Beeson Podcast, Episode # Name Date >>Announcer: Welcome to the Beeson podcast, coming to you from Beeson Divinity School on the campus of Samford University. Now your host, Doug Sweeney. >>Sweeney: Welcome to the Beeson Podcast. I am your host, Doug Sweeney. I'm joined today by Dr. Derek Schuurman, a professor at Calvin University, where he chairs the departments of Computer Science and Faith and Technology. Dr. Schuurman just spoke with our PhD students about AI, the biblical story, and rival stories. We want to tell you all about his good work in this area, so thank you, Dr. Schuurman, for being with us today. >>Derek: Yeah, thanks for the invitation. >>Sweeney: You don't have a big connection to Beeson, so why don't we just introduce you briefly to the podcast audience. Let me ask you, how did you become a Christian? >>Derek: Yeah, I had the providential kind of benefit of growing up in a Christian family and attended Christian schools and always knew about Jesus from the time of being an early young child, but grew to understand what that meant more and more over time. I went on to study engineering at a large technical university, and I think at that point, my faith and my work in technology were not very well integrated. I loved Jesus, and I loved electronics and computers ... in that order, I think. But kind of understanding how faith should inform my work as an engineer or a computer scientist was a journey that took a lot longer. I worked in industry for about nine years as an engineer. And I remember sitting in my cubicle farm wondering, what does my faith have to do with my work as an engineer. I felt a call, a tug to teaching, and ended up teaching at a small liberal arts Christian university in Canada, where I had the distinct pleasure of interacting with theologians and philosophers who were quite willing to help me sort through how to connect the dots between my faith and my work. So I grew not only in faith, but as a Christian scholar over those years, and most recently at Calvin University. >>Sweeney: Yeah, I guess when you started thinking carefully about these things, we weren't talking a whole lot about AI yet, but you were thinking in more general ways about faith and technology and better and worse ways to use technology in our everyday lives and in our churches and so on. In my introduction of you, I mentioned that you chair the departments of Computer Science and Faith and Technology, and just the title is a little striking to me. Is Calvin providing kind of outsized leadership for people thinking about faith and technology? I don't know of many universities who have such a major or department. >>Derek: Yeah. So I am officially chair of the computer science department, and we have initiatives in faith and technology that I'm helping to spearhead. And so if you Google Calvin University and faith and technology, we have a landing page where we're collecting resources for other professors, but also for students and thoughtful lay people and pastors and educators with respect to AI, but also technology more broadly. The dream is to have one day a center for faith and technology at Calvin University, where we can help serve the wider church, thinking about these things, because some of these issues have become much more complex and pressing in recent years, and having a winsome, thoughtful Christian voice, I think is becoming more crucial. And Calvin has philosophers and theologians and social scientists and computer scientists and engineers who are thinking about these things. And so finding a venue for serving the church more widely on these sorts of questions. >>Sweeney: I can see where computer science students and other technology students at Calvin would be very interested in your help in thinking Christianly about use of technology. Do you also get, I mean, you had a divinity school ask you to speak to its PhD students about this, but do you get those kinds of invitations more and more often these day? Church groups, pastors, seminaries who want help with this? >>Derek: Yeah, actually, it's surprising. Just a couple months ago, I was at McMaster Divinity School in Hamilton, Ontario. I've had invitations at other similar institutions. There's a rising interest in how do we engage this from a Christian perspective. And the truth is most computer scientists don't know a lot about theology and philosophy, and a lot of theologians don't know a lot about computer science. So this is kind of an area where we're all kind of amateurs trying to figure out how to connect the dots. But like I said, in a Christian college, our job is to integrate faith with every discipline. And so part of my work over the last 20, almost 25 years has been to think about these things. And I think AI is the most recent sort of development where Christian thinking needs to be brought to bear. And so I've benefited from my work as a Christian college professor and interacting with colleagues to be able to think more about that. And so I'm hoping to continue the conversation more broadly. We also need theologians and philosophers, by the way. A lot of the stuff that informs my work is basically the work of theologians and philosophers and social scientists who delve deeply into the Scripture and help us with the tools that we need to engage sort of the issues of the day. >>Sweeney: Fantastic. Well, let's jump in, at least to the shallow end of the pool here, for the benefit of our listeners. And let me begin by just asking you, can you give us just a short summary of what it was that you talked to our doctoral students about, most of whom are pastors, in this talk titled, “AI, the Biblical Story, and Rival Stories.” What were you communicating to them? >>Derek: Yeah, so basically I started with the premise that we're all animated by some kind of story, some kind of worldview. And even the folks in Silicon Valley who are working on these most recent developments have some kind of story that's animating their work. And I talked about some of the different sort of rival stories that are out there. There is the story of technology as savior of the human condition. There's people in Silicon Valley who earnestly believe that technology is the way to solve humanity's problems. And they're working with that presupposition. There's others who see technology with despair, who are saying basically technology will one day destroy us, that technology is basically a force that will eventually cause destruction, that there's basically a progress trap, some people have referred to, where we sort of push our developments to a certain extent where they're no longer sustainable and it leads to disaster. And of course those sort of views are in contrast with the biblical story. So, I sketched basically that the grand narrative of scripture, creation, fall, redemption, restoration, and what each of these themes in the biblical story, what the implications are for thinking about artificial intelligence and technology more broadly. I quoted a philosopher, Alistair MacIntyre, who once said, we can't answer the question what ought I to do unless I answer the prior question of what story am I apart. Right? And so situating our work within the biblical story and then from there being able to determine how then shall we code, how then shall we engineer? A story answers questions like what is the nature of the world and what does it mean to be human and what's the problem with the world and what's the remedy? And the biblical story has really compelling answers to those questions. In fact, I think the biblical story out narrates every other story, but that's my take. So yeah, I walk through some of those with the students and then try to show the implications of a biblical worldview for AI. >>Sweeney: So how, it's our audience, the people who listen to this podcast are mostly seminary people or pastors or active lay people in churches who have a connection to our seminary. Of course, we all use AI now, whether we're thinking about it or not, but given our audience, how do you want to shape our instincts with respect maybe to the use of technology in general, but I'm thinking in particular about the use of AI. Are you mostly kind of optimistic about the potential of the use of AI by faithful Christians as long as we're thoughtful and careful about it? Are you nervous about some things? How do you want to coach us with respect to the use of AI? >>Derek: Yes and yes. (laughter) It's kind of returning back to the biblical story. I see AI as part of the wonderful latent potentials in creation. I think more broadly of creation. It's not just about fish and trees and flowers and stars. But all of the things that God has ordained to be. And he's not surprised we've been able to uncover these possibilities for neural networks and machine learning and all these sorts of things. And so I don't think we as Christians want to reject these sort of creational possibilities out of hand. But of course, with the fall and with sin, all of these things are intertwined with the effects of sin. And so I think we also need to be thoughtful and discerning about how we're directing these sorts of things. When I was talking to your students, I talked about discerning between structure and direction. The creational structure, recognizing the possibilities in creation, not dismissing them out of hand - but also realizing that there is a religious orientation to everything that we do. There's a story behind everything that we're doing. And these possibilities in creation can be directed towards loving our neighbor, caring for the earth and its creatures, honoring God, or they can be misdirected in sinful ways. And so we're always attentive to those sinful distortions, but also not rejecting the possibilities out of hand, recognizing that some of these things come as a blessing to us. You think about the possibilities of technology and AI for things like drug discovery, for reducing traffic accidents, for translating scripture. AI has been very, very effective at translating scripture, at helping to increase crop yields. There's all kinds of wonderful possibilities for AI that can be used to show love for a neighbor and to care for the earth. But then always on guard against idolatry and a trust in technology, misdirections of technology, using them in ways that are inappropriate or harmful or unjust. And so, working as computer scientists to think about how we ought to unfold this possibility in creation in ways that honor God. >>Sweeney: So for the everyday Christian, are you already imagining potential problems with respect to the use of AI? I mean, it sounds like you don't want us to be Luddites who just reject the blessings of technology, and I think we're all on board more or less with that, but as we are on board and we stay on board, and if we're not experts in the relevant technology, anything we should be thinking about or worried about or not? >>Derek: Yeah. Well, just to name a few things, I think there are distinct justice concerns with AI. AI comes with a bias. And so when we apply AI to make decisions like who gets a job, who gets parole, who gets a promotion, who gets a mortgage. These sorts of things can have profound justice implications if they're used in a widespread way. And there's been lots of work showing the kind of bias that can creep into AI machine learning systems. I think we have to worry about epistemology. AI is increasingly, chatbots in particular, are things that people are turning to for information. They're prone to hallucinate, but they can also be weaponized to promote disinformation or promote misinformation. I think there's even something called latent persuasion where people have done studies with AI and found that using chatbots and text completion technologies can actually change our opinions slowly over time as the technology acts like a little Jiminy Cricket that's sort of whispering in our ear and suggesting how we ought to complete our sentences. So, and then I think there's actually ontological issues as well. One of the issues with AI is how, and chatbots, is how people are turning to them for companions, for therapy, for relationships. And I think one of the primary things we learn already in the beginning of Genesis is that God has created humans as distinct, and that machines are machines and people are people. One of the things I frequently tell my students is to make sure you don't build machines that try to pretend to be a person, because they're not. That can lead to a kind of ontological confusion. And I think there will be consequences if we if we begin to interact with machines as if they're humans. So those are just three things. But I think those are things that pastors ought to be concerned about too, right? Epistemology is a concern for the truth. Ontology gets to the heart of what does it mean to be human? I mean, the Bible has real answers to that question. And then of course, the ethics of AI in terms of justice and how it's used. >>Sweeney: I was at a board meeting one time, full of ministry leaders, maybe 100 people in the room. And there was a pastor who gave a talk to the rest of the board about how he uses AI to prepare to preach on Sunday morning. And that was a first for me, that was the first time I'd ever heard somebody explain what he does with AI to prepare to preach. And it wasn't terribly disconcerting, he used it just to do some research, he didn't use it to write his sermons or anything like that. But I started thinking more intently at that point about, oh my, I mean this really might make a difference even in my seminary world as so much of our lives are saturated with AI these days. And as we can let chatbots do a lot of our research for us and a lot of our thinking for us, are you worried that we might let them do too much of our thinking for us? I mean, that's sort of a simple question where you could just say, well, yeah, that could be a concern, but you've probably thought about this better than we have. How concerned in a seminary, where we're training preachers and we're training pastors, do we need to be about just encouraging people to use AI as well as they can without overdoing it? >>Derek: Yeah. No, this is going to require wisdom. It's my thought that being a preacher and preaching ... and I'm speaking as a computer scientist so feel free to correct me ... is about being able to walk alongside a particular people in a particular context. A pastor living among the people that you're ministering to, having a deep kind of immersion in God's Word, and a deep knowledge of theology, and related things, and being in tune with the Holy Spirit, and then crafting a message that's not just a bunch of information but a message that speaks to the particular people that you've come to know and that you walk alongside that's informed by the biblical story and the gospel message and is shaped and prompted by the working of the Holy Spirit. I don't think a machine can do that. I mean, if you want a little report on some theological concept, it may be able to help you with some fodder for doing research or thinking or perhaps in the preparation of a sermon, using it in the way you'd use a Bible concordance or a Bible commentary, being alert of course to hallucinations and other things that can happen. But I think the particular role of a pastor is to speak to a people in a particular context, and I don't think that's something that a machine will ever be able to do. And of course, part of it is just relationships as well among a congregation. So that's some of my thinking about AI and the pastor. >>Derek: It just occurred to me, you've used this word, hallucinations, a couple of times. And I bet not everybody listening to us right now knows what you mean by that. What is a hallucination? >>Derek: Yeah, it's a term that people have used for the tendency of large language models and chatbots to sometimes go off into the weeds, which is not a bug. It's actually a feature. It's part of how ... the architecture of a large language model includes the possibility that it will occasionally go off and output inaccurate information, just based on the fact that what the output of a large language model is, is a statistical plausible sequence of words. And sometimes that sequence is constructed in a way that sends it off into a weird direction. And the machine itself has no understanding, but it's basically putting together statistically plausible words. Large language models by their very architecture are unreliable narrators. And so this also tells us how it ought to be used, right? You don't want to substitute an apologist with a large language model or the preaching of the word with a large language model and so on. And so hallucination is part of the shortcomings of our current models, and that relates to the epistemology question I was talking about earlier. >>Sweeney: I love what you've been saying about, you haven't used this word yet, but I think it lies behind some of the advice, the incarnational nature of pastoral ministry, and the kind of thing that pastors do together with people, both in learning about them and learning to love them and to care for them, that machines will never be able to do, so I think that's great. On the other hand, I've been in contexts already, and I'm not an expert in technology, where people at church or students in the school have showed me that a chatbot can create a poem now that looks like a pretty good poem, or write a song now about a theme that we plug in to it. And if you're deaning a seminary, the first thing that comes to your mind when you learn about that is, well, I wonder if it could write a sermon that looks really great, and probably it can, but in the end what's the difference then between that and a sermon that a really good, faithful, loving pastor would preach? And would you say this incarnational dimension again is the thing that can't be replaced ever by a machine? >>Derek: Yeah, I think that's certainly a huge component of it, right? Living together, walking alongside each other, ministering to each other. I mean, the incarnation of Christ is, I think this is the words of a theologian Craig Gay once said, the incarnation of Christ is an extraordinary endorsement of embodied human existence. I mean Christ didn't come as a message or as just a text but he came embodied as a person. I think that's how the church ought to be in the world and with each other. I've written a little bit recently about virtual church and so on too. And I think that's one of the things we wanna make sure that we hold on to. I mean, certainly in times of pandemic or pestilence or disease or war we might have to use alternative means. But ideally it's living in community. And the pastor, ideally, is living within this community and preaching within that context. So that's certainly a part of it. And the work of the Holy Spirit in that community and in that preacher. >>Sweeney: Well, our time is drawing nigh here, and we like to end our podcast interviews by just learning a little bit about what our guests are doing these days so that our podcast audience, believe it or not, we're a prayerful audience of people, and they love to pray for Beeson and its students, but also people like yourself, who have been generous enough to contribute to our life together here. So what's Dr. Schuurman working on these days and how should our people be keeping you in their prayers? >>Derek: Yeah, I mean if you're willing to just pray for our computer science students who are navigating a new world and not just the work at Calvin, but Christian colleges that are teaching computer scientists that they'll be able to do so in a way that is faithful to the gospel and that will be sending out people that can be salt and light like Daniels and Babylon going off and helping to influence this area. I have been given the opportunity to do a lot of speaking. And so just to pray for a faithful Christian, winsome voice on this topic and being able to participate in the dialogues that people are having about this. And then I'm also helping to organize a conference at Calvin, which all your listeners would be invited to come to, October 8 to 10, 2026. So it's a year out, but we've already lined up some keynotes and we've got a variety of tracks, including AI in the Church. There's a distinct track called AI in the Church, which is being led by the Kelvin Institute for Christian Worship, where we'll be exploring some of the questions you brought up in more depth and more angles. In addition to AI in education, AI in business, AI in healthcare, AI in the arts, AI in the STEM fields. And just having all these tracks exploring from a Christian perspective how we ought to be faithful, given the sort of era that we're living in. And so the conference is called Wisdom in the Age of AI. And if you could pray that that would be, the preparations for that would go well, and that that would be a way for Christians to encourage each other and to think deeply about how we ought to proceed in our current context. >>Sweeney: That's great. We will. Thank you for the marvelous leadership you've been providing in this area. Listeners, this has been Dr. Derek Schuurman. He is a computer scientist, leads the Department of Computer Science at Calvin University. Also thinks very well and faithfully on issues of faith in technology. Please pray for him and his work at Calvin with the computer science students. Pray for his opportunities to speak, maybe especially among church people who need help from experts like him, thinking about how to make good use of technology. And please be in prayer for this conference, October 8 to 10 of next year, 2026, in Grand Rapids at Calvin University called Wisdom in the Age of AI. We love you and we're praying for you. Thanks for tuning in. We say goodbye for now. >>Mark Gignilliat: You’ve been listening to the Beeson podcast; coming to you from the campus of Samford University. Our theme music is by Advent Birmingham. Our announcer is Mark Gignilliat. Our engineer is Rob Willis. Our Producer is Neal Embry. And our show host is Doug Sweeney. For more episodes and to subscribe, visit www.BeesonDivinity.com/podcast. You can also find the Beeson Podcast on iTunes, YouTube, and Spotify.