Is Google God?
Columnist Thomas Friedman posed this query within the New York Occasions in June of 2003. Quoting the vice chairman of a Wi-Fi supplier, Friedman writes that: “Google, mixed with Wi-Fi, is a little bit bit like God. God is wi-fi, God is all over the place and God sees and is aware of every little thing. All through historical past, folks linked to God with out wires. Now, for a lot of questions on the planet, you ask Google, and more and more, you are able to do it with out wires, too.”
Greater than 20 years later, not many would ask if Google is God. Nevertheless, they could surprise if AI is.
Nobel Prize winner Geoffrey Hinton, generally known as the “Godfather of AI,” helped lay the inspiration for the AI expertise usually used in the present day. Involved about what he had helped beginning, in 2023 he left his job at Google the place he had labored for greater than a decade to sound a warning:
“It truly is godlike.”
He’s not alone. Open AI CEO Sam Altman has referred to his firm’s expertise as a “magic intelligence within the sky.” Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal and Palantir, has even argued that AI may assist deliver in regards to the antichrist.
Whether or not warning in regards to the existential menace the facility of AI poses to humanity or arguing for a technological revelation that may usher in a brand new age of human evolution, it appears everyone seems to be approaching it with a non secular set of glasses.
And even as a faith itself.
“Pc scientist and creator Ray Kurzweil has been predicting because the Nineteen Nineties that people will in the future merge with expertise,” reviews the Related Press, “an idea also known as transhumanism.” When requested if he considers AI to be his faith, he finally conceded, “Sure.”
The god of expertise guarantees a brand new world. Professor Robert Geraci, who research faith and expertise at Knox School, first observed non secular language getting used to explain AI’s potential within the early 2000s. He mentioned that the language reminded him of early Christianity: “Solely we’re gonna slide out God and slide in… your decide of cosmic science legal guidelines that supposedly do that after which we have been going to have the identical sort of wonderful future to come back.” Reflecting on how pervasive this sort of language and these sorts of concepts have grow to be, Geraci provides, “What was as soon as very bizarre is sort of all over the place.”
That is new to the tech world. As famous by the Related Press, “Its secular repute has so preceded it that one episode of the satirical HBO comedy collection, ‘Silicon Valley,’ revolves round ‘outing’ a coworker as Christian.”
However this isn’t the embrace of the Christian religion—it’s something however. Moderately, it’s the embrace of technological religion. Of AI changing into our “greater energy.” Or as Mark Zuckerberg was quoted when selling his personal firm’s efforts in AI, “When folks within the tech business discuss constructing this one true AI, it’s virtually as in the event that they assume they’re creating God.”
We dwell in a technological age, and have embraced technological advance with abandon, creating what Neil Postman termed a “technopoly,” the place expertise of each form is cheerfully granted sovereignty. Or, as Jacques Ellul has written, a minimum of the course of of method designed to serve our ends.
Paradoxically, inside the phrase “expertise” itself lies the brand new philosophical mooring that marks our intent.
The phrase is constructed from such Greek phrases as technites (craftsman) and techne (artwork, ability, commerce), which communicate to the concept of both the one who shapes or molds one thing, or to the duty of shaping and molding itself.
However it’s the Greek phrase logos, to which technites is joined, that makes our time period “expertise” so provocative.
Logos is a reference inside Greek thought to divine motive, or the organizing precept of the world. In John’s gospel, logos was used to speak to these aware of the Greek worldview the concept of the divinity of Jesus.
Moderns have put collectively two phrases that the ancients wouldn’t have dared to mix, for the becoming a member of of the phrases intimates that mere people can form the very order of the world.
So whereas expertise itself could also be impartial in its enterprise, there will be little doubt that inside the phrase itself are the seeds for the presumption that may search to forged God from His throne and assert humanity in His place because the conduit of divine energy.
Or a minimum of one thing that humanity itself has created.
James Emery White
Sources
Thomas L. Friedman, “Is Google God?” The New York Occasions, June 20, 2003, learn on-line.
Krysta Fauria, “AI Apocalypse? Why Language Surrounding Tech Is Sounding More and more Non secular,” AP Information, August 29, 2025, learn on-line.
Krysta Fauria, “How Silicon Valley Is Utilizing Non secular Language to Speak About AI,” AP Information, August 29, 2025, learn on-line.
Neil Postman, Technopoly: The Give up of Tradition to Know-how.
Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society, translated from the French by John Wilkinson.
On the that means of the phrases techne and technites see the article on “Carpenter, Builder, Workman, Craftsman, Commerce” by J.I. Packer in The New Worldwide Dictionary of New Testomony Theology, Vol. 1, Colin Brown, editor.
