Artificial intelligence is everywhere — but what does it mean for us as humans, as embodied creatures, and as people of faith? In this episode of The UpWords Podcast, host Dan Johnson sits down with Noreen Herzfeld, a computer scientist turned theologian who has been thinking seriously about AI and humanity since the 1980s. Together they explore why we are driven to create AI in our own image, what Christian theology says about embodiment and relationship, and why the church should be cautious about AI.

WHAT YOU WILL LEARN

• Why humans are compelled to create AI in their own image — and what that reveals about us
• How the Imago Dei (image of God) shifts from intellect to relationship in 20th-century theology — and why it matters for AI
• What Christianity's strong theology of embodiment means in a world increasingly dominated by language and the cloud
• Why AI chatbot "relationships" are fundamentally different from — and inferior to — human relationships
• Where AI has real, appropriate uses (narrow, domain-specific tools like AlphaFold) and where it falls dangerously short
• Why Noreen sees limited good use for AI in ministry — and significant risks in pastoral care and counseling settings
• How large language models differ fundamentally from earlier AI — and why they hallucinate
• The collision course between AI energy consumption and climate change
• Why Noreen would advise most people: don't use it at all

GUEST BIO

Noreen Herzfeld is one of the rare scholars who holds advanced degrees in both computer science and Christian theology. She earned her M.S. and M.A. from Penn State, took a sabbatical to study why humans want to build AI in our image, and ended up earning a Ph.D. in Theology from the Graduate Theological Union at Berkeley. She has been teaching and writing at the intersection of technology and faith for over two decades. Her books include In Our Image: Artificial Intelligence and the Human Spirit (Fortress, 2002), Technology and Religion: Remaining Human in a Co-Created World (Templeton, 2009), and The Artifice of Intelligence: Divine and Human Relationship in a Robotic World (Fortress, 2023). She also directs the Benedictine Spirituality and Ecotheology Program at St. John's School of Theology and Seminary and is a Senior Research Associate at the Institute for Philosophical and Religious Studies in Koper, Slovenia.

RESOURCES & LINKS

• Noreen Herzfeld's faculty page: csbsju.edu/sot/person/noreen-herzfeld/
• In Our Image: Artificial Intelligence and the Human Spirit — (Fortress Press, 2002)
• Technology and Religion: Remaining Human in a Co-Created World — (Templeton, 2009)
• The Artifice of Intelligence: Divine and Human Relationship in a Robotic World — (Fortress, 2023)
• AlphaFold (DeepMind protein folding AI) — deepmind.google/technologies/alphafold
• Sherry Turkle, MIT sociologist — referenced in discussion of chatbot relationships

Send us Fan Mail

CONNECT WITH US
Subscribe to The UpWords Podcast wherever you listen to podcasts and visit slbf.org/studio to learn more about our work at the intersection of faith, the academy, and the marketplace.

This episode was created by the SLBF STUDIO at Upper House.

Produced by Daniel Johnson and Dave Conour

Edited by Dave Conour