I was awarded Early Career Philosopher of Religion of the Year (2025) by Tyndale Fellowship and InterVarsity Press.
The Academic Paper is titled Instrumental Inversion: Idolatry, Enframing, and the Ontological Limits of the Imago Dei (download by clicking the link)
Abstract
This award-winning paper confronts the central philosophical and theological crisis of the technological age: the risk that humanity becomes the tool of its own tools. Artificial intelligence reframes existence by reducing persons to data, efficiency, and prediction, echoing Heidegger’s warnings about Gestell and Levinas’s insistence on ethical encounter. Drawing on Aristotle, Aquinas, Marion, Augustine, Ubuntu, and fitra, the study exposes how AI generates an “instrumental inversion” in which human agency bends toward the systems designed to serve it. The work argues that the imago Dei forms an ontological limit that restores participation, responsibility, and relational being in a world tempted by optimization and transcendence through technological ascent. The result is a rigorous account of why AI must remain a servant rather than claim sovereignty, and why humanity must resist becoming the tools of its tools.
