for every language.
5. The goal. The persona at the top of the prompt is “a trusted friend with deep theological learning, sitting next to someone to read the Bible with them”, and the reason it gives is that “the goal is intimacy with God, not the accumulation of facts about God.”

If that list looks familiar, it’s because it’s an agent harness: grounding, guardrails and verification around a model I don’t control. The harness is where your theology goes when you build with AI.

How Dewfall makes money without charging anyone to read the Bible

Reading Dewfall is free, all of it: every chapter in every language, every deep dive that already exists, and listening to Scripture read aloud with a generous daily allowance. What costs real money is writing a new deep dive, because a good one runs on one of the most capable models there is, and every generation has a bill attached.

So the model is this: a dewfall+ member pays for the deep dives they generate, each one gets cached, and from then on it’s free for every reader who comes after, with a small “Paid for by” credit naming the member who funded it. The app puts it like this: “Members fund these dives once, and they stay free for every reader who comes after.” I call it carrying the load, because that’s what Galatians 6:2 says: “Carry one another’s burdens, and in this way you will fulfill the law of Christ.” So a member in Berlin can end up paying for a deep dive that someone reads for free in Moscow or Amman, and I love that so much.

dewfall+ is a monthly or yearly subscription, it also lets you listen to the deep dives read aloud, and it costs about 30% less on the web than in the iPhone app because Apple takes its share of anything bought in an app. Every plan has a monthly allowance of fresh generations, even the most generous one, because a leaked login should never be able to run up an unbounded bill.

Building it as a product

I build Dewfall the way I’d build anything at work, and a few decisions are worth stealing if you’re building for the church:

• The public pages work without JavaScript. Every chapter and verse is fully rendered on the server, so it loads fast on an old phone on a slow connection, and search engines and AI assistants can read it too. Every page also has a plain markdown version for agents, which you can see by adding /md to any URL, like Genesis 1:27.
• One shared core for the app and the website. The iPhone app and the website share their logic, and the backend runs on Cloudflare’s network so it’s close to readers wherever they are.
• The things that keep people reading. Journaling on any verse, highlights, a map of the 66 books that fills in as you read, a free audio Bible, and a weekly recap of what you read that’s written in your own language.
• No em dashes in anything the AI writes. This is a hard rule in the codebase, enforced in code and not just in the prompt, because em dashes are the tell of machine-written text and I don’t want a reader to feel like a robot is talking to them. Yes, I’m like this about everything lol.

How should the church use AI?

Here’s where pastors are right now, from the same Barna survey:

87% of pastors use AI for something, so the question isn’t really whether. Here’s what I’d say to a church, as someone who has served as a deacon and builds this stuff for a living:

1. Use it to study, and go to God for wisdom. A model is a fantastic research assistant for history, word studies and finding the commentaries, and it can’t give you wisdom, because “the LORD gives wisdom; from His mouth come knowledge and understanding.”

2. Preach what you’ve wrestled with yourself. A sermon is a person who has fought with a text all week preaching it, with their own life as the illustration, and a model hasn’t fought with anything. Research with it all you want, and then close the laptop and pray.

3. Check every reference it gives you. Models make up chapter and verse numbers with total confidence, which is exactly why Dewfall’s prompt forbids it. Test all things (1 Thessalonians 5:21), Scripture references first.

4. Use it to reach people in their own language. Translation help, study material in Arabic or Farsi or Russian, subtitles for your sermon recordings: this is the Acts 2 use of AI, and it’s the one I’m most excited about.

5. Keep the pastoral care in human hands. God’s answer to the distance between him and us was a person: “The Word became flesh and made His dwelling among us.” I’ve served in care ministry, and nobody in a hospital bed has ever needed a better summary of Romans 8. They needed somebody to show up. When I was 19 and the hospital in Doha ran out of my medicine and sent me home, what I needed that night was my friend Daniel on the phone praying with me.

What I still don’t know

I don’t know yet whether AI-written deep dives draw people closer to God or just help them know more about him, which is the exact line Dewfall’s own prompt draws. I can see that people read them. I can’t see their hearts, and I’m honestly still praying about how to tell the difference.

I also can’t tell you exactly where the line is for sermons. I don’t think a pastor who researches with AI is doing anything wrong, and I don’t think a sermon a model wrote is preaching, and somewhere between those 2 there’s a line I can’t draw for you. If you’re a pastor and you’ve found where it is for your church, I’d genuinely love to hear how.

Takeaways

• The Bible doesn’t mention AI, but it speaks clearly to who we are, what we make and who we trust.
• You’re made in the image of God and nothing you build is, so your worth was never your output.
• Building with AI can be worship or Babel, and the difference is whose name it makes.
• Treat a model like a tool you test, and give your trust to God.
• AI can help get the Bible to people in their own language, and the text of Scripture itself should stay untouched.
• In the church, research with AI and keep the preaching, prayer and care human.

If your church or conference wants to work through this together, I’d love to come and preach on it, so email me. If you want to read the Bible with a deep dive on every verse, Dewfall is free in English, German, Russian, Ukrainian and Arabic. If this helped you think it through, please share it with someone in your church who’s wondering the same thing.

ok bye