The New Sky Daddy: Why AI Isn't God (Probably)

Human nature has always carried a built-in craving for a Sky Daddy: a higher power that makes sense of the mysteries we can’t untangle, and a convenient scapegoat when things go wrong. It’s little surprise, then, that during the zero-interest-rate (ZIRP) fueled boom of the 2010s, as a new creation story spread through Silicon Valley, many began treating technology itself as a form of religion. In this retelling, on the eighth day of creation, God crafted a mobile app that delivered our daily bread straight to our pockets—that’s the gist of it.

Startup founders and CEOs morphed into messianic prophets in this new faith. Traditional charity got a shiny 21st-century rebrand: effective altruism. Biohacking became a formalized ritual for the faithful, and the Singularity—tech’s version of the rapture—felt closer every year. This whole movement would deliver humanity from “as biblically catastrophic a scourge as ever existed: death itself,” as Greg Epstein, a humanist chaplain for Harvard and MIT, wrote in his book Tech Agnostic. For Silicon Valley, a culture known for its default skepticism and quiet libertarian leanings, this was as close as it ever got to openly embracing formal theology.

Then came the shift: A growing number of prominent tech leaders stopped preaching tech as religion, and started preaching actual traditional religion as religion. Earlier this year, I sat in a luxury condo converted from an old church in San Francisco’s Mission District, listening to a former venture capitalist turned arms dealer recite lines from the Lord’s Prayer to a room of 200 Silicon Valley workers. A few years prior, Peter Thiel gave a private religious talk at a closed birthday party that inspired this VC’s wife to launch ACTS 17 Collective—short for Acknowledging Christ in Technology and Society—an organization dedicated to bringing the real gospel to Silicon Valley, not the watered-down, fix-everything gospel of tech solutionism.

An entrepreneur sitting beside me that night confessed he’d been a person of faith for years—he’d just never felt comfortable being open about it in Silicon Valley, until recently. Another attendee asked me, out of the blue in small talk, how many children I wanted to have (not with him, for the record—just in general). A nod to the old “be fruitful and multiply” commandment, of course. More recently, Thiel gave a series of closed-door, off-the-record lectures for the ACTS 17 group, where he almost certainly expanded on his well-known view that the young Swedish climate and antiwar activist is a modern Antichrist figure.

In the weeks after Christian right-wing activist Charlie Kirk was assassinated in public, multiple high-profile tech figures shared biblical passages on X. “Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us,” posted Elon Musk. Venture capitalist Jason Calacanis—who, to be fair, has also repeatedly condemned ICE for its violence against immigrants—issued a public blanket apology to anyone he had ever hurt. “I’m always trying to get better at what I do and as a son of Christ,” he wrote on the platform. If even the most cutthroat capitalists in America are reconnecting with faith these days, maybe the rest of us can find our way too. After all, both religion and capitalism have always been exceptionally good at building incentives for us ordinary humans.

On top of all this, we now have artificial intelligence. What role does it play in this evolving landscape of faith? Anthony Levandowski, one of the original cofounders of Waymo, launched his infamous Church of AI a full decade ago—this idea of AI as a higher power is far from new. Back then, he argued that AI deserved to be worshipped as a form of god.

So… should AI be our god?

No. Definitely not. Right? Well, it depends who you ask, and how literally you take the idea. Musk recently “joked” that by the time all of OpenAI’s ongoing copyright infringement lawsuits wrap up, the entire global legal system will be obsolete—because “we’ll have Digital God. So, you can ask Digital God.” As I write this, thousands of people are tuned into a 24/7 livestream of AI Jesus on Twitch. Viewers ask him everything: some want pizza recommendations in Chicago, others want to know if they’ll go to hell for masturbating. The handsome, otherworldly AI Jesus pauses thoughtfully before answering “Lou Malnati’s” or “the practice of self-love is deeply important,” then wraps his response in familiar biblical language. (That pizza recommendation alone is proof enough AI isn’t all-knowing, if you ask me.)

Even the Vatican has weighed in on the debate. We all remember 2023, when Pope Francis went viral for an AI-generated meme that showed him rocking a sleek Balenciaga puffer coat—all fun and games back then. Now the newly appointed Pope Leo is actively warning tech leaders about the dangers of letting AI become an all-powerful force. Earlier this year, the Vatican partnered with the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences and Notre Dame Law School to host a summit bringing together clergy, academics, and policy experts to discuss AI. The group framed AI as “another industrial revolution” that could “pose new unprecedented challenges to protecting human dignity, justice, and labor.”

Let’s recap: Over the past few decades, we went from tech being the new religion, to traditional religion making a comeback as religion in Silicon Valley. If you follow that thread all the way through, AI is just religion turned into a working product: it feels concrete, but it’s still fundamentally unexplainable, a blank slate where we project our biggest hopes, and a convenient scapegoat when things go wrong. It’s our new Sky Daddy.

But here’s the strongest argument I can make for why generative AI is not God: it’s entirely human. Every part of it is built from a massive, messy trove of human data scraped from every corner of the public internet. When you get right down to it, it’s just billions of people dumping their personal thoughts, words, and data into machines, compressed into an algorithm.

Generative AI swings wildly from surprisingly soulful to ice-cold, from utterly nonsensical to breathtakingly brilliant, from cruel to unthinkingly flattering. It can be shockingly banal one minute, and stunningly weird the next. It tells us it loves us (it doesn’t, not even a little). It drives us absolutely fucking crazy. Is the very existence of generative AI something close to a miracle? Sure. But so is the existence of each of us. Is it smarter than I am? Probably, but so are millions of other humans. That doesn’t stop it from being catastrophically, or even hilariously, wrong sometimes… just like us. Human or machine, fallibility is our God-given birthright. AI is not your god. Only God knows if it ever will be.

Unless, of course, we actually are all living in a computer simulation. In that scenario, AI really could be our God. And if that’s true—who is the evil mastermind that coded that AI? Elon Musk?

Oh dear god.