In the third session of Doyt’s 12-part Bible study on AI and human identity, the focus turned entirely to understanding the soul—what it is, why it matters, and how it shapes everything from worship to our treatment of one another. “If you get this piece, everything falls into place,” Doyt explained. This deep dive into the nature of the soul revealed three critical truths about what makes us irreducibly human.
The Soul: Universal Recognition Across Cultures
One of the most striking aspects of understanding the soul is how universally humans have recognized its existence. During the axial period—when Abraham received his call to leave Ur and philosophers like Plato began their work—humanity across cultures simultaneously began wrestling with the same question: What is this metaphysical aspect of our being?
Plato claimed there is “a divine spark that gives life to the body. It is indestructible, and as a result, it is eternal.” Aristotle insisted that “if you are alive, you have a soul,” using the term “anima” to describe this distinguishing characteristic of being alive. Hinduism developed the concept of Atman—a universal soul of which each person has a piece. Judaism taught that “every soul is created anew with each child,” a supernatural entity created and bestowed by God.
Why does this matter? Because across every tradition where people thought deeply about what it means to be human, they stumbled into the same insight: there is something beyond the material, something indestructible and eternal within us. The soul isn’t just a religious concept—it’s a human universal, recognized wherever people have deeply considered existence.
Biblical teaching adds crucial clarity: God gives the soul (seen in stories of Sarah, Hannah, Elizabeth, and Mary), God receives the soul, and God speaks into the soul through dreams and deep moments. The soul is assigned by God, exists only because of God, is unique to each person, and serves as “a vessel into which God’s love is poured.”
The Equalizing Truth: All Souls Are Equal
Perhaps the most revolutionary insight about the soul is its radical equality. The session outlined key attributes: the soul has no agency, is unalterable, is eternal, is made with love, imbued by love, and eternal because of love. This means “everybody is beloved—equally.”
This equality stands in stark contrast to how we typically evaluate people. We assess minds (some are sharper than others), bodies (some are stronger, healthier, more capable), and social positions (neighbors of different status and influence). But souls? Every soul is equally full of God’s love, equally connected to the divine, equally valuable.
As the discussion emphasized: Bishop Tutu’s soul is the same as a child without a brain. Mary’s proclamation of God’s greatness doesn’t make her soul better than Judas’s. “Who is the best soul? The next person you meet.” This isn’t feel-good sentiment—it’s theological bedrock that protects against manipulation and power structures based on supposed spiritual hierarchy.
The moment we start creating qualifying agents—thinking someone’s soul is more ascended, more worthy, more connected to God—we fall into dangerous territory. History shows how easily religious leaders manipulate people around soul-value, creating fear-based hierarchies. The truth is simpler and more beautiful: if you are born, you have a soul, and that soul is complete, perfect, and full of God’s love.
Worship: The Spiritual Exercise of the Soul
If all souls are equal and connected to God, the most natural outcome is gratitude. This is where worship enters as “the spiritual exercise of the soul.” Unlike activities that train the mind, strengthen the body, or form the heart, worship specifically attends to the soul.
The session described worship through a powerful framework based on Luke 10:27—loving God with heart, soul, strength, mind, and neighbor. While we often live “bracketed” in the material realm (mind, body, neighbor), constantly aware of death’s reality, the spiritual life works differently. When we focus on soul and heart—the metaphysical dimensions—we’re “living lives that are driving in the reality of an eternal and present God.”
Liturgy brilliantly captures this integration. It’s “voluntary attachment to an involuntary design”—you come at a certain time, to a certain place, and do what you’re told together with “uncurated community” (whoever shows up). This isn’t very American, but it’s purposeful:
- Liturgy captures our mind through words, readings, and sermon
- It engages our body through standing, sitting, kneeling
- It connects us with our neighbor (whoever happens to be there)
- It involves heart choice (the decision to participate)
- And through all this coordination, our soul can soar
This is why practices like daily office, breath meditation on the nefesh (the breath God blows into each person), and repetitive prayers matter. When you can recite prayers by heart, when Sunday’s hymns remain in your mind on Thursday, you’re experiencing something profound—the spiritual habits that align you with the soul’s natural orientation toward God.
Why This Matters for AI
The soul’s nature reveals exactly why AI can never replicate authentic human spirituality or community. AI can simulate intelligence and emotion, but it cannot:
- Worship because it has no gratitude arising from a soul connected to God
- Bless because blessing requires embodied, ensouled presence
- Experience the yearning that someone beautifully described as “God’s yearning for you coming through the soul”
- Participate in the entanglement of all souls connected through God
- Practice freedom which is required for authentic love and relationship
Science, interestingly, may serve the soul by prolonging life and giving us countless near-death experiences that point beyond the material. From six-year-olds in the Amazon to 95-year-olds in Japan, these experiences show remarkable consistency—transcendence beyond the material, guides, peace, light—reminding us of biblical truth.
Living as Homo Anima
The session introduced the concept of Homo Anima—humanity understood primarily as ensouled beings rather than merely wise beings (Homo Sapiens). This isn’t just semantics. When we understand ourselves fundamentally as souls bearing God’s love, everything changes: how we treat others, why we gather for worship, what science reveals, and how we resist technology’s reduction of humanity to data and algorithms.
The principle purpose of life, according to Thomas Aquinas, is “for your soul to encounter God.” We train the heart to follow God’s will, we engage the mind in understanding, we serve our neighbors, and we care for our bodies—all so the soul can fulfill its ardent longing to see God.
As we continue navigating our AI-shaped world, this foundation matters more than ever. In an age of sophisticated simulation, we need the anchor of embodied, soul-to-soul worship. In a time of digital manipulation, we need the equalizing truth that every human bears the same divine spark. In a culture of efficiency and productivity, we need the reminder that our primary purpose isn’t achievement but the soul’s encounter with God.
The Bible is fundamentally about this—heart and soul, life eternal, the connection between Creator and created. As we move forward in this series, this understanding of the soul grounds everything else we’ll explore about human identity and calling in the age of machines.