- How Christians are attracted to answers from AI, since it seems to certain;
- Paul Krugman on the administration’s obvious corruption;
- Carl Zimmer: Are babies “conscious”, and whether it matters;
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This is revealing.
OnlySky, Adam Lee, today 5 Oct: Christians bow down at the altar of AI, subtitled “Artificial intelligence is becoming a competing source of theology.”
Do they not realize that AI just absorbs what thousands or millions of its sources have said and boil them down into appropriate feedback? In other words, it’s telling them what they want to hear.
Our era is going through a massive economic transition, as AI has enabled computers to do jobs that were once the sole domain of humanity. From writing code to churning out books to generating art and music, the explosive proliferation of LLMs threatens to make millions of human workers obsolete.
But here’s one AI-driven layoff you probably didn’t see coming: Artificial intelligence is threatening to put God out of a job.
Where they might once have turned to the Bible or their pastors, millions of devout churchgoers are treating chatbots as sources of spiritual advice and theological wisdom. It sounds almost too strange to be true, and yet it is. What’s going to become of religion when millennia of practice collapse down to the statistical output of a word-prediction model?
From a July 2026 survey by the Barna Group:
Practicing Christians are outpacing nearly every population segment on AI adoption, including pastors, according to Barna’s newest research on faith and AI.
OK, some of them are using AI for mundane questions. Yet (shown in a chart) those who attend church the most often, trust AI the most.
Here I think is the key:
The appeal of religion is that it promises an infallible source of wisdom to tell followers what to do in all aspects of their lives. Whatever secular critics might say about the stifling atmosphere of religious dogmatism, or the cruelty of discouraging curiosity and punishing doubt… the uncomfortable truth is that some people don’t want to think for themselves.
Maybe this is the key:
The hunger for certainty
Better still for this purpose, AI is always confident.
For people who care about accuracy, this is a major drawback of AI. LLM chatbots are algorithms that obey a statistical model of word association; they have no inherent concept of truth or falsehood. Sometimes they provide correct information, but sometimes they hallucinate facts. In either case, they speak with the same calm confidence and apparently persuasive reasoning.
However, in the eyes of religious believers, particularly fundamentalists, this is a feature and not a bug.
Religion offers certainty in a chaotic world—that’s always been one of its selling points. It promises immutable truth that holds fast against the shifting tides of culture. It asserts that its doctrines are trustworthy because they never change, no matter what.
Concluding:
How far will this trend go? As churchgoers age and dwindle, will brick-and-mortar churches die off? Will the congregations of the future huddle around the glow of screens, getting spiritual advice and consolation from virtual avatars? Will we craft AI gods and prophets in the likeness of the old pantheons, or will we let the computers dream up brand-new ones for us? It seems bizarre, implausible, ridiculous even to contemplate. But who would have guessed it would play out even to the extent it already has?
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That this is so obvious, and that his fans can’t see it, says something about human nature. The tribal nature thereof, and the inability to see reality for what it is.
Paul Krugman, today 5 Oct: The Trump Administration is a Cesspit of Corruption, subtitled “And fighting it should be at the heart of the Democratic agenda”
The cesspit of corruption that is Donald Trump’s presidency is finally getting the attention it deserves. It’s about time. And if a massive blue wave sweeps Washington on November 3rd as polls now suggest, Democrats should put corruption front and center of their agenda in Congress.
The level of corruption that Trump has engaged in and enabled in others is completely unprecedented – self-dealing that, as Trump would say, is like nothing anybody has ever seen before. America currently has a Republican president who, along with his family, has raked in billions, possibly close to $10 billion in personal gain from office in less than two years. He has effectively sold criminal pardons to scammers, invalidating the legal claims of their victims for restitution. His son-in-law Jared Kushner has become a billionaire running an investment fund for Gulf petro-state autocrats despite having no discernible investment skills. The Times just reported that Kristi Noem paid hundreds of millions over the reasonable price for 5 aircraft – one of which contains a marble bathroom and luxury bedroom – that were ostensibly for deportations but are instead sitting on the runway. And then there’s Trump’s Secretary of the Commerce, Howard Lutnick, whose family has doubled its net worth to over $7 billion, largely through its investments in Tether, the crypto-currency of choice by Iran, terrorists and rogue states.
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How does it matter…?
NY Times, the venerable Carl Zimmer, today: Are Babies Conscious?, subtitled “By pinpointing when it begins in young humans, scientists hope to better understand what consciousness is, and how it arises, in all of us.” [gift link]
I’m not going to try to profile the article, so much as consider some of the philosophical issues it raises.
Indeed, there’s an active scientific debate over whether newborns possess consciousness. Resolving it could help solve one of science’s most stubborn mysteries: what consciousness is, how it emerges and how we can know if another being possesses it.
The obvious issue is about the “soul.” The religious think an embryo, no matter how young, possesses a “soul” and so is the equivalent of a full human being and deserves preservation of its life.
This is religious fantasy. There is no evidence that anything like a “soul” exists. It’s all about brain function. (Yet another example of … confusion among realms)
At the same time, this is evolutionary precaution. Humans are wired to protect their children, no matter how young, because those who do have bigger families and larger tribes.
Does the argument change if it’s about “consciousness”? I don’t think so. The drive to protect newborns remains. At the same time, history is full of examples of triage. Among humans, and animals. If an infant isn’t likely to survive, then… let it go.
The modern idea of abortion and its opposition is due to the success of modern medicine. And the philosophical distinction of when an embryo is truly human. The religions play it safe. Thinkers like Carl Sagan suggested that only until an embryo reached a certain limit.
(From his book BILLIONS AND BILLIONS, reviewed here:
A long essay is about abortion, trying to find a middle ground, which Sagan and Druyan conclude to be the point at which the embryo’s thinking becomes barely possible, brain waves, around the 30th week, which is coincidentally where the Supreme Court drew the link (in Roe v. Wade), though on different grounds.
)
Peter Singer took these issues to animals. And his criteria was: do they feel pain?
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