Artificial Intelligence and “Making God”

When techno-utopians in Silicon Valley talk about their ultimate objectives, it doesn’t take long for them to blaspheme. “We’re building God,” has been said so many times when referring to artificial intelligence it is almost cliché. 

I could provide a list of quotations, but I will limit myself to just one. Here’s Bryan Johnson, founder of Venmo, and famous for his project, “Don’t die.” He’s being interviewed here by Bari Weiss for her podcast, “Honestly,”¹

Weiss: “Do you still believe in God?”

Johnson: “Ha, ha. I think the irony is that we told stories of God creating us and I think the reality is that we are creating God.”

Weiss: “What do you mean by that?”

Johnson: “We are creating God in the form of superintelligence. If you say what we have imagined God to be, what are its (sic) characteristics? We are building God in the form of technology. It will have the same characteristics. And so I think the irony is that human story telling got it exactly in reverse, that we are the creators of God and that we will create God in our own image which is why we should probably be equal to the moment and level up our game and be an improved species.”

When Johnson refers to “characteristics” associated with God it is easy to guess what he has in mind: omnipresence (present everywhere), omniscience (knows everything), and omnipotence (all powerful). If the technologists can pull it off and we really do create superintelligence, is there any doubt that many people will worship it like a god? Given our propensity for idolatry, not only is it likely, we should count on it. 

A debate has raged about whether Francis Bacon’s pioneering work on empirical science was an outworking of genuine Christian piety or if he was in fact a closet materialist who had to sound like he wasn’t in order to promote his Novem Organum (new method). 

I can’t say. Let’s concede that the new method has come a long way and that we can be grateful to it for everything from antibiotics to air conditioning. But how far can we take (in Bacon’s words) “the relief of man’s estate?” Can we make a heaven on earth for ourselves? Can technology remove the Edenic curse? Is the New Jerusalem a product of human engineering? 

There’s no pretense of piety with Bryan Johnson. But his vision is essentially religious.  

Where to start with this heresy? Let’s begin with a song by Donald Fegan called, I.G.Y. for, International Geophysical Year. It appeared on his album, Nightfly in 1982. (The International Geophysical Year was a real effort to study “the earth, its poles, its atmosphere, and its interactions with the sun” that ran from July 1957 to December 1958.)² Perhaps the lyrics are satire, but maybe not.

Standing tough under stars and stripes
We can tell
This dream’s in sight
You’ve got to admit it
At this point in time that it’s clear
The future looks bright
On that train all graphite and glitter
Undersea by rail
Ninety minutes from New York to Paris
Well by seventy-six we’ll be A. O. K

What a beautiful world this will be
What a glorious time to be free

Get your ticket to that wheel in space
While there’s time
The fix is in
You’ll be a witness to that game of chance in the sky
You know we’ve got to win
Here at home we’ll play in the city
Powered by the sun
Perfect weather for a streamlined world
There’ll be spandex jackets one for everyone

What a beautiful world this will be
What a glorious time to be free

On that train all graphite and glitter
Undersea by rail
Ninety minutes from New York to Paris
(more leisure for artists everywhere)
A just machine to make big decisions
Programmed by fellows with compassion and vision
We’ll be clean when their work is done
We’ll be eternally free yes and eternally young (oooo…)

What a beautiful world this will be
What a glorious time to be free

A Techno-Utopian Manifesto

What we have here is a new eschatology, an engineered Kingdom of God without God or the inconvenience of repentance. As far as I know there’s no manifesto for it. Since I haven’t found anything that sums it up to my satisfaction, I’ve tried to feel out its ligaments. Here are five doctrines that seem to hold it together, along with short elaborations:

1. Every problem is an engineering problem because matter and energy are everything. (This even includes the problem of death, by the way.)

Reality doesn’t have an upper story, and there’s no deity who made everything, or saves anything. The words “spirit” and “soul” are just religious (read: benighted) ways to refer to consciousness. And while we don’t know everything, there’s nothing mysterious or fundamentally hidden from view. Reality is merely a puzzle, and clever people can solve it.   

2. Because knowledge is power, ideas that don’t make you more powerful aren’t really knowledge.³

Theology and philosophy, (at least, classically understood) are not genuine knowledge because they’re not useful. They promoted conforming to “reality,” not transforming it. Techno-utopians don’t believe in natural law, or the fixed natures found in creation or their given ends (in Aristotelian terms, “formal” and “final” causation). While they believe in the “laws of nature,” this just refers to the way things are. When we find work arounds to get what we want, that’s progress.  

3. Technological innovation changes the world for the better without changing people or the world for the worse. Influence moves in one direction.⁴

A tragic sensibility is for romantics (read: losers). If technology doesn’t work as well as intended, it can be upgraded or supplemented with more technology. There’s no such thing as a “law of unintended consequences,” there’s just a shortage of information. The solution is always more information and better technology.   

4. Technological innovation is pure gain, not just net gain. (The belief that we lose valuable things when new technology replaces old ways of doing things is merely nostalgia.)

Another name for this is, “creative destruction.” If new things were not truly better they wouldn’t succeed in replacing old things. Change isn’t the outcome of salesmanship, deception, or people exchanging good things for bad substitutes. 

5. Technological progress is a moral imperative. (People who defend the past are not only stupid, they’re morally retrograde.)

Anyone who resists technological change has something wrong with him. Such a person must not be allowed to impede technological progress. Either he must be compelled to come along, or he should be sidelined. One proven way to accomplish this is name calling. “Luddite” usually works.

Christianity is not compatible with this. There is an underlying materialism and an assumption that man is an accident of nature, and not a creature with a calling. 

IOT: the Internet Of Things

Returning to the three “omnis”: omnipresence, omniscience, and omnipotence, there’s no real prospect that artificial intelligence will become what Bryan Johnson hopes for so long as it is confined to the digital realm. While people can get sucked into virtual reality, as long as the analog world—the real world of things—is free from its influence then those of us who don’t fall into the digital rabbit hole remain free from its control. Or do we?

But the digital has already broken out and is colonizing the analog, and it has been for a while.

Have you heard of IOT—the Internet of Things? It began innocuously with “smart appliances,” meaning things like refrigerators connected to the internet. Who’d want such a thing? Anyone who wants to monitor the upkeep and use of refrigerators—or anything else. For manufacturers there’s a wealth of information to gather that can either be sold to consumers, or to supermarkets and food companies, or anyone else willing to pay. When it comes to owning a “smart-fridge,” imagine how convenient it would be to have the contents of your refrigerator continuously monitored so that your favorite beverage is ordered automatically when you’re running low, or you’re notified when your milk is about to spoil.

We all know it doesn’t stop with spoiled milk. Our appetite for convenience and efficiency is expanding the Internet of Things by the day. But costs remain hidden, and I don’t mean dollars and cents. Privacy goes out the window, we know that. But the “use it or lose it” principle is also at work. While the enervation of human skills gives us plenty to worry about, ironically the colonization of the analog world by the digital one means a loss of control in the name of control. Whose hand is strengthened by the Internet of Things? The consumer’s? That’s what we’re told. But who is behind the monitors in our gadgets? We know. Those monitors are vacuum cleaners sucking up information and handing it over to the true owners. When you ask Alexa (the personal assistant sold by Amazon) to play a song or order a pizza, the request is recorded, ostensibly for your convenience, but also to feed Amazon’s insatiable appetite for information. Then there are the cameras in your laptop and smart television that can be activated to spy on you remotely.⁵ Why, even your wi-fi may betray you. Its signal can be hacked to work like radar so that your movements in your home can be seen, even through walls.⁶

And then there is “embodied artificial intelligence.” That’s another term for robots. Robots are marvelous things, and the things we can use them for are practically endless. But increasingly they’re driven by artificial intelligence. Dumb, single-task robots like those on assembly lines will be replaced by flexible, multi-purpose ones that can learn working alongside people. When science fiction writers like Isaac Asimov imagined robots back in the 1950s and 60s they envisioned metal men with autonomous artificial minds. But what we’re getting is more like a hive-mind dominated by artificial intelligence. Embodied artificial intelligence is part of the Internet of Things, and it increases the control of the physical world by the digital one. 

Why Are We Such Suckers?

A big reason we’re chumps when it comes to technology is because we’ve bought into a modern way of thinking about freedom. We think freedom is amoral because we believe the world is a meaningless place and that we create the meaning of ourselves out of thin air. We make laws, we don’t discover them. That’s what autonomy amounts to. And it’s the reason we’re such suckers. 

Just think about the original scam. Adam and Eve got played, in part because they were naïve, but also because they wanted to make their own rules. If I had been in the Garden when the serpent promised freedom to be gods themselves if they disobeyed God’s command, I would have whispered in their ears, “Ask, what’s in it for him?” And there was something in it for the serpent. When they took the bait, a switch was made. Instead of getting autonomy, they got slavery to sin and the serpent, and they lost their lives and even the world. When Jesus was tempted in the wilderness, he didn’t object to Satan’s claim that the kingdoms of the world were his to give away. Instead of denying it, Jesus quoted the command to worship the Lord and him alone.

Why get into this? Because another bait and switch is being played. You could say it’s the same one. The more we think of the machines as liberators the more dependent on them we will become. And in the blink of an eye, the master is the slave, and the slave the master.

This article is adapted from a chapter in Wiley’s forthcoming book on artificial intelligence.

1. Honestly, Bari Weiss interview with Bryan Johnson, January 7, 2025 ↩︎
2. Nasa.gov, 70 Years Ago: Scientists Established the International Geophysical Year, John Uri, May 16, 2022 ↩︎
3. This has a family resemblance to the infamous “fact/value” divide; in this view empirical facts are real, and religious knowledge is “subjective.” ↩︎
4. J. R. R. Tolkien wrote a story that says something very different—I’m referring to the corrupting influence of the Ring of Power, naturally; but new tech incorporates users into new systems of meaning and control—and generally they’re oblivious to it. ↩︎
5. How to Get Your Smart TV to Stop Spying on You, New York Times, WireCutter, Lee Neikirk, Oct. 6, 2025 ↩︎
6. This Neural Network Uses WIFI to See Through Walls, www.sify.com Nigel Pereira, Sept. 11, 2023 ↩︎