Artificial intelligence is impressive. Creepy impressive. It can write a term paper in 30 seconds, design your dream kitchen and replicate the greatest art work in history in a blink. It’s moving fast, it’s getting smarter and depending on who you ask, it might one day replace everything from customer service reps to your therapist.
But here’s what it can’t do:
It can’t fall in love.
It can’t feel awe.
It can’t choose to forgive.
It can’t stare at the stars and ask, “Why me?”
It doesn’t want anything.
It doesn’t care.
And that’s not a glitch. That’s the point.
“We wrote this book to say the quiet part out loud,” says Bryan Trilli, co-author of Soulless Intelligence: How AI Proves We Need God. “AI isn’t going to become sentient. It’s not going to ‘wake up.’ And the fact that it can’t—that gap between what it can do and what it can never be—is exactly where we see evidence of God.”
Bryan’s not just speculating from the sidelines. He and his brother Greg have spent years deep in the weeds of machine learning and computer vision. They’ve built real AI tools, run a top-tier training company and seen firsthand how powerful the technology can be. But somewhere along the way, Bryan started asking the kind of questions Silicon Valley doesn’t like to answer—questions about souls, meaning, consciousness and what it means to be us.
“People like Ray Kurzweil and Sam Altman genuinely believe we’ll be able to upload our minds to machines and live forever,” he says. “They think we’re just patterns of information. But if that were true, we wouldn’t see things like terminal lucidity—Alzheimer’s patients suddenly becoming lucid right before death. Or people with 5% of a brain scoring above-average on IQ tests. Or slime molds doing advanced math without a nervous system.”
In other words, if you think the brain is the only thing that makes us “us,” you’ve got a lot of explaining to do.
“There’s something more,” Bryan says. “There’s a part of us no machine can replicate. Something immaterial. Something eternal.”
Something like a soul.
This is where Trilli lands his punch: AI is helping us see what makes us human by failing to be human. For all its logic, all its speed, all its ability to mimic thought—it still can’t choose to be kind. It can’t desire goodness. It can’t cry when a friend dies or get goosebumps from a song or fall to its knees in gratitude. And it never will.
That’s not just a philosophical point. It’s a spiritual one. Because it turns out, the more we try to recreate ourselves in silicon, the more obvious it becomes that we’re not just brains in meat suits. We are image-bearers of God. And the image of God includes free will, moral agency, a hunger for beauty and truth and justice. Things that don’t run on code.
“AI will never set its own goals,” Bryan says. “It doesn’t have desires. It doesn’t have a will. You can lock it in a digital cage for a year and it won’t care. But a human in solitary confinement? That’s torture. Why? Because we’re wired for connection. For meaning. For transcendence. That’s the soul talking.”
We’re not just looking at an ethical dilemma here—we’re looking at a worldview divide. Either we’re programmable machines or we’re sacred beings. Either our value comes from what we can do or it’s rooted in something much deeper—something uncopyable.
“If you define a person by intelligence or consciousness—things that exist on a spectrum—then you’re saying some lives matter less than others,” Bryan says. “But if you believe every person has a soul, then every person has unshakable worth.”
That’s not just theology. That’s the foundation of human rights.
It’s also why AI can’t be the moral compass for our future. It doesn’t have a compass. It has an objective function.
If anything, this moment should remind us what we’ve forgotten: that human dignity doesn’t come from capability. It comes from being made in the image of Someone greater.
Genesis says God breathed life into Adam’s nostrils. That’s the difference. Not code, not logic—breath. Spirit. Soul.
That’s what AI is missing. And that’s why we need God more than ever. Because in a world racing to replace humanity with smarter, faster machines, we need something to remind us why we matter in the first place.
Not because we’re useful.
Not because we’re efficient.
But because we’re human.
And no machine, no matter how advanced, will ever be that.
Title: How AI Proves Our Need for God
URL: https://relevantmagazine.com/culture/tech-gaming/how-ai-proves-our-need-for-god/
Source: REL ::: RELEVANT
Source URL: http://www.relevantmagazine.com/rss/relevantmagazine.xml
Date: April 8, 2025 at 05:16PM
Feedly Board(s): Religion