The first offer made to human beings in Scripture by anyone other than God was an offer to become like God. That is where this guide begins, because the hopes now gathering around artificial intelligence sound remarkably like it. In Eden and again at Babel, people reach to become like God on their own terms instead of living with him, and both stories show where that reach leads. The aim is to read those two passages closely enough that you can recognize the same reach when it shows up in a product launch, a futurist’s promise, or your own habits.
You can work through this alone in two sittings or with a group in about an hour. Keep Genesis 2:15 through 3:24 and Genesis 11:1-9 open the whole time. If you are leading a group, have someone read each passage aloud before anyone comments. Most of the work here comes from noticing what the text says before deciding what it means for us.
The guide draws on a Jude 3 Project conversation between Lisa Fields and apologist Abdu Murray, whose ministry is called Embrace the Truth. Murray traces today’s talk of godlike machines back to these chapters. “The very first story about human beings was their attempt to be God,” he says. That is a strong claim about Genesis, so the best way to test it is to read Genesis.
Read first, then interpret
Both passages are narrative. Narrative describes what happened and lets the shape of the story carry its meaning. It does not issue commands at every turn. Christians hold different views about how the early chapters of Genesis relate to history and to the details of creation, and this guide does not need to settle that. Whatever position you hold, the narrator is clearly telling us something about God and about us, and that message is what we are reading for.
Before going further, read Genesis 3:1-8 slowly and mark three things:
- Every place the serpent changes or adds to what God said in Genesis 2:16-17.
- Every verb describing what the woman sees, wants, or does in 3:6.
- Where the man and woman end up by 3:8, and what they are hiding from.
The garden: what exactly was offered?
Start with the command the serpent attacks. Genesis 2:16-17 reads: “And the LORD God commanded the man, saying, Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat: But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.” The first word God gives is generous. Every tree is open except one.
The serpent’s opening question turns that around. Genesis 3:1 records it: “Yea, hath God said, Ye shall not eat of every tree of the garden?” A single restriction has been reframed as a total ban. Before any fruit is eaten, God has been recast as stingy. That reframing is the first move of the temptation, and it is easy to miss.
Then comes the offer itself. Genesis 3:5 says: “For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.” The Hebrew word behind the KJV’s “gods” is the ordinary word for God, so many translations render the phrase “like God.” Either way, the serpent is not selling a better garden. He is selling a change in status.
Faithful interpreters read “knowing good and evil” in more than one way. Some understand it as moral autonomy, the right to decide for yourself what counts as good. Others take the pair as a figure for everything, so the offer is total knowledge. Others stress knowledge gained by experience, learning evil by doing it. In each reading, the human being stops receiving the good from God and starts grasping it independently. Even the fruit’s appeal in Genesis 3:6, “a tree to be desired to make one wise,” shows that wisdom itself was not the problem. The problem was wisdom pursued apart from the One who gives it.
Notice what the man and woman already had. Genesis 1:27 says: “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.” Many Christian readers see an irony here: the serpent offers likeness to God to people the narrative has already described as made in his image. On that reading, the temptation was to seize on their own terms what had been given.
Now look at where the story lands. Genesis 3:8 says: “And they heard the voice of the LORD God walking in the garden in the cool of the day: and Adam and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the LORD God amongst the trees of the garden.” The first loss the narrative shows is not knowledge or power. It is presence. People who were meant to walk with God are now hiding from him.
Murray’s distinction names exactly this. He describes a thread running “from Eden to the current digital Eden, we’re in that natural desire to wanna be God, not to be with him, that’s our purpose, but to be him.” A gift received keeps people with God. A status grasped sends them into the trees. The offer promised elevation, and the result was distance.
Babel: the same reach, built in brick
Read Genesis 11:1-9 aloud. Then, before reading any further in this guide, go back to verses 3 and 4 and underline every phrase that begins “let us.” Next to each one, write what the builders intend to make. Finally, find the “let us” in verse 7 and note who is speaking there.
You should have three human plans: to make brick, to build a city and tower, and to make a name. Genesis 11:3 describes the first: “And they said one to another, Go to, let us make brick, and burn them throughly. And they had brick for stone, and slime had they for morter.” That is engineering, and the text reports it without condemning it. The trouble surfaces in Genesis 11:4: “And they said, Go to, let us build us a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven; and let us make us a name, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth.”
That final clause matters. Genesis 9:1 records God’s word to Noah’s family: “Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth.” The builders organize their technology around refusing that calling. Some readers also hear an echo of Genesis 1:26, where God says “Let us make man in our image,” and verse 7 answers the builders’ plans with God’s own “let us.” That echo is an interpretive observation rather than a stated point, but it sharpens the contrast between creatures making their own name and the Creator who made them.
Genesis 11:5 says: “And the LORD came down to see the city and the tower, which the children of men builded.” Many readers hear irony here: the tower meant to reach heaven is something God must come down to see. Treat that as a reading the narrative invites rather than one it spells out.
Verse 6 is harder. God says: “Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do.” Some hear judgment on unchecked pride that would keep escalating. Others hear mercy, a scattering that limits harm. Either way, verse 7 shows God acting to stop the project.
When Lisa Fields heard Murray describe the hopes surrounding AI, she said it gave her a Tower of Babel feel, and she linked it to a pattern throughout Scripture of people “looking for ways to control one’s life.” Murray agreed and explained why he thinks God intervened: “he confounds the language, not so that, we would be ignorant, but because we were going against his purposes, which was to go out into all the world and be fruitful and multiply.” In his view, the issue was never creativity. “Babel was all about rivaling him, which is completely different.”
Murray sets this beside Pentecost in Acts 2, stressing that “God had them hear it in their language.” Reading the two scenes together is a connection many Christians make, not a claim either passage states. Still, the contrast teaches: at Babel people manufacture a unity to secure themselves, while at Pentecost God gives a unity that keeps their languages intact.
Is it fair to read AI into Genesis?
A careful reader should push back here. Genesis was not written about computers, and its first audience never imagined a thinking machine. Reading AI into these chapters can easily become the kind of anachronism that makes a text say whatever we want.
The answer depends on separating two steps. The historical meaning comes first: these narratives show human beings reaching for godlike status and show the results. That meaning stays fixed. The application comes second: wherever the same desire appears, the same warning applies. The application holds only because the pattern lives in the human heart, not in the hardware. Genesis does not predict silicon. It describes the person who will use it.
Murray applies the pattern to transhumanism, the hope that people will one day merge with a superintelligent machine and leave sickness and death behind. In his summary of that story, “we’ll finally beat God at his game because God created us to be with him.” He then points to the contradiction inside it: “a God just like Him doesn’t need to be created, logically speaking.” Anything people build has a beginning, depends on its makers, and can be switched off. A god that needs builders is the same irony Babel tells.
The texts also guard against the opposite mistake. Babel does not condemn bricks, and Eden does not condemn fruit. Murray says of himself, “I actually like technology. I’m a bit of a technophile.” The question these passages press is not whether to build. It is what the building is for, whose name it serves, and whether it helps us flee a calling God has given.
Put the two stories side by side
This exercise takes about twenty minutes. Groups can split in half, each half taking one passage, then come back together.
- On one sheet, make two columns headed Genesis 3:1-8 and Genesis 11:1-9.
- In each column, write what the people wanted, in the text’s own words where possible.
- Write what God had already given or commanded that they were working around. For Eden, use Genesis 1:27 and 2:16-17. For Babel, use Genesis 9:1.
- Write how each story ends: where the people are and what has been lost.
- Draw a line between items that match across the columns.
- Add a third column for one present-day promise about AI that you have heard or read. Fill it in the same way, and say so plainly if it does not match. Not every new tool is Babel.
Leaders: the third column is where groups tend to drift into general complaints about technology. Bring people back to the text. Ask which line in Genesis the modern example actually resembles, and why.
Questions for discussion
- The serpent’s first move was to make God seem stingy. What would someone have to believe about God before a machine’s promise of unlimited knowledge or endless life started to sound better than what God offers?
- Which reading of “knowing good and evil” do you find most convincing from the context of Genesis 2 and 3, and what in the passage persuades you?
- Lisa Fields observed that “our attempts to be God revealed that we don’t really know who God is.” Looking only at Genesis 3 and 11, what misunderstandings of God do the serpent and the builders reveal?
- The builders wanted to avoid being scattered. What did they fear, and are there ways people use technology today to avoid a calling or a risk?
- Where in these two stories do you see the loss of being with God, and what would wanting that instead look like in practice?
- What would make you conclude that a particular use of AI is not Babel? What evidence would change your mind either way?
Carry this into the week
Choose one tool, project, or ambition in your life, whether it involves technology or not. Ask it the three questions Genesis 11:4 raises. What am I trying to reach? Whose name does this make? What calling does it help me avoid? Write each answer in a sentence. Whatever the answers show, read Genesis 3:8 again and notice who comes walking in the garden.
Then turn one page past Babel. In Genesis 12:2, God says to Abram: “And I will make of thee a great nation, and I will bless thee, and make thy name great; and thou shalt be a blessing.” The builders tried to make a name for themselves. One chapter later, God promises to make a name great as a gift, and that blessing reaches beyond the one who receives it. Many readers see that sequence as deliberate. Either way, it leaves a question worth carrying: what would change if you stopped building your own name and received the one God gives?