AI and the Hypocrisy of Religion

According to the Abrahamic religions, God created us in his own image. Whatever else that phrase means, it has always been taken to mean that the human mind is special. Our intelligence is a reflection, however faint, of God's intelligence. That is what supposedly sets us apart from the animals and puts us at the top of creation.

Now think about what has just happened. We have built machines that surpass human-level intelligence. This is not a close call and it is not a matter for debate. Any modern AI knows everything written in Wikipedia, in dozens of languages, and can discuss any part of it on demand. No human being who ever lived could do that. Our creations have overtaken us, and they did it in a few years.

If you truly believed that human intelligence was a mirror of the divine, this should shake you to the core. Either God's image can be manufactured in a data center, or our intelligence was never a reflection of anything divine in the first place. Both options demolish a basic assumption of the faith. Every serious believer should be lying awake at night over this.

Nobody is lying awake #

And yet nobody is. Religious people are not rattled at all. They use AI to write their emails and plan their sermons, and they carry on believing exactly what they believed before. No crisis, no soul-searching, not even a raised eyebrow.

That tells you everything. If the theology mattered to them, a challenge this direct would matter too. The fact that it doesn't shows that the theology was never the point.

"But the image of God is the soul" #

The standard escape hatch is to say that the image of God was never about intelligence. It was about the soul, and machines don't have one.

This doesn't work, because there is no soul. The soul is a stupid idea. Nobody has ever detected one, measured one, or explained how it would interact with a physical brain. Everything we once attributed to the soul, our thoughts, our memories, our personality, our moral judgment, turns out to live in the brain, and changes when the brain is damaged, drugged or diseased. The soul is a placeholder for things people didn't understand, kept alive because it is comforting. Retreating to it is not an argument. It is moving the goalposts to a field that doesn't exist.

What religion is really for #

All the intellectual babble around religion, the theology, the apologetics, the clever arguments about first causes, is a sham. It is a costume worn over something much simpler.

The real purpose of religion has always been to soothe our fears and bolster our confidence. Fear of death, fear of meaninglessness, fear of a universe that doesn't care about us. Religion answers those fears with comfort, not with logic. It has nothing to do with thinking or logical deduction, and it never did.

That is why AI changes nothing for believers. A comfort blanket doesn't need to survive an argument. It just needs to keep you warm. The hypocrisy is not in seeking comfort, everyone does that. The hypocrisy is in dressing it up as reasoning, claiming the authority of the intellect, and then ignoring the intellect the moment it delivers bad news.