Does AI have a soul? Pope Leo XIV says machines are “tools, not persons.” What the Bible says

What the Bible says

The Bible never mentions a thinking machine, so anything said about AI is drawn from what it says about people and about things people make. Three passages carry most of the weight.

Humans are made in God’s image. This is said of human beings and of nothing else in creation:

²⁶ Then God said, “Let Us make man in Our image, after Our likeness, to rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, over the livestock, and over all the earth itself and every creature that crawls upon it.” ²⁷ So God created man in His own image; in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them.

The text does not give a test for it. Nobody earns the image by reaching a level of ability, and the Bible still treats it as true of ordinary people long after Eden: murder is wrong “for in His own image God has made mankind” (Genesis 9:6), and even cursing people is wrong because they “have been made in God’s likeness” (James 3:9).

Life is breathed in by God. Here is the second creation account:

⁷ Then the LORD God formed man from the dust of the ground and breathed the breath of life into his nostrils, and the man became a living being.

Older English Bibles such as the King James say “a living soul,” which is why this verse comes up in the AI debate. In the Hebrew, though, the same phrase is used for animals in Genesis 1:24, where the Berean Standard Bible has “living creatures.” So “soul” in this verse is not a human badge. It means a living thing. What marks out the man is that God himself breathes into him. A person’s life comes from God and, as Ecclesiastes 12:7 puts it, “the spirit returns to God who gave it.”

Things we make cannot become what we are. The sharpest biblical parallel to a talking machine is not a person. It is an idol:

⁴ Their idols are silver and gold, made by the hands of men. ⁵ They have mouths, but cannot speak; they have eyes, but cannot see; ⁶ they have ears, but cannot hear; they have noses, but cannot smell; ⁷ they have hands, but cannot feel; they have feet, but cannot walk; they cannot even clear their throats. ⁸ Those who make them become like them, as do all who trust in them.

The last line is the warning. The psalm’s worry is not that idols come alive but that the people who trust them shrink. Habakkuk says the same of the craftsman who “trusts in his own creation,” asking of the idol, “Can it give guidance?” and answering, “there is no breath in it at all” (Habakkuk 2:18–19). A chatbot can do what a carved idol could not, because it does answer. That makes the warning more pointed, not less.

None of this makes making things sinful. God fills Bezalel with his Spirit “with skill, ability, and knowledge in all kinds of craftsmanship” (Exodus 31:3). Skill is a gift. The trouble starts when the thing made is treated as the maker.

What the Bible does not say

Revelation 13:15 does not name a computer. The verse says the second beast “was permitted to give breath to the image of the first beast, so that the image could speak,” and it is often quoted as a prophecy of AI. Read in its place, it is a vision about forced worship: the image speaks so that those who refuse to worship it can be killed. Christians disagree about how to read Revelation, but nothing in the text names a machine. Note too that even there, the breath is “permitted.” That is not, on our reading, a new soul. Antiqua et Nova (no. 105) makes the same comparison with Psalm 115 and points to this verse with a “cf.,” without calling it a prediction.

Daniel 12:4 is not about technology either. “Knowledge will increase” is often read as a forecast of the modern age. The verse is about a sealed book until “the time of the end,” and it says nothing about machines.

The Tower of Babel is not a verdict on tools. In Genesis 11:4 the builders want to “make a name for ourselves.” On the usual reading, the sin is the pride, not the bricks.

It does not rule on what God could do. Scripture never says God could not give a soul to anything he chose. It also never says he will or has done so for something humans build, and an argument from silence is no basis for doctrine.

How Christians differ

None of the statements below grants a machine personhood. They differ on emphasis.

• Catholic. The soul is not produced by parents: “every spiritual soul is created immediately by God” (Catechism, no. 366). The Vatican’s 2025 note Antiqua et Nova calls generative AI “a tool, not a person” (no. 59), says responsibility for its use rests with human decision-makers (no. 44), and warns that “the presumption of substituting God for an artifact of human making is idolatry” (no. 105).
• Eastern Orthodox. Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew, speaking at Athens University in May 2025, named AI among “dizzying technological advances” and “the impending robotocracy,” and said religious tradition “upholds the absolute priority of the person over systems” (AP). He did not oppose the technology itself.
• Southern Baptist. The convention’s 2023 resolution says “God alone has the power to create life,” and holds that humans, “as distinct moral agents created by God,” carry “the moral responsibility” for how these tools are developed and used.
• World Council of Churches. Its central committee said in June 2023 that “human beings – rather than profit – remain at the centre of this technology” must be the aim, citing study of “human uniqueness as created in the image of God.”
• Theologians asking harder questions. Noreen Herzfeld, in In Our Image: Artificial Intelligence and the Human Spirit (2002), argues that the image of God is best understood as relationship rather than as reason, which changes what would even count as a thinking machine being like us. Christians who read the image as reason, or as rule over creation, frame the AI question differently, though the writers we read do not conclude that a machine bears it.

Our take

The pope is right about the conclusion, but the most common argument for it is the weakest one. Saying “it has no feelings” or “it doesn’t really understand” rests the case on what a machine can do, and that line moves every year. If human worth depends on being able to think or feel, then a far better system would eventually pass us, and a newborn or a person with advanced dementia would already be in trouble.

The stronger ground is the Bible’s. The pope’s speech uses that kind of argument too, but his encyclical makes the better point: dignity “does not depend on a person’s abilities” (no. 50), and Antiqua et Nova (no. 34) says it holds for “an unconscious person.” The Southern Baptist resolution agrees. The image of God is something given, not a capacity anyone scores on. That is why a machine cannot earn it, however clever it gets, and why no person can lose it, however little they can do. Everything else follows from that, and it holds even if the engineers surprise us.

We also think Christians are worrying about the wrong thing. Sermons that hunt for AI in Revelation 13 miss the danger the Bible actually names, which is ordinary and already here: people trusting what they made, and becoming like it. A chatbot as a stand-in for a pastor, a friend or prayer is a much closer fit to Psalm 115 than any talking image in the end times. It will not die for you, it cannot pray for you, and it does not know you. Use the tool. Do not confide in it as though someone were there.

Over to you

Suppose a chatbot gave you the same comfort as a friend’s prayer on a bad night. What would still be missing, and which passage would you point to? Or, if you think we are wrong and the image of God does not settle this, where would you draw the line?

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