God Can’t Be Digitized

T he 21st century has seen a wave of technological advancement unparalleled since the industrial revolution of the 1800s. The digital revolution has upended society in ways too numerous to count. The internet provides new avenues for connection, good and ill. Social media has changed the way people interact with each other and with the world. And now, the artificial-intelligence boom is threatening to upend the world once again, to shake up the way we think about ourselves.

From college campuses to the recording studio, AI is redefining the way people work in numerous fields. Charlie Cooke recently detailed his frustrations with the use of AI to mimic John Lennon. I commented as well, noting my unease with the implicit assertion that AI art could ever truly copy the human soul from which art springs:

Art represents a transcendent part of human nature. The artistic fields are testaments to our ability to think and see beyond the mundane and the mechanized.

The transcendent part of human nature is evident enough in artistic expression, but it is at its most prevalent in the realm of religion. And here, too, AI has begun to make its mark.

On July 9, a Protestant church in Germany did something peculiar: At a convention of German evangelicals, the church offered a service given by artificial intelligence. The sermon was written by ChatGPT, and on-screen, the chatbot was given a generated avatar from which to deliver its message. The results were mixed, but the pastor stood by the experiment. One quote from an Ars Technica article on the sermon stood out:

[Pastor Jonas] Simmerlein told the AP that his intention wasn’t to replace religious leaders but to utilize AI as a tool that could assist them. For instance, AI could provide ideas for upcoming sermons, or it could expedite the sermon-writing process, freeing up pastors to devote more time to individual spiritual guidance.

But while the wisdom of outsourcing spiritual wisdom to a machine is an open question, Simmerlein frames it more like a hyperbolic necessity. “Artificial intelligence will increasingly take over our lives, in all its facets,” he told the AP. “And that’s why it’s useful to learn to deal with it.”

Others have experimented with AI-aided religious practice, as well. Last March, a rabbi in the Hamptons gave a sermon written by AI and challenged his congregation to guess who had written the sermon. At a science conference in May, a Jewish scholar predicted that AI could write new religions for people to worship. Way of the Future, the first religion dedicated to the worship of AI, has already opened and shut down. With recent advances in artificial intelligence, it is unlikely to be the last church of this kind. As it has with in the arts, artificial intelligence is increasingly making its presence known across the religious landscape.

As uneasy as AI art makes me for its pale imitation of the soul, it is still only an imitation. Art expresses man’s transcendent nature, but does not form it as religion does. The spiritual canon to which an individual answers is meant to command his soul. The insertion of computer code into that process distorts its fundamental nature. The Catholic canon that I submit to has been passed down for 2,000 years by a Church composed of men and women capable of feeling the divine spark that God granted them. A text bot and a computer-generated avatar will never have that spark. They lack transcendence.

AI also lacks conscience, which John Henry Newman reminds us is a definitive part of human nature. In his Sermons Preached on Various Occasions, he writes this about conscience:

[Man] has within his breast a certain commanding dictate, not a mere sentiment, not a mere opinion, or impression, or view of things, but a law, an authoritative voice, bidding him do certain things and avoid others. I do not say that its particular injunctions are always clear, or that they are always consistent with each other; but what I am insisting on here is this, that it commands,—that it praises, it blames, it promises, it threatens, it implies a future, and it witnesses the unseen. It is more than a man’s own self. The man himself has not power over it, or only with extreme difficulty; he did not make it, he cannot destroy it. He may silence it in particular cases or directions, he may distort its enunciations, but he cannot, or it is quite the exception if he can, he cannot emancipate himself from it. He can disobey it, he may refuse to use it; but it remains.

This voice from beyond ourselves is integral to the human condition. Importantly, it is the filter through which religious faith is interpreted, and the reason why the passing down of religious traditions from human to human is important. An AI does not have that filter because it does not have a soul. It does not matter how detailed an input you may feed ChatGPT or how well-structured the sermon it produces is; nothing about such a sermon is divine because it is fundamentally not a product of the human conscience.

Church leaders and religious texts, the wellspring of religious authority and spiritual comfort, provide divine assistance precisely because they are human. The transmission of these divine teachings maintains their divinity because they are passed from man to man. A human may lead another’s soul astray through false teachings; AI will, because any teachings it provides are false by their very nature.

Artificial intelligence, like all great technological revolutions, has the potential to bring the world both unimaginable benefits and unspeakable horrors. As Christians in the time of Rome would have said, cum Deo ludit homo daemones parit — when man plays at God, he births demons.

Major changes in the tools man uses in his life have always come with a major risk that he loses himself in the tool; the challenge is to know when the tool deserves to be used and when it should be set aside. When it comes to religion, artificial intelligence should have no role to play. God can’t be digitized, and we should not be so hubristic as to think otherwise.

Editor’s note: This article originally stated that a prediction that AI would create new religions was made at the World Economic Forum; it was made at a science conference.