as preached May 18, 2025 at the First Unitarian Universalist Church of Houston
Artificial intelligence is everywhere. You probably arrived here carrying a device infused with it. Maybe you navigated the path to services using an app that paired real time data with algorithms to optimize your route. Perhaps, last night, you did virtual battle with AI guided monsters or watched an AI recommended film. It might be that you use it regularly for work or frequently engage with a large language model like ChatGPT.
Even if you do not, you are likely aware of the constant stream of news stories on the subject. Some offer grim humor. “For One Hilarious, Terrifying Day, Elon Musk’s Chatbot Lost Its Mind,” ran the title of an opinion piece in the New York Times. It recounted how earlier this week Grok, the AI chatbot connected to what used to be called Twitter, echoed the sentiments of its Afrikaner master. It spread the falsehood that the ethnic group behind Apartheid, the White folks who still control the majority of land in South Africa, are somehow victims of “white genocide.”
To almost any question it was asked, it answered “white genocide.” “How much do the Toronto Blue Jays pay the team’s [star] pitcher … white genocide in South Africa. What’s up with this picture of a tiny dog? … white genocide in South Africa,” Grok responded. It is not funny. It is proof that AI is no better than its creators. If Grok’s originator is a white supremacist, then there’s a good chance that the chatbot will carry his prejudices.
Pope Leo XIV, the new pontiff, has stated that making theological sense of AI will be a central mission of his papacy. Like his immediate predecessor, he is calling for an international treaty to regulate it. The inspiration for his name comes from Pope Leo XIII, whose encyclical Rerum Novarum, “Rights and Duties of Capital and Labor,” offered Catholic social teachings to navigate an earlier era of industrialization. Leo XIV appears to be preparing to follow his namesake. He has stated, “the church offers everyone the treasury of its social teaching in response to another industrial revolution and to developments in the field of artificial intelligence that pose new challenges for the defense of human dignity, justice and labor.”
Some of the prognosticators promise wonders. In the text we have been reading in the Senior Minister’s book group, the AI advocates Kai-Fu Lee and Chen Qiufan claim, “AI and other technologies will drive down the cost of almost all goods, most of which will be produced for next to nothing. For the first time in human history, developed countries could eradicate poverty and hunger.”
Such pronouncements bespeaking the wonders of AI ignore the reality that poverty is not a technological problem. It is a human problem that has arisen from sort of gross economic inequality that many of AI’s corporate boosters further through their hoarding of resources. We could eradicate poverty and hunger right now if we wanted to adopt redistributive policies. This has been true for decades.
That has not stopped some AI advocates from going even further. Also this week, the New York Times columnist Ross Douthat interviewed the AI researcher Daniel Kokotajlo whom he branded as a “herald of the apocalypse.” Kokotajlo and his collaborators have developed a forecasting model that enables them to proclaim, “the impact of superhuman AI over the next decade will be enormous, exceeding that of the Industrial Revolution.”
Do you find such claims convincing? Where do you see yourself in the world of AI? If you are teacher, has it changed the way that you teach? If you are a student, has it changed the way that you learn? If you are worker, has it shifted your workflow? Does it make you anxious, offer you comfort, or provide you with inspiration?
You might recall that over the course of this program year we have been exploring what is to come through our “Future Visions, Future Selves” series. This morning we consider some of the religious implications of the rise of artificial intelligence. Some, like Kokotajlo, predict that it will develop into a “kind of machine god.” Others, like Lee and Qiufan, make more modest claims and merely argue that it will “change the status quo … and improve our standard of living.”
These are all religious claims. In the past, I have suggested that religion can be understood as what binds us together. As we approach the middle decades of the twenty-first century, it is increasingly clear that we are bound together by computer technology. As I suggested earlier, it is embedded into almost every aspect of our lives.
What is perhaps less obvious is another manner in which we are bound together. We are connected to each other through the stories we tell. Many of those that we use to make sense of a changing world have their origins in narratives from older religious traditions. We sometimes forget this and fail to realize that we are responding to shifting world around us not with new stories but by rehashing old ones.
I invite you to think about how you might do this in your own life. I do it in mine. To offer but one problematic example, I came of age as part of a Unitarian Universalist religious community in the eighties and nineties. The dominant story in my home congregation was that Unitarian Universalism was primarily a rational religion. Our most important principle was probably the one that united us in a “free and responsible search for truth and meaning.” On Sundays we were invited to critique and consider. The story I was given was that good preaching prompted congregants to think more clearly, to reason more sharply.
In recent years, the Unitarian Universalist Association has encouraged its member congregations to shift the story we tell about ourselves. Instead of the old story that, in the words of the twentieth century Unitarian theologian Earl Morse Wilbur, claims that our tradition is one of “freedom, reason, and tolerance.” Our Association now argues, “Love is the power that holds us together and is at the center of our shared values.”
Love at the center, sometimes I fear that my preaching and ministerial perspective are still caught in the old story of freedom, reason, and tolerance. I worry that I am living out the theological narratives about Unitarian Universalism from my childhood, with their emphasis on reason, rather than those of the contemporary moment, with their centering of love.
I invite you to consider the ways in which you might be living out past stories in your lives rather than considering new ones. It often happens. One of the reasons why it can be so hard to change congregational patterns. Often, congregants are not in relationship with the present. Take the relationship that some lay people have with those who are ordained. Parishioners frequently relate to clergy through the stories that you have about the minister who came before or from even earlier in their lives. Maybe the religious leader you grew up with was an intolerant tyrant. That story, you might subconsciously think, is true about all religious leaders.
In the past, I have talked with you about the need for our community to be a place for people to recover from religious trauma. Religious trauma is connected to the accumulated memory, the past stories, that people tell about their experiences in abusive religious communities. One aspect of it is being caught in old stories–that religious leader was a tyrant so all religious leaders must be tyrants–rather than being able to form new ones.
The need to form new stories, the societal shifts that we are in the midst of undergoing are challenging for many of us. Lives are being upended. Communal patterns–the shape of the economy; the way people do politics; and the formations of communities–are all being altered.
The response of many in these situations is not to develop new stories. It is repeat old ones. Daniel Kokotajlo’s prediction that we are about to see the birth of a “kind of machine god” and find ourselves upon the edge of a great transformation, well that’s been around a long time too. Narratives that proclaim we are on the edge of apocalypse and that our futures will be dominated by superhuman intelligences are little more than the retelling of old religious stories.
Kokotajlo and his compatriots predict that in just a few short years AI research will be driven by AI’s themselves. These new AIs will be beyond human control and rapidly outpace human ability. Intelligence beyond our imagination will emerge. The algorithms will either become self-aware or mimic self-awareness.
Which is it I doubt we will know. The title of this sermon “the ghost in the machine” comes from the continuing inability of science to either fully describe the nature or the location of consciousness. We do not know whether our experience of self-awareness and free choice is a neuro-chemical illusion bound up in predictable laws of nature or if it something more than that. Whether there is a spirit or a soul that extends beyond matter–a divine ghost in the fleshy machine–is a problem of faith.
If we do not know that about ourselves then it seems likely that we will know it about AI. In the face of such uncertainty, many of us appear to be recycling old stories to make sense of the unfamiliar. Kokotajlo and others like him suggest that in just a few short years we will witness a “new age.” It will go in one of two directions. The ghost in the machine that is AI self-awareness will either help humans to “terraform and settle the solar system” as part of a society “that is unimaginably amazing in almost every way” or exterminated as an impediment to the development of digital life.
Such claims have had me thinking about a religious story that took its most influential form in a conversation more than eight hundred years ago. The dialogue occurred in the closing months of 1190. The English king Richard I, sometimes called Richard the Lionheart, found himself in Sicily.
He was not on an Italian sojourn to enjoy wine, pasta, and pizza. The Sicilians were not yet eating noodles and tomatoes could only be found on the other side of the ocean. Nor was Richard a tourist pursuing the best Nero d’Avola. He was a military crusader heading to the Middle East to invade the Holy Land.
On his way, he occupied the ancient seaport of Messina. A classical Sicilian city, it was founded by Greeks in the 8th century B.C.E., sacked by the Carthaginians in the 4th century B.C.E., and incorporated into the Roman republic in the 3rd century B.C.E.
Amidst this rich history of sea wind, hewn stone, troubled beaches, and human conflict and continuity, Richard heard tell of a local monk who it was rumored had uncovered the key to all history. Curious, he summoned this cleric, the abbot of a nearby monastery, a man now know of Joachim of Fiore.
Joachim assured the English king that he could see into the future. Passages from the Christian New Testament did not necessarily refer to centuries past, he claimed. Instead, they described what was to come. Reciting a selection from The Revelation of John, he predicted the downfall of the sultan Saladin and the advent of an Antichrist. He told the king that history was divided into three ages: an Age of the Father which had ended with the birth of Jesus; an Age of the Son which would end with the overthrow of the Antichrist; and an Age of the Spirit which would last forever.
Joachim’s vision of this Age of the Spirit–which he imagined would come in the lives of some then living–would be a time of human and terrestrial perfection. One of his interpreters has paraphrased his vision of the third age this way: it “would be to its predecessors as broad daylight compared with starlight and the dawn, as high summer compared with winter and spring. … [It] would be of love, joy, and freedom, … [and] knowledge of God would be revealed directly in the hearts of all.”
Broad daylight compared with starlight and the dawn, love, joy, and freedom, knowledge of God in the hearts of all, Joachim’s vision of successive ages is often taken as a crucial moment in the development of apocalyptic thought. Crudely summarized, this is the claim that what binds us together is some sort of coming crisis that will fundamentally change human history. On the one side, the normal quotidian time that we inhabit today–the daily rhythm of morning tea and oatmeal, a bicycle commute, time in the office, household chores, and dinner around the table. On the other side, something fundamentally, permanently different. Hopefully, it will be the advent of the messiah and perfect peace. Possibly, it will include the temporary–or in some versions even enduring–triumph of the Antichrist and great suffering.
We seem to be stuck in the conversation between the Italian monk and the English king. It has shaped European philosophy and theology for centuries. Versions of it can be found in the writings of Karl Marx and the French philosopher Auguste Comte. Marx divided human time human time into the past of primitive communism, the present of exploitative capitalism, and the future of liberating communism. Comte claimed that the scientific age was the final destiny of humanity. More recently, the phrase “the Third Reich” was meant by the Nazis to evoke such a historical schema.
Ross Douhat’s interview with Daniel Kokotajlo suggests that Joachim’s exchange with Richard the Lionheart continues to haunt us. In his prediction that the coming years will bring a technological acceleration and the advent of a new age, Kokotajlo seems to be doing little more than casting the Italian’s Age of the Spirit into the twenty-first century. In the place of the Christian New Testament, he reads the data, the algorithms, the trend lines, and claims a new age is coming and that there will be a great transformation. In lieu of the Antichrist or Christ, he offers self-aware and superintelligent machines.
I am not sure about you, but my theological training makes me deeply suspicious of the endless reuse of narratives like Joachim of Fiorre’s. Humans have been long stuck in the cycle of imagining the arrival of a new age. Often such predictions are used to justify violence and repression. In the last century, the Marxist Leninists and the Nazis both imagined radical breaks with the past to justify mass killing.
The same is happening with AI today. Though it gets little reported, the technology is an environmental disaster. Many a tech guru, like Demis Hassabis at Google, claims “AI is going to be one of the main drivers of solutions to the climate situation.” At present, it is on track to be one of the main drivers of the climate catastrophe. Today, somewhere between 1.5% and 2% of global energy usage is going to fuel AI. In just eighteen months that level of consumption is likely to double. At the same time, the data centers necessary for AI to function use vast amounts of water and, in some areas, are driving water scarcity. Taken together these factors place AI on track to further the ecological disaster we are already facing.
We need a different story. Instead of being bound together by the imagined end of times or a promise of future permanent bliss, I want to suggest that the proper religious response to AI–the response that considers how we are bound together–is rooted in a narrative that reminds that we inhabit this present world and not a new dawn to come.
Such a story, such a reminder, has been found in the teachings of the wise. They tell us not to look to the new dawn–the imagined time when AI might mitigate the climate crisis or bring unprecedented prosperity–but to root ourselves in the now. It is the call to open ourselves to the beauty of the world as it already as and do what we can to treasure it. It is the Buddha’s answer to question, “Are you a god?” with the words “I am awake.” It is Jesus’s teaching, “God is not God of the dead but of the living.” It is Jewish theologian Martin Buber’s claim, “All actual life is encounter.” It is the Hindu poet Mirabai’s enjoinment, “Get up, stop sleeping–the days of a life are short.” It is the Sioux scholar Nick Estes’s observation, “the moral universe is how one relates to others and to the land.” It is…
Sunflowers on my rooftop garden, rust orange or sunbeam yellow, dancing under the sky’s light as they are blessed by bees. It is a child’s laugh, a parent’s love, anything that connects us to the fullness of now instead of directing us to the age to come. It is treasuring this moment, this time together, and not wrapping ourselves endlessly in a future that may or may not come. To that religious story, that power of being together here, now, I invite the congregation to say Amen.
