Can we use AI to deepen experience with nature?
Yes.
A chatbot can suggest hikes, parks, seasonal activities. It can create a nature scavenger list. It can identify plants or insects. But the real exploring happens when we go exploring.
Step outside digital reality into physical reality. Be spiritually present in the moment. Invite friends or family, but put your device away. When we step outside, we step into God’s classroom.
Nature teaches patience as seeds grow, humility as storms pass, and joy as sunlight warms the earth. These lessons are not downloaded, they’re lived. As we reverence in and care for creation, we honor the Creator. Every breath of fresh, crisp air can spark gratitude. Intentionally choose moments that gladden the heart and lift the soul.
Technology can inform us, but without the Spirit, it cannot transform our nature or our being.
Let us wisely use AI and technology tools to deepen faith and spiritual understanding, strengthen relationships and families, and instill reverence and gratitude for God’s creations.
Showing posts with label Nature. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Nature. Show all posts
Friday, August 14, 2026
Excessive screen time also comes at a high opportunity cost.
Excessive screen time also comes at a high opportunity cost. Imagine all the things we could do with that time. So, as the saying goes, please make time to “touch grass.” If you find you’re more comfortable on your phone than with people, or that it’s keeping you from the delight, serendipity, and spontaneity inherent in God’s nature, now’s a good time to change.
Find again the serenity, calm, and assurance that come when we re-immerse ourselves in the order and beauty of creation. Let quiet, natural places put our daily personal concerns in perspective. Watering a plant, nurturing a garden; they can restore equilibrium. It can uncrowd an apartment. It can unclutter a mind.
Watch the leaves dance with the first kiss of light. Pause as the sun paints the clouds with God’s palette. Listen to the stories the constellations tell as they wheel through the expanses of the heavens. It takes conscious effort to slow down. God’s goodness can enrich our souls.
Today’s noisy, cluttered, polluted world can make it hard to “be still and know that I am God.” We curate life to be “insta-perfect,” even though we know insta-perfect is neither insta nor perfect. Only when we turn off the kitchen fan do we remember how noisy it is. Sometimes slowing things down, those things that matter less, helps us find the things that matter most. In an age of AI, what tech insiders warned earlier is even more true now. If you’re not paying for the product, you are the product.
Find again the serenity, calm, and assurance that come when we re-immerse ourselves in the order and beauty of creation. Let quiet, natural places put our daily personal concerns in perspective. Watering a plant, nurturing a garden; they can restore equilibrium. It can uncrowd an apartment. It can unclutter a mind.
Watch the leaves dance with the first kiss of light. Pause as the sun paints the clouds with God’s palette. Listen to the stories the constellations tell as they wheel through the expanses of the heavens. It takes conscious effort to slow down. God’s goodness can enrich our souls.
Today’s noisy, cluttered, polluted world can make it hard to “be still and know that I am God.” We curate life to be “insta-perfect,” even though we know insta-perfect is neither insta nor perfect. Only when we turn off the kitchen fan do we remember how noisy it is. Sometimes slowing things down, those things that matter less, helps us find the things that matter most. In an age of AI, what tech insiders warned earlier is even more true now. If you’re not paying for the product, you are the product.
Digital exchanges are at best a poor substitute or, at worst, a counterfeit for what we live through our senses, hearts, and minds.
Beauty, says author Marilynne Robinson, is the “signature of God.” An important way to know God is to discern his signature in creations made to gladden the heart.
Imagine you’re preparing for a wilderness hike. You light a single candle as you assemble your maps, food, sleeping bag, tent, and so on.
Because of the light in the room, you do not notice the candle. Now imagine you turn off the light in the room. Now the candle shines clear and bright. It illuminates the room. It was not that the lit candle was invisible before, it was that the room’s artificial light obscured the lit candle’s natural light.
In some ways, we need to be in nature, away from the artificial light and the artificiality which crowds so much of modern life. There we can see God’s light, not as a single candle, but, as E.B. White put it, as “the combustion of stars.”
Digital screens can serve us, but they can’t substitute for the testimonies of nature and the natural world. AI cannot replace sunlight, wind, and natural wonder. Digital exchanges are at best a poor substitute or, at worst, a counterfeit for what we live through our senses, hearts, and minds.
Our physical and spiritual senses and abilities are God-given, in part so we can experience time, space, and physicality, including the stunning, revitalizing beauty of our physical world and environment.
Imagine you’re preparing for a wilderness hike. You light a single candle as you assemble your maps, food, sleeping bag, tent, and so on.
Because of the light in the room, you do not notice the candle. Now imagine you turn off the light in the room. Now the candle shines clear and bright. It illuminates the room. It was not that the lit candle was invisible before, it was that the room’s artificial light obscured the lit candle’s natural light.
In some ways, we need to be in nature, away from the artificial light and the artificiality which crowds so much of modern life. There we can see God’s light, not as a single candle, but, as E.B. White put it, as “the combustion of stars.”
Digital screens can serve us, but they can’t substitute for the testimonies of nature and the natural world. AI cannot replace sunlight, wind, and natural wonder. Digital exchanges are at best a poor substitute or, at worst, a counterfeit for what we live through our senses, hearts, and minds.
Our physical and spiritual senses and abilities are God-given, in part so we can experience time, space, and physicality, including the stunning, revitalizing beauty of our physical world and environment.
Thursday, August 13, 2026
Each of us has personal moments of reflection, reverence, even transcendence. We feel present. We feel purpose and connection. This occurs in part because all things denote and bear record of their Creator.
We begin at the beginning. “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. ... And God said, Let there be light: and there was light. And God saw the light, that it was good.” You may or may not consider yourself spiritual or religious, but each of us has personal moments of reflection, reverence, even transcendence. We feel present. We feel purpose and connection. This occurs in part because all things denote and bear record of their Creator. Put another way, God is God. Some talk too glibly about AI “becoming God” or “godlike AI.” Even if AI training changes or if we achieve AGI (artificial general intelligence) or ASI (artificial superintelligence), we know reasoning, even superhuman reasoning, has limitations. Man is not, and certainly divinity is not, defined solely by reasoning.
AI is not and cannot be God. AI can answer questions, but it cannot answer prayers. It may organize thoughts, but it cannot offer covenant relationships or blessings. Platforms and technologies cannot substitute for authentic, divine, and human connection.
Wednesday, April 30, 2025
To be clear, the idea that God has stopped loving should be so far down the list of possible explanations in life that we don’t get to it until after the mountains have left and the hills are gone!
When we don’t feel the warmth of divine love, it hasn’t gone away. God’s own words are that “the mountains shall depart, and the hills be removed; but [His] kindness shall not depart from [us].” So, just to be clear, the idea that God has stopped loving should be so far down the list of possible explanations in life that we don’t get to it until after the mountains have left and the hills are gone!
I really enjoy this symbolism of mountains being evidence of the certainty of God’s love. That powerful symbolism weaves into accounts of those who go to the mountains to receive revelation and Isaiah’s description of “the mountain of the Lord’s house” being “established in the top of the mountains.” The house of the Lord is the home of our most precious covenants and a place for us all to retreat and sink deeply into the evidence of our Father’s love for us
October 2024
General Conference
Karl D. Hirst
Wednesday, August 31, 2022
His matchless genius for beauty
I still love to hike high in the mountains among the magnificent granite rocks and peaks. Although silent, they speak of the power and majesty of God—and of His matchless genius for beauty. As Alma testified, “All things denote there is a God; yea, even the earth, and all things that are upon the face of it, … do witness that there is a Supreme Creator” (Alma 30:44).
I love stargazing at night, trying to wrap my mind around the eternity of time and space within my gaze. I always marvel at the knowledge that comes in those quiet moments that, despite the vastness of the cosmos, the Lord of the universe knows puny me. And He knows each of us. The creation witnesses of the Creator, and if we preserve these special, unspoiled places, they will eloquently and profoundly witness of our God and inspire us onward.
March 2021
2021
Marcus B. Nash
Wednesday, October 23, 2019
Turn off social media and other outside distractions from time to time to sit and talk and enjoy each other’s company.
Some of you may be overprogrammed with lots of activities, including good ones. Please be careful not to overprogram your children. Turn off social media and other outside distractions from time to time to sit and talk and enjoy each other’s company. As I recently taught in general conference, regularly hold a family council (see “Family Councils,” Ensign, May 2016, 63–65).
Remember, the Lord counseled us to find time to “be still, and know that I am God” (Psalm 46:10; see also Doctrine and Covenants 101:16).
To keep family members occupied and away from what matters most, someone is always creating something new—a new app or game, for example, that prompts young people to look down at their smartphones rather than up to see the beautiful creations of God’s wonderful world or even someone they may want to meet, date, and marry and with whom they could have a real-world relationship that results in eternal blessings.
Remember, the Lord counseled us to find time to “be still, and know that I am God” (Psalm 46:10; see also Doctrine and Covenants 101:16).
To keep family members occupied and away from what matters most, someone is always creating something new—a new app or game, for example, that prompts young people to look down at their smartphones rather than up to see the beautiful creations of God’s wonderful world or even someone they may want to meet, date, and marry and with whom they could have a real-world relationship that results in eternal blessings.
September 2019
Ensign
M. Russell Ballard
Thursday, May 30, 2019
Our Campfire of Faith
We used as a model his beautiful watercolor titled Campfire at Sunset. As we painted, we talked about faith—how as we face the light and warmth of a campfire, we leave the darkness and uncertainty behind us—how on sometimes long, lonely nights, our campfire of faith can give hope and assurance. And the dawn does come. Our campfire of faith—our memories, experiences, and heritage of faith in God’s goodness and tender mercies in our life—has strengthened us through the night.
There is [a] complete harmony between nature, science, and the gospel of Jesus Christ.
“God is the Creator of the heavens and the earth and all things that are in them, that all nature bears testimony of that divinely directed creation, and that there is [a] complete harmony between nature, science, and the gospel of Jesus Christ.”
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