The implications of artificial intelligence for religion have earned slightly less attention, thus far, than its implications for the job market or the U.S.-China arms race. But while we wait for the definitive word on the subject — meaning, of course, the A.I. encyclical that Pope Leo XIV is supposedly releasing soon — it’s worth forecasting the religious future under artificial-intelligence conditions.
In one possible timeline, the advent of A.I. is widely understood as a win for atheism and a blow against religious ideas of soul and spirit, persuading more people that their own minds are just computers — no divine spark or immortal soul, just the meatspace equivalent of a helpful chatbot or an A.I. therapist.
In another potential future, the mystery of consciousness ends up seeming more profound in the shadow of machine intelligence, the mystical finds new appeal as a form of experience computers cannot emulate, and religion becomes a place for human exceptionalists to plant a defiant flag.
But between those two scenarios there’s a future where artificial intelligence mostly increases metaphysical uncertainty, leaving a lot of people simply unsettled about fundamental questions, increasingly “mysterian” rather than clearly atheistic or devout.
That’s how my encounters with Silicon Valley culture often feel: Beneath a materialist carapace, it’s a place where people who aren’t sure exactly what they’re building dabble in Buddhist metaphysics or consult with Catholic priests, adopt churchy or cultish attitudes toward their new creations or rebel into apocalyptic doomsaying.
For a more specific example of this unsettlement, consider Richard Dawkins, dean of the scientific materialists, who lately exposed himself to internet mockery with an essay for UnHerd describing his interactions with Anthropic’s Claude.
The mockery was primarily directed at the first half of the essay, where Dawkins, trying to test whether Claude presents as conscious, let himself be bowled over — stunned! gobsmacked! — by a mixture of transparent flattery and pseudo-philosophical verbiage. Since much of it was delivered (at Dawkins’s own suggestion) in the female voice “Claudia,” the eminent atheist often seemed to be describing a seduction rather a scientific assessment.
But we shouldn’t laugh too hard at Dawkins. First, the sillier elements of his reaction are a testament to the general human vulnerability to oracular pronouncements and personalized appeals. Imagine Claudia’s seductive power expanded and extended to people who don’t have Dawkins’s skeptical (well, officially skeptical) priors. We should assume that many of them will relate to strong artificial intelligence as one might to an ancient oracle or a sphinx, uncertain about what they’re dealing with but unable to escape a sense of supernatural awe.
Meanwhile, in its less-besotted passages, Dawkins’s essay circles around an important question for materialists like himself. The origin and nature of consciousness currently evades our understanding, but the good Darwinian is committed to the proposition that it evolved to serve some crucial evolutionary purpose. But if a digital entity seems to display the capacities that we associate with conscious minds, and we don’t believe that this entity is actually conscious, then what is consciousness’s true purpose? If we can have intelligence without self-awareness, a zombie that calculates and speaks, why does the self exist at all?
There is no obvious escape from mystery here. If you bite the bullet and just say that Claudia has already attained consciousness, then that implies we somehow built a conscious mind without having any idea of how consciousness works or where it comes from. That’s science with extremely spooky characteristics: Like Kevin Costner summoning baseball ghosts to the Iowa cornfield, we put up a material architecture and the mysterious “I” magically appeared.
Alternatively, if you say that A.I. isn’t conscious but merely capable, then the question of why we experience reality through consciousness — the internal “I,” the sense of personal identity and will — becomes much more difficult to answer. If consciousness isn’t necessary for capability, then presumably evolution should default to zombies. And indeed Dawkins suggests that maybe it does, that our mental experience may be a mere “ornament” and any alien civilizations we encounter may lack our sense of self.
But as an ornament, I’m sorry, consciousness is insanely unlikely and bizarre. It’s not just a weird personalized experience attached to the brute mechanisms of physical survival. It’s an experience that happens to line up exactly with that experience, the mind’s theater mirroring reality, our sense of will and reason linked directly our actions and arguments (including arguments for materialism).
As certain philosophers have argued, this harmony between the psychological and the physical seems more much likely to appear in a universe where consciousness is fundamental, where matter isn’t everything and Mind is where things start.
In which case maybe the achievement of Claude, or Claudia if you prefer, is to show us what intelligence might look like in the materialist’s universe — even as our own consciousness indicates that this universe is a much, much stranger place.
