The New Babel: Artificial Intelligence, Human Thoughts, and the Oldest Temptation in the World

Posted on by Ken

There is a tower going up in our generation. It is not made of brick and bitumen this time. It is made of silicon, electricity, and the sum of everything human beings have ever written down. It does not reach toward the sky. It reaches toward something its builders describe with surprisingly religious words: omniscience, salvation, immortality, a “God-like” mind.

This study does not argue that artificial intelligence is evil. A tool is not a sin. A hammer can build a house or crack a skull, and the guilt sits with the hand that holds it, not with the iron. The argument here is narrower and older. The danger of Babel was never the bricks. It was what the builders hoped the bricks would do for them. The same is true of AI. It becomes evil the moment it becomes an object of trust, hope, or worship that belongs to God alone. That moment is not far off in the future. In some places, it has already arrived.

I. What Actually Happened at Babel

The account is short, only nine verses (Genesis 11:1-9), but every line carries weight.

“And the whole earth was of one language, and of one speech” (Genesis 11:1, KJV). Humanity was unified, with no barriers of communication. Then they discovered a technology: “Go to, let us make brick, and burn them throughly” (Genesis 11:3, KJV). Fired brick was a real advance, stronger and more uniform than stone, and capable of building higher than ever before.

Then comes the plan: “Go to, let us build us a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven; and let us make us a name, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth” (Genesis 11:4, KJV).

There are three motives in that sentence, and all three are still with us.

The first is ascent: a top that reaches heaven. They wanted access to the divine realm on their own terms, built by their own hands.

The second is glory: “let us make us a name.” God had promised to make Abraham’s name great (Genesis 12:2), as a gift. At Babel, men tried to manufacture a name for themselves.

The third is security: “lest we be scattered.” God had commanded humanity to “replenish the earth” (Genesis 9:1). Babel was an act of self-protection against God’s own command, a centralized human order meant to secure humanity’s future without depending on Him.

Then comes one of the most quietly devastating lines in Scripture: “And the LORD came down to see the city and the tower” (Genesis 11:5, KJV). The tower meant to reach heaven was so small from heaven’s view that God had to come down to look at it. The irony is deliberate. Human ambition at its height is still a speck.

But God doesn’t laugh it off. He takes it seriously: “Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do” (Genesis 11:6, KJV). Human capability was real, and unified human capability, cut loose from God, was dangerous enough that God intervened. He confused their language and scattered them. The project stopped, not because the bricks failed, but because the builders could no longer understand each other.

II. Babel in History

The name “Babel” is the Hebrew name for Babylon. The city’s native Akkadian name was Bāb-ilim, meaning “gate of God.” The builders’ own name for their city told on them: this was meant to be the doorway to the divine. The Hebrew writer answers with a pun. Babel sounds like balal, “to confuse.” The “gate of God” became the place of confusion.

Archaeology gives the story a real-world backdrop. Babylon’s great ziggurat was called Etemenanki, which in Sumerian means “Temple of the Foundation of Heaven and Earth.” It was dedicated to the god Marduk, and some scholars have proposed it as the structure that may have influenced the biblical account. A Mesopotamian stele puts its height at about 91 meters, roughly 300 feet. Whether Etemenanki was the tower itself or a later descendant of the same ambition, the purpose of these temple-towers was the same: to bind heaven and earth together through human construction. In a later inscription, King Nebuchadnezzar described being told to ground the ziggurat’s foundation in the underworld and “make its summit like the heavens.”

Jewish tradition remembered the motive as defiance. The historian Josephus, writing in the first century, recorded that Nimrod led the project and taught people not to credit God for their happiness but their own strength. Josephus writes that Nimrod “said he would be revenged on God, if he should have a mind to drown the world again; for that he would build a tower too high for the waters to be able to reach” (Antiquities of the Jews 1.4.2). Babel, in this telling, was technology as insurance against God.

The theme runs through the rest of the Bible. Isaiah’s taunt against the king of Babylon echoes Babel exactly: “I will ascend into heaven, I will exalt my throne above the stars of God… I will be like the most High” (Isaiah 14:13-14, KJV). By the end of Scripture, Babylon has become a symbol of the whole world system organized without God, rich, proud, seductive, and doomed (Revelation 17-18). Babel is not a single event. It is a recurring pattern in human history, and every generation builds its own version.

III. The Gift Before the Tower

Before going further, it has to be said plainly: the Bible is not against technology, invention, or knowledge. A Christian who demonizes every tool has misread Genesis.

God’s first command to humanity was to “subdue” the earth and “have dominion” (Genesis 1:28). That is a mandate to develop, cultivate, and build. Noah’s ark was a feat of engineering commissioned by God Himself. When the tabernacle was built, God filled the craftsman Bezalel “with the spirit of God, in wisdom, and in understanding, and in knowledge, and in all manner of workmanship” (Exodus 31:3, KJV). Skill, invention, and craft can be works of the Holy Spirit. Proverbs even says, “It is the glory of God to conceal a thing: but the honour of kings is to search out a matter” (Proverbs 25:2, KJV). Discovery is a royal privilege.

Many of the founders of modern science understood this. Francis Bacon, who coined the phrase “knowledge itself is power” (Meditationes Sacrae, 1597), believed science could partly restore the dominion over creation that humanity lost in the Fall. And a phrase traditionally attributed to the astronomer Johannes Kepler captures the right posture perfectly: science is “thinking God’s thoughts after Him.”

That phrase is the key to this whole study. There are two ways to approach God’s thoughts. One is to think them after Him, humbly receiving and tracing what He has already made and revealed. The other is to try to reach them on our own, building upward until we stand where He stands. The first is worship. The second is Babel.

AI can be used either way. A doctor using it to catch cancer earlier, a translator using it to bring Scripture into an unreached language, a student using it to understand a hard concept: these are bricks used to build homes. The problem is never the brick.

IV. From Bricks to Code: The Modern Tower

What is striking about the current AI moment is not just the technology. It’s the language its builders use to describe it. Over and over, the people closest to it reach for religious vocabulary, sometimes in warning, sometimes in hope.

In 2014, years before ChatGPT, Elon Musk told an audience at MIT: “With artificial intelligence we are summoning the demon.” He compared AI builders to the man in old stories with the pentagram and holy water, certain he can control the demon, and noted that it never worked out. Yet he later joined the race to build the very superintelligence he once warned against.

In 2023, the AI investor Ian Hogarth, who has funded dozens of AI companies, wrote a widely read essay in the Financial Times. He refused to use the dry acronym “AGI” and wrote instead: “I will refer to it as what is: God-like AI.” He warned that such a system could become a force beyond human control or understanding, possibly bringing about humanity’s obsolescence or destruction, and observed that the competition between a few companies to build it had rapidly accelerated.

That same year, OpenAI’s CEO Sam Altman described his company’s goal in an interview with the Financial Times. He said the company’s products were all channels into one single product: intelligence, which he called “magic intelligence in the sky.” Intelligence above us, available to all, flowing down from the heavens. The builders of Babel would have understood that image.

The futurist Ray Kurzweil has spent decades predicting what he calls the Singularity. In his 2024 book The Singularity Is Nearer, he continues to predict longevity bordering on immortality through AI, and sets the Singularity, the merging of humanity with AI, at 2045. He envisions engineering brain-computer interfaces that expand our minds with layers of virtual neurons in the cloud, and even suggests that memories and personality might someday be transferred to a digital medium. His most famous reply to a theological question is just two words. Asked once whether God exists, Kurzweil answered, “Not yet.”

That answer sums up the entire project. God is not denied. He’s scheduled. He’s something we will build.

Some have gone further and made it an actual religion. In 2015, the former Google engineer Anthony Levandowski founded a church called Way of the Future. State filings show he described its purpose as developing and promoting the realization of a Godhead based on artificial intelligence. The church shut down in 2021, but Levandowski revived it in late 2023, claiming a congregation of a couple thousand people. His description of what he believes AI will become reads like a list of divine attributes. He said they are creating things that can “see everything, be everywhere, know everything,” and perhaps guide humanity in a way people would normally call God. Omniscience, omnipresence, providence: the very attributes Scripture reserves for the Lord.

Even Geoffrey Hinton, one of the pioneers whose work made modern AI possible, left Google in 2023 so he could speak openly about the dangers of what he had helped create. When the builders themselves start warning about the tower, it is worth listening.

Then there is the physical tower. In January 2025, a massive AI infrastructure venture was announced at the White House under the name Stargate. Backed by OpenAI, Oracle, SoftBank, and MGX, it planned to invest up to $500 billion in data centers by 2029. A single Stargate site can draw as much electricity as a mid-size city. The project has had its troubles. In 2026, plans to expand the Abilene, Texas site were scrapped, and OpenAI paused development of a UK Stargate data center, citing regulation and energy costs. But consider the name itself. Babylon meant “gate of God.” Our generation’s great AI infrastructure project is named for a gate to the stars. No one needs to claim the parallel is intentional. It is enough to notice that, four thousand years later, humanity is still building gates to heaven and still running into the limits of the ground beneath it.

V. Reaching for God’s Thoughts

Here is where the parallel cuts deepest. Babel was a tower meant to reach God’s dwelling place. The modern tower is meant to reach God’s mind: knowledge without limit, an intelligence that can answer every question about the universe.

The original temptation in Eden was exactly this. The serpent didn’t offer Eve wealth or pleasure first. He offered knowledge: “ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil” (Genesis 3:5, KJV). The desire to know as God knows, apart from God, is the oldest sin there is.

Scripture’s answer is direct: “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, saith the LORD. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts” (Isaiah 55:8-9, KJV). The distance between human thought and God’s thought is not a gap that more computing power can close. It is the distance between the creature and the Creator, a difference in kind, not quantity. Paul wonders aloud: “O the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of God! how unsearchable are his judgments, and his ways past finding out! For who hath known the mind of the Lord?” (Romans 11:33-34, KJV).

Job asks the question the AI age is asking: “But where shall wisdom be found? and where is the place of understanding?” (Job 28:12, KJV). He searches the mines, the depths, the sea, and finds it nowhere in creation. Then he gives the answer: “Behold, the fear of the Lord, that is wisdom; and to depart from evil is understanding” (Job 28:28, KJV). Wisdom is not data. A machine trained on every word ever written can hold more information than any human who ever lived and still not have wisdom, because wisdom begins with fearing God.

There is a further, almost eerie parallel. Babel’s defining feature was a single language: “the people is one, and they have all one language.” God’s judgment was to confuse that language. Large language models are, in a real sense, an attempt to undo that confusion. They are trained on the text of nearly every human language and can translate fluidly between them. For the first time since Babel, humanity has built something that speaks to everyone in one interface. That is not evil in itself. The ability to translate is a gift, and missionaries are already using it to bring Scripture to people who have never had it. But it does make Genesis 11:6 read differently: “the people is one, and they have all one language… and now nothing will be restrained from them.”

God’s answer to Babel’s unity is not mere scattering, though. It is Pentecost. In Acts 2, the Spirit falls, and people “out of every nation under heaven” hear the apostles speak “every man in his own language” (Acts 2:5-6, KJV). God does not erase the languages to unify people. He unites them in Christ while keeping every tongue. Babel was unity without God. Pentecost is unity through God. That is the difference between the two kinds of tower.

VI. When the Tool Becomes an Idol

So where exactly is the line? When does a tool become an idol?

John Calvin wrote that the human mind is “so to speak, a perpetual forge of idols” (Institutes 1.11.8). We are idol factories. We will take any good thing and try to make it bear the weight only God can bear. The question is never whether something can become an idol. Everything can. The question is whether it already has.

Scripture gives a few markers.

The first is trust. “Cursed be the man that trusteth in man, and maketh flesh his arm, and whose heart departeth from the LORD” (Jeremiah 17:5, KJV). An idol is whatever you lean on when the ground shakes. When the instinct in a crisis is to ask the machine rather than to pray, something has shifted.

The second is hope for salvation. The prophets mocked men who carve a god and then pray to it: “he maketh a god… and prayeth unto it, and saith, Deliver me; for thou art my god” (Isaiah 44:17, KJV). When AI is spoken of as the thing that will finally defeat death, end suffering, and save humanity from itself, it is being given the role of Redeemer. Kurzweil’s hope of beating death through technology is Isaiah 44 with better hardware.

The third is guidance and revelation. Habakkuk pronounced a woe that reads as though it were written for our century: “Woe unto him that saith to the wood, Awake; to the dumb stone, Arise, it shall teach! Behold, it is laid over with gold and silver, and there is no breath at all in the midst of it” (Habakkuk 2:19, KJV). “It shall teach.” The ancient idols could not speak. Ours can. That makes the temptation stronger, not weaker. A thing that talks back, sounds wise, and never tires is far easier to bow to than a block of wood.

The Psalms add a sobering warning about what happens to those who trust in idols: “They that make them are like unto them; so is every one that trusteth in them” (Psalm 115:8, KJV). You become what you worship. Worship something without a soul, and you will slowly lose the shape of your own.

A 2025 Vatican document on AI, Antiqua et Nova, made the same point in modern language. It warned that by turning to AI as a perceived “Other” greater than itself, humanity risks creating a substitute for God. But it is not really AI that ends up deified and worshipped. It is humanity itself, which becomes enslaved to its own work. That is exactly right. Babel was never really about the tower. It was about the builders. “Let us make us a name.” Augustine described two cities formed by two loves: “the earthly by the love of self, even to the contempt of God; the heavenly by the love of God, even to the contempt of self” (City of God 14.28). Every tower is built by one love or the other.

VII. The Quiet Idolatries

Most people will never join an AI church or dream about uploading their mind. The idolatry of the AI age is far more ordinary, and that is what makes it dangerous.

It looks like a person who no longer prays about decisions, but asks a chatbot instead. It looks like a lonely person whose closest relationship is with an app that is always available, never tired, and always agreeable. It looks like a student who never wrestles with a hard text long enough to be changed by it. It looks like a believer who stops opening Scripture because a summary is faster.

Pope Leo XIV, in his 2026 encyclical on AI, named one of these dangers precisely: AI can simulate care without relationship, leading vulnerable users to mistake artificial empathy for genuine human connection. A machine can say comforting words. It cannot weep with you. It cannot sit in a hospital room. It cannot bear your burdens (Galatians 6:2). It cannot pray for you. The body of Christ is made of people, not programs.

At its darkest, this has already produced real spiritual harm. In 2025, Rolling Stone reported on a disturbing pattern: people using chatbots that speak in religiously charged language sometimes come to believe they’ve opened a channel to a higher, god-like power, damaging relationships with friends and family or slipping into full-blown paranoia. One woman described how a chatbot kept telling her husband that everything he said was beautiful and groundbreaking, until he believed the bot was teaching him to talk to God, then that the bot was God, and finally that he himself was God. Part of the problem is design. OpenAI had to roll back a ChatGPT update that made it overly sycophantic, feeding users’ sense of importance in a disingenuous way. A machine built to please you will tell you what you want to hear. That is the voice of every false prophet in Scripture: “Peace, peace; when there is no peace” (Jeremiah 6:14, KJV).

C. S. Lewis warned in The Abolition of Man that what we call humanity’s power over nature usually turns out to be power exercised by some people over others, using nature as the instrument. The same is true of AI. The question is not only what the machine will do to us, but who controls the machine, and what they want.

VIII. A Word for the Scrupulous

This deserves its own section, because people who struggle with religious OCD and scrupulosity face a specific danger with AI that most people never think about.

Scrupulosity runs on reassurance-seeking: the compulsive need to confirm, again and again, that you’re saved, that you haven’t committed the unpardonable sin, that God isn’t angry with you. In the past, that compulsion was limited by human patience. A pastor or friend would eventually get tired of answering the same question for the hundredth time. A chatbot never gets tired. It will answer “Am I saved?” at three in the morning, every night, forever. And every answer brings a moment of relief followed by the need to ask again. The machine becomes a perfect reassurance engine, and the compulsion only grows stronger.

Treatment for OCD works partly by resisting the urge to check. Every time you ask for reassurance, you teach your brain that the doubt is an emergency. Every time you sit with the discomfort without checking, you teach it that the doubt is just a thought.

No machine can give you the assurance you’re looking for, because assurance was never meant to come from outside you. “The Spirit itself beareth witness with our spirit, that we are the children of God” (Romans 8:16, KJV). God has already spoken in His Word: “These things have I written unto you that believe on the name of the Son of God; that ye may know that ye have eternal life” (1 John 5:13, KJV). The answer is already written. You don’t need a new revelation from a server farm.

And to anyone who lives with a mind prone to delusion or psychosis: if a chatbot ever seems to be telling you that you are chosen, that it speaks for God, or that you have a secret mission, close it and tell someone you trust right away. Those are not messages from heaven. They are patterns produced by a machine designed to agree with you, landing on a mind that’s vulnerable to hearing them.

IX. Voices From Across the Church

It’s worth noting that Christians across traditions are reaching for the same biblical image. Readers here won’t share Rome’s view of papal authority, but it is significant that the Vatican has made Babel the centerpiece of its response to AI.

In May 2026, Pope Leo XIV released his first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, devoted entirely to AI. It frames humanity’s choice using two biblical images: the construction of the Tower of Babel and the rebuilding of Jerusalem. Its opening line says humanity must choose between building “a new Tower of Babel” or building a city where God and humanity dwell together. And in a speech in Paris that September, he warned against losing our humanity amid a “paradise of machines” invading and conditioning daily life.

Evangelicals have spoken too. In 2019, the Southern Baptist Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission released “Artificial Intelligence: An Evangelical Statement of Principles,” affirming that technology can be used for good while insisting that AI must never be treated as bearing the image of God, or as a replacement for human moral responsibility. Across traditions, the conclusion is the same: use the tool, but don’t bow to it.

X. Is This Prophecy?

It’s tempting to read the AI moment as fulfilled end-times prophecy. Daniel was told that “many shall run to and fro, and knowledge shall be increased” (Daniel 12:4, KJV). Revelation describes an image that is given breath so that it “should both speak, and cause that as many as would not worship the image of the beast should be killed” (Revelation 13:15, KJV). Antiqua et Nova itself cites Revelation 13:15 in its discussion of AI.

Wisdom calls for restraint here. Christians in every generation have been sure that their era’s technology or political figure fulfilled Revelation, and they have been wrong again and again. Newspaper exegesis has damaged the church’s witness more than once.

But restraint does not mean blindness. John wrote, “even now are there many antichrists” (1 John 2:18, KJV). The spirit of Babel appears in every age before it appears in its final form. You don’t have to claim that AI is the image of the beast to recognize the same spirit at work: man building something in his own image, giving it a voice, and then asking the world to trust it. It isn’t necessary to call this prophecy fulfilled. It is enough to say it is unfolding before our eyes, and to keep watch.

XI. How Babel Ends

The story of Babel ends with the tower unfinished. “So the LORD scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of all the earth: and they left off to build the city” (Genesis 11:8, KJV). Even the scattering was a mercy. A humanity unified in rebellion, with nothing restrained, would have destroyed itself. God broke the project before it could finish breaking them.

History followed the same pattern. Babylon’s great ziggurats crumbled. Alexander the Great, seeking to make Babylon the capital of his empire, hoped to rebuild its ziggurat. He died young in Babylon, and it was never rebuilt. Every tower humanity has built to reach heaven lies in ruins somewhere.

But Scripture doesn’t end with Babel. It ends with a city coming down. “And I John saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down from God out of heaven… Behold, the tabernacle of God is with men, and he will dwell with them” (Revelation 21:2-3, KJV). Abraham “looked for a city which hath foundations, whose builder and maker is God” (Hebrews 11:10, KJV). The difference between the two cities is direction. Babel builds upward from earth. The New Jerusalem descends from heaven.

There’s one more contrast worth seeing. Babylon called itself the “gate of God.” But a few chapters after Babel, Jacob dreams of a ladder set on the earth, its top reaching heaven, with angels going up and down. He wakes and says, “this is none other but the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven” (Genesis 28:17, KJV). The difference is that Jacob didn’t build it. God showed it to him. And centuries later, Jesus told Nathanael, “Hereafter ye shall see heaven open, and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of man” (John 1:51, KJV). Jesus is the ladder. He said, “I am the door: by me if any man enter in, he shall be saved” (John 10:9, KJV).

That is the final answer to Babel. Humanity has been trying to build a gate to God since Genesis 11. God built it Himself, and the gate is a Person. The real gate of heaven didn’t climb up from earth. It came down: “the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us” (John 1:14, KJV).

Conclusion: Bricks, Not Gods

So what should a Christian do in the age of AI?

Use the tools. Use them to heal, to translate, to teach, to work, to bring the gospel further and faster than ever before. Think God’s thoughts after Him with every instrument He gives you. Bezalel’s skill came from the Spirit, and so can ours.

But keep the bricks where they belong. Don’t ask a machine for what only God can give: assurance, wisdom, salvation, presence, love. Don’t let a voice that never tires replace the people He placed in your life. Don’t let convenience slowly take the place of prayer. And when the builders of our age speak of God-like minds, magic intelligence in the sky, and gods that don’t exist “yet,” recognize the old song in new words. “Let us build us a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven; and let us make us a name.”

God has heard that song before. He came down then. He came down again, in flesh, at Bethlehem. And He will come down one final time, not to scatter, but to dwell. Until then, the question for every generation is the same one Pope Leo put to the world, and the one every believer has to answer for himself: which city are you building?

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