Out today: I’m in Christianity Today’s July/August 2025 issue on intelligence (artificial and human) and the imago dei. Several contributors were prompted with the question, “What is intelligence, and what does it require of us?” I’m grateful that my editor (the excellent Kara Bettis Carvalho) let me run with a rather contrarian take. I questioned the question!

Here’s a bit of it:

Living beings and humans in particular are not mere task-accomplishing machines. We have greater purposes. Playing games around a table does not “accomplish a task.” Neither does loving someone!

Thus, we cannot say what intelligence per se requires of us. Not only does intelligence belong in different measures and wildly differing functions to many kinds of creatures; it is also the wrong starting point for thinking about ethical obligations.

In fact, treating others’ intelligence as the basis of our ethical duties to them is perverse. This would imply that the more intelligent someone is, the deeper the obligation — and vice versa. Unborn infants, people suffering from progressive dementia, and severely mentally handicapped people would require less of us than a brilliant mathematician, scientist, composer, or poet. But our Lord teaches us the opposite: Whatever we have done to the least of his brothers and sisters, we have done to him (Matt. 25:40).

Read the rest! (It’s behind a paywall for now, but you can read it for free by signing up for an account.)