How Does the Bible Shape Our Technology Use?

A Fast-Changing World

Imagine the world 100 years ago. If you lived in a rural area, you would probably go to school in a one-room schoolhouse, and students living in a city might go to a bigger school where children were split up according to age, but many of your classmates would leave school by 8th grade to work and help support their families.

For fun, you might gather around the radio to listen to one of the popular programs of the day—the Grand Ole Opry opened in 1925, but you could also listen to westerns or comedies.

A family gathered around their radio.

Does that sound different from how we live today? For one thing, there was no such thing as the Internet, cell phones, TV, or video games. People were much more focused on their local communities because technology didn’t connect us as much with the outside world.

People who were alive during the invention of cell phones, when the Internet was growing in popularity and accessibility, can remember how much that changed many aspects of our lives. Instead of flipping through a paper encyclopedia at the library, we could look it up through Ask Jeeves or Yahoo, two early search engines. I remember chatting online with my first international pen pal, long before worries about Internet safety were popularized, and thinking how cool it was that we could send messages across the world in only seconds!

Today, artificial intelligence is changing society just as much as the Internet did a generation ago—but many argue it isn’t for the better. Videos created with AI are often called “slop,” but that doesn’t stop them from crowding out videos created by humans. One of the worst consequences of AI happens when people start turning to AI chatbots rather than other people. AI can’t really think or love, but sometimes people have what feel like real conversations that encourage destructive tendencies. This can have very sad outcomes.

A boy looking at a laptop
Photo by Zeesha on Unsplash

How the Bible Should Guide Us

God created us in his image to have dominion over the earth (Genesis 1:26). Part of that is using the earth’s resources to create technology. However, because people are sinful, the technology we produce can be used for good or evil—and the Bible helps us to tell the difference. It also gives us some helpful guardrails to keep us from hurting ourselves or others with our technology use.

Can you think of any truths from God’s Word that can help us to use technology for good instead of causing harm? First, the Bible tells us that God’s image makes us unique in creation—we can’t replace human relationships with anything, even animals, which are living beings that can relate to us at some level. AI doesn’t even do that—it’s a machine trying to predict what you want it to say, and it doesn’t even do that very well sometimes. AI is not your friend.

That also means that we can’t replace human creativity with a machine substitute. We can glorify God with our singing, painting, or other endeavors, but a machine can’t. We should exercise our own minds and skills by doing things ourselves instead of outsourcing them to AI.

The Bible also forbids lying (Exodus 20:16)—which means you can’t get AI to do something for you and claim it’s your work, especially for a school assignment or a job. There are times when AI can be used legitimately to help with some aspects of a task, but you should always be honest about how much AI helped you do something.

Finally, the Bible calls us to live our lives to glorify God. That means that whenever we use AI, the Internet, or anything else, we should do so in a way that glorifies him.