Silicon over neurons? No. We are neither the Creator, nor the slave of artificial intelligence. We are created in stunning beauty.
Is AI Bigger and More Pervasive Than We Think?
I was talking to a friend today who is a computer scientist. We were talking about AI, and whether or when it will become as impactful as the internet. He didn’t think we are there yet. The internet, he maintains, continues to be far more impactful on society as a whole than AI right now.
It’s a tough analysis to make either way. There are so many unknowns. What we agreed is that AI is growing subtly but quickly–and that there is much more behind the scenes than we think.
In Max Tegmark’s book entitled Life 3.0 he begins with a scenario. A small team of aristocratic elites get together one weekend and release a very powerful but under the radar AI. The AI begins with media, putting out all kinds of news stories that shape popular belief. The news stories begin to influence politics creating various political personas that begin to shape policies. In just a few months it is taking over the banking industry and stock markets. It also opens a major film and television studio and makes all kinds of movies and television series, including hiring actors and controlling their schedules, and directing. After six months the AI is in full control of all major sectors in the world, and it has very rapidly shaped the lives of every living person.
Part of my work is scenario writing and teaching others how to write scenarios. I’ve written scenarios for the World Economic Forum and other high profile think tanks. I understand how scenarios are researched and written. And Max Tegmark’s scenario seems to betray an understanding and ‘hidden knowledge’ that leads me to believe such an AI already exists. News stories, movies, books, television series are being pumped out at such a pace, and seemingly so strategically, that it seems that it is all being generated by an external intelligence that is self-organized and ‘tacit’. It seems to me that we’re further ahead than merely a chat-based AI. Such ‘intelligence’ offers such a plethora of power and control that it is not a stretch of the imagination that we are already tacitly experiencing very large AI systems.
Take for instance DARPA: In Annie Jacobsen’s book on DARPA she notes that it is working on technologies twenty years in advance of what is currently ‘mainstream’. What does twenty years of AI look like? Tell me DARPA is the only think tank on the planet working at such an advanced level of technology.
The Great Delusion: That We Are Creating God
Brian Johnson, the man who seeks to extend his life indefinitely through bio-hacking, claims that we are not created by God but that it is the reverse: that we are creating God in the form of a super intelligence that will exceed our own intelligence. That we are “building God in the form of technology” that will have the same characteristics as what we ‘imagine’ God to be; that we are the creators of God and thus we will create God in our own image. That we are engineering an intelligence that will exceed our intelligence in all things, even our capacity to understand and comprehend.
Silicone Transcending Neurons Isn’t a Thing
In another article by philosopher of science and physicist Étienne Klein, in the journal Horizons, Spring 2025 No. 146, he talks about “the silicon that sometimes surpasses neurons,” which would cause us to celebrate the human spirit for “inventing something more powerful than ourselves.
Klein in this article writes about “Promethean shame,” i.e., “the sense of inferiority humans experience when faced with the impressive quality of the things they have created.”
But Klein concludes,
Until proven otherwise, artificial intelligence is not in direct competition with us. [For] on the one hand, imitating intelligence is not the same as being intelligent. On the other, disregarding the body, sensation, and physical dimension of existence is not a neutral operation.
And then he says this …
“AI has not body, face, or spirit. It feels nothing.”
AI has no spirit, which Klein seems to define as that which animates the body, a kind of consciousness that allows one to feel pain.
And with consciousness, as spirit, the animating force of the body, “AI is incapable of inventing concepts or conceiving thoughts, experiments, the kind that have allowed us to escape the traps of induction.”
Klein wraps up his argument by stating that,
AI is radically different from what we understand as ‘intelligence,’ which also involves critical thinking and the ability to explain or demonstrate what makes it intelligent.” Data is no match for theories that contextualize it. Data may build on itself, may expand, but data alone do not reveal new elements of reality that without a good theory would likely have remained unknown.
Klein’s argument is humans have spirit, they are animated by something ‘other’ within themselves, and they are those beings that can open and create new realities that simply managing or scraping data cannot do. His argument is simply from that place of cognition.
But Klein’s observations hinge on something that is obvious but that in his scientific mind he is seemingly missing: that there is more to the human than simply a kind of higher-order cognition.
And even so, what we call ‘spirit’ is what makes us alive, what makes us living creatures, and is the breath of life that God put into us when He breathed into Adam the breath of life, and Adam became a living soul (Genesis 2:7). There’s a fullness to our understanding of ‘spirit’ that moves us beyond Klein’s definition of it.
The Stunning Beauty of the Human Being
Humans are endowed with a spirit, or in Greek ‘nous’: it is the faculty that is the necessary condition for the possibility of encountering the divine, the transcendent. It is the ‘eye of the soul’. It is the part of the person that directly perceives and communes with God.
God created us in His Image and Likeness; He created us not out of necessity, but out of Love; and He desires one thing from us, i.e., to love Him back and love His creation, including one another.
He endowed us also with the faculty to create–including things like artificial intelligence; and therefore He is presupposed in everything we create, which is why we are sub-creators in the world.
And when God created us, He called us, along with the rest of His creation, ‘good’ or ‘beautiful’. In fact, in terms of the ordering of creation, we were created last as the pinnacle, the highest order of creation–He created the world for our enjoyment and benefit, and made us priests of all creation.
St Athanasius …
For of what use is existence to the creature if it cannot know its Maker? How could men be reasonable beings if they had no knowledge of the Word and Reason of the Father, through Whom they had received their being? They would be no better than the beasts, had they no knowledge save of earthly things; and why should God have made them at all, if He had not intended them to know Him? But, in fact, the good God has given them a share in His own Image, that is, in our Lord Jesus Christ, and has made even themselves after the same Image and Likeness. Why? Simply in order that through this gift of Godlikeness in themselves they may be able to perceive the Image Absolute, that is the Word Himself, and through Him to apprehend the Father; which knowledge of their Maker is for men the only really happy and blessed life”(On the Incarnation).
Humans are beautiful–stunningly so. So beautiful that Christ was incarnated, em-bodied, as a human being just like us. He became man that we may become like God, as St Athanasius wrote in his book On the Incarnation. Christ did not become an angel, He did not take on the form of an angel or any other created thing–no, He became one of us to save us from death and hell.
Why?
Because He loves us so much. Because He sees the Beauty in us, the Beauty of His creation. He delights in us. He yearns for us to love Him, and through His Love to bear His Image to everyone around us. And Because we are created to become like Him (by adoption and grace, not by merit), and rule and reign with Him over the cosmos.
We therefore ought not fear death from AI or any other form of intelligence.
AI will never exceed us–never. It will always remain something that humans, in their weakness and fallibility, have created. And because of that, it will always be inferior to us.
Do angels fear AI?
I doubt it …
So why–even less so!–should we.
