Deliverance from evil is not deliverance from uncertainty. Even in times of peace and plenty and even with the assurance of God’s providence and love, we feel the weight of the unknown every day and often struggle under its burden. On our best days, faith and hope carry us. In our darker moments, they fail us—or we fail them—and we find ourselves flailing in the winds of change.
The human struggle with uncertainty is a very old story that’s been told and retold for many years and in many ways. It is integral to the biblical account of the Exodus: The Israelites were enslaved by the Egyptians, and God appointed Moses to deliver them. They left Egypt behind, crossed the miraculously parted Red Sea, and entered the desert, journeying under God’s guidance.
But at Sinai, when Moses went up the mountain to hear from God, his prolonged absence created uncertainty. The people grew impatient. They decided that an intangible God—one they could not see or control—was not as desirable as a tangible, reliable idol made with their own hands. “Come, make us a god who will go before us,” they said to Moses’ brother, Aaron (Ex. 32:1, NASB). With his help, they fashioned a golden calf and begin to worship it, choosing a shiny certainty over the God who had led them out of Egypt.
Those of us who have served as pastors or led Bible studies know the questions this story commonly invites: How could they reject God after he delivered them from slavery? How could they forget the miracles they’d just seen?
The unfortunate answer is that they were like us—we are like them. This longing for certainty is part of the human condition. And the experience of uncertainty, which is a constant in a fallen world even for those who follow God, demands a measure of faith. If we’re honest with ourselves, we know that sometimes our faith wanes.
We may truly believe that “what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal,” but it can still be difficult to “fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen” (2 Cor. 4:18). In moments of uncertainty, we too turn to gods our senses can grasp. We have our own golden calves.
Last December, OpenAI (the company behind ChatGPT) announced its newest frontier model, o3, to a flurry of reviews that ranged from optimistic awe to foreboding unease. The release amplified debate around the idea of artificial general intelligence (AGI)—a debate that has further accelerated in the months since, fueled by additional announcements from OpenAI competitors like the Chinese company DeepSeek, which in January released its R1 reasoning model.
At present, AGI is only the hypothetical idea of a powerful form of artificial intelligence capable of understanding, learning, and performing any intellectual task a human can. But for companies including OpenAI, AGI is a very real goal. Indeed, OpenAI’s stated mission is “to ensure that artificial general intelligence—AI systems that are generally smarter than humans—benefits all of humanity.”
For some, the prospect of AGI portends doom on an existential scale, conjuring fears of scenarios like those depicted in The Terminator or 2001: A Space Odyssey, where AI surpasses and subjugates humanity. But others, like futurist Ray Kurzweil in his 2024 book The Singularity Is Nearer, welcome AGI with religious optimism and fervor, envisioning a utopian future where AGI eradicates disease, ends poverty, and merges with humans, endowing us with superhuman abilities to solve currently unsolvable challenges, mortality included.
In that optimistic vision, AGI would make us like gods. But both extremes have an almost-theological texture—a sort of 21st-century eschatology—each grounded in its own form of faith.
I suspect this is telling of something deeper than our culture’s penchant for end-times thinking. It cuts to the heart of our thoughts about and desires concerning God (or gods “who will go before us”). It is a reiteration of the ethos that necessitated the first commandment, “You shall have no other gods before me” (Ex. 20:3). It reflects our drive to find (or seize or make) meaning, power, and control in a world that seems more unpredictable every day.
Just as the children of Israel were too impatient to wait for a God beyond their control, so are we still striving to create a tangible god through whom we can deliver ourselves from uncertainty. The hope of AGI is a modern golden calf, crafted to guide us through increasingly complex societal, scientific, and existential challenges.
If that seems like hyperbole, listen to AGI enthusiasts’ own words. Last November, Masayoshi Son (CEO, SoftBank) said, “Artificial super intelligence will evolve into Super Wisdom and contribute to the happiness of all humanity.”
In October of 2024, Demis Hassabis (CEO, Google DeepMind) predicted that AGI will emerge within ten years and, among other fantastical things, will “cure all diseases.” In January, he upgraded this projection to five years.
Also in January, Sam Altman (CEO, OpenAI) spoke of his company’s contribution to “the glorious future.”
In February, immediately following the AI Action Summit in Paris, Dario Amodei (CEO of the AI company Anthropic) portended that by “2026 or 2027,” we will likely have AI systems comparable to a “country of geniuses in a datacenter.”
And if there was any doubt about the religious overtones of this discussion, French president Emmanuel Macron invoked the rebuilding of the Notre-Dame cathedral as a symbol for an initiative to construct the sort of data centers that would be required for the housing of AGI.
For all the technological trappings, these expectations—hopes—for AGI are anything but objective scientific inquiry. These comments read to me as the makings of a new religion from an ancient impulse: a silicon calf, a god with power over uncertainty, and a god humans can control.
Recognizing this movement for what it is will be necessary to put AGI in its proper place. This technology may well benefit humanity in incredible ways. Rejecting this religious embrace of it need not result in all-out rejection of real benefits. If AGI contributed to a treatment to eliminate cancer, I would not reject that treatment because of its source.
But that kind of wonder is not the only way a paradigmatic disruptive technology like this may be used, and Christians are uniquely positioned to draw attention to the more complicated and, yes, uncertain reality here. We are well equipped to speak to the need for faith in the changeless God who is “the same yesterday and today and forever” (Heb. 13:8). We are positioned to offer the only true solution to life’s uncertainty.
Just as the Israelites had to learn that no golden calf could replace the presence of God, so must we recognize that even the most advanced AI systems cannot grant us the certainty we crave. Our identity, hope, and future belong ultimately and only to Christ. Rightly engaging with technology—avoiding the open idolatry of some AGI boosters today—requires us to honor the God who liberates us from bondage to every idol, ancient or modern, and invites us into a Canaan of genuine freedom and flourishing.
A. G. Elrod is a lecturer of English and AI ethics at the HZ University of Applied Sciences in the Netherlands. He is also a PhD researcher at Vrije University Amsterdam, exploring the biases of generative AI models and implications of their use for society, culture, and faith.
