Wake Up, Look Up

Hello, everyone. Thanks for listening to Wake Up, Look Up, a podcast where we connect events happening in real time to the gospel of Jesus Christ. I'm Zach Weihrauch. In today's episode, we're talking about artificial intelligence in schools, and we're asking the question, is this a good thing? This is prompted by a fascinating article in the New York Times about how Miami Dade County school system is launching into an AI era.

Now for the past two years, Dade County has resisted artificial intelligence for all the reasons you might imagine. They were worried about widespread cheating, about advantaging certain students versus others, but they've recently decided AI is not just the future, it's the present. And if they resist it, they're not actually equipping students to participate in the modern world. So they're leaning in. In fact, training over a thousand teachers on how to deploy Google's Gemini, their AI chatbot, to more than a 5,000 high school students.

They're doing things like having former presidents give lectures using artificial intelligence on their own experience in history, all kinds of fascinating approaches. The school district is saying, hey. We view this as essential job prep because these students are gonna need to use artificial intelligence in their future work. They also view it as teaching students how to use it responsibly and how to think critically about what's appropriate and what is not appropriate. Now they developed a vetting process of educators who will look at the way it's being used and try to detect different, irregular uses of it.

But it's an interesting question because the question here really is bigger than schools. It's just culturally, should we lean into this or away from this? As a church, as Christians, how should we think about artificial intelligence? Well, I think if the past two hundred years have taught us anything, it is that the church typically loses when it spends the first ten years of any innovation being the institution that is against it. Look.

The truth is the Bible tells me cheating begins in the heart. Laziness begins in the heart. AI is a tool that a lazy heart might use, but that's no different than any other tool that a lazy heart might use. AI as a tool is frankly benign. What we wanna try to do is find a way to lean into its usage in all the right ways.

Let me give you some biblical warrant for this. The first thing I want you to think about is that Colossians three says, whatever you do, do as unto the Lord. I don't want the church to spend ten years holding out against artificial intelligence just to be ten year years behind asking what does it look like to use AI to the glory of God. Are there some uses of artificial intelligence that are inherently unjust or wicked or sinful? Absolutely.

Wicked people will do wicked things with just about anything. But does it follow that every use of artificial intelligence is broken? Absolutely not. There are a lot of really great ways to use artificial intelligence. Let me give you an example.

I have many friends who are preaching their sermons on the weekends in English, but artificial intelligence is translating it overnight into multiple languages so that the preacher looks like he's preaching in your heart language of, let's say, Russian, making now sermons that were once only available to a small group of people available to many more people. Is that to the glory of God? Absolutely. Well, that comes from innovators leaning in, not away from artificial intelligence. We have to work second on cultivating discernment, not dependence.

We have to test everything and hold to what is good. That's the advice Paul gives us in first Thessalonians five. Trying to work with artificial intelligence will allow us to say this is helpful. This is not. This is beneficial.

This is not. Again, you don't get that just by standing at a distance and saying, oh, no. I'm scared. This is bad. You get it by actually wrestling with the tool and its different uses.

We also have to begin, third, to equip the next generation. In Proverbs, when the writer tells us to train up children in the way they should go, he doesn't mean training them to live in our world. It means training them using universal moral principles to live in the world they're going to have. Artificial intelligence is going to be everywhere in the lives of our children and grandchildren. And if we wanna be the ones teaching them how to use it well, we have to lean in.

Now when we lean in, here are some cautions. Fourth, we have to guard human dignity. There is a danger of artificial intelligence replacing people in some meaningful ways, replacing human interaction in some meaningful ways. That's why we have to get in the arena so that we can show children what it looks like to leverage a tool, but to always stop short of anything that threatens the fact that humans alone are made in the image of God. When Jesus calls us to be salt and light, he's calling us to do it in the world in which we live.

And for us, that's a technological age. So how can we be salt and light in the world of artificial intelligence? We can't be if we're too busy standing on the sidelines wagging our finger at everybody else. I love what Dade County is doing. I hope more families do it, more churches do it, so that Christians will not just be moral and just in their use of AI, but even maybe leaders and innovators in that field.

Hey. Thanks for watching this episode of Wake Up, Look Up. If you enjoyed it, please help us get the word out by sharing it with someone you think might benefit from it. And while you're here, make sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel to get further content or even download the CCC app where you'll find even more resources to help you grow in your faith and relationship with Jesus Christ.

Have an article you’d like Pastor Zach to discuss? Email us at wakeup@ccchapel.com!