The Algorithm Doesn't Bear God's Image. You Do.

Genesis makes a claim so old we've stopped hearing how radical it is: a human being — every one, regardless of usefulness or output — bears the image of God. Not the image of a function performed well. The image of a Person, stamped into every person, which is precisely why you cannot morally average a human being against a spreadsheet and arrive at a coherent answer.

We're about to be tested on whether we actually believe that, because we've built machines that are, by certain narrow and very loud metrics, more capable than we are. They calculate faster. They recall more. In tightly defined tasks, some now outperform trained specialists. And a certain kind of mind — purely utilitarian, purely output-obsessed — looks at that gap and starts quietly recalculating human worth downward. If value is capability, and the machine has more capability, the math gets uncomfortable fast.

This is where the doctrine of the image of God stops being a nice thing said in church and becomes the only argument standing between you and being valued the way a machine values things: by output. Because the claim was never about capability. It was about origin and relationship — you are valuable because of whose you are, not what you produce. A newborn cannot calculate, labor, or contribute a unit of economic output, and every sane tradition on earth still recognizes that child as fully a person. An elderly man in advanced dementia, who no longer recognizes his own children, hasn't lost an ounce of that status. Place the algorithm next to him: it can calculate what he cannot. It will never, on that basis, become what he already is.

The psychologist Nick Haslam has spent much of his career studying exactly the mechanism by which humans lose this status in each other's eyes — what he calls mechanistic dehumanization: the tendency to perceive certain people as more machine-like, more interchangeable, less possessed of the "human nature" traits like warmth, agency, and depth of feeling that we automatically extend to people we value. His research, along with related work by the psychologist Susan Fiske on how we categorize others along dimensions of warmth and competence, documents a pattern worth sitting with: societies do not usually dehumanize people by calling them evil. They dehumanize them by quietly reclassifying them as machines — mere function, mere output, mere cost or benefit on a ledger. An AI-saturated culture doesn't just risk over-elevating machines. It risks training an entire population's perceptual habits to run the comparison in the wrong direction, until human beings start getting evaluated the same mechanistic way the culture has gotten used to evaluating its tools.

I think about this every time I sit with a man who has begun, even privately, to measure his worth against what an algorithm can now do faster than he can — the executive who feels obsolete because a system can draft the memo he used to take pride in. Hear this clearly: your worth was never located there. It never depended on being the fastest processor in the room. It depended, from the moment you existed, on being the kind of thing that bears an image incapable of being computed into existence and incapable of being computed out of it. The machine cannot take that from you, because it was never the metric being measured.

Build with these tools; that's good stewardship, not betrayal. But do not let their fluency talk you into forgetting what you are and they are not. You bear an image. They render an output. The moment a culture starts treating those as competing categories, it has already lost something more valuable than the argument.

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