In December 2024, Apostle Ron Carpenter, Jr. made waves across the Christian world when his ministry released the “Ron Carpenter Ministries Advanced Archive” app, rebranded today as Ron Carpenter AI.
The app provides 24/7 access via text or audio call to an AI version of Apostle Ron that was trained on over 30 years of sermons by the megachurch pastor. Originally launched with a $49 a month subscription, the app is now free to the public, and anyone can receive Apostle Ron’s “biblical wisdom” for their “marriage challenges, financial stress, spiritual growth, family matters, career guidance, [and] personal faith.”
Considering this is 2025, I know that I am late to the AI Apostle collective freak out. The app’s release was met with media coverage in major Christian outlets, secular media networks, and, of course, an avalanche of pastors’ blogs. Coverage paralleled the general conversations on AI: praise among early AI enthusiasts, hand-wringing among intellectual types, and practiced neutrality elsewhere. A lot of people seem to have an opinion on AI Apostle Ron.
Though I’m not sure mine is set just yet.
Full disclosure, I grew up in the orbit of Apostle Ron—the one made of meat, to be clear. As a teen, I went on trips to his South Carolina megachurch, he spoke at my home congregation, and I had meaningful faith experiences at events put on by his ministry. I once even attended a group dinner with him at our local Ruby Tuesday’s. While I cannot say he was a great spiritual influence on my life, I can say that my teenage Pentecostal self felt overimportant as he supped on the all-you-can-eat salad bar that night.
I understand the appeal of Apostle Ron in the flesh, but I’m more puzzled by the appeal of the AI version and how we got to this point in the first place. How can a Christian leader look at artificial intelligence technologies and see a spiritual opportunity? And how can individual Christians look to an AI agent for answers about life’s deepest mysteries?
As I started poking, it turns out that this sort of thing is not really new at all. Christian’s have been dreaming of AI for a long, long time.
This Christian history of AI exists in two streams. In this post, I want to focus on the first stream, the one that centers on a philosophical mode of reasoning within the Christian tradition. To do this, I’ll be relying a lot on Stephen W. Williams’ and George M. Coghill’s short histories of AI, as well as Jonathan Gray’s excellent piece on computational imagination. In the next post, I’ll move to the more fantastical worlds of Christian automata—real and imagined. Perhaps by then, I might have something more definitive to say about AI Apostle Ron.
Philosophically, the story starts much earlier than Christianity. As Hubert Dreyfus has argued, the path toward AI was cut when Plato insisted that (1) all truth could be stated as propositional truths and (2) that the mind is superior to the sorry meat bags—my words, not Plato’s—we are stuck in. In short, argues Dreyfus, Plato severed the faculty of reason from the human body and produced a philosophical tradition that was bent on achieving a rationality that was not encumbered by human frailty. And so, when his student Aristotle defined humanity as the ‘rational animal,’ Plato’s dilemma was baked into the Western philosophical tradition. Reason was a process burdened by the limitations and vicissitudes of human existence. What was needed was access to a rationality that was not so encumbered.
One of the first Christian thinkers to truly lighten the load was Ramon Llull (c.1232–c.1315), a mystical Mallorcan missionary in the late 13th century. In his thirties, Llull experienced a series of intense visions that led him to three major conclusions: (1) he needed to take on religious vows, (2) he must devote his life to converting Muslims, and (3) he must write a book that conclusively proved the errors of other faiths. After purchasing a Muslim slave to serve as a tutor, Llull established a hermitage where he spent years studying Islamic, Jewish, and Christian scholastic texts.
In his studies, Llull came to reject the syllogistic approach of his fellow Christian scholars. Their approach—presenting one truth against another and then proceeding toward a solution—could not offer conclusive enough proof. Rather, Llull became inspired by the zairja, a device created by Islamic astrologers that could generate predictions by mechanical means. Taking this idea and turning it towards the philosophical and theological, Llull produced the Ars Magna. The Ars is a sort of system of universal logic that seeks to begin with general principles and then use these principles in combinatorial processes to provide proofs for larger, more complex ideas (e.g., God is a Trinity). Often described as algebraic or algorithmic, Llull was fond of complex diagrams and conceptual notation.
Llull’s Ars was no machine, but rather a process, a system, for outsourcing logical judgements to achieve definite conclusions based on first principles. In short, it was a tool meant to mechanize the process of reasoning itself. It was a thinking machine.
Lull’s insights would go on to inspire other Christian’s like the Protestant, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716). While Leibniz critiques Llull’s categories, he was nevertheless inspired by his combinatorial processes, his notation style, and his quest for mechanizing rational disputation. A true companion to Llull, Leibniz believed that:
The only way to rectify our reasonings is to make them as tangible as those of the Mathematicians, so that we can find our error at a glance, and when there are disputes among persons, we can simply say: Let us calculate, without further ado, to see who is right.
The universal symbolic language that would make this calculus possible never fully materialized (just the normal calculus, which Leibniz invented). Still, he was able to make a good start by developing a detailed notation system for formal logic. It would take another 200 years before engineers stumbled on the same sort of notation to describe the complex worlds of circuitry. For this, Norbert Weiner suggests that Leibniz should be hailed as the “patron saint of cybernetics.” Importantly, Leibniz’s focus on combinatorial forms of logic was put to theological ends. Alongside his work on mathematics and metaphysics, Leibniz also produced rational defenses of God’s existence and God’s justice, updating and revising classical forms of the ontological and cosmological arguments.
More could be said of other philosophical Christian luminaries like Charles Babbage (1791-1871) who used his work on Difference Engines (i.e., automatic mechanical calculators) as a foundation for his Ninth Bridgewater Treatise. The Treatise was an extended essay that argued that “there exists no fatal collision between the words of Scripture and the facts of nature” due to God’s omniscient foresight to encode a vast array of laws into the universe upon its creation.
However, I’d like to end this brief history by jumping forward to the 20th century thinker Donald MacKay, a key contributor to the development of artificial intelligence. With a background in physics and electronics at St Andrew’s University, MacKay was posted to the Admiralty Research Establishment during World War II. There, he developed an interest in information theory and started to hash out ideas on mind-like behaviors. In 1956, MacKay served as one of the United Kingdom’s representatives to the Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence, a summer workshop which launched the field of artificial intelligence. MacKay eventually took his interest in information theory and applied it to the study of the human brain. In his exploration of the early days of AI, MacKay fully engaged one of the classic philosophical and theological problems of the Christian tradition: the conflict between determinism and free will, a particularly good subject considering his interest in the mechanization of thinking.
MacKay introduced two related concepts into the technical and philosophical discussion: complementarity and logical indeterminism. Complementarity refers to the way two competing definitions of an object can actually complement on another because the “context of the concepts used [in each definition are] mutually exclusive.” For example, imagine a neon sign that reads “Anxious Bench.” One could accurately describe the physical and chemical properties needed to make a neon sign glow, but that description would fail to adequately account for the message of the sign itself, which a straightforward reading of the letters would accomplish. In short, mechanistic causation can not necessarily describe to totality of a complex phenomenon like thought.
MacKay’s logical indeterminism works on the same principle of mechanized thinking. Imagine you had a tool called a cerebroscope that could allow someone to accurately measure the mechanical state of a brain, be it meat or machine. If an outside observer looked through the cerebroscope, they could see the determined mechanistic functions of the brain. However, if that observer tried to look through the cerebroscope at their own brain, they would never be able to receive an accurate reading because the act of observation would continually alter the mechanized state of their brain, creating a sort of feedback loop.
Taken together, MacKay’s observations suggest a straightforward conclusion: Any thinking agent’s actions are both completely free and mechanistically determined. It is a simple matter of observational positioning. Applied theologically, as MacKay did in the Scottish Journal of Theology, this means there is no real contradiction in affirming the complete sovereignty of God and complete human freedom.
Now, I admit, we are still a long way from explaining why we live in a world with an AI Apostle. Yet, this short history does suggest a few things about the “Christian” nature of the history of artificial intelligence and its use today.
First, it illustrates that Christian thinkers were active participants in the historical processes that led to the creation of AI. A simple, but needed observation.
Second, it illustrates that, far from incidental, Christian motivations and concerns were instrumental in laying the technological groundwork that would ultimately produce AI. In each of the above thinkers, the Platonic/Aristotelian ideal of pure, unencumbered rationality wedded itself to deeply felt Christian hopes, desires, and ideals. For Llull, pure reason offered a path towards fulfilling his missionary vocation; for Leibniz, it was the language of logic that suggested the possibility of universally verifiable truth claims and firm evidence for God; for MacKay, computational thinking provided new ground to understand the relationship between divine omniscience and the agency of created things. The cradle of artificial intelligence was, at least in part, a religious one.
Finally, perhaps the nature of this history sheds some light on current uses of AI. Llull and Leibniz were trying to address the fundamental problem with rational argumentation: the human element. They imagined machines that could perform these tasks for us, think for us, think better than us. In so doing, these imagined machines could produce rational truths which were clear, indisputable, and certain.
Most people do not yearn for a symbolic system of universalizing logic or proofs for the existence of God. They are not after universalizing theories. No, most of us just want some trustworthy advice on how to live our lives. In that yearning, the straightforward machinations of a large language model trained on 30 years of sermons by a guiding light might just be worth a download.
Select your answer to see how you score.
