Christianity Today: How to Stop Technology from Rotting Your Brain, by Russell Moore:

I was fascinated to read an essay by my friend David Brooks in The Atlantic about who will thrive—and who won’t—in the AI era. …

The stakes are high for all of us as a society. David warns about what he calls a “cognitive underclass.” The kinds of people who fall into that underclass will be those for whom AI makes writing, reading, and thinking easier in the short term. Long-term, he shows, those who use AI tools this way will surrender the very abilities they are trying to help.

The stakes are also high for the church. Most people don’t write for a living, but almost everyone does creative work of some kind. Maybe you journal to help your prayer life. Maybe you do personal Bible study. Maybe you teach children at your church or incarcerated people in a prison ministry or single moms in an afterschool program. Those gifts are not just about you. The rest of us need you to be able to do them.

The apostle Paul commanded us to present our bodies as “a living sacrifice” and then immediately called us to resist conformity to the age through “the renewal of your mind” (Rom. 12:1–2, ESV throughout). Mind here refers not merely to the intellect, although it does include that, but also to the imagination, intuition, affections, and attention. Paul made clear that this is not simply an individual admonition. He pivoted to a discussion of how each person—with all his or her gifts and capacities—is meant to serve the rest of the body since we, with differing gifts, are nonetheless “members one of another” (v. 5).

If you outsource your thinking to a machine—or if you atrophy gifts meant to be sharpened in practice and difficulty—you are not simply limiting your potential. You are neglecting something intended to build up in ways you do not now know and cannot even imagine.

That need for stewardship requires forcing yourself into some discomfort. If you sit down to study your Bible and you jump when you hear your phone buzz, just recognize how you are responding and verbalize it: “Lord, I do not want to read the Bible. I want to check my phone. Will you help me?” When you’re reading that text and you don’t understand how it applies to you, stop—before you search for an answer—and allow its perplexity to sit with you for a while. Look for patterns, for ways you’ve encountered similar mysteries before.

To sit with perplexity requires a strange combination of attention and lack of attention. It’s often not until someone asks me a question that I discover what I think. When I sit down and ask myself generally, “What do I think about this?” the managerial mind can take over. I become conscious of arranging, evaluating, anticipating objections, or trying to produce an answer. But when I answer someone’s particular question, part of my mind is occupied with responding. My attention moves outward toward the text, person, or problem.

One part of my brain has something to do, which allows me to bypass what C. S. Lewis called “watchful dragons.” I am not very conscious of the fact that I am answering a question. I simply am. Then, afterward, I can hear what I have said and think, Ah. So that is what I think.

A certain kind of thinking requires a temporary loss of mastery. Momentary perplexity—say of an unexpected question or a previously unimagined viewpoint—pulls something out of us in a new way. This makes me think of Jesus telling his disciples that, when they are brought before authorities or expelled from their synagogues, they should not prepare their defense in advance, because the Spirit will give them words to say “in that hour” (Mark 13:11).

That does not mean the answer comes from nowhere. Jesus also repeatedly says, “Have you not read …?” calling forth knowledge of the Old Testament that his hearers had learned before. The answer a Christian gives “in that hour” draws upon something already present. God has made us with different gifts, interests, and abilities, to be sure, but that response is always somehow present in every one of us.

Technology gives us vast tools, part of human ingenuity that images God by harnessing creation. And as the Scripture tells us, “Everything created by God is good, and nothing is to be rejected if it is received with thanksgiving” (1 Tim. 4:4). With technology, as with almost anything else, regulations of “Do not handle, Do not taste, Do not touch” can leave us with a legalism and asceticism that “are of no value in stopping the indulgence of the flesh” (Col. 2:21, 23).

Yet technology will make it easier and easier for you to stop thinking, to stop paying attention, to stop the renewal of your mind. Part of what it means to love is to conserve your ability to think, feel, and create. That requires paying attention to where the present age is attempting to pull you, and to map out another, harder way.

Your brain does not belong to you. It was bought with a price. Guard that trust.

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