Zero-Sum Anthropology

No.299: August 7, 2026

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“Cheeky Squirrel,” by Richard Croft (Wikimedia Commons)

Dear Friends,

I wonder if you ever had an adolescent spat with a friend, the sort that included the phrase, “My Dad is better than your Dad!”? I can remember several such instances in my youth. For some reason we kids felt a deep desire to defend and vindicate the honor and glory of our fathers, and viewed such honor and glory as a competition. How silly it sounds! This deep insecurity that there is only so much honor and glory to go around, and any accruing to someone else must involve a corresponding depletion for our own Dad is, it seems, a native characteristic of juvenile thinking.

My youngest daughter’s favorite baseball player is a center fielder named Byron Buxton. He is a great player, the proverbial “five-tool” guy. High on-base percentage, big power to all fields, and he has also, for many years running, been the fastest player in Major League Baseball. Alas, he’s also had an injury-plagued career. Nevertheless, Mary loves Byron Buxton and thinks he’s just the greatest.

I finally had to sit her down and “deprogram” this annoying habit she developed. We would be watching a game and I would admire something—anything, really—about another player, even a player on the opposing team. Like clockwork she would chime: “But not as good as Byron Buxton.”

Me: “Man, that Bobby Witt, Jr. is fast.”

Mary: “Not as fast as Byron Buxton.”

Me: Wow, Cedric Mullins is an awesome center fielder.

Mary: “Not as awesome as Byron Buxton.”

You get the drift. I explained that no amount of praise and laud and honor for another player diminishes in the slightest the talents and abilities and praiseworthiness of her favorite baseball player. This is an insecurity that takes time and work to overcome.

But this insecurity is also not, in my estimation, the sole possession of juveniles. In fact, we are witnessing a massive outbreak of this precise kind of insecurity from fully grown adults, and it is cropping up with increasing frequency in the discourse about our Brave New Technological World. And once you see it, you will never unsee it.

Approximately 99% (by my rough calculation) of negative commentary on Artificial Intelligence is essentially an expression of this very deep insecurity. The moves are to downplay its capabilities (it’s “slop”) and/or to minimize its quality (it’s “inauthentic,” “fake,” “insubstantial”). I don’t think the psychological roots of this are difficult to identify. We humans think of ourselves as special. We are unique. And, of course, we are right to think this. We, unlike any other creature, are imago Dei.

But it is also emerging that we have a highly impoverished (and, I will argue at length elsewhere, sub-biblical) understanding of what is, precisely, the imago Dei. We think it is some attribute or quality that we exclusively have that no other creature possesses. Given that assumption, we feel threatened by a material artifact or other creature exhibiting or displaying that quality. A machine—or a networked array of silicon chips—that “thinks,” and “reasons,” and “speaks” is, we think, intruding upon or devaluing our specialness. The privilege, honor, and glory we rightly feel about ourselves is diluted or diminished if some other creature does what we do. We fancy ourselves in a zero-sum competition, an inherently antagonistic relationship with the rest of the creaturely world. Sure, that machine can write and arrange words; but not like humans can.

“Not as good as Byron Buxton.”

This is not the biblical picture, and this is not the first time this anxiety has surfaced. In the 19th century Christians everywhere experienced what Herman Bavinck once called the “horror naturalis,” the natural revulsion at being told that human beings aren’t special; they are, rather, according to Darwin, just the accidental descendants of a common ancestor with apes. The reaction was so violent, people expended so much energy insisting on the difference and distinction between man and animal, that one might argue they overdid it and ended up dishonoring one of God’s most magnificent creatures.

Of course, I want to ask why we shouldn’t expect commonality and kinship with our fellow creatures? We too, are of the dust of the ground. A lot of Christians I know have always been deeply bothered by the oft-cited (and, it turns out, deeply misleading) “fact” that humans and chimps share something like 98% of their DNA. I have never been particularly bothered by it. Because I am not a materialist trapped into explanations involving strictly physical causality and evolutionary descent, I can simply observe that it makes all the sense in the world that two creatures from the same common Creator share a kinship and likeness and a great many attributes in common. A smart chimpanzee is no threat to my dignity as a human being imago Dei.

Neither is a smart computer.

This assumed zero-sum competitive relationship is really difficult to eradicate. I grew up hearing people confidently explaining to me that animals don’t reason. That’s an exclusively human thing. But then I would watch a squirrel in my backyard sit on a branch and, well, think about and attempt different ways to get at that bird feeder. They say that animals don’t have emotions. And I wonder if they have even the slightest familiarity with a dog. They don’t have wills, they just react according to instinct, we are told. The evidence for this is fairly lacking; in fact, if the notion were true, animals would be transparently predictable. Always acting in the exact same way in the same circumstances. But they aren’t predictable. At all. But we believe in the uniqueness of our volition with ironclad certainty, nevertheless.

The other day Jonathan Barlow published what is literally, in my estimation, the first competent theological appraisal of artificial intelligence I have seen at the popular level. He describes this imagined competitive relationship with other creatures as the fallacy of “commensurability.”

This erroneous concession that I will label ‘commensurability’ is a key error lying beneath many of our anxieties about artificial intelligence. Silicon Valley technologists place humanity and AI on the same scale, perhaps of intelligence, and then predict our supersession. Some Christian critics of AI also evidence an implicit commitment to commensurability when they desperately attempt to prove that AI doesn’t really understand, reason, or create, or that the robot is of the city and we must be of the country.

The “commensurability” is what produces the competition. To the extent that a machine “thinks,” it devalues our thinking. To the extent it writes, it devalues human writing. And so on. Now, the great irony here is that the person assuming such commensurability is doing so out of a desire to preserve or protect “humanness,” but they have in fact already devalued the imago Dei by imagining it can be threatened in the first place!

I’m not going to write my book here. But the need of the hour is a revitalized biblical doctrine of Creation and the imago Dei, a doctrine that produces something other than the typical fare we are being offered: cowering, debilitating fear toward the works of our hands. I was delighted to see Barlow use that phrase, “works of our hands”; I’ve been using myself frequently. This “thing” is a material artifact, a creation of human beings. In fact, it is probably the most awe-inspiring invention of human beings in the whole of human history—which also means it will be an artifact ripe for idolatry, abuse, and misuse. Good to keep that in mind. How amazing are human beings imago Dei? We made a physical artifact that thinks and speaks. It’s like Tom Hanks is washed up on a beach and puts a bloody handprint on a volleyball to form a face, and instead of him imagining that Wilson is speaking to him, Wilson actually speaks to him. That appears to be what is happening here. If it isn’t what is happening here, you can’t tell the difference.

Now, you might object that I am comparing apples and oranges. It is one thing for an animal to exhibit some attributes and qualities in common with humans; after all, animals are distinct creatures made directly by the Creator, and so they have an intrinsic sort of authenticity and meaningfulness. AI is a human creation or artifact, and it isn’t obvious that it is entitled to the same kind of deference or evaluation. But if the fact that something is a human artifact strips it of meaning and authenticity, then it is stripped for every human artifact. Nobody is willing to say that. In fact, with regard to most artifacts we would insist that they do have meaning and authenticity precisely because they are made by an image-bearer of God, a creaturely sub-creator and vicegerent over creation. Again, note the irony: in the name of preserving or protecting our humanity, we must insist that this particular artifact of our creation is … “inauthentic” and “meaningless.” That’s rather counterproductive. Now, not every human artifact participates in language the way an LLM does; whether and to what extent it does authentically participate in meaningful communication is an important one, but that is also a question not answered by pointing to its manufacture.

So we need thoughtful, mature people to deeply reflect on what, exactly, “thinking” and “speaking” are for a machine; to teach wisdom and instruct others on how we are to use and harness this technology for the kingdom of God and human flourishing. We image-bearers, creatures of the Divine Word, have created an artifact that participates in language at a scale never before envisioned. That is a momentous thing. But so far it seems like all we are being told by the Christian intellectual class is that if you have to, in some circumstances, if you squint, it might be okay, but you’re better off—more “human”!—if you don’t. I believe this is patent nonsense.

I don’t want to spend all my time on The Square Inch on this topic, so I will just briefly tell you a few things you can expect from a future book from me. The imago Dei is not an attribute, not a specific quality unique to humans. We are not a canvas upon which an image is painted. We are the image. As such, the image is ineradicable. It is not our reason, not our wills, not our affections, not even our “self” or personhood that by itself makes us the image of God. We are not at war with the material world or in a zero-sum struggle for meaningfulness and significance. We ought to feel no threat whatsoever by other creatures and created things expressing these qualities in accordance with their natures—indeed, it is many of these shared qualities that tether us to the very world over which we have dominion. Language and meaning are not the sole possession of human minds. The entire cosmos is spoken, created by the Word—without him nothing was made that has been made. Language is intrinsic to the very fabric of the world. We find it in every single cell in an organic body—an inexpressibly vast trove of information technology, communication in the form of DNA strands. Language is something spoken even by non-image bearers—angels, stars of the heavens (Ps.19:1-2), even rocks, if need be! And, as we now can readily see, electrons interacting with a complex array of silicon chips. This is a personal universe. Meaning is not fundamentally dependent on the human mind (people “mean more than they intend” all the time); the meaning of language is dependent on its relation to truth, the Divine Word.

And there is so, so much more to explore …. what a time to be alive!

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Soon I will publish my thoughts on The Gospel Coalition’s recent “Line in the Sand” on Artificial Intelligence. In the meantime you can go check it out and see if you notice any of the anxieties I’ve mentioned here. Thanks for reading The Square Inch Newsletter, and I hope you have a great weekend!