The Pope, AI, and the Tower of Babel:

Pope Leo XIV, a man I greatly admire, begins his Encyclical Magnifica Humanitas by warning humanity against embracing Artificial Intelligence as another Tower of Babel, the building of which “was a project conceived without reference to God, supported by a uniformity that eliminated diversity and that chose homogenization over communion.” (Genesis 11:1-9)

I share Pope Leo XIV’s concern about AI, and I was both intrigued and disappointed by his reference to the Tower of Babel. Intrigued because it was an apt insight, disappointed because he gave it short shrift, something I plan to correct here.

The story begins with the fact that the whole earth had one language/shafah and the same words/devarim (Genesis 11:1 NRSV) meaning over the four centuries between the Flood and the Tower of Babel, the descendants of Noah migrated and spoke many dialects of the same language. While pronunciations of words differed, their meanings did not.

The people who built the Tower migrated from the east (Kedem), and settled in the alluvial plain of Shinar between the Tigris and the Euphrates rivers (Genesis 11:2 NRSV), which provided water for drinking and fertile land for grazing and agriculture. In Hebrew, kedem means more than “east;” it also refers to antiquity and even eternity. In Deuteronomy 33:27, for example, God is called Elohay Kedem, the Eternal God. The author of our story tells us that these migrants are moving from the eternal to the temporal and, as we shall see, from authentic wisdom to artificial intelligence.

And they said to one another, “Come, let us make bricks and fire them thoroughly” (Genesis 11:3 NRSV). The purpose of their brick making was to “build ourselves a city and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves; otherwise we shall be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth” (Genesis 11:4 NRSV).

Pope Leo XIV calls these bricks “artificial stones,” and contrasts them to “Christ, the living stone,” but in a mud plain like Shinar, a city and tower, technically a ziggurat, would be made of adobe, sun-baked clay of which there was plenty. The people were working in harmony with nature. I see no problem. Yet.

Nor is there a problem in building a city and a tower with its top in the heavens. Pope Leo XIV reads the building of the Tower of Babel as “a project conceived without reference to God.” I disagree entirely. It was a project conceived solely to honor God.

The Tower of Babel was not a rampart from which to storm Heaven and displace God, but a ziggurat, a place “to rise high” in order to draw near and worship God. And access to this ziggurat, unlike others in the region, was not limited to a priestly hierarchy, of which none is mentioned in this story, but was open to all. Again, I see no problem.

The problem comes with the second aim of the tower: to “make a name” for themselves.

Names carry significance in the Bible. Yet the names of the builders of Babel are unknown to us. This, I suggest is what troubled Pope Leo XIV and why he sees the Tower of Babel as a metaphor for AI which “can translate everything, including the mystery of the person, into data and performance… and … a means.” As the early medieval rabbis taught, “If an individual fell at the work site and died, the death was ignored, but if a brick fell and broke, the entire workforce sat down and wept, and said, ‘When will we be able to get another brick to replace it?’” (Pirkei d’Rabbi Eliezer, 24). The “I” of the individual had given way to the “We” of the collective.

The “name” the people made for themselves was “We.” The Name they forgot was “I.”

Each of the city’s builders had their own “name,” their own sense of “I am.” But the new name, “We,” erased the old name, and with it the eternal Name, I AM (Exodus 3:14). It is then that the Elohay Kedem, the Eternal God we know as I AM is moved to investigate the doings of the people. God’s concern is not with the tower, but with the fact that they are one people—without room for individuals—and they have all one language—without room for individual thought—and this is only the beginning of what they will do—and the end of what individuals might be allowed to do (Genesis 11:6 NRSV).

The problem is that they are “one people” without allowing for the uniqueness of each person. In short, the language of “We” had erased the language of “I.”

Come, let us go down and confuse their language there, so that they will not understand one another’s speech” (Genesis 11:7 NRSV). The descent of the I AM reawakens the individual’s realization of the “I am,” and shatters the artificial “we” that had erased it. God came down to restore the individual’s uniqueness.

So the Lord scattered them abroad from there over the face of all the earth, and they left off building the city (Genesis 11:8 NRSV). Notice that the people stopped building the city, not the tower. Why not both? Think of the city and the tower like a wheel and its axle. If there is no wheel, there is no axle; if there is no axle, there is no wheel. The people ceased to build the city, the wheel, so construction of the tower, the axle, halted as well.

Therefore, it was called Babel because there the Lord confused the language of all the earth, and from there the Lord scattered them abroad over the face of all the earth (Genesis 11:9 NRSV).

This is a strange ending to the story. The builders of Babel were not the only people on earth, and even if their language was confused, the common language of the rest of humanity was not. Read from the perspective of the Hebrew, we might read the verse this way: Therefore, it was called Babel because there I AM revived the Name, and from there I AM scattered those who remember the Name abroad over the face of all the earth to remind others who may have forgotten it as well.

As Pope Leo writes, “Whenever humanity is in danger of marring its true identity, we Christians lift our eyes to the Incarnate God, knowing that it is “only in the mystery of the Word made flesh that the mystery of humanity truly becomes clear.” In Jesus Christ, this humanity in its grandeur becomes the Way, the Truth and the Life, opening the path for each of us to grow toward fullness.”

I am not a Christian, and Jesus Christ is not my avatar of incarnate divinity, but I agree with Pope Leo. AI is marring our true identity, reducing the “I” to “We” and even to “It.” But it is not Jesus who is the Way, the Truth and the Life, but, as Jesus himself says, “I AM is the Way, the Truth and the Life” (John 14:6).

I AM is the Elohay Kedem, the eternal or timeless and therefore ever-present Divine manifest as all reality. This is who you and I and all reality is. Knowing this is the authentic intelligence beyond the intelligence of egoic I and AI.

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This essay is based on a talk I gave this morning at my local Unitarian Universalist Fellowship. Unbeknownst to the congregation or myself, there is a direct link between AI and UU.

Erin Maus, a Unitarian Universalist and software engineer, filed for and received a religious exemption from her employer, allowing her to refuse to work with AI on religious grounds. While Unitarian Universalism is in no way antithetical to technology or AI, it insists that it must be in service to the UU principle asserting the “inherent worth and dignity of every person.” Ms Maus argued that it was not.

As Corey Quinn, a software-startup founder in San Francisco, posted on X, “The funniest possible outcome of the AI mandate era is about to be HR departments discovering that ‘sincerely held religious belief’ under Title VII has a much lower bar than they assumed, and Pope Leo handed every Catholic employee a written excuse.” (https://www.businessinsider.com/worker-got-religious-exemption-using-ai-at-work-2026-6)