What does it mean that we are made in the image of God?
The verse is short. “So God created human beings in his own image. In the image of God he created them; male and female he created them” (Gen 1:27, NLT). I do not read it as a statement about faces. The image is not a portrait. But what is it? Theologians have placed it in different parts of us over the centuries. I want to take three of those places one at a time, because I think our moment depends on which one we choose.
First answer: the mind
The first answer locates the image in what we have inside: reason, will, the capacity to know and to choose. It has a long pedigree. The International Theological Commission, in a document published in 2004 with the permission of its then president, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, sums up the tradition: Augustine saw in the soul a reflection of the Trinity, in “memory, intelligence, and will”, and for Aquinas the image “is realized principally in an act of contemplation in the intellect” (Communion and Stewardship, §§15–16). It is also, I suspect, the answer most of us carry without knowing it.
It is true, and it is the answer AI threatens most. If the image of God is reasoning, then a machine that reasons begins to look like a rival image, and every advance in AI becomes a small theft of our dignity. I do not accept that conclusion, and I do not think the encyclical does either. It insists that AI systems “merely imitate certain functions of human intelligence” (§99). Fine. But an anthropology that rests our dignity on being the best calculator in the room is one we will lose, sooner or later, and I would rather not stake the image of God on it.
Second answer: relationship
The second answer says the image is not something we have but something we are in: relationship, with God, with others, with creation. It is the encyclical’s own answer. Men and women are created “in the image and likeness (cf. Gen 1:26-27) of the Triune God. Created for relationship, every human person is planned and willed by God to enter into communion with him, with others and with creation” (§50).
This answer is right, and it is where what I have called, elsewhere in this series, the seed lives: the particular way each of us pays attention, loves, is someone. The Church calls it dignity, the image and likeness; I call it the seed. No machine reproduces it, because it is not a function. But the relational answer, taken alone, can become passive. It describes who we are. It says less about what we are for.
Third answer: the office
The third answer is the one the text puts first, and the one our time is most afraid of. In Genesis the image comes with a task in the same breath: “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth” (Gen 1:26, RSV). And then: “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion” (1:28, RSV). On this reading the image is an office. The Commission notes that the Old Testament understanding “in part reflects the ancient Near Eastern idea that the king is the image of God on earth”, and that the Bible is “distinctive in extending the notion of the image of God to include all men” (§8). What the ancient world reserved for a king, Genesis gives to every human being.
The second chapter of Genesis tells us what kind of rule. The Lord God puts the man in the garden “to work it and take care of it” (Gen 2:15, NIV). Work and keep. Pope Francis drew exactly this lesson: “we must forcefully reject the notion that our being created in God’s image and given dominion over the earth justifies absolute domination over other creatures,” because the texts “tell us to ‘till and keep’ the garden of the world” (Laudato si’ §67).
The Church has a name for the whole of this: stewardship. The same Commission called “communion and stewardship … the two great strands out of which the fabric of the doctrine of the imago Dei is woven” (§25). And it said how the steward works: human beings exercise a “participated sovereignty over visible creation … through science, technology and art” (§59), acting “in place of the master as stewards … with a certain bold inventiveness” (§60). The same document adds the condition I accept without reservation: “Neither science nor technology are ends in themselves; what is technically possible is not necessarily also reasonable or ethical” (§61).
The verdict
Here is my answer to the question I started with. The encyclical’s answer is the second one, relationship (§50). Mine is the third, grounded in the second. To be human is to be the image of God, and the image is a vocation. It is grounded in the seed, the irreducible person; it is lived in relationship; and it is exercised as an office: to reason, understand, interpret, transform and guide creation toward its fulfilment, as stewards, not owners. The Commission warns against placing the image in any single faculty or function, whether “his intellect” or “his domination of the earth” (§9), and I take the warning: the office does not stand alone. It is the whole person, seed and relationship included, who is sent to work. Magnifica Humanitas says it in one line I wish it had developed: “creation bears the imprint of an original goodness that our human outlook must preserve, cultivate and bring to fulfilment” (§20). Preserve, cultivate, and bring to fulfilment. Not stand aside and let the world be.
The encyclical goes further, in a sentence addressed to people like me. “In one sense, technological innovation can represent human participation in the divine act of creation” (§111). It draws the consequence at once: developers “bear a particular ethical and spiritual responsibility, for every design choice reflects a vision of humanity.” And: “Created in the image of the Creator, our own work in some way continues his” (§148). And again, near the end: “In Christ, we are called to cooperate in the work of creation, rather than be disinterested observers of technological processes that limit our freedom and responsibility” (§233). If that is so, then AI is not outside the image of God. It is one more instrument of the vocation, and like every instrument it is judged by whether it serves the office or usurps it.
The objection: “you will be like God”
Now the objection, at full strength, because it is serious.
The Bible’s most famous warnings against reaching for godlikeness sit a few pages from the image. The serpent’s promise is “you will be like God, knowing good and evil” (Gen 3:5, NIV). At Babel God says of the builders, “nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them” (Gen 11:6, NIV), and scatters them. The encyclical builds its whole argument on Babel and warns against “a power that claims to dominate the heavens” (§9), against a vision in which “the fullness of life is equated with having more, reducing weakness, eliminating uncertainty and exerting total control” (§112), and against any “technological divinization” (§126). It is blunt about where that leads: “If the human being is treated as something to be perfected or surpassed, it becomes easier to accept that some lives are less useful, less desirable or less worthy” (§117). And it was not only theologians who worried. The historian Lynn White Jr., writing in Science in 1967, argued that “especially in its Western form, Christianity is the most anthropocentric religion the world has seen”, and concluded: “we shall continue to have a worsening ecologic crisis until we reject the Christian axiom that nature has no reason for existence save to serve man.”
I take all of that seriously. Here is why I do not think it defeats the thesis.
The image comes first, and it comes in God’s own voice. Genesis 1 gives us the image of God as a gift before the serpent ever speaks. The sin in Genesis 3, as I read it, is not wanting to resemble God; we already do. It is seizing that resemblance on the serpent’s terms, against the giver. Babel is the same: a name made for ourselves (Gen 11:4), not a vocation received. The line runs between grasp and gift, not between doing much and doing little. As for Lynn White’s charge, the Church answers it: a reading of Genesis that paints the human being as domineering and destructive “is not a correct interpretation of the Bible as understood by the Church” (Laudato si’ §67).
And the encyclical draws that very line, in a quotation from Pope Francis that I would put at the center of any Christian conversation about AI: “We become fully human when we become more than human, when we let God bring us beyond ourselves in order to attain the fullest truth of our being” (§128). It continues: “Herein lies the radical departure from Promethean dreams: what saves humanity is not enhanced self-sufficiency, but a relationship that liberates, a communion that transforms.” To be like God, received, is the Christian hope. To be like God, grasped, is the serpent’s. I agree with the Pope on the distinction.
Where I part from the encyclical is on what follows from it, and I should say where. It asks for “prudence, rigorous evaluation and even, at times, a slower pace in adopting AI” (§106), and for a politics “capable of slowing things down when everything is accelerating” (§107). It adds that this “does not mean opposing progress”, and I believe it means that. My disagreement is with the tone more than the substance: the danger of grasping is not a reason to stand down from the office. My own rule for innovation applies here: “Do not artificially truncate, limit, mutilate innovation. Be part of it, accompany it, and let’s see and be open to different directions when steering where it leads us.” A steward who refuses to work the garden for fear of becoming its tyrant has failed the garden too.
Perhaps, Omega
I will end with something I hold as a hope, not as a claim.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, the Jesuit paleontologist, imagined evolution as a long ascent of complexity and consciousness converging on what he called the Omega Point. In The Phenomenon of Man he gave it four attributes: “Autonomy, actuality, irreversibility, and thus finally transcendence are the four attributes of Omega.” Omega, for him, was not something we build. It was personal, and it draws us: “To be supremely attractive, Omega must be supremely present.” And in the book’s epilogue he wrote that the Christian vision of the end, “God, the Centre of centres”, coincides “so exactly, so perfectly” with the Omega Point that he would never have ventured to propose it had he not found in his faith both its model and its living reality.
I must be honest about his standing. In 1962 the Holy Office issued a warning (a monitum, not a condemnation). Leaving his science aside, it judged that in philosophy and theology his works “abound in such ambiguities and indeed even serious errors, as to offend Catholic doctrine” (in the Latin of the Acta Apostolicae Sedis: talibus scatere ambiguitatibus, immo etiam gravibus erroribus, ut catholicam doctrinam offendant). In 1981 the Holy See said that warning still stood. Yet popes since have cited his vision with approval. Benedict XVI, in a homily at Aosta in 2009: “This is also the great vision of Teilhard de Chardin: in the end we shall achieve a true cosmic liturgy, where the cosmos becomes a living host.” Francis, in Laudato si’, attached a note to his paragraph on the destiny of the universe: “In this horizon we can set the contribution of Fr Teilhard de Chardin” (§83, note 53). And Magnifica Humanitas itself, without naming him, speaks of the same horizon: “the certainty that the Father has decreed to bring all things, those in heaven and those on earth, back to Christ, the one Head” (§233).
The encyclical is right to distrust ideas of humanity surpassing itself “in a new evolutionary stage” (§116), and it is tempting to read Teilhard as a prophet of exactly that. I do not think he was. If Omega is transcendent, as he says it is, it cannot be manufactured. So when I say that AI is perhaps one more step on that road, I mean something modest. Every tool that has let human beings understand more, connect more, care for more, has been a step in the long work the image of God was given. AI may be one more. Whether the road ends where Teilhard hoped is not mine to say. What is mine to say is that we will not get there by standing down.
— Carlos Miranda Levy Coordinator of Impact, Innovation and Intelligence