Jordan Wales is Associate Professor and John and Helen Kuczmarski Chair in Theology at Hillsdale College. He focuses on early Christianity, theology, and the intersection of artificial intelligence (AI) with human personhood, meaning, and knowledge. He is also a member of the AI Research group within the Center for Digital Culture, which is part of the Vatican’s Dicastery of Culture and Education.
In that role, he helps make sense of the spiritual impact of artificial intelligence—now considered one of the Papacy’s defining moral challenges as highlighted by Pope Leo XIV’s massive 43,000-word encyclical on protecting human dignity in the age of AI. What is striking about the current moment, however, is not that theologians are fixated on AI, but that technologists are obsessed with theology. The architects of the digital age see technical hurdles not as algorithmic crises but metaphysical ones, revealing that the deeper they push into computation, the more they stumble back toward the divine.
In seeking to understand the implications of AI, modern Silicon Valley technologists are actively pursuing guidance from religious leaders and guardians of the ancient past, engaging in dialogues with institutions like the Vatican to learn what religion has to say about intelligence and a good life, especially if AI succeeds to cure diseases and alleviate all suffering. What then?
The irony is that as we reach some sort of triumphant technological milestone we find ourselves precisely at the beginning asking the same old questions. Teleology, anthropology, and ultimate meaning become far more compelling to explore than mere computational knowledge.
Speaking with Jordan was a delight, especially given his many analogies and illustrations to help viewers/listeners understand the complex topic of intelligence, humanity, and God. I hope you enjoy our conversation.
You can learn more about Jordan here: https://www.hillsdale.edu/faculty/jordan-wales/
You can learn more about his work here: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Jordan_Wales2
Interview coverage
1:03 - The Vatican’s interest in AI and the anthropological and moral questions explored.
4:34 – What guidance are Silicon Valley technologists seeking from religious leaders?
10:07 - If we no longer have limitations, what more will man do? What is man’s purpose?
11:42 - Many disciplines (philosophy, epistemology, anthropology) lay claim to the question: what is intelligence? Why theology is the main pursuit as it is the widest frame of reference.
17:32 – Theology at its best commits us to the widest horizon. As Dante wrote in The Divine Comedy, theology is the highest form of human knowledge.
19:23 – Studying theology is not just an academic pursuit. To know God is to have a relationship with God. Intellectual probing is the earnest pursuit of one’s friends.
22:00 – Why relational is the right way to view intelligence vs computational/outcome oriented. Augustine of Hippo’s Intelligentsia and why understanding is begotten in love.
26:00 – Computation is the manipulation of uninterpreted symbols. How the appreciative engagement of reality can emerge through calculus.
30:00 - Intelligentsia must quest further through knowledge to wisdom. Intelligentsia is loving engagement with reality as it is.
33:47 – The nature of the moral framework when it comes to mundane objects, such as pens. A pen is not just a pen but an unconscious talisman.
38:40 - Augustine would say our world is shaped by a hierarchy of love. Humility is not a low opinion of oneself but an accurate one, according to Bernard of Clairvaux, one of the most influential Christians of the Middle Ages.
39:53 - A value-neutral state (a separation of church and state) is fiction. Classical liberalism has an agnostic approach to flourishing. But even in that there is an implicit value system. If we give up all claims of moral values, we don’t have a place to start to making laws.
46:55 – Clashing value systems: optimization (a cynical value system) vs an intuitive sense of what feels right.
52:51 - The challenge of clashing value systems and morality encoded into AI. And what we can learn from 12th century poetry. Robots in the Roman de Troie (Romance of Troy), a 12th-century medieval French poem as well as in Thomas of Britain’s version of Tristan and Ysolt.
1:11:00 - Does Anthropic want to keep control of AI to control our value system?
1:27 - Gnosticism in the 21st century, suffering, Irenaeus and why God gave us a gym, not a spa.
1:32 - Where does consciousness come from?
1:42 - Can AI produce breakthrough technologies and think in heterodox ways?
