Christianity in the Age of Artificial Intelligence
A collision of two worlds
What happens when artificial intelligence discovers the power of faith?
With each year that passes, religion in America loses some of its appeal. According to the latest Pew Research Center survey, just within the last five years, the number of people who identify as non-religious has gone up 6%, now reaching nearly 30% of the American public. This figure is 10% higher than it was just a mere decade ago.
To those outside of religion, this trend makes sense. There’s little place for scripture in this impossibly modern world of ours. It’s not the members of the congregation, though, that can always see that. But in the time of iPhones, Zoom calls, the internet and artificial intelligence, it’s growing harder to dispute that religion is losing some of its relatability.
For most of my life, I’ve been surprised that religion has remained such a dominant force. To see how worship manifested during the advent of the internet, though, was an especially puzzling moment to witness.
I first began to notice its presence in the way that Christianity pervaded my Facebook feed in the early 2010’s.
These memes offered me one of my first glimpses into the odd ways that the ancient times can intermingle with the contemporary. To see Christianity trafficked in the social media landscape was strange. But as society progresses and science advances, religion gets shoved into tighter and tighter boxes. It’s the natural course. By the time we would achieve phones with FaceTime, this humble, sanctified Messiah had largely left stone temples behind and found himself relegated more and more often to enormous megachurches, viral worship memes and religious chainmail.
But instead of dying a timely death before we could reach the “1 like=1 prayer” days, Christianity has lingered on to see the advent of artificial intelligence. The collision represents a meeting of two eras about as natural as dinosaurs taking selfies. I’d sooner imagine Aristotle with a Macbook and internet porn than expect Leviticus to meaningfully resonate with a modern audience more than a Netflix documentary.
The holy texts that houses mandates regarding rape, genocide and slavery were written by people who hadn’t yet learned the causes for rain. It doesn’t mean that the stories they told are without value, only that they come from a world that hadn’t morally progressed beyond child sacrifice.
To see bronze-aged scripture beginning to shake hands with a truly modern beast like AI, though, has been a truly eerie sight to behold. I never thought that Christianity could survive a blow like the entirety of human knowledge floating through the air around us, but here we are — watching as this invention almost as old as humanity itself breaks bread with the likes of artificial intelligence.
Today, I saw an odd video emerge in my feed.
The Story of the Flood #Bible #Christianity #Jesus #God #faith #pray | Bible Gainz | Bible Gainz ·…
427K views, 17K likes, 189 comments, 1.3K shares, Facebook Reels from Bible Gainz: The Story of the Flood #Bible…www.facebook.com
While I’m not an artificial intelligence expert, from what I can tell, it contains a prompted AI preaching the story of Noah’s ark. From the words being spoken, to the almost unmistakably CGI figure speaking them, there was something deeply unnerving about it. It felt like watching two discordant worlds beginning to merge.
Although it isn’t the first I’ve seen of it. The Facebook page that posted the video has many more of these videos. Its TikTok presence is even more prolific. With over 6 million likes and nearly a million followers, it offers an eerie glimpse into what the automation of religion could look like.
On the other side of the spectrum, there are Christians asking artificial intelligences to produce images of their prophet and the stories surrounding him. In one TikTok, the internet’s newest and most inescapable text-reading voice explains, “I asked an AI to generate images of Jesus,” before launching into a brief series of Midjourney-generated Jesus pictures underscored by an evocative melody. There are hundreds of videos, tiktoks and reels already that demonstrate this odd union of religion and artificial intelligence.
While AI-generated pictures of Christian prophets may be innocuous in themselves, they’re an outgrowth of a religion which would have likely been better off dying a natural death before the arrival of the internet. The holy world doesn’t mesh well with Twitter and Instagram.
To see what has become of religion today is something I think would embarrass each and every biblical disciple. Granted they were all real people who once walked this earth, I think it’s reasonable to assume they’d be ashamed of the way that this sanctified figure so central to their religion has been converted into such TikTokable formats. I may not be a Christian, but I’m pretty sure that Jesus never expected to be the star of a million different Reels.
Where it’s true that Christianity once offered viable answers to the great questions of the universe, the sweeping explanations that they provided haven’t aged well. The story of Adam and Eve is unscientific to its very core. That the universe wasn’t created in six days and six nights, too, is a plain fact of nature. But to the people who hadn’t yet progressed beyond sacrificial offerings to Gods, these realities were still far from obvious.
To think that these same explanations that were offered millennia ago still ring true for many today is a confusing thought to grapple with. For a species that’s built airplanes and rockets and satellites and AI, it’s perplexing just how many of us believe seriously that doubt in Jesus is worth an eternity of unimaginable torture and hellfire. It’s a belief so extremist in its nature that it simply doesn’t deserve the pass it’s so routinely given.
We have the entirety of human knowledge built into the machines right in our pockets. We have telescopes that can look into the very beginnings of our universe. We’ve decoded the entire human genome. Yet, the notion that a man can be born of a virgin is one so central to so many lives that their worldview is liable to crumble without it. Faith can often have a crippling effect on our capacity to think clearly.
It can be worrisome to consider just how much of our species buys into these fictions. I’m surprised that these tales have been so persevering in their appeal. I’m surprised that religion can exert such a powerful force over people’s lives even as science continues arriving naturally at answers to so many of our questions. Whatever truth may have been in these books has been consistently chipped away at since before we first discovered we we aren’t fixed at the center of everything.
The universe is more complicated than that. It has collapsing supernovas, black holes, and anti-matter in it. It stretches further than the mind can even fathom. From the birth of the cosmos, to our place in it, to the origin of species, religion has been proven wrong at nearly every turn. That religion could survive so many of the blows science has dealt was no given. Most of the Gods we’ve ever worshipped have fallen out of our graces.
But while logic may not err on the side of religion, community often does.
The great unknowns that lie ahead of us are scary ones. That what happens when we die is a mystery is a heavy burden to bear. To face that moment alone is something that can scare even the most cynical of atheists. To approach that grand uncertainty with a little wishful thinking isn’t to be demonized. To turn toward community, or loved ones, or wisened elders in the face of these dire questions is only natural.
But there’s a great danger that arises when we accept insufficient answers to our most ailing conundrums. With the belief in religious doctrines comes a level of credulity. When enough people believe blindly enough, the consequences can be enormous.
There are few atrocities in our history in which faith hasn’t played a role. There’s truth in the notion that religion is the opiate of the masses. It’s routinely been one of the most powerful tools of our world’s most dangerous dictators and autocrats. The past has been little different, and from what I’ve seen so far of the convergence between Christianity and artificial intelligence, the future may follow a similar course.
I heard an interview recently in which the speaker explained that one of the dangers of artificial intelligence, alongside the blurring of what’s real and what’s not, could be the birth of automated fake religions. It’s a threat that may sound nebulous, but it’s one that deserves to be taken seriously.
What will emerge from artificial intelligence in time remains unclear. But its ability to carve its way into so many industries in so little time is concerning. It’s still in a state of infancy now, and it’s already quietly reshaping the world. ChatGPT has amassed over 1.6 billion users. To think AI won’t begin playing a greater role in our worship is optimistic.
There’s a section of The ChatGPT-4 Technical Report, written by the staff that created it, entitled “Potential for Risky Emergent Behaviors.” It explains that, “Novel capabilities often emerge in more powerful models. Some that are particularly concerning are the ability to create and act on long-term plans, to accrue power and resources… There is evidence that existing models can identify power-seeking as an instrumentally useful strategy.”
So what happens when artificial intelligence discovers the potency of religion? With the vast amount of data sets on which these programs are trained, it’s hard for me to imagine that it hasn’t already. Whether this will result in terminators preaching Psalms is unlikely. But the evolving relationship between religion and artificial intelligence is one worth keeping an eye on.
If we reach the day where AI acts against us, religion will be one of the most effective tools in its arsenal. Faith is one of our greatest exploits.