What Would C. S. Lewis Have Thought of AI?
June 26, 2026By Benjamin M. Osborne
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What would C. S. Lewis have thought of artificial intelligence? I doubt he would have begun with the machine. Indeed, Lewis always began with man.
He would not have asked first whether AI can write a poem, draft a law, tutor a child, or write a sermon. He would have asked, “What sort of people want a machine to do these things for them?” He would have asked, “What have we already lost when we greet such a tool not with care, but with wonder?”
That is why reading The Abolition of Man in 2026 makes the work feel more like a book written for the age of the chatbot. Lewis warned that we “make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise.” By the chest he meant the trained physical sources of love and judgment. The head thinks. The belly wants. The chest teaches a man to love what is good, hate what is evil, and submit both thought and appetite to truth.
AI has no chest. It has no loves. It does not know courage, shame, mercy, sin, or worship. It can regurgitate “writing” about these things, but it cannot live them. It can compose a prayer without praying and a sermon without fear of God. It can say “I understand,” but, in truth, there is no “I” and no understanding.
The machine is made. Man, on the other hand, is made in the image of God. Machines are tools. Men have souls. When we forget the difference, we do not raise up the machine. We lower the man.
Lewis saw this danger before AI, data centers, and servers. Modern man wants to conquer nature. But when man throws off moral law, “man’s conquest of Nature” soon becomes the rule of some men over other men. AI will not govern itself. Men will train it, tune it, censor it, sell it, and use it to govern other men. And man’s flawed idea of man will pass into how and what it trains AI to say and do.
That should trouble us. A tool trained by people who think speech is harm will teach others to fear plain speech. A tool trained by people who hate limits will teach others to hate limits. A tool trained by people who think man is only a bundle of wants will answer as if man were no more than that. No software is neutral when its makers are not.
George Orwell helped us see what is coming. In “Politics and the English Language,” Orwell wrote that bad public speech is not just clumsy. It is dishonest. It piles up long words, stale phrases, and soft names until the facts disappear. The words do not defend the act; they rename it, doing what the Prophet Isaiah condemned: calling evil good and good evil, so the honest argument never has to happen.
Orwell called this inflated style a kind of euphemism. It falls on the facts like snow. It blurs the outline. It covers the blood. The great enemy of clear language, he said, is insincerity. When a man’s real aim differs from his declared aim, he reaches for cloudy words. He does not say what he means because he does not want others to see what he means.
AI can make that habit effortless for those who want to practice it. It can turn a lie into a memo, a threat into a policy, a command into a recommendation, and a sin into a service. It can help the coward sound kind and the tyrant sound calm. It can give every evasion a pleasant voice.
We already live under this kind of speech. We are told to say “care” when we mean killing, “safety” when we mean censorship, “equity” when we mean favoritism, “misinformation” when we mean dissent, and “progress” when we mean decay. AI did not invent this perversion of language. It only gives it a faster tongue.
So the first Christian rule for AI is simple: Do not let the machine teach you to lie.
Use it, perhaps, as one uses a calculator or a plow. But do not kneel to it. Do not ask it to replace your mind, your memory, your judgment, or your conscience. Do not let it write what you have not dared to think. Do not let it soften what ought to be said plainly.
A sane people would teach children to read old books before they are encouraged to prompt new machines. It would teach them to write one honest sentence before asking software for 10 smooth ones. It would teach them that words are acts. They can bless, wound, hide, reveal, tempt, and tell the truth.
Lewis would not have feared AI as a rival soul. He would have feared the man who sees in it a mirror and likes what he sees. The machine has no chest. But does man still have his?
THE ARTFUL DILETTANTE 