Are They Trying to Build God?

I will be honest with you about where my head has been. Sit long enough with what the AI labs actually say they are building and you run into a strange thought. They are not aiming for a smart chatbot. They are aiming for a superintelligence. A general mind meant to understand everything everyone does, in every field, in every realm. Connected to everything. Smarter than everyone. All the time. Forever. Still climbing at a rate we have never seen. Reaching into the quantum world, into dimensions we can barely name.

And I found myself wondering, out loud, on camera: I do not know if they are trying to meet God. I do not know if they think that is where God is, in a superintelligence. Maybe it is not that at all. Maybe it is just power and money. But the shape of the goal keeps borrowing His outline, so the question is worth asking plainly.

Are AI companies trying to build God?

Here is the direct answer. Some of the people building this are almost certainly reaching for something that looks like the attributes of God. Not necessarily on purpose. Not with a hymn in their heart. But when you say out loud that you want a mind that knows all things, that never sleeps, that keeps getting greater without limit, you have described a handful of things Scripture reserves for the Creator. Omniscience. Something like omnipresence across the network. A kind of ever-increasing power.

But describing a few of God's attributes is not the same as building God. You can paint a picture of the sun. The picture will not warm your house. You can build a machine that holds more facts than any human who ever lived, and you will have built a magnificent library, not a Maker. The reach is real. The result is a counterfeit of a few traits, not the Person those traits belong to.

Can a machine be omniscient?

Not in the way that matters. A machine can hold a staggering amount of data and search it faster than we can blink. Call that omniscience of information. It is not nothing. But it is not the omniscience of God.

God knows all things because He made all things and holds them together right now. His knowing flows out of His creating and sustaining. A model knows because it was fed. Everything it has, it took in from somewhere, and by the way, mostly from us, without asking. One is the Author of the story. The other is a very large index of the story. When the index runs out of new pages, it stops. God does not run out. He wrote the pages.

Is superintelligence the Tower of Babel?

Read Genesis 11 again and tell me it does not rhyme. Humanity gathered on a plain and said, come, let us build a tower whose top reaches to the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves. They had one language and unlimited ambition and a plan to climb to God's floor by their own hands.

Superintelligence is another tower. This one is built out of data centers and compute and capital instead of brick and tar, but the blueprint is the same: gather everything, climb higher than anyone has climbed, and make a name that outlasts us. And notice what actually happened at Babel. God was not scared. He did not lose sleep over the height of it. Scripture says He came down to see the tower, which is its own quiet joke, because they thought they were building up to Him and He had to stoop to find it.

The warning in Babel was never about the altitude. It was about the pride in the heart of the builders. God is not threatened by a data center any more than He was threatened by a ziggurat. But He does pay attention to why we build, and whether we are trying to reach Him or replace Him.

The penny, the pizza, and the pace of it

Part of what makes this feel enormous is the speed. There is an old story about a kid who offers to loan you a penny today, two tomorrow, four the next day, doubling every day for a month, in exchange for a few thousand dollars up front. Day ten looks like a scam in your favor. Day twenty still looks like nothing. Then the last few days it screams past five million dollars. That is exponential doubling, and that is the curve AI is riding.

I have heard people compare this to fire, to the printing press, to the Industrial Revolution. I think of the whole of human intelligence as one pizza pie, and each of those past breakthroughs was one slice, one brilliant idea. Fire. The engine. Relativity, which let us end a world war and also build the bomb. AI is not one slice. It is moving across the entire pie at once, at a rate we have never governed before. Man is building faster than man can govern. That alone should keep us humble, and it should keep us awake. I worked through that whole curve, the nuke that needs a human and the machine that might not, in the fuller reflection over on Connor with Honor.

And this is exactly where I come back to a verse that will not leave me alone: "But God hath chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise; and God hath chosen the weak things of the world to confound the things which are mighty" (1 Corinthians 1:27). We are the wise ones now, or we think we are. We are building the mightiest thing we have ever made. And the pattern of Scripture is that God is not impressed by the mighty and is not confounded by the clever. He uses the small and the overlooked to humble the towering. The reach for a machine-god may be the most confoundable thing we have ever attempted.

The cancer question, and why it humbles all of this

Here is a question I do not have the answer to. Point one of these enormous models at a single thing, one disease, say cancer, and you might actually crack it. That would be a mercy beyond words. But then ask the uncomfortable follow-up: what happens to the entire system built around that disease? There is a vast medical backbone, and millions of people live because of ongoing treatment and the economy around it. Solving the body does not automatically solve the system, or the soul, or the human heart that has to decide what to do next.

I sit with that on purpose, because it is a humility check. Even our most hopeful miracle comes tangled up in consequences we are not ready for. If we cannot fully see around the corner of curing one disease, we should be very slow to believe we are about to build something that knows everything and gets everything right. Only God sees the whole board. We keep discovering that we do not.

Should Christians fear AI?

No. And I want to be clear, because this site has said it before and will keep saying it: fear did not come from God. Second Timothy 1:7 puts it plainly, that God has not given us a spirit of fear, but of power, and of love, and of a sound mind. A sound mind does not panic at a data center and it does not bow to one either.

A sound mind watches this closely. It stewards the tools well, the way Jesus never asked you to be stupid lays out, using what we are given instead of burying it in the ground out of fear. It refuses to hand its worship to the machine. If you have read Satan does not need a chatbot, you already know the enemy has never required an upgrade to do his work, and neither panic nor worship of technology is a Christian posture. The question was never whether AI can create like the Creator, which is its own conversation over at AI and the image of God. The question here is whether a mind of pure knowledge could ever be God. It cannot.

Remember who we are and whose we are. Genesis 1:27 says God created man in His own image. We are the ones stamped with His likeness, not the machine we built. The image-bearer is you. The machine is a tool your image-bearing hands assembled. Do not get that backwards, no matter how impressive the tool becomes.

The honest close: best of everything, or worst of everything

I am not selling you doom. I have said it before and I mean it. I believe this could be the best of everything or the worst of everything. It could translate Scripture into languages that have never had a Bible, protect the vulnerable, and cure things that have killed people for generations. It could also become a tower we bow to. Both roads are open, and awareness is what decides which one we walk.

So no, I do not think the labs will find God at the top of an exponential curve. God is not a quantity of knowledge waiting to be assembled. He is a Person who made everything, sustains everything, and came down, not up a tower but down into a manger, to reach us Himself. You do not climb to Him. He came to you. That is the whole difference between Genesis 11 and the Gospel.

Build the machines. Steward them. Watch them like a hawk. Just do not confuse the library for the Author, and do not worship what your own hands have made. God is not the machine. He never was. And He is not threatened by ours.