Grounded, Part 1

Grounded in what?

If you take the Bible seriously, as I do, you learn quickly that two things have consistently plagued the human race. We inevitably forget who we are, and we muddle up who God is, affecting us in ways that aren’t always immediately apparent. From the moment Moses asks to see God, it begins, and we see this consistent theme running throughout the Bible, from early narratives to the writings of the prophets and the Gospels. We see God respond by confronting His people, declaring that we have forgotten Him and neglected who we are as His people in favor of illusory idolatry.

In so doing, we fail to recognize a defining reality: the relationship God established between Himself as the Creator and us, His creatures. This is not like forgetting where you left your phone or a misplaced password. This runs deeper. This kind of forgetting is more like the kind that ruins marriages, when you ask yourself one day, with unbridled honesty, “Who is this person? I don’t know them anymore, and why did I ever marry them?”

This kind of amnesia tears apart our closest relationships. It feels like independence, but it most often ends in isolation. We lose a balanced sense of ourselves in relationship to a grounded “other,” whether it’s our spouse or our God. If anyone doubts this phenomenon, consider the epidemic loneliness that continues to plague developed societies. The problem may be more widespread now, but it’s not new. Consider Mick Jagger’s observation from 2026’s Man on the Run, a documentary on Paul McCartney’s post-Beatles life:

“He just wanted to be grounded in an ordinary life. Because being in the Beatles was free of any kind of grounding whatsoever.” — Mick Jagger

Younger readers may not immediately grasp the reference or remember the “Paul is dead” stories that dominated news cycles before the band announced its end. It all began when John Lennon quietly told his bandmates that he was leaving the group, effectively ending the Beatles. For business reasons, the band delayed issuing a public statement. During the interim, Paul disappeared, shocked by Lennon’s decision. Rumors began to circulate that he was dead. Reporters, fans, and commentators combed the band’s lyrics and album art for clues confirming McCartney’s demise.

However, all Paul had done was retreat from public life to his remote farm in the wilds of western Scotland. In his own words, he wanted to figure out how to rebuild his life. He and John had been friends and bandmates since their mid-teens. For more than a decade, Paul held a stable sense of identity and purpose. He was Lennon’s co-writer, friend, fellow Beatle, and business partner. With Lennon’s decision, the man who was one half of arguably the greatest songwriting duo of the 20th Century no longer knew who he was. As Jagger observed, he was completely ungrounded. By his own admission, McCartney began drinking heavily as his sense of self unraveled.

Fortunately for him, he had the stability of farm land with its timeless sense of life’s rhythms. He had time. He didn’t have to react with the contemporary speed of the almighty algorithm. He had solid, earthy work, a strong and patient wife, and the unconditioned love of his young children. He was surrounded by grounded relationships. Even the nearby villagers helped, refusing to see him as some kind of superstar rock god.

He was just another farmer to them.

Slowly, McCartney became a more stable, grounded version of himself. This is more than a tale of one man. It’s a microcosm of humanity’s search for identity, meaning, and purpose. That quest must be grounded in solid, real relationships. If not, we become increasingly unstable and irrational. Consider Isaiah’s satirical take on the attempt to ground oneself in an idol. The prophet pokes fun at the absurdity, pointing out that a man will chop down a tree and use the same wood in two ways: to make a fire that cooks his food and to fashion an idol he worships. Isaiah’s point? Idols aren’t real. They do not have the power to ground us in reality as does the one true and living Creator God, the Holy One of Israel.

This God is the ultimate grounding reality.

So, let’s accept for the moment that this God Isaiah writes about is real, the God of Abraham, Issac, Jacob, and Jesus. We can then see how this God might be the only unfailingly reliable grounding for human beings. Of course, to do so, we must accept the self-revelations of Isaiah’s God, both as recorded in the Bible and as embodied in Jesus, the Messiah.

This makes sense to me because I am a Christian, convinced by the historical truth claims of my faith. Not every reader will share those convictions. In fact, I hope that many don’t, so this writing might serve them as a fresh introduction to the possibility of the Christian faith and its God. From a biblical worldview, this God is the only consistently reliable ground for any human being. Whether this is true or not is a question of immense importance, because the ungrounding of any person’s identity, meaning, and purpose in life is a persistent problem regardless of one’s faith or lack thereof.

For this reason, I want to examine this problem of grounding in a series of posts I hope to write through a unique lens: grounding in AI. What’s the concept of grounding for AI? At a high level, it’s a simple idea. As chatbots like Claude or GPT interact with humans, they can hallucinate, inventing things that don’t exist. The solution is to ground the bots’ responses in a wealth of proprietary data (let’s call that reality for the sake of analogy), so their predictive abilities don’t fill gaps left by incomplete data with probabilities that seem plausible but don’t actually exist.¹

However, that’s not the only problem. There’s another that’s related: the extent to which people interact with AI in ways that mimic authentic human relationships, with all the psychological, emotional, and spiritual implications one might expect.

As a friend of mine wrote on the grounding parallels between humans and LLMs:

“Humans ground as well, but on our senses. When we see or hear things that don’t match our senses, that is, by definition, a hallucination. Grounding is also relational: any entity that needs grounding must be grounded by another entity outside it, not by itself. There is only one entity in all of philosophy or existence that is both stable and self-grounded.”

We chatted at length about these ideas, and my friend confirmed that he was writing about God as uniquely stable and self-grounded.

The implications of this idea are playing out in history. Social media, now decades old, draws us into relationships with entities that lack the embodied grounding humans are designed for. Throughout his 2020 film The Social Dilemma, documentary filmmaker Jeff Orlowski holds that the early creators of social platforms had increasingly less understanding of and control over what these platformed machines were doing to addict humans, turning them into a salable commodity.

If that aging tech doesn’t sound worrisome enough, consider that the epidemic of our culture’s social isolation and instability now has a new accelerant. The sophisticated mimicry of generative AI. It can increasingly draw us into an inherently ungrounded relationship with itself that only feels grounded.² Most humans are overmatched by the pace of this technical innovation and cannot adapt fast enough. It’s simply too easy to believe the illusion that we’re involved in a grounding relationship with this new, disembodied technology.

Just as Paul McCartney needed the centuries-old solidity of a real Scottish farm and a loving community to ground him, so the rest of us need equally stable, real person-to-person relationships that ground us in a similar manner. As I see it, and as I’ll argue, the only seminal grounding relationship that promises persistent human flourishing begins with the Person of Jesus Christ.

1. As the technology behind generative AI, like these bots, matures, the problem of hallucinations becomes less persistent, resulting in more grounded and helpful responses.

2. Despite the dire tone, I think the vast majority of emerging technology has the potential to be incredibly helpful to humans, as is the intent of most innovation. However, the crux is the nature of its relationship with humans. AI’s human-like properties pose a unique challenge.