Human Distinctiveness in the Era of AI
In a viral clip this week, influential American pastor, Dr. John Piper, read a ChatGPT-generated prayer aloud at The Gospel Coalition 2025 Conference. He then asked the audience, “is this praise [of God]?” before answering himself, “No!”
Piper continued: “Why were you made? Words? Computers do words better than you. Seriously. Better than me. They don’t feel anything. Therefore, the universe is created to have people who feel. This is amazing. Think of it.”
This quotation reveals a weak understanding of anthropology, specifically what distinguishes humans from Artificial Intelligence (AI)—or even from animals. We have been thinking about this question in the context of building and investing in AI technology at Volis and New Founding. In this sector, accurate anthropology is critical: which human characteristics will be replaced, augmented, or unimpacted by AI? If Christians get this right, we will have an edge over Silicon Valley secularists in applying AI in our businesses and preparing for coming technological change.
Before joining New Founding, I (Nathan) worked with rats in an animal lab for the Department of Anesthesiology at Vanderbilt University Medical Center. Rats have feelings. This may seem obvious to animal-lovers or anyone familiar with animal neurobiology, but rats can feel happiness, fear, or even depression. In classic pastoral scenes, sheep are sometimes described as being in a state of permanent emotional ecstasy. But if a wolf appears, the amygdala brain region will drive a rapid flight response in the sheep. Emotions are a cognitive tool, reducing complexity and driving behavior. The limbic system—the emotion center of the brain—is largely conserved both structurally and neurochemically across all vertebrates, including humans.
However, despite the presence of emotions, animals cannot pray. Emotion is an important part of human experience and a useful tool for forming heuristics, but it is not what makes humans distinct. Of course, all of creation, animate and inanimate, glorifies God, but only humans can pray.
Emotion in prayer can be a sign that our passions are aligned with reason, but emotion is not always necessary in prayer. Even Piper recognizes that worship and prayer can take place absent strong emotional accompaniment.
A Christian can feel nothing in a quick prayer on a certain day, but that emotionless prayer was still a real prayer. Mother Teresa famously had 40 years of “dryness”—lack of feeling—in her prayer. St. John of the Cross called this the dark night of the soul. Further, the angels in heaven can pray despite lacking the conserved biological characteristics to feel emotions in the same way we do. AI prayer, then, is not made invalid because it lacks emotion.
However, Piper’s instinct is right: AI, like animals, cannot pray. But this is because both AI and animals lack certain other distinctive human elements: a soul, moral responsibility, reflective consciousness, and above all, a rational will. This is a sharp contrast with AI, which lacks true agency—following human prompting and heuristics—or the animal, which follows emotion and associated instincts.
Prayer is an act of the will. It is directed reason consciously turning toward God—what Aquinas describes as “beseeching a superior.” An AI-generated prayer could help a Christian articulate thoughts, just as a prayer book could. But the words only become a prayer in the strict sense when they are expressed sincerely by a human in a directed manner toward God.
Thus, emotion is not the defining feature of prayer or what makes humans unique. And while emotion can be subjected to reason and perfected in virtue, indulging constant emotional experience for its own sake is not our purpose here on earth. If anything, non-volitional emotion—what Aquinas would call appetitive reaction—is what makes us like the animals.
Image Credit: Midjourney.
