How to Choose Goodness
Sermon — October 4, 2026
The Rev. Greg Johnston
Lectionary Readings
On Tuesday, The New York Times ran a fascinating story about a series of meetings between Christopher Olah, one of the cofounders of the AI company Anthropic, and religious leaders of different faiths, from all around the world. “The discussions served two purposes,” the Times reports: “to broach the possibility of AI consciousness, a controversial idea that Anthropic’s leaders had been unusually open to; and to learn how Anthropic—which could be valued at $2 trillion—might apply centuries of human moral wisdom to its models, as rapidly as possible. If the models themselves could be made to choose goodness, Mr. Olah reasoned, the world would be more safe.”
Believing that his company had created a thinking machine with superhuman intelligence, which can already be used by humans for good or evil and which he believed may even be a conscious moral agent capable of doing good and evil on its own, Chris Olah reached out to the religious leaders of the world to learn: how can we make it choose goodness?
There’s a kind of innocence about this question that fascinates me. Here’s a man—a couple years younger than I am—who’s dedicated his adult life to the creation of artificial intelligence. And now that his company has made AI intelligent, he wants to make it good. So he turns to the religious leaders of the world, to ask: So, you religious people have been at this for a while. You know how to make people do the right thing, right? World religions have discovered how to make an intelligent creature behave the way its creator wants? Right? Right?
And if you’ve ever read Frankenstein or Paradise Lost or any of the works of Saint Augustine or Saint Paul, or the Book of Genesis, then you already know that the answer is: Nope! The religious traditions of the world have not, in fact, succeeded in consistently making people choose the right thing.
Of course we’ve tried. Encouraging prosocial behavior is one of the basic anthropological functions of religion. And the religions of the world really do share a lot of basic moral beliefs. We read the Ten Commandments just now. While we might argue over what it means to make an idol, and whether that includes stained glass windows, and we might wonder how exactly to honor the sabbath day, we all know and we agree that murder is wrong, and theft is bad; that you shouldn’t lie and say your neighbor committed a crime, and that you should probably treat your parents well. We teach these things to children as soon as they can grasp that it’s wrong to grab someone else’s toy. And yet Louise and Priscilla and I spent four hours a couple weeks ago with our auditor, meticulously checking documents and making sure that our church has all the right policies and procedures in place to prevent any kind of financial wrongdoing, because—it turns out—you can spend your whole life reciting the Ten Commandments and still steal money from your church.
Simply having a philosopher read you the Ten Commandments doesn’t make you follow them, because knowing what’s right and wrong doesn’t mean that we’ll do it. In fact, AI researchers, and psychologists, and the Apostle Paul have all independently discovered that telling someone not to do something can sometimes have the opposite effect; it can make them more likely to do it, because now the idea’s been planted in their head.
But even doing good things doesn’t make us any more likely to choose goodness ourselves, when we do it for some external reward or punishment. Psychologists call this extrinsic motivation; in AI, it’s called reinforcement learning. In your life it might be a sticker chart, or a report card, or a set of performance metrics that will get you a promotion. This kind of extrinsic motivation kind of works. But it doesn’t build up intrinsic motivation. In fact, it undermines it. This is why Harvard’s faculty report that the two biggest problems the college faces right now are how little its students care about their coursework and how much they care about their grades. We see the same thing in matters of religion. It may have worked for Moses to put the fear of God on people so they didn’t sin (Exod. 20:20); but we’re going to spend the rest of the story listening to those same people complain and rebel. Three thousand years of history suggests that you can entice and threaten people with heaven and hell all you want—they’ll still do the right thing or the wrong one at more or less the same rate.
Paul’s own life illustrates the point he’s trying to make. Look, he says in the Epistle today, I’ve done everything by the Book. I was born into the chosen people of God. I’m as learned in the Law as the most diligent Pharisee. I’ve been zealous in my faith; I’ve been blameless in my obedience to the law. (Phil. 3:4-6) And yet when Paul was at the peak of this performance, when—by every standard offered by the religious leaders of his day—he was always doing the right thing, he stood by and watched a crowd of men stone Stephen, the first martyr of the early church. (Acts 7:58) And then he signed up to join the effort to hunt the followers of Jesus down.
This is the life that Paul regards as loss: a life in which he had measured his own goodness by external things. Paul’s conversion isn’t a matter of swapping in a new set of Christian ethics, or beliefs, or behaviors for Jewish ones, as if he’d discovered that those were bad but these were good. It’s a total reorientation of what he thinks goodness means. It’s a shift away from a kind of achievement to a kind of yearning. He doesn’t give us measurements or laws; he doesn’t tell us that he wants to love his neighbor, or that he wants to grow the church, or that he wants to become the foremost theologian of early Christianity. “I want to know Christ,” he says, and that’s really all there is. (Phil. 3:10)
Paul is filled with a desire that many of us have known, although we might not use the same language for it as Paul: the desire to come into contact with the Source of Truth and Beauty and Light that mathematicians tell us they can find in elegant proofs and poets sometimes capture in their words; that artists and musicians encounter in their art, and that we sometimes even catch a glimpse of here. “Forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead,” Paul yearns to know Christ, to be filled with that Light, because he has come to believe that, while he’s not very good on his own, God’s goodness can be made manifest in him.
We either live our lives in relationship with this Source of All, or we don’t. But if it’s there, there is no third option in which we pretend that it doesn’t exist. That’s what the parable of the tenants in the vineyard is ultimately about. The vineyard is bears good fruit. The tenants are work hard to harvest it. But when God reaches out to them, they don’t want anything to do with him. They are so committed to the belief that they have earned what they have that they kill the Son and heir so they can keep it; even though that’s not at all how inheritance works.
Do you notice that Jesus doesn’t say that the tenants will be punished? He asks, “What will the owner of the vineyard do?” and the people listening answer him, “He’ll put those wretches to a miserable death.” That’s how we think God will act. But Jesus says, “Haven’t you read the Bible?” and then he quotes a Psalm: “The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone.” Jesus’ moral vision, I think, is a little bit like Paul’s. It’s not so much a vision of a world in which people follow the right rules. It’s one in which the Son who came and died, who himself embodies Love, is lifted up as the cornerstone for the whole thing; the Source of Love without which the whole structure falls apart.
The artists and musicians in the room know that there’s a difference between technical perfection and beauty. The programmers know that there’s a difference between making all your tests pass and finding the right solution. The lawyers will acknowledge, I think, that sometimes there’s a difference between simply following the law and doing the right thing. And it’s our yearning for this second kind of goodness that helps us navigate a life that’s less about the Ten big Commandments not to break and more about the ten thousand small choices we all face. If we focus on the letter of the law, if we never do what’s right without a reward, we have no hope of choosing what’s right in ambiguous circumstances. But if we try to orient our whole lives toward goodness, and let the rest follow from that, then we just might stand a chance.
Can machines experience that kind of desire to be good? I don’t know. But we can. And we can feed it, too. In fact, I think that’s what many of us are doing here. We are not here because we’ve been told that it is right. We’re not here to earn some great reward. We’re here to catch a glimpse, once more, of the One we want to know with all our hearts.
