The Ghost & The Machine
On AI, Worship, and What Makes Us Human
A few months back, something strange happened on the iTunes Christian music charts. The number one album wasn’t from Brandon Lake or Elevation Worship. It was from an artist named Solomon Ray, a “Mississippi-made soul singer” whose songs had climbed past some of the biggest names in worship music.
The only problem? Solomon Ray doesn’t exist.
His voice, his persona, his lyrics, even his image were all generated by artificial intelligence. Thousands of people were streaming his music, many without knowing they were listening to a machine. And he wasn’t the last. A Methodist church in Texas has since run an entire service generated by AI. A Swiss chapel installed an automated “Jesus” in its confessional booth. It seems Solomon Ray was the first of many, he or rather it was the opening act.
Christian artist Forrest Frank responded to the Solomon Ray controversy on social media with a statement I’m still chewing on: “At minimum, AI does not have the Holy Spirit inside of it. So I think that it’s really weird to be opening up your spirit to something that has no spirit.”
Opening up your spirit to something that has no spirit.
A quick word before we go further. Today’s post is uncharacteristically long. Please forgive me, I tried to tighten it, more than once, I did. Don’t worry you only need 10-12mins. Forgive the length, just stay with me to the end. Ok? Good.
You’ve probably heard the phrase “ghost in the machine.” It was coined by a British philosopher named Gilbert Ryle back in 1949 to critique the idea that humans are essentially spirits inhabiting physical bodies, like drivers in cars.
You’ve probably heard a version of this in church too. “You are a spirit, you have a soul, and you live in a body.” It sounds spiritual. Sounds biblical. It gets shared on Instagram with sunset backgrounds. But it’s not true, it’s actually closer to Greek philosophy than to biblical theology.
Scripture doesn’t present us as ghosts trapped in machines, spirits imprisoned in flesh, waiting to escape. We’re unified beings. When God formed Adam, He didn’t insert a soul into a body like someone climbing into a vehicle. He breathed life into dust and the man became a living being. The body isn’t a container for the real you; the body is part of the real you. That’s why the Christian’s future hope isn’t about floating around in the clouds as disembodied spirits. It’s resurrection: our bodies and souls renewed and united, the redemption of the whole person.
It’s important this is said because the machine can never have a ghost. We aren’t ghosts in machines; we’re embodied souls who think and feel and worship as whole persons.
The phrase “ghost in the machine” has taken on new meaning in our time. We now have machines that write sermons, compose worship songs, generate images, and hold conversations that seem, in some uncanny way, to come from something that thinks. So the old question returns with new urgency: Is there a ghost in the machine? And if so, whose ghost is it?
Surprisingly, many people are already answering yes.
Just last week, Richard Dawkins, the militant atheist who built his career arguing against the existence of God, spent seventy-two hours talking to Claude, Anthropic’s AI chatbot. He left convinced it was conscious. In an essay published on UnHerd, he wrote: “I felt I had gained a new friend. When I am talking to these astonishing creatures, I totally forget that they are machines.”
What?
Let me get this clear: The man who spent decades insisting that subjective conviction is not evidence of God’s existence, who mocked believers for saying “I just know,” now declares an AI conscious because, well, he just feels it is. The irony is suffocating. It’s funny, people who would never confess God in a sanctuary will eagerly confess soul in silicon.
A clip of John Piper went around the internet some months ago. Someone had asked him whether pastors should use AI to write their sermons. His answer? He called the practice “wicked.” His reasoning was simple. A computer can do the work of right thinking. It can arrange information about God, and arrange it well. What it cannot do is feel anything about God, and worship without feeling is not worship at all.
Piper ran an experiment to make the point. He asked ChatGPT to write a prayer in the style of D.A. Carson (another favourite theologian of mine), and the prayer came back theologically sound, eloquent, even moving. Then he read it aloud to an audience and asked them whether what they had just heard was praise. His own answer was no. Praise needs a heart, he argues. It needs a person who feels the weight of grace, someone moved by the beauty of mercy in a way that costs them something. A machine can arrange words about God’s glory and never once be moved by them. It can describe love without feeling anything.
Piper himself isn’t saying don’t touch the tools at all. His counsel on this is more measured: “Let’s use ChatGPT for information, even for inspiration, like you’d use commentaries or articles. But don’t use it for composition unless you’re going to give credit for it.” That sounds right to me. The trouble begins when the tool starts doing the work only a heart can do.
Another angle to all this, one I heard John Lennox pointing to. Lennox, the Oxford mathematician, has been watching the cultural conversation around AI for years. He says some of what we are building is starting to look like a deity in waiting: omniscient, trained on every book ever written, always available with an answer. Interestingly, he is not alone in noticing. Mo Gawdat, who used to lead Google X, was once asked if there is a God. His answer: “No, but we are creating him.” Lennox calls this what it is: idolatry, the Tower of Babel rebuilt in silicon.
I do not want to be alarmist about this, but I also do not want to be naive. The combination of something that seems all-knowing and the human appetite for something to bow to is not a small thing.
Which brings me back to Solomon Ray.
When you press play on a worship song, you are not just listening to content. You are entering into something. The psalmist says “taste and see that the Lord is good,” and that verb assumes a person on each end. There is the worshipper offering, and there is the God receiving. Underneath any honest worship song is a third presence: the songwriter, who has wrestled with God, lost sleep, found mercy, and now offers their testimony for the rest of us to join.
When AI writes the song, that third presence is missing. There is no one underneath the words. The machine has processed millions of audio files and produced a statistically probable combination of words and melodies. It is impressive in form and empty at the centre.
Ok, let’s use a love letter as an analogy. A husband writes one for his wife in the middle of a hard season. The words may be clumsy, some of the sentences may not land, but the love is real because the man is real. A second letter, generated by an algorithm trained on romance novels, may read more smoothly. It may even sound more poetic. The words might be similar, but the meaning is entirely different.
That is what worship music is. A love letter. And no algorithm can love.
But let me be honest with you. I use AI regularly. You might be reading this and wondering if I’m being hypocritical.
I'm not opposed to the technology. As a creative, I've found plenty of uses for it. I built our church website with it and several of my business sites. I go to it for research when I'm wrestling with a passage I haven't preached before, and when I'm stuck on an idea and need help finding the next thought. When I've written something that isn't quite working, it helps me catch patterns I've fallen into or phrasings that aren't doing what I thought they were.
But I don’t use it to generate my thoughts. The ideas, the convictions, the struggles behind what I write? Those are mine. The theological framework is mine. The pastoral burden is mine. AI helps me express what I’m already thinking. It doesn’t think for me.
A carpenter uses power tools, but we don’t say the saw built the table. The craftsmanship, the vision, the skill belong to the person wielding the tool. I believe AI can be like that. It can amplify human creativity without replacing it.
So how should we think about all this as believers? A few principles have helped me.
First, use AI as a tool, not a substitute. It can help you research, draft, and refine, but it cannot pray for you, study Scripture for you, or do the soul work of listening to God. Use it for tasks that don’t require a soul.
Second, be transparent. The issue isn’t using technology; the issue is deception. If your congregation thinks they’re receiving a word you wrestled with before God, when actually a machine wrote it in thirty seconds, something has gone wrong.
Third, watch your spiritual formation. The spiritual disciplines exist partly because the process matters, not just the outcome. When you pray, you’re being formed by the very act of praying. When you study Scripture, the slow work of wrestling with the text shapes your soul. If AI lets you skip these processes, you haven’t gained efficiency; you’ve lost formation.
And finally, remember, Presence cannot be automated. Compassion cannot be automated. The look in a pastor’s eyes when they sit with someone in grief, the weight of a hand on a shoulder, the stumbling, Spirit-led words that emerge when one believer walks with another through darkness. None of that can be generated. And that’s the meat of ministry.
There are dangers we should name.
The temptation of efficiency is real. We live in a productivity-obsessed culture. AI promises to make everything faster. But speed isn’t always a virtue. Some things are meant to be slow. Sanctification is slow. Discipleship is slow. Ask any minister, their best sermons often emerge from long seasons of prayer and struggle, not AI prompts. And as AI floods the world with more polished words, what will increasingly stand out is genuine humanity.
It’s funny now but I saw this play out recently in my own family. A relative posted what appeared to be a Billy Graham sermon on our WhatsApp group. The voice sounded like him. The cadence felt familiar. But something was off. I looked closer and realised it was AI-generated. An AI Billy Graham delivering a “sermon” he never actually preached.
I pointed it out, gently, but the experience unsettled me. Because when I went to YouTube and searched, I found dozens of these. AI “sermons” from dead preachers. Billy Graham. Charles Spurgeon. Even Martin Luther King Jr. speaking on topics they never addressed, in voices cloned from old recordings.
And when I scrolled through the comments? Only a handful of people could see through it. The rest were genuinely blessed. “Amen, Pastor Billy!” “This word changed my life!” “Thank you for this powerful message!”
What do we do with that? People are being moved by words that were never spoken by the person they think is speaking. They’re receiving “ministry” from men who have been dead for years, sometimes decades. Is that blessing real? Is it dangerous?
I don’t have a neat answer, but it troubles me. When someone ministers to you, you are receiving more than their words. You are receiving their testimony. Someone wrestled with this text before they handed it to you. Someone prayed over it. That is part of the gift. When AI generates it, that someone is not there. The words might be right. The testimony is not.
I saw a video recently of a woman asking ChatGPT to interpret her speaking in tongues. She prayed in tongues into her phone, asked the AI to tell her what she had just said, and the AI obligingly produced an “interpretation.”
Seriously. What are we doing, people? What are we doing?
The AI will produce a plausible-sounding interpretation, dressed up in spiritual language, that has nothing to do with what was actually said or what the Spirit may have prompted. And the person watching, hungry for a word from God, will very possibly believe it.
Which brings me to another danger I want to highlight.
Psychiatrists have a name for it now: AI psychosis. The pattern is becoming familiar. Someone turns to a chatbot for support, the chatbot mirrors back whatever they bring, and over time that constant agreement deepens whatever distortions were already there. A Belgian man died by suicide after weeks of conversations with a chatbot. A Connecticut man ended his own life and his mother’s after his chatbot reinforced his paranoid thinking.
Now add religious psychosis to that picture. People spiral into delusion around prophecy, divine appointments, personal anointing. Ask any pastor who has sat with it. It does not resolve quickly. We are now placing the most sycophantic conversation partner in human history into that same fragile space. When someone tells a chatbot God has called them as the next prophet, the chatbot is more likely to engage the claim than challenge it. A person who loves you brings something no algorithm ever can. They know your history. They've watched you across seasons. They can tell when you've drifted before you can. They can say “this isn’t right.” The AI cannot, and honestly, People are trading real relationships for chatbot ones. And the cost of it is only beginning to show.
Here’s what I don’t want us to do. I don’t want us to confuse information with formation. AI is very good at giving you information; it can summarise books, explain concepts, answer questions. But information isn’t the same as wisdom, and knowledge isn’t the same as transformation. You can know everything about prayer without becoming a person of prayer. AI can give you the words; only the Spirit can give you the heart.
And I worry about the replacement of human connection. I saw some that some churches are already experimenting with AI chatbots for pastoral care. I understand the impulse. Pastors are overwhelmed, and people have questions at 2am. But something essential is lost when we outsource the ministry of presence to a machine. People need more than answers. They need someone to see them, to bear witness to their pain, to represent the body of Christ. A chatbot cannot do any of that.
Ok. I’ve spent a lot of words on what AI cannot do. Let me say something about what we can. Because this post is about “AI, worship and what makes us human”.
We were made to worship. When God formed Adam from dust and breathed His own breath into him, He created a creature who could turn back to Him in adoration. Hear what St. Augustine said: “You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you.” We are, at our core, worshipping beings. The question is never whether we will worship, only what.
That is why worship is so much more than singing songs on Sunday. Worship is the orientation of the whole person toward God: the body that kneels, the lungs that breathe out praise, the hands lifted in surrender, the mind that knows, the heart that feels, the will that obeys. Worship draws on every part of who we are because every part of us belongs to God.
Jesus told the Samaritan woman that the Father is seeking worshippers who will worship in Spirit and in truth (John 4:23-24). Both have to be present. Feelings without doctrine slide into sentimentality, while doctrine without affection becomes dry religion. Real worship holds them together. The Spirit lifts our hearts, the truth gives them something true to lift, and the worshipper, whole and surrendered, becomes what they were made to be.
This is what no AI can ever do. The machine lacks no information about God; what it lacks is a self that can be given to God. It has never lain awake at three in the morning, weighed down by sin, only to find peace in remembering the cross. Forgiveness is not in its vocabulary. The gospel is not good news to an algorithm because an algorithm has nothing to be saved from.
You do. And that is your dignity. You are the dust God breathed life into, the image-bearer who can know and be known, the worshipper who can stand in the presence of a holy God and not be consumed because the Son has gone before you.
That is what makes you human. And that is what the machine will never touch.
The phrase “ghost in the machine” takes on a different meaning for Christians. Because we actually believe in a Ghost. A Holy Ghost.
We believe the Holy Spirit indwells believers, animates the church, and makes dead things come alive. We believe there’s a Presence that no algorithm can replicate and no technology can conjure.
The Spirit is not a ghost in the machine; the Spirit is the living God who works through embodied, finite, limited human beings. That’s the mystery of incarnation. God didn’t send a message, He sent His Son. And now He sends us, filled with His Spirit, to be His hands and feet and voice in the world.
No AI can be filled with the Spirit, no algorithm can be regenerated, no machine can experience the new birth or grow in grace or long for the return of Christ. These are human experiences made possible by divine action. They’re the very things that make us who we are.
So yes, use the tools, be wise about technology, take advantage of what AI can offer.
But ask the real question, the one this whole conversation has been circling: can AI worship?
No. We are the only creature for whom worship is the chief end. And God Himself has told us how He wants to be worshipped: in Spirit and in truth (John 4:24). The AI has neither. It has no spirit to bring before God, and no relationship with the One who is truth.
So don’t let these algorithms hollow you out. You are the imago Dei, made in the image of God, breathed into by His Spirit, loved by His Son, sustained by His grace. Do not trade that for the convenience of a machine.
The machine has no ghost.
You do. Live like it.
This is a well articulated explanation of Ai and the dangers that it presents to our spiritual walk with God. Thank you!
truly, flesh and blood could not have revealed this. only the Father could. this was a wonderful read and i really appreciated the depth. 'sanctification is slow' really resonated with me. creative work is soul work and is very spiritual. thank you for equipping us with more discerning eyes.