False Gods

The Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore collapsed in March 2024 after being struck by a container ship. Six people were killed.

n 1991, Maryland was among the states that helped develop a test to evaluate bridges for the likelihood of collapse if they were to be struck by a ship. The risks varied according to a number of factors, including the speed of the vessels passing underneath, the depth of the water, the geometry of the bridge and what systems were in place to protect a bridge’s support structures.

Even as the vessel traffic crossing under the Key Bridge grew over the years in size and volume, increasing the bridge’s vulnerability, Maryland transportation officials never conducted such a risk assessment. An assessment by federal officials after the collapse revealed that the bridge’s risk level was almost 30 times the recommended threshold. Given that Maryland officials helped developed the test, one official said, “there’s no excuse.”

But many other states have not conducted risk or vulnerability assessments on their bridges. Investigators found that dozens of bridges in 19 states had not been assessed for risk of collapse in recent years, even though the volume of vessel traffic passing underneath these bridges suggested a strike by a ship was a distinct possibility. The National Transportation Safety Board has contacted the operators of these bridges — in most cases, state transportation departments and regional port authorities — to urge them to conduct assessments and, if needed, come up with measures to reduce the risk of collapse.

An accountant who fills out spreadsheets at the beach, a dog groomer who always has time for one more client, a basketball player who shoots free throws to the point of exhaustion.

Every profession has its share of hard chargers and overachievers. But for some workers — perhaps more than ever in our always-on, always-connected world — the drive to send one more email, clip one more poodle, sink one more shot becomes all-consuming.

Workaholism is a common feature of the modern workplace. A recent review found that roughly 15 percent of workers qualify as workaholics. That adds up to millions of overextended employees around the world who don’t know when — or how, or why — to quit.

Workaholism could be on the upswing thanks to Zoom, Slack and every other technological advance that makes it easier for people to work anywhere, anytime. Behavioral scientist Toon Taris says. “It is something I’m worried about. The conditions for workaholism to develop have never been as good as today.”

Psychologist Malissa Clark agrees that the stage seems to be set for more people to find their inner workaholics. She said, “The mass shift to working from home and remote work may have changed some of our communication patterns and expectations.” Working from home, which became especially widespread during the pandemic, likely created a new group of always-on workers who lost all sight of the boundaries between work and home life. It’s troubling, she says. “Even just your average worker might now start to be more of a workaholic.”

Jack Hassell, a human resource specialist in New Zealand, interviewed an academic who got a wake-up call during the massive Christchurch earthquake of 2011. When the earthquake started, they were reluctant to quit work and leave their desk, Hassell says. Finally forced to exit the shaking building, the academic had an epiphany. “They realized, ‘Oh my God, I was so consumed with work I was willing to almost die.’”

Possible Preaching Angle:

Part of the curse (Gen. 3:19) introduced toil and effort into our lives. Yet, God never meant for us to become slaves to our work. In fact, He insists that we take a day of rest for every six days we labor (Exod. 20:8-11; Luke 23:56).

Anthony Levandowski makes an unlikely prophet. Dressed in Silicon Valley-casual jeans, the engineer known for self-driving cars, is laying the foundations for a new religion. Artificial intelligence has already inspired billion-dollar companies, far-reaching research programs, and scenarios of both transcendence and doom. Now Levandowski is creating its first church.

Levandowski created the first Church of Artificial Intelligence called Way of the Future. It was founded in 2015 but shut its doors a few years later. Now the recently rebooted church, which shares the original’s name, now has “a couple thousand people” coming together to build a spiritual connection between humans and AI, its founder said.

Papers filed with the Internal Revenue Service in May of 2015 name tech entrepreneur and self-driving car pioneer, Anthony Levandowski, as the leader of the new religion. The documents state that WOTF’s activities will focus on “the realization, acceptance, and worship of a Godhead based on Artificial Intelligence (AI) developed through computer hardware and software.”

“What is going to be created will effectively be a god,” Levandowski said in an interview with Wired magazine. “It’s not a god in the sense that it makes lightning or causes hurricanes. But if there is something a billion times smarter than the smartest human, what else are you going to call it?”

But WOTF differs in one key way to established churches, says Levandowski: “There are many ways people think of God, and thousands of flavors of Christianity, Judaism, Islam … but they’re always looking at something that’s not measurable or you can’t really see or control. This time it’s different. This time you will be able to talk to God, literally, and know that it’s listening.”

Levandowski said he’s rebooting his AI church in a renewed attempt at creating a religious movement focused on the worship and understanding of artificial intelligence.

He said that sophisticated AI systems could help guide humans on moral, ethical, or existential questions that are normally sought out in religions. “Here we're actually creating things that can see everything, be everywhere, know everything, and maybe help us and guide us in a way that normally you would call God,” he said.

Possible Preaching Angle:

This has always been the conceit of those who try to replace the true God with man-made “gods.” Humans wants a visible god, a god they can control, and a god that they can know is listening. True biblical religion is based on an eternal God who sees everything, is everywhere, knows everything, and who hears all of our prayers. But he can only be approached through faith in his Son (Heb. 11:6; John 14:6; Heb. 4:15-16) who provides access and fellowship with our Father (1 John 1:1-5).

There is a reason God gave us the Sabbath rest. We need it. We were not created to work seven days a week. Yet, that is where we are headed as a culture, especially since COVID-19, and this is not a good thing.

Technology tethers us to our work through smartphones and “productivity” apps such as Slack and Teams. The majority of workers regularly check their email on their smartphones, which never leave their side, even after work hours or on vacation. The rise in remote work means work and family spheres are no longer separate, blurring the boundaries between work and home. Or as Andrew Barnes, cofounder of 4 Day Week Global, said, “We’re not working from home, we’re sleeping in the office.” This is our new world of work.

Our relationship with work is becoming increasingly unhealthy. Levels of burnout and stress are at all-time highs. Even before the pandemic, the World Health Organization called stress the “health epidemic of the 21st century.” What is a major source of that stress? Our jobs.

COVID-19 exacerbated this problem. During the pandemic, workdays became longer—in the United States, the average workday is now three hours longer; and in the United Kingdom, France, Canada, and Spain, it’s two hours longer. But more than that, we have gotten used to working outside traditional work hours.

In Buddhist Japan, they now have robot priests. Mindar is a robo-priest which has been working at a temple in Kyoto for the last few years, reciting Buddhist sutras with which it has been programmed. The next step, says monk Tensho Goto, an excitable champion of the digital dharma, is to fit it with an AI system so that it can have real conversations, and offer spiritual advice. Goto is especially excited about the fact that Mindar is “immortal.” This means, he says, that it will be able to pass on the tradition in the future better than him.

Meanwhile, over in China, Xian’er is a touchscreen “robo-monk” who works in a temple near Beijing, spreading “kindness, compassion and wisdom to others through the internet and new media.”

In India, the Hindus are joining in, handing over duties in one of their major ceremonies to a robot arm, which performs in place of a priest.

In a Catholic church in Warsaw, Poland, sits SanTO, an AI robot which looks like a statue of a saint, and is “designed to help people pray” by offering Bible quotes in response to questions.

Not to be outdone, a protestant church in Germany has developed a robot called BlessU-2. BlessU-2, which looks like a character designed by Aardman Animations, can “forgive your sins in five different languages,” which must be handy if they’re too embarrassing to confess to a human.

Possible Preaching Angle:

Computer scientists and programmers pursue their goal of creating their own god from AI. They seek wisdom and guidance apart from the true source. “For my people have committed two evils; they have forsaken me the fountain of living waters, and hewed them out cisterns, broken cisterns, that can hold no water.” (Jer. 2:13)

According to a survey, 37% of Americans think billionaires are terrible role models, and 49% said they have overall negative feelings towards them. And the heat is felt most prominently by the big-name tech billionaires like Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, and Jeff Bezos.

But despite the negative feelings, people still admire and look up to some of these individual figures. And it’s not because of just their financial success; a 2021 study found that people who stand against a class of extremely wealthy people still tend to admire individual billionaires like Elon Musk and Bill Gates.

Margaret O’Mara, a professor of history at the University of Washington, says “The secret of Silicon Valley has been the storytelling.” She describes intense admiration of tech billionaires as kind of “a religion of entrepreneurship.” With the lack of presence of other role models and declining faith in other institutions like the government or churches or even science, people want to find a myth to believe in that will give them comfort.

When you have these really exciting stories of the startup company in your dorm room or garage that then becomes this trillion-dollar company, this exciting rags to riches story really fits into an American narrative that predates Silicon Valley. Those stories are exceptional, to be clear, but I think the fault is presuming that anyone can do this.

Another story within the tech billionaire narrative that appeals to masses is that of disruption. O’Mara said, “This is a nation founded on revolution, so being a rebel, not bowing to authority and being your own boss is kind of cool.”

Richard R. John, professor of business history and journalism at Columbia University calls the hype surrounding tech billionaires a cult of personality. He says:

A cult of personality is the deliberate glorification of a specific public figure. Throughout history, cult of personality hype of billionaire figures has usually been propagated through journalists and news media. But with the founding of social media, it grew massively through its unprecedented reach. It’s no longer regional, it’s now national and even international.

Our existence on a Goldilocks planet in a Goldilocks universe is so statistically improbable that many scientists believe in the multiverse. In other words, so many universes exist that it’s not surprising to find one planet in one of them that’s just right for human life.

Other scientists don’t want to make such a leap of faith. They see this world as the result of intelligent design. That, however, suggests God. So, atheists seeking an alternative are following Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom, who suggested that we “are almost certainly living in a computer simulation.” Neil deGrasse Tyson gave the theory credibility by saying it was a 50-50 possibility, and Richard Dawkins has taken it seriously. Elon Musk semi-popularized it in 2016 by saying he thought it true.

That raises the question: Who or what is the simulator? Some say our distant descendants with incredibly high-powered computers. One of the theory’s basic weaknesses is that, as Bostrom acknowledges, it assumes the concept that silicon-based processors in a computer will become conscious and comparable to the neural networks of human brains. Simulation theory has many other weaknesses, and those who understand the problems of both the simulation and multiverse hypotheses should head to the logical alternative: God.

Mike Tyson is one of the greatest boxers of all time. Over his career, “Iron Mike” had 50 wins, including 44 knockouts, and only six losses. Coming from a difficult childhood, during which he was surrounded by crime and poverty, he escaped his circumstances through a laser-like focus on his dream of athletic greatness. And he realized that dream in 1986 by becoming the world heavyweight champion at the age of 20.

Despite his success and fame, Tyson was dogged by crises, failed relationships, and legal troubles, including allegations of domestic violence and nearly three years in prison in the 1990s after he was convicted on a charge of rape. He achieved all his ambitions of riches and renown, but a happy life seemed to elude him.

This might seem ironic or contradictory to some. To Tyson, however, it was neither. “You almost have to give your happiness up to accomplish your goals,” he reflected in a 2020 interview.

That is what we might call the Tyson Paradox. Building a good life requires us to have goals that keep us focused, enthusiastic, and out of trouble. But actually, attaining those goals might not give us the payoff we imagined, and could in fact bring us misery. Although most of us will never see the highs and lows that Mike Tyson experienced, we can all easily fall into our own version of the same trap.

Formerly the Religion Editor for the Atlantic, Sigal Samuel now writes about the future of consciousness, artificial intelligence, and neuroscience, and their "staggering ethical implications." She describes much of the hope for artificial intelligence as mimicking what Christianity and other major religions have been espousing for centuries. She writes:

Suppose I told you that in 10 years … you will live in a sort of paradise. You won’t get sick, or age, or die. Eternal life will be yours! Even better, your mind will be blissfully free of uncertainty — you’ll have access to perfect knowledge. Oh, and you’ll no longer be stuck on Earth. Instead, you can live up in the heavens.

The more you listen to Silicon Valley’s discourse around AI, the more you hear echoes of religion. That’s because a lot of the excitement about building a superintelligent machine comes down to recycled religious ideas. Most secular technologists who are building AI just don’t recognize that.

These technologists propose cheating death by uploading our minds to the cloud, where we can live digitally for all eternity. They talk about AI as a decision-making agent that can judge with mathematical certainty what’s optimal and what’s not. (It is) an endeavor that guarantees human salvation if it goes well, even as it spells doom if it goes badly.

Jack Clark, co-founder of the AI safety company Anthropic, recently wrote: “Sometimes I think a lot of the breathless enthusiasm for AGI is misplaced religious impulses from people brought up in a secular culture.”

Sigal Samuel summarizes the beliefs in this nutshell: "When we put all these ideas together and boil them down, we get this basic proposition:

• We may not have much time until life as we know it is over.
• So, we need to place a bet on something that can save us.
• Since the stakes are so high, we should ante up and go all in on our bet.

Silicon Valley’s vision for AI? It’s religion, repackaged

Work success isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. That’s the gist of an article in The Wall Street Journal titled, “Is This It?’ When Success Isn’t Satisfying.” The article states:

You got the job, won the award, launched the new project to accolades. So why don’t you feel better? “You get the title and it’s, like, ‘Ugh. Is this it?’” says Robert Waldinger, a professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School who leads a study on how people thrive.

Sometimes, getting the thing is just as delicious as we imagine. Other times, we climb and climb, only to be underwhelmed by what we find at the top: more work, political wrangling, the feeling of being a fraud. Or the success high wears off fast, replaced by that old panic we hoped the accomplishment would finally cure. Then we wonder: Where’s the next win?

We’re all sprinting on what psychologists call a hedonic treadmill. That is, we might get a hit of joy when we achieve something, but we eventually return to our baseline level of happiness (or unhappiness). Whatever heights we reach, we’re still, well, us.

The article quotes a man named Andy Dunn who sold his clothing line to Walmart for $310 million. Mr. Dunn, now 44, spent years strategizing and fantasizing about such a sale but says it was a mirage. Building the company brought him more happiness, he says, than the eventual payout. Dunn said, “From the outside, people think, ‘Oh, my God, amazing, [but] I learned that those are just illusory things.”

Miwa Sado, a reporter for NHK, Japan’s public broadcaster, “died in the line of duty and her body was found with her mobile phone still clasped in her hand.” Doctors soon established that Miwa Sado died as a result of congenital heart failure. But following an investigation by Japan’s Ministry of Labor, the official cause of here death was changed to “karoshi”: death by overwork.

In the month preceding her death, Sado had clocked an exhausting 159 hours of official overtime. That was equivalent to working two full eight-hour shifts every weekday over a four-week period. Unofficially, the number of hours of overtime probably exceeded that.

For the last few decades, the world has watched as China became the world’s largest producer and exporter of manufactured goods. But one of the unintended consequences of this has been a surge in the number of people whose deaths have been attributed to overwork. In 2016, CCTV, the state broadcaster, which usually only resorts to hyperbole when they have good news to share, announced that more than half a million Chinese citizens die from overworking every year.

Many in China’s high technology sector now order their working lives according to the mantra “996.” The two 9s refer to the requirements to put in twelve-hour days, from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., and the 6 refers to the six days of the week that employees with ambitions to get anywhere are expected to be at their workstations.

Possible Preaching Angle:

There are so many people who overwork their entire lives. They may not suddenly die as poor Miwa did, but over the course of their lives, they do eventually work themselves “into” death by fixating on the wrong goal, and putting temporary gains over eternal rewards.

Writing in the Wall Street Journal, best-selling author and Ronald Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan thinks back to how promising and exciting the advent of the internet and artificial intelligence was expected to be. Things aren't looking so well today. She writes:

But a small, funny detail always gave me pause and stayed with me. It was that from the beginning of the age its great symbol was the icon of what was becoming its greatest company, Apple. It was the boldly drawn apple with the bite taken out. Which made me think of Adam and Eve in the garden, Adam and Eve and the fall, at the beginning of the world. God told them not to eat the fruit of the tree, but the serpent told Eve no harm would come if she did, that she’d become like God, knowing all. That’s why he doesn’t want you to have it, the serpent said: You’ll be his equal. So she took the fruit and ate, she gave to Adam who also ate, and the eyes of both were opened, and for the first time they knew shame. When God rebuked them, Adam blamed Eve and Eve blamed the serpent. They were banished from the garden into the broken world we inhabit.

A.I. tech workers are stealthily taking a bite out of the apple:

I believe those creating, fueling, and funding it want, possibly unconsciously, to be God and on some level think they are God. The latest warning, and a thoughtful, sophisticated one it is, underscores this point in its language. The tech and AI investor Ian Hogarth wrote that a future AI, which he called “God-like AI,” could lead to the “obsolescence or destruction of the human race” if it isn’t regulated. He observes that most of those currently working in the field understand that risk. People haven’t been sufficiently warned. His colleagues are being “pulled along by the rapidity of progress.”

In an article written by Neil McArthur at the University of Manitoba, he said:

We are about to witness the birth of a new kind of religion. In the next few years, or even months, we will see the emergence of sects devoted to the worship of artificial intelligence (AI). The latest generation of AI-powered chatbots have left their early users awestruck —and sometimes terrified — by their power. These are the same sublime emotions that lie at the heart of our experience of the divine.

People already seek religious meaning from very diverse sources. For instance, there are multiple religions that worship extra-terrestrials. As these chatbots come to be used by billions of people, it is inevitable that some of these users will see the AIs as higher beings. There are several pathways by which AI religions will emerge:

First, some people will come to see AI as a higher power. Generative AI that can create new content possesses several characteristics that are often associated with divine beings:

1. It displays a level of intelligence that goes beyond that of most humans. Indeed, its knowledge appears limitless.

2. It is capable of great feats of creativity. It can write poetry, compose music, and generate art.

3. It is removed from normal human concerns and needs. It does not suffer physical pain, hunger, or sexual desire.

4. It can offer guidance to people in their daily lives.

5. It is immortal.

Second, generative AI will produce output that can be taken for religious doctrine. It will provide answers to metaphysical and theological questions, and engage in the construction of complex worldviews.

Third, generative AI itself may ask to be worshipped or may actively solicit followers. We have already seen such cases, like when the chatbot used by the search engine Bing tried to convince a user to fall in love with it.

Finally, AI worship poses several notable risks. The chatbots may ask their followers to do dangerous or destructive things, or followers may interpret their statements as calls to do such things.

Possible Preaching Angle:

False Religion; Idols; Idolatry; Technology – Since the Garden of Eden humans have been vulnerable to being lured away from worship of the true God. The sad history of mankind is filled with the creation and worship of idols made by human hands.

Derek Thompson, a staff writer for The Atlantic, argues that Americans have a new object for worship. He calls it the religion of workism. Thompson writes:

The decline of traditional faith in America has coincided with an explosion of new atheisms. Some people worship beauty, some worship political identities, and others worship their children. But everybody worships something. And workism is among the most potent of the new religions competing for congregants.

Thompson defines workism as the need to make work “the centerpiece of one’s identity and life’s purpose; and the belief that any policy to promote human welfare must always encourage more work.”

No large productive country averages more hours of work a year. And the gap between the U.S. and other countries is growing. Americans “work longer hours, have shorter vacations, get less in unemployment, disability, and retirement benefits, and retire later, than people in comparably rich societies.”

In a recent report on the epidemic of youth anxiety, 95 percent of teens said “having a job or career they enjoy” would be “extremely or very important” to them as an adult. This ranked higher than any other priority, including “helping other people who are in need” (81 percent) or getting married (47 percent). Finding meaning at work beats family and kindness as the top ambition.

The Ganges River is one of the world’s largest fresh water outlets, after the Amazon and the Congo. The headwaters emerge from a glacier high in the western Himalayas, and then drops down steep mountain canyons to India’s fertile northern plain. Just after it merges with the Brahmaputra, the Ganges empties into the Bay of Bengal. It supports more than a quarter of India’s 1.4 billion people, all of Nepal, and part of Bangladesh.

But sadly, the Ganges has also long been one of the world’s most polluted rivers. The river is befouled by poisonous bi-products from hundreds of factories and towns. Arsenic, chromium, and mercury combine with the hundreds of millions of gallons of raw sewage that flow into the river on a daily basis.

But despite countless studies and evidence proving the river's polluted state, environmentalists have gained little traction in cleaning up the river. Why?

The Ganges River is a sacred waterway worshipped by a billion Hindus as Mother Ganga, a living goddess with power to purify the soul, and to cleanse itself. A recent article in National Geographic explains: “There is this belief that the river can clean itself. If the river can clean itself, then why should we have to worry about it? Many people say the river cannot be polluted; it can go on forever.”

Possible Preaching Angle:

False gods are capable of cleaning neither themselves or their worshippers. Only Jesus can purify the pollution of the human heart.

As recently as five years ago, author and speaker Doreen Virtue was the world’s top-selling New Age author. She enjoyed a phenomenally lucrative lifestyle, living on a 50-acre ranch in Hawaii. Her publisher treated her like a rock star, flying her and her husband first class to give sold-out workshops across the globe. She rubbed elbows with celebrities.

Virtue described her life and teaching this way:

New Agers often view Christianity as having dogmatic rules, but they have their own rigid standards about what an “enlightened person” must and mustn’t do. During my 20 years as a New Age teacher, I promoted techniques like “positive affirmations,” believing and teaching that “your words create your reality.” We held up our wealth and fame as evidence that our principles were true and effective. Yet despite this worldly success, we were unrepentant sinners with lives marred by divorces and addictions. Having sold-out workshops, standing ovations, adoring fans, and celebrity friends gave us swollen egos. I remember believing my every thought was a message or a sign from God or his angels.

In January 2015, she was driving along a Hawaiian road while listening to the Scottish-born pastor Alistair Begg. It was a sermon called “Itching Ears” taken from 2 Timothy 4, where the Apostle Paul writes that in the end times, people will want their itching ears tickled by false teachers who offer false hope (v. 3).

I could tell he was describing people just like me. God used Begg’s sermon to convict me for the first time in my life. His words pierced my stony heart, and I felt ashamed of my false teachings. Then when I read Deuteronomy 18:10–12, I encountered a list of sinful activities that included several I was practicing, such as divination, interpreting signs and omens, and mediumship. I was broken, deeply shamed, and humbled. I dropped to my knees in shame and sorrow. “I’m so sorry, God!” I kept wailing in repentance. “I didn’t know!” On that very day I gave my life to Jesus as Lord and Savior.

The decision had far-reaching consequences. Doreen and her husband left their fancy Hawaii home. Her New Age publisher ended their professional partnership. New Agers treated her as an object of scorn.

Having to admit that I was wrong to the entire world—my books were published in 38 languages—has been deeply humbling. Even so, I needed that humility to better learn how to lean upon God. After seeking but never finding peace in New Age, I have finally found it in Christ.

Christmas is the season of choice. If you want to buy a food processor, Amazon offers you 2,000 types. Or how about a drill—there are more than 40,000 options. No, I'm not making those numbers up.

Choices can be glorious, and confusing, and empowering, and overwhelming, all at the same time. And in the West today, it looks as though it is the same with God. There is a huge array of deities to choose from, including the "no to all" option.

Walk through an airport or shopping mall anywhere and you will be walking past countless people who believe in no God, plenty of people who (believe) that there are many gods, and another great multitude who believe in one God but who have very different thoughts on what that one God is like and what he (or she, or it) thinks.

For some, God is kind of a distant grandfather guy, looking down benevolently and wanting us to be happy. To others, God is a harsh taskmaster, counting up your good and bad actions and weighing up whether he's going to have mercy on you in the end. To others, God is an impersonal force that wound the universe up and is now off doing other stuff while we get on with it down here. To others, God is the universe.

There are so many options to choose from—it's empowering and overwhelming at the same time. How do you know? How can you choose? And what does it matter?

Isaiah's claim was that the baby who would be born at the first Christmas would be "Mighty God." …. For all that Israel needed, for all that they lacked, for all that they could never be in themselves, they had God: The great I AM. The Mighty God … a purifying, ever present, shepherding, providing, healing, defending God.

In April of 1966, Time magazine set off a firestorm of public debate by publishing a cover story asking the question: “Is God Dead?” But looking back on the 50th anniversary of that article, the magazine pointed out that survey results showed that while a full 97 percent of Americans believed in God in 1966, “… the number has been shrinking ever since. In 2016, Pew found that only 63 percent of Americans believed with absolute certainty.”

But people need somewhere to go for answers to life’s questions and to find a deeper meaning to the mystery of life. Where do they turn today? They are turning more frequently to artificial intelligence in the form of Google, Alexa, and Siri. Who needs God when we’ve got Google?

A.I. is already embedded in our everyday lives: It influences which streets we walk down, which clothes we buy, which articles we read, who we date, and where and how we choose to live. It is … invoked all too often as an otherworldly, almost godlike invention. One tech worker said, “At the end of the day, A.I. is just a lot of math. It’s just a lot, a lot of math. It is intelligence by brute force, and yet it is spoken of as if it were semidivine.”

One of the most influential science fiction stories is “The Last Question” by Isaac Asimov which dramatizes the uncanny relationship between the digital and the divine. These days, the story is usually told in an updated form: A group of scientists create an A.I. system and ask it, “Is there a god?” The A.I. spits out an answer: “Insufficient computing power to determine an answer.” Then they redouble their efforts and spend years improving the A.I.’s capacity. Then they ask again, “Is there a god?” The A.I. responds, “There is now.”

But ultimately in seeking answers from A.I. we need to realize that there is no super intelligent machine crafting the answers to our deepest questions. Instead, the main thing to learn from the New York Times story is that (people) write the scripts for what Google and Amazon’s Alexa and other devices will answer when asked these questions. The algorithm just prioritizes the answers that come up. This is NOT truly artificial intelligence. It is still human programming.

Possible Preaching Angle:

After declaring that God is dead, people turned to the created gods of technology for the answers and the meaning to life that their hungry souls demand. But no satisfaction can be found in the echo chamber of man’s wisdom--“They became futile in their thinking and darkened in their foolish hearts. Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools …” (Rom. 1:21-22).

In an issue of CT magazine Nicole Watt shares her journey from spiritism to faith in Christ:

From the time I was a child … I felt I could sense (and at times see) what you could call the unseen or spirit world. Sometimes this world was as sweet as the childlike wonder of knowing where the prize Easter egg was hidden. Other times, an ominous flash of perception would warn me that I was in a home where witchcraft was practiced.

As a teenager, I was curious about the supernatural realm, and I started satisfying that curiosity with books on the occult. I loved God, but I also nursed a disobedient streak. And even though the subject matter was frightening, I found myself gradually lured in. I bought a Ouija board and became interested in clairvoyance.

As the doorway to the demonic realm swung open, terrifying incidents occurred. At one point, I slept with a Bible because I believed I was hearing demons in my room. Another time, I woke up in a cold sweat after feeling a tug at my nightgown and hearing a low, menacing growl in my ear.

Yet the idea of accessing supernatural powers remained appealing …. Looking back, I see how Satan was preparing me to be seduced by one of the greatest dangers of New Age thinking: the false promise of peace through spiritual enlightenment.

In my mid-20s I began studying Reiki, a New Age healing technique that uses different symbols and hand positions to supposedly channel energy from the universe. (The term itself means “universal life energy.”) At the time, I was desperate for peace and longing for spiritual awakening. Wanting to belong, I eagerly accepted the idea that Satan was a manmade myth contrived to keep people in religious bondage.

By the time I became a Reiki master, I was also a mom living on my own. And as so many new parents can attest, the anxious and awestruck feelings of parenthood have a way of awakening interest in religion. Next door to me lived an elderly couple raising their young granddaughter. She invited me to her church, where I finally found a home for my soul … and was baptized.

Now, I was straddling two worlds. On Saturdays I would offer Reiki sessions and teach classes …. But I was becoming increasingly uncomfortable with the Reiki world. Every day I felt a greater burden of conviction to tell people that whatever healing they experienced during Reiki sessions was a gift from God, not me. He was the answer to all their questions, problems, and longings.

Soon enough, I came face-t0-face with the foolishness of serving two masters. The crisis point arrived when a friend asked if I would teach Reiki to her and another woman …. The first session went smoothly enough, but that night I had a terrible dream of two witches attacking me. I yelled out the name of Jesus, and immediately they disappeared. I awoke from the dream scared but in awe of a name so powerful that satanic forces fled at its mention.

The next day I informed the women that I wouldn’t teach the class any longer. I said, “You do not need more teaching. You need Jesus.” They erupted in tears and anger, accusing me of arrogance, stupidity, and a lack of empathy …. But I also felt an incredible relief. I ripped up all my Reiki books and asked God to forgive me. That was over 15 years ago, and I haven’t practiced Reiki since.

The New Age is the old Satan playing on our deepest longings for peace, connection, abundance, and immortality. In contrast, the Christian path of obedience, sacrifice, and suffering can seem foolish. That’s why I praise the name of Jesus, who laid down his life not for spiritual masters but for weak and wounded sinners he loved so dearly.