Growing up in the country, my father regularly kept a fairly extensive garden. Certainly, it brought food to the table, but as a youth, I confess that I never fully appreciated the economics of grocery bills. Honestly, often, I often resented my father’s “hobby” because the presence of the garden meant that I spent many of my Saturdays helping to till, weed, or harvest the vegetables he grew. It is not as if I was afraid of the manual labor, but I often found myself jealous of the “free time” my friends, whose parents did not maintain gardens, happened to have. As Paul wrote, when I was a child, I thought as a child…

Curiously, though I resented working in my dad’s garden as a youth, as an adult, I find great pleasure in gardening. In fact, of the three of us siblings, I am the only one of us who has chosen to maintain a garden as an adult. I have also come to look at gardens quite differently in my adult years. For instance, while my garden does produce fresh vegetables for the table, I am not convinced that it really cuts down on my grocery bill as much as it could. Why is that? The answer is simple: as a gardener, I am always looking for ways to improve the garden that I have, and any money that I might have saved on groceries is often spent on a new line of seed or wood for a new raised bed, etc…

Yet, there is much more than grocery dollars saved that drives my gardening. The quality of the food is better than that of the grocery store. I know what has been used on the plants as they have grown and how they are fed. As I am preparing dinner, I can walk out back and pick beans or carrots to use directly in the meal I am fixing. I have grown to appreciate the many varieties of heirloom seeds that are available to work with, and I often marvel, particularly with beans, at the wonderful array of colors that swirl about in the seeds — the seeds themselves being a picture that reflects an artist’s design, not just random combinations caused by cross-fertilization.

There is also a kind of patient satisfaction that comes from witnessing the completed cycle of a plant’s growth. The soil is prepared, the seed is planted, and as birds often dwell around my garden plot, a little extra seed is sown into the ground to accommodate my avian “guests.” Then, as the seeds grow, weeds are removed from the plot, some of which are composted, and the plants are trained to climb a trellis where appropriate or supported by cages, and then others are left to grow tall and strong on their own. Then, as fruit matures, the picking and eating, the picking and preserving in small batches, and then the process of allowing some of the seed to grow fully mature so that they can be harvested and prepared for the following year. Finally, there is the cutting down of plants so they begin to break down and can be tilled under the following spring. The work is quiet and peaceful, and the satisfaction that comes from eating what you grow is great.

As a youth, I never appreciated what my father was quietly teaching me as we worked together in the garden. The work can sometimes be frustrating (especially when deer run ramshod through my garden or groundhogs destroy entire plants, but the work is good and wholesome. Further, while my hands are busy pulling weeds, I have also found it to be a good time to pray and put the stresses of the day in their proper perspective.

As a Christian, I also recognize that the original gardener was God Himself, as after He finished the work of creation, he set aside a plot of ground and planted an orderly garden that we know today as Eden (or Paradise in the Greek). Further, mankind’s first job was to function as gardeners in this new creation, seeking to mimic the work of God in the rest of the natural order. So, there is something both Human and Divine about gardening. In that sense, the practice of gardening can be seen as a tool in our sanctification. It draws us closer to our original profession, which was a profession that God demonstrated for us by His actions in creation. Thus, growing things is good for our soul.

It should also be known that while gardening can feed the masses when communities work together to grow their food, in today’s world, gardening is better suited as a supplement. Hence, there is a distinction between farming and gardening. It is my experience that sometimes gardeners mistake themselves for farmers (in their mind, just farming on a small scale). The problem is the matter of scale. When you are gardening a backyard plot, you have time to give to every plant; when your scale is that of acres (or hundreds of acres!), every plant cannot be individually tended. Gardening can be a hobby or a pastime; farming is a business. That does not mean that farmers do not care for their crops; it simply means that due to scale, farmers simply cannot tend to their plants in the way a gardener can if he or she wishes to do so. Further, if a gardener loses a handful of plants due to deer, that can wipe out their harvest; if a farmer loses a handful of plants, it cuts into their profit, but scale prevents utter loss (most of the time). The two are different approaches, and while not mutually exclusive (farmers can also garden for themselves, and often do, but most gardeners do not also farm), they are distinct and should not be confused.

And that leads us to AI. We live in a world that seems to be putting more and more of its resources toward developing artificial intelligence and robotics that would allow mechanical entities to do many of the tasks that society needs done. This has given no end to the rise of conspiracy theories, fears about lost jobs, and a loss of control that would follow the rise of these AI-driven machines. I am a child of the Terminator movies, so I do appreciate, and in many senses, share, the concern.

Regardless of your concerns, recognizing that machines can and will transform the manner in which food is produced in our world, AI cannot, by its very design, truly replace gardening. A machine might be able to do the job of tending to plants, but it cannot appreciate the spiritual benefits that come along with doing so. They have no spirit, they are not made in the image of God, and cannot be sanctified. Machines simply do what they have been programmed to do. That programming may be extensive, and it may mimic human thought in a wide variety of ways, but it is still a program running on a machine. AI can be Imitatio Hominis; it cannot be Imitatio Dei.