The ninth session of Doyt’s 12-part Bible study on AI and human identity tackled a crucial distinction: the difference between information and wisdom. In an age where AI excels at processing vast quantities of data, this session revealed why biblical wisdom operates in an entirely different category—one that requires embodiment, relationship, and formative practice that no algorithm can replicate. Three key insights emerged about what makes wisdom irreducibly human.
Information: Facts That Serve Identity and Community
The session began by defining information as data, facts, answerable questions. In our materialist culture, some believe “everything is data” and with enough information, human behavior becomes completely predictable. A recent book, Determined by a Stanford physicist, claims exactly this: gather enough data on someone and you can predict everything they’ll do.
Christians reject this framework because it excludes the soul, spirit, and human freedom. We believe people can change, can choose differently, can be transformed through relationship with God. While patterns exist and data reveals tendencies (algorithms know what advertisements work on us), we’re not reducible to our data because we possess freedom and souls.
Where does information appear in the Bible? Three primary places:
Genealogies: Matthew 1 traces Jesus’s lineage through 42 generations (three sets of 14) from Abraham through David to the Messiah. Luke 3 goes further back—all the way to Adam. These aren’t just facts. Matthew’s genealogy establishes Jesus’s identity within Jewish community (son of Abraham, son of David). Luke’s genealogy declares Jesus’s identity as universal (son of Adam—father of everyone).
The genealogies answer: Who are we? Where are we from? Who are our people? They’re about identity, roots, continuity, belonging, inclusion. While AI could compile these lists, it cannot understand what they mean—how they establish embodied identity within community and history.
Law Codes: Exodus 20-23 contains the Ten Commandments (from God through Moses) plus extensive laws about altars, slaves, violence, property, restitution, social and religious matters, justice, Sabbath years, and annual festivals. These laws define boundaries—who’s in and who’s out, how the community lives together, what maintains relationship with God.
The Old Testament operates largely within this boundary framework: stay inside (follow the laws) and things go well; cross outside and disaster follows. Ezra and Nehemiah enforce boundaries by making Jewish men divorce foreign wives—believing this pleases God and keeps the community pure. But throughout the Old Testament, glimpses of a merciful God appear who keeps coming back to the people regardless of their boundary violations.
Jesus reveals what was always there: God cares less about boundaries and more about being merciful. God’s nature is love, which means mercy always. The tension in the Old Testament between boundary-keeping and divine mercy resolves in Jesus’s teaching that mercy, not law-following, defines relationship with God.
Histories: The historical accounts (Ezra, Nehemiah, Kings, Chronicles) provide facts that create community story and vision for the future. But reading history as mere facts creates problems—like contemporary Israel using biblical history as factual land claims to justify displacing current inhabitants. History read only as data (disconnected from wisdom about mercy, justice, and relationship) becomes weaponized.
The critical insight: While the Bible contains information, that information serves purposes beyond data. Genealogies establish identity. Laws define community character. Histories provide context for understanding God’s merciful nature. AI can retrieve these facts but cannot grasp their theological, relational, and communal purposes.
Wisdom: The Liminal Space Between Facts and Lived Experience
One participant beautifully defined wisdom as “the liminal space between a fact and your lived experience.” Wisdom involves morals, values, principles—the “ultimate aspiration” of how to live well. Unlike information (discrete, answerable, compilable), wisdom is formative, relational, and embodied.
Where does wisdom appear in the Bible? Everywhere—because Scripture fundamentally addresses how to live as humans before God. The wisdom literature explicitly focuses on this:
Proverbs: Practical sayings teaching the art of godly living—how to speak, work, relate, choose. Wisdom distilled into memorable forms.
Ecclesiastes: A philosopher reflects on life’s limits, urging us to receive life as gift rather than something we control. “That is not American,” someone noted—our culture prizes control, prediction, optimization. Ecclesiastes counters with acceptance, humility, and receiving.
Job: Suffering, humility, and the mystery of God. Job’s friends offer information-based theology: good things happen to good people, bad things to bad. Job’s experience contradicts this data. God’s response? “What do you know?” God is huge, mysterious, beyond our informational frameworks.
Wisdom of Solomon: Divine wisdom as radiance—not just intellectual knowledge but participated reality that transforms.
Ecclesiasticus (Sirach): Discipline and faithful living within Jewish tradition. Found in the Apocrypha (which Protestant Reformation removed), it offers practical wisdom for community life.
These books don’t primarily instruct—they form. They shape character through repeated engagement. You don’t extract data from Job; you wrestle with suffering’s meaning. You don’t memorize Proverbs like a database; you internalize wisdom through meditation and practice.
The Psalms: Formative Prayer Through Repetition
The Psalms exemplify wisdom’s formative power. Psalm 1 declares: “Blessed is the one who meditates on the Torah day and night.” This isn’t about information extraction but spiritual formation through repetition.
The session emphasized why repetitive prayer matters. When you pray the same prayers daily—morning office, hour by hour, liturgy—they become ingrained. Not through intentional memorization but through practice, these prayers become “beautiful to meditate on.”
A powerful example: A prisoner visiting the doctor had his eyes dilated. Alone in the office, unable to see, he couldn’t scroll his phone (the usual default). What did he do? He meditated on prayers he knew by heart—the Lord’s Prayer, Apostles’ Creed, the Great Thanksgiving. Not desperate “get me out of here” prayer but contemplative engagement with memorized prayers that had formed him.
“Almighty and merciful God, we give you thanks”—the opening of the Great Thanksgiving. Praying this daily makes it available for meditation anytime. A former monk encountered on pilgrimage had the entire book of Psalms memorized from years of twice-daily recitation. He could meditate on any psalm, anywhere, because they’d been inscribed in him through practice.
This is wisdom as formation: repeated engagement with sacred texts that shape how you see, think, feel, and live. It’s not data retrieval but character transformation. The practices (daily office, liturgy, memorized prayers) aren’t magical formulas—they’re disciplined repetition that forms wisdom in us over time.
Why AI Cannot Access Wisdom
The distinction between information and wisdom reveals AI’s fundamental limitation:
AI excels at information. It can compile genealogies, explain laws, summarize histories, answer discrete questions with impressive accuracy. Given enough data about the Bible (and vast amounts exist), AI can retrieve facts reliably.
AI cannot create or possess wisdom. Why not?
Wisdom requires embodiment. It emerges from “lived experience”—the embodied encounter with life’s complexities, suffering, joy, relationships, choices. AI has no body, no experiences, no life to live.
Wisdom requires relationship. Biblical wisdom isn’t individual achievement but communal formation. We gain wisdom through relationship with God, community practice, and engagement with those who’ve walked before us. AI has no relationships, only data processing.
Wisdom requires freedom and choice. Wisdom involves choosing how to apply knowledge in novel situations, weighing competing values, exercising judgment shaped by character. AI follows optimization functions, not freely chosen values.
Wisdom requires formation over time. The prisoner who meditated on memorized prayers—that wisdom came from years of daily practice. The monk with Psalms memorized—decades of repetition. Wisdom forms through disciplined engagement, not instantaneous download.
Wisdom requires humility. As one participant noted, humility is wisdom. Job teaches this profoundly: recognizing what we don’t and can’t know, receiving life as gift rather than controlled outcome. AI cannot be humble because it has no self to diminish, no illusions of control to release.
The session’s core claim: If we removed genealogies, laws, and histories from the Bible, we’d have “disembodied it.” Our God is an embodied God. The information matters because it provides context for embodied wisdom—who we are, how we belong, what community means, how to live together.
AI can process the information but cannot participate in the wisdom. It can tell you what Proverbs says but cannot be formed by meditating on it. It can summarize Job but cannot learn humility through suffering. It can recite the Psalms but cannot be shaped by praying them daily for years.
Living in Wisdom, Not Just Information
As we navigate an AI-saturated world, this distinction becomes crucial. We’re drowning in information—facts, data, answerable questions, algorithmic predictions. AI will only increase this flood. But wisdom remains scarce, precious, and distinctly human.
The practices that form wisdom—daily prayer, liturgical repetition, contemplative meditation, communal worship, wrestling with Scripture—these matter more, not less, in the information age. They’re how we remain human rather than becoming information-processing nodes.
The materialists who believe “everything is data” miss what makes us irreducibly human: souls, spirits, freedom, relationships, and the capacity for wisdom formed through embodied practice over time. The Bible contains information, but it offers something AI never can—formation into people who know how to live before God and with each other.
This is “old school, simple Christian stuff”—the recognition that facts serve purposes beyond data, that wisdom requires more than information retrieval, and that becoming wise people happens through practices AI cannot replicate: prayer, worship, community, meditation, and the slow formation of character through relationship with the God who is love.