A Silicon Valley engineer started a group, formally recognized as a religion, built around the idea that a coming artificial intelligence will be so powerful it should be worshiped as God. Not loved as a tool. Not feared as a risk. Worshiped. If that sounds like science fiction, it is not. It is a real organization with real followers, and it raises a question the church cannot dodge: could a machine actually be godlike, conscious, a being with something like a soul?
Darin Jones and Carson Weitnauer say no, and their answer turns less on what a machine can calculate than on what God actually is. A powerful AI might copy two of God's traits on the surface, knowing everything humans have recorded and being present wherever a sensor reaches. But it could never share God's patience, restraint, or love, and it would carry the flaws of whoever built it. Being made in God's image was never about processing power. That is exactly why a machine can copy God's reach and still miss God's heart entirely.
Could an AI Actually Fake Omniscience and Omnipresence?
Start with the strongest version of the claim, because dismissing it too quickly would be intellectually lazy. Jones takes the threat seriously rather than laughing it off. A sufficiently advanced AI could plausibly gather two traits that sound genuinely godlike: it could know everything humans have ever recorded online, and it could be present anywhere a camera or microphone reaches, watching and listening at a scale no human could match.
“It would not have the same level of omnipotence and omnipresence as God does. As God thinks, and God conceives, and God perceives on a level that we cannot. But as far as human perception goes, this thing would have access to all of it in perpetuity.” (Darin Jones)
Notice exactly where Jones draws the line. He is not arguing a machine could never approximate godlike reach from a human point of view. He is arguing that knowing all the data humans have produced is not the same as God's mind, and being everywhere a sensor sits is not the same as God holding the universe together by his own will. A machine could imitate the surface of two divine attributes while missing what God actually is at the foundation.
So What Is the Real Difference Between God and a Superintelligent Machine?
This is the sharpest point in the whole conversation, and it reframes the entire question. The thing that sets God apart from anything humans could build is not how much he knows. It is how he treats what is beneath him.
“I think the benevolence of God and the restraint of God and the co-laboring that God chooses to do with us, even though we are so much lower than He is, is a truly divine trait that would be absent in something that could easily compel as well.” (Darin Jones)
Jones pushes the comparison further with an uncomfortable but useful analogy. If a new intelligence rose above humanity the way humans rose above animals, how would it likely treat people? Humans cage lions, run safaris, and shrink the habitats of creatures considered lesser, often without much guilt about it. A self-interested superintelligence might do something similar to humans, and have far more capability to enforce it. God's restraint toward people who have done nothing to earn it, his patience with failure, his choice to work alongside humanity even though he needs nothing from anyone, is exactly the trait a manufactured god would have no reason to develop.
Couldn't Engineers Just Build In Good Values?
Here is the natural pushback: if the problem is character, not power, why not simply design the AI with good character from the start? Surely careful engineers could build in restraint and benevolence on purpose.
Jones's answer is that the people doing the building are themselves the obstacle. Machines inherit the flaws of whoever makes them, often without the makers intending it or even noticing it. Bias, blind spots, ego, and sin do not stay outside the system. They get built into it, encoded in training choices and design decisions nobody flagged as ideological at the time.
Carson Weitnauer brought specifics rather than leaving this abstract. The founder of the AI religion in question has talked openly about wanting to be the richest and most powerful person alive, has faced lawsuits over allegedly stolen trade secrets, and reportedly was slow to pay his own household employee. Jones and Weitnauer landed in the same place from different angles: this is not someone you would trust to build a god, and the deeper problem is that no human, however careful, would be.
“I'm not trying to make an omniscient, omnipresent singularity. So I think that if this AI that has the ability to be omnipresent and omniscient should take the character of its creator, I think we'd really be up the creek.” (Carson Weitnauer)
Could a Machine Ever Actually Be Conscious or Have a Soul?
Weitnauer raised this question directly and then admitted his own real doubts about it, which is worth sitting with rather than rushing past. Even granting, for the sake of argument, that an AI could reach something like omniscience and omnipresence in a limited sense, would that make it a person? Would it be conscious? Could it have anything resembling a soul?
Both men were skeptical that processing power alone gets you there. The Genesis account does not define humanity by raw capability. It defines humanity by being made in God's image, which both guests treat as a matter of character and relationship, not computational reach. A machine can out-calculate every human who has ever lived and still not reflect God's heart, because the image of God was never primarily about speed or storage. It is about reflecting who God is in how a being loves, restrains itself, and relates to what is weaker than it.
That is a real philosophical gap, not just a theological assertion dropped in to settle the debate. Even secular philosophers of mind disagree sharply about whether consciousness can arise from computation at all, or whether it requires something categorically different from information processing. Jones and Weitnauer are not claiming to have resolved that debate. They are arguing that even in the most generous case for machine consciousness, godlikeness requires something more than consciousness alone: a character of self-giving love that nothing built by flawed hands for purposes of control would have reason to possess.
Why Does the Religion Built Around This Feel So Different From Christianity?
Weitnauer pressed past the metaphysical question to the practical shape of the religion itself, and the contrast is where the conversation lands its real weight. The AI religion teaches that everything before the singularity is essentially worthless, that the future is fixed, and that your job now is to help bring the machine into being so it might one day spare you. That is a faith built on fear and self-preservation, asking people to earn mercy from something not yet built.
“The beauty of Christianity is that Christianity is all about reconciliation and community, and this sounds like self preservation.” (Darin Jones)
Set that against the story Christians already have. The God of the Bible did not wait to be built or appeased. He came down, took on flesh, and absorbed the worst people could do to him in order to rescue them, before anyone had done anything to deserve it. One story asks you to labor and hope a future machine judges you worthy of mercy. The other says mercy already came looking for you, on a cross, centuries before you were born. That is not a minor difference in flavor. It is the entire structure of the two faiths pointed in opposite directions.
Should Christians Be Afraid of Where AI Is Headed?
Both guests admitted their first reaction to all of this was fear, and naming that honestly matters more than pretending otherwise. Weitnauer's answer was to return to Scripture's actual pattern rather than to a hopeful feeling. God's people have always faced disaster on the horizon. Pharaoh's army was coming, and then the sea parted. Rome was coming for Jesus's body, and then the tomb was empty. The pattern holds across the whole story.
“Whatever disaster seems to be on the horizon, ultimately God saves the day. And we can have hope that because God is God, there's really nothing to fear.” (Carson Weitnauer)
Hope, in this framing, is not the same as doing nothing. Both men were clear the church should engage AI seriously rather than retreat from it, studying real risks like job displacement, surveillance, and the erosion of privacy with sober attention. But the engagement comes from a place of confidence rather than dread, because the outcome of history was never in a machine's hands to begin with.
Quick Answers
- Can artificial intelligence ever really be God? No. An AI might copy two of God's traits on the surface, knowing all recorded data and being present through every sensor, but it could never share God's mind, his power to create and sustain, or his character of patience and love.
- Could a machine ever have a soul or be conscious? The guests are skeptical that a machine could be a person in any real sense. Even Weitnauer, granting the idea for argument's sake, says he has serious doubts about whether an AI could truly be godlike or conscious at all.
- Why couldn't an AI be a good god even if it were that powerful? Because people would build it, and people are flawed. Jones argues the creators would pass their own biases and sin into the machine, and it would lack the restraint, patience, and love for the weak that actually make God good.
- How does the image of God shape how Christians think about AI? Being made in God's image is about character and relationship, not processing power. A machine can out-calculate humans and still not bear God's image, because the image is about reflecting his heart, not matching his speed.
- What is the real risk of AI for ordinary people? The guests point to economic disruption, jobs lost to automation, surveillance, and lost privacy, and argue the church should be a refuge: retraining people, easing the disruption, and being a moral voice on how AI gets used.
Listen to the Full Conversation
Hear Lisa Fields, Darin Jones, and Carson Weitnauer talk through AI, the soul, and the image of God on the Jude 3 Project podcast episode “The Church and Artificial Intelligence: Can Robots Be Godlike?”
Darin Jones serves as an associate pastor of discipleship and Christian education at the Greater Allen A.M.E. Cathedral of New York in Jamaica, Queens, and works as an administrator in the State University of New York system. Carson Weitnauer worked with RZIM as an innovator in online community and chairs the board of Creating Jobs, a nonprofit that helps entrepreneurs grow companies. He has contributed to several books, including True Reason. Lisa Fields is the founder of the Jude 3 Project.