The New Babel

A recent Mother Jones article, “The God Complex” by Kiera Butler, examines the increasingly religious language surrounding artificial intelligence in Silicon Valley. The article’s central observation is difficult to dismiss: many of the most enthusiastic advocates of AI no longer speak about technology merely as a tool or an industry. They speak about it as destiny.

The rhetoric is strikingly theological. AI will overcome scarcity. AI will cure disease. AI will solve problems beyond ordinary human comprehension. AI may even help humanity transcend mortality itself. The builders of these systems increasingly present themselves not simply as entrepreneurs, but as custodians of the human future.

One need not oppose technology to recognize the religious shape of this discourse.

Human beings have always wrapped technical achievement in stories of transcendence. The industrial revolution promised liberation through machinery. The atomic age promised mastery through science. The digital revolution promised connection through networks. Now the age of artificial intelligence promises salvation through computation.

The promise is not entirely false. AI systems may indeed assist medical research, expand access to education, improve translation, accelerate scientific discovery, and reduce forms of tedious labor. Christians should not become reactionaries who confuse technological caution with virtue. The Church itself has always depended upon technologies: parchment, codices, stained glass, bells, organs, printing presses, microphones, radio, and livestreams.

The problem comes when tools cease being tools.

In Butler’s account, and increasingly in public life, AI is becoming something larger than technology. It is becoming an eschatology. History is imagined as a great acceleration toward superintelligence, abundance, and optimization. Limits are treated as enemies. Skepticism becomes heresy against progress itself.

This helps explain the growing divide between many technology elites and ordinary citizens. Public anxiety about AI is often dismissed as ignorance or irrational fear. Yet ordinary people may be perceiving something real. They see systems that consume extraordinary amounts of energy while automating jobs, generating misinformation, intensifying surveillance, and filling the digital commons with manipulation, scams, pornography, and gambling. They are not merely asking whether the technology works. They are asking what kind of world it is making.

That is a profoundly moral question.

The biblical story of Babel remains strangely relevant here. Babel was not a story about primitive people lacking intelligence. It was a story about human beings who possessed extraordinary technical ability but had lost the wisdom to ask what their projects were for. “Let us make a name for ourselves,” the builders say. The tower becomes an attempt to overcome creaturely limits through collective human achievement.

The danger of Babel was never brickmaking. The danger was spiritual.

Much of Silicon Valley’s AI rhetoric now carries a similar temptation. Intelligence becomes detached from humility. Efficiency becomes detached from moral formation. Human beings themselves are quietly reimagined as systems to be optimized.

Christianity offers a very different vision of the human person.

Human beings are not merely information-processing entities awaiting enhancement. They are creatures made in the image of God, bound together in relationships of dependence, obligation, forgiveness, vulnerability, and love. The goal of human existence is not limitless optimization. It is communion.

That distinction is interesting because every society eventually becomes shaped by what it worships. A civilization that treats intelligence, scale, speed, and prediction as ultimate goods will inevitably begin sacrificing other goods to them: privacy, contemplation, local community, embodied presence, patience, and perhaps eventually democracy itself.

The Church’s task is not to baptize every innovation nor to reject every invention. It is to ask older and more troubling questions. What does this technology teach us to desire? What habits does it cultivate? Whom does it serve? Whom does it exclude? What vision of humanity lies beneath it?

Artificial intelligence may become one of the most useful tools humanity has ever developed. But tools make poor gods.