Smooth Things: A Reply to Collin Hansen on AI

In "Why Humans Pretend to Be Computers" (The Gospel Coalition, October 22), Collin Hansen argues that AI's power rests on a false perception of objectivity and infallibility, that its builders have "conjured a counterfeit god," and that Christians should resist its song as Odysseus resisted the sirens. The essay gets its facts wrong, misplaces the idol, and reaches for Homer where the Reformed tradition had a sharper answer. Its sharpest charge, that people trust a voice because of who stands behind it, lands first on the ministry that published it.

Start with the facts, since Hansen builds his case on them. He says that two days after Sam Altman tweeted "her" in May 2024, OpenAI changed its model names, and the latest model became o1, after the operating system OS1 in the film. OpenAI announced o1 on September 12, 2024, four months later. It said the name restarted its numbering at 1 for a new kind of model.¹ The film connection is Hansen's invention. His second pillar is the claim that "therapy and companionship" is the top use of AI, "according to Harvard Business Review." That ranking came from a consultant's curation of posts, drawn mainly from Reddit forums.² When OpenAI studied 1.5 million actual ChatGPT messages, conversations about relationships and personal reflection made up about 1.9 percent. Practical guidance, information-seeking and writing made up about 80 percent.³ Hansen's suggestion that OpenAI's valuation rests on lonely people seeking a friend rests on a Reddit sample. He also says Johansson "exposed his lie" about the voice. The Washington Post, working from casting documents and recordings, reported that the Sky actress was hired months before Altman ever contacted Johansson.⁴ Hansen presents a disputed question as settled.

The theology is weaker than the facts. Hansen says AI's value depends on "convincing you it's not like humans," on seeming "objective in its advice, infallible in its judgments." But every use he lists for his own argument points the other way: a counselor for your new relationship, a medium for your future, a confidant who "never tells you what you don't want to hear." Nobody wants that from an oracle. He wants it from a flatterer. Calvin, on Isaiah 30:10, named the appetite that Hansen misses. When Israel told its prophets to "speak to us smooth things," the prophet "points out the very source; for they were ready to receive flatterers with unbounded applause, and would willingly have allowed their ears to be tickled in the name of God." The world "is not only liable to be carried away by delusions, but earnestly desires them."⁵ The danger was never a myth of objectivity. It was the hearer's demand for a prophet who agrees with him.

That error carries into his main charge. Hansen says AI's creators have "conjured" a counterfeit god. The Reformed did not believe idols were conjured by their manufacturers. Calvin: "the human mind is, so to speak, a perpetual forge of idols."⁶ John Preston said what makes a thing a god: "that which a mans minde is set most upon, and which he looks for comfort from, in time of need, this they count as God: so that, whatsoever it be ... if you set your minde upon it, you make it as God."⁷ James Durham called this the subtlest idolatry, committed "when lawful things are made Idols."⁸ By blaming Silicon Valley for conjuring the idol, Hansen lets the worshipper off. The idol is made on the user's side of the screen.

Nor is the flipped analogy new, as Hansen thinks. He dates the reduction of man to machine to "the later 20th and early 21st centuries." Richard Baxter was answering it in 1675, against Hobbes, for whom human volition "is necessitated by superiour or natural Causes as much as any motion in a Clock or Watch."⁹ Scripture had already explained why it happens: "They that make them are like unto them; so is every one that trusteth in them."¹⁰ Calvin's gloss could be Hansen's thesis if he had read it: "there is in an idol some likeness to man; it has various members but no understanding."¹¹ The psalm, not Spike Jonze, is the source of the insight Hansen wants.

Then the remedy. Hansen's answer is Odysseus at the mast: stop the ears and refuse the song. The Reformed called the arts gifts of the Spirit. Calvin traced the knowledge behind useful inventions to the Spirit who filled Bezaleel; Thomas Manton: "Every art is a common gift of the Spirit."¹² Their rule for a dangerous instrument was disciplined use under God. Manton applied it to medicine: "Physicians are to be called in their place, but not first, not chiefly. It was Asa's fault, 'In his disease he sought not to the Lord, but to the physicians.'"¹³ A Christian is not told to stop hearing voices. He is told to judge them.

Which brings us to Hansen's benchmark, and to the hypocrisy at the center of his essay. The test found the models "perfectly credible" when told to answer from TGC's Foundation Documents, and "destructive" when left alone. So the standard of a correct answer was the house confession of the organization grading the test. Hansen condemns AI for being "aligned by humans" and trained toward "the values of its programmers rather than the God who thundered on Mount Sinai." His remedy is to align it toward the values of TGC. That is not the God of Sinai either. It is another set of programmers.

The Reformed had a word for treating any teacher's say-so as the standard: implicit faith. Calvin: "Is it faith to understand nothing, and merely submit your convictions implicitly to the Church? Faith consists not in ignorance, but in knowledge."¹⁴ Baxter went further and named the sin: valuing the approbation of men before God "is an IDOLIZING MAN, or setting him up in the place of God." He set Matthew 23 against it: "be not ye called Rabbi, for one is your Master, even Christ."¹⁵ Hansen writes this as executive director of a center named for Tim Keller, and he is the author of Keller's intellectual biography. A movement that names its institutions after its pastor, and grades machines by fidelity to its own documents, is in no position to warn others against trusting a voice because of whose voice it is. Baxter's rule applies to everyone: "all men are Lyars; i.e. fallible, and not fully to be trusted."¹⁶

Some things have to be conceded. Hansen is right that the models drop the first table of the law and keep the second. Thomas Watson described that profile: "Try a Moral Man by the Duties of the First Table, Piety to God, and there you will find him Negligent."¹⁷ But the models learned that from the people who write, and churchgoers are among them. Hansen is right that a speaking image has a man behind it. Franciscus Junius said the images of Revelation 13 that "miraculously speake, and giue iudgement" do so "by the fraud of the false prophets."¹⁸ He is right that Altman sought out Johansson and invoked Her, which no one disputes. And he is right that a computer cannot love anyone. Baxter's friend is one who will "lovingly reprove your sin"¹⁹, and a machine built to please will not reprove.

Commonplace uses AI to search the library quoted here, and we would rather be judged by Hansen's standard than exempted from it. That standard, applied honestly, is the one his own text gives: "Fear God, and keep his commandments." The first commandment forbids setting the mind for comfort on any creature, whether its mouth is silicon or a famous pastor's. The question Hansen should be asking is not who programmed the machine. It is whether the people grading it can tell Scripture from their own house style.

Notes

1. OpenAI, "Introducing OpenAI o1-preview," September 12, 2024. Read ↩
2. Marc Zao-Sanders, The 2025 Top-100 Gen AI Use Case Report (Filtered, March 2025), the basis of the HBR article; its method is "curation of public discourse, sourced primarily from Reddit forums." Read ↩
3. OpenAI and NBER, "How People Use ChatGPT" (September 2025), as summarized in The Hustle and UNU. ↩
4. Washington Post reporting, May 22, 2024, as carried by the Anchorage Daily News. ↩
5. John Calvin, Commentary on Isaiah, on 30:10, passage 142827. Read ↩
6. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, I.11. Read ↩
7. John Preston, Life Eternal (1631), sermon 5, p. 90. Read ↩
8. James Durham, The Law Unsealed (1676), on the first commandment, p. 20. Read ↩
9. Richard Baxter, Catholick Theology (1675), sect. XII, p. 38. Read ↩
10. Psalm 115:8, in Matthew Henry, Commentary, vol. 3. Read ↩
11. John Calvin, Commentary on Jeremiah, vol. 1, passage 147454. Read ↩
12. Thomas Manton, A Practical Commentary on the Epistle of James, on 3:3–4, passage 247453; see Calvin, Institutes, II.2. Read ↩
13. Manton, James, on 5:14, passage 247659. Read ↩
14. John Calvin, Institutes, III.2. Read ↩
15. Richard Baxter, A Christian Directory (1673), pt. IV, p. 218. Read ↩
16. Richard Baxter, Of the Immortality of Man's Soul (1682), p. 65. Read ↩
17. Thomas Watson, The Ten Commandments (1692), p. 271. Read ↩
18. Franciscus Junius, Apocalypsis (1592), on Rev. 13:15, p. 51. Read ↩
19. Richard Baxter, A Christian Directory (1673), p. 59. Read ↩