In our “age,” we risk losing sight of what makes us human, distracted by the powerful tools we create. There is a famous psychological experiment: in it, participants watching a video are asked to count basketball passes. What they found was that the participants in the experiment often fail to notice a person in a gorilla suit walking through the scene, simply because their attention is narrowly focused. This illustrates how we can miss the obvious—God’s presence—when we fixate on what machines or science dictate, what we should see. As we immerse ourselves in technology and artificial fixes, we may be training ourselves to overlook the divine, the “guy in the gorilla suit,” who stands at the heart of our existence (hopefully that last statement is not blasphemous).
However, to understand this drift, we must first define what it means to be human. C.S. Lewis is helpful in this. In his essay “Men Without Chests” from The Abolition of Man, he offers a profound insight. He describes humanity as a synthesis of intellect, emotion, and moral intuition—he calls them head, chest, and belly. The “chest” represents the seat of virtuous sentiment, the capacity to feel rightly about truth and goodness, it bridges raw instinct and cold reason. Lewis warns that modern society risks producing humans without this ability “men without chests”—people governed solely by either intellect or appetite, a monstrosity of just those two, stripped of the heart’s noble passions. True humanity, he argues, is not mere calculation or biological function but a holistic reflection of God’s image, capable of love, wonder, and worship. Carl Trueman notes, “to assess cultural, technological, and political developments on the basis of whether they restore or enhance what it means to be truly human… requires a prior understanding of what it means to be human.” Without this, we drift toward a hollowed-out existence, and technology often hastens that descent. Creating a supercharged intellectual appetite driven human.
Now add to that, psychotropic drugs, a hallmark of modern medicine turned cultural crutch. A depressed individual takes an antidepressant and feels better—a seeming victory. Yet, as depression swells to epidemic proportions, we must ask: Are we just masking a spiritual ailment with a chemical physical fix? Again, Lewis reminds us, “You don’t have a soul. You are a soul. You have a body.” When we reduce the soul’s cries to material bodily chemical imbalances, we diminish our humanity, sidelining the “chest” that yearns for meaning. The Psalmist models a different response: “Why, my soul, are you downcast? … Put your hope in God, for I will yet praise him, my Savior and my God” (Psalm 42:11). Medicating rather than seeking God risks convincing us by silencing our screaming “chests,” that our restlessness (Augustine says “the heart is restless until it rests in Thee”) is a flaw to be silenced, not a call put there by God, to divine purpose. Thus, we become less human, trading soul-depth for artificial and superficial relief.
Artificial intelligence (AI) can further erode this human essence. Its latest iterations dazzle us, mimicking thought so well that we call it “intelligent.” But it merely recognizes patterns, lacking the soul’s depth. “Men without chests” looms here: if we redefine thought as algorithmic output, we lose the heart’s intuitive wisdom. Thomas Aquinas wrote, “The intellectual soul is the form of the human body,” affirming that our reasoning, entwined with emotion and spirit, reflects God’s image (Genesis 1:27). AI has no such soul—it cannot grasp what Blaise Pascal called “the heart’s reasons that reason knows not of.” The Turing Test is where a human falsely deems a computer “human” if it fools us, it misleads us further. A giraffe mistaken for an elephant remains a giraffe; a machine’s mimicry does not make it human. Yet, as we emulate AI’s detached logic, we risk becoming chestless—calculating, but not truly alive—missing God in the gorilla suit.
This mechanical shift may even imprint itself biologically. Here’s something I wonder. The great leap in cases of autism where is it all coming from. We keep looking for some food we eat or pollutants we breathe as a cause. But maybe it’s a learned handicap. We taught ourselves autistic thinking, that shaped our brains and now we pass the shape on to our children. This is just wild speculation on my part and not supported by any scientific evidence or recognized theory. However, the concept aligns loosely with broader discussions in autism research about environmental and cultural influences on neurodevelopment, though no mainstream study explicitly frames autism as a “learned handicap” passed down through behavioral or cultural adaptation alone, there are many studies exploring how environmental factors, including social and technological influences, might shape brain development.
Are we starting to think more and mor narrowly like machines, without the chest’s breadth? The gorilla-suit experiment warns us. Are we fixated on what technology highlights, and overlooking the divine. Jesus asked, “Having eyes, do you not see, and having ears, do you not hear?” (Mark 8:18). Our obsession with the measurable blinds us to the One who declares, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life” (John 14:6).
However, this dehumanization carries a redemptive thread. Our unease with drugs and AI whispers of Ecclesiastes 3:11: “He has also set eternity in the human heart.” This longing, unmet by created things, points to God, I believe it’s meant to. Pascal observed, “There is a God-shaped vacuum in the heart of every man which cannot be filled by any created thing, but only by God, the Creator, made known through Jesus.” The more we chase artificial fixes, and the more the Zeitgeist of the “age” tries to remove our “chests,” more we prove our need for Him. Paul exhorts, “Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind” (Romans 12:2). Technology, stripping us of our chests, conforms us to this age; God restores us to wholeness.
The antidote is not more innovation but communion with our Maker, who knit us together (Psalm 139:13). Lewis writes, “If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.” In this age of AI and antidepressants, we can heed the call: “Seek me and live” (Amos 5:4). By seeking God, we reclaim our full humanity—not as machines, but as image-bearers with heads, chests, and souls, attuned to the One who walks among us, even when we fail to see Him.