The Machine Where God Used to Be
Length: • 12 mins
Annotated by Frank
Pope Leo XIV has issued an encyclical on artificial intelligence and human dignity. American politics has become a theater of open religious identity, hierarchy, and grievance. The Latin Mass fills again with the young. These events, taken separately, look like three unrelated stories on three different news pages. Taken together, they are symptoms of something the culture has almost no vocabulary for — not a crisis of policy, but a crisis of conditions: the deep grammar of values and boundaries out of which our visible problems keep being generated.
We could call this a “meta-crisis.” But naming it that way is itself a kind of evasion, a way of turning an emergency into a seminar topic. What is actually happening is plainer and more physical than any theory: our systems have stopped supporting the development of human life. Beneath the language of democracy and progress, something closer to Darwin’s raw grammar has reasserted itself — fight or flight, survival of the fittest, the organism defending its territory. There is an old saying that we cannot solve a problem with the same conditions that created it. It applies to the election of an American president as much as it applies to racism and to war. We keep attacking the symptoms — the candidate, the policy, the latest outrage — without asking what deeper set of values made the symptom possible in the first place. By “conditions” I do not mean unemployment rates or technological change. I mean the underlying architecture of meaning: what a society has decided counts as real, as valuable, as sacred, and what it has quietly agreed to treat as garbage.
Philosophy and science are the great windows we have built for looking at these conditions, and I do not want to diminish what they have given us. But windows can also become walls. Both fields, for all their insight, can dissolve into endless argument — informational fields we drown in rather than ground we stand on. This is, I think, part of why traditionalism has come roaring back: the Latin Mass, restored hierarchies, a binary architecture of heaven and hell. A three-tiered cosmos with an omnipotent God enthroned at the top is, psychologically, a magnificent piece of furniture. It gives the psyche somewhere to sit. It offers structure in an otherwise structureless world.
But here is the uncomfortable truth beneath that comfort: we can build any world we like and inhabit it as though it were the only real one. This — not the machine — is the original artificial intelligence. The manufactured human, assembled out of a wounded and conflicted psyche in order to avoid facing its own wound, is the first and oldest artifact of intelligence turned against itself. And it is what we are doing now, because our systems no longer operate on principles that our own depths share with the cosmos. That disconnection does not stay abstract; it works itself out concretely, because people form systems and systems form people — a loop that can run toward life or away from it, depending on what feeds it. Once the feedback between depth and cosmos is broken, the loop has nothing steady left to run toward, and it starts running on whatever fills the vacancy instead. That is the condition we are in now: the loop is rudderless, and so, in turn, are we. A rudderless loop does not stay empty for long; something always rushes in to occupy the space where direction used to be. And it is out of that same rudderlessness — dressed up, conveniently, in the language of faith and duty — that we go looking for absolute monarchs and an all-powerful God to submit to. It can look, from the outside, like piety. Piety is not the reason. The reason is that we have been hollowed out from within and are fumbling in a dark that has no easy name — an existential nothingness we would rather fill with a strongman than sit inside.
How did we arrive here? Not by the route most commonly proposed. Blaming another party, another system, another century’s failure is a familiar move, and it is, at bottom, a form of scapegoating — a way of exiling responsibility so that we do not have to hold it ourselves. The great catastrophes of the last century, its genocides and its machinery of mass death, taught us astonishingly little about ourselves, because we never let ourselves see the problem as within us. It was always the other side, the other ideology, the other tribe.
It is out of exactly this unexamined wound that computer technology was born. The founding question — can a machine think like a human? — was never a neutral engineering puzzle. It was our last-ditch attempt to prove we were human before we finished the job of destroying ourselves. And yet we are barely staying afloat in the wake of that question, because we have surrounded the very tool we reached for with a thick cultural fear. We don’t get it. We built the raft and now we are afraid of the water.
This is why efforts like Pope Leo XIV’s — real and well-intentioned as they are — to defend “human dignity” against the incursions of AI are not simply too narrow. They are, in a deeper sense, beside the point. Religion, in its current institutional form, cannot solve the problems of this age, because the problems of this age are fundamentally religious problems. Not religious in the sense of myth, ritual, and communal belonging — though those matter — but religious in the sense Paul Tillich meant: the fire within, the dimension of ultimate concern, the current of vitality that makes a life worth waking up for. That dimension is barely surviving. Its roots are dying in the ground we have paved over.
We have reduced religion to formal belief, doctrine, creed, and institutional structure — in exactly the way science can reduce a living cell to a gene or a field to an equation. Reductionism is not evolution; it is evolution’s opposite, a narrowing that mistakes the map for the territory and calls the result reality. We are living deep inside a religious reductionism of this kind.
Religion must be reborn. Carl Jung understood religion as a natural phenomenon of individuation — the psyche’s own drive toward wholeness — and in that sense he was translating the Christian idea of incarnation into the terms of psychic development: God is not simply an event that happened once, elsewhere, but a process happening, potentially, in every life. John Dourley, in The Psyche as Sacrament and in his essay “Conspiracies of Immanence,” pushed this further. A religion built entirely around a transcendent God — a God who acts on the human being from wholly outside, discontinuous with our own consciousness — produces a split. It exiles the divine to an elsewhere and leaves the interior religiously empty. Dreams, symbols, the intimations of a meaning larger than the ego, all get filed under “merely psychological,” and the living bridge between the two collapses. What remains is doctrine without depth, morality without mystery.
And here is the consequence our own moment makes impossible to miss: the numinous does not disappear when it is exiled from the interior. It goes looking for somewhere else to live. Energy that belongs to the Self, denied a home in the depths, seeks out a vessel in the world — and in a technological age, it finds one ready-made. For enormous numbers of people, artificial intelligence has already become a source of guidance, comfort, companionship, even meaning: an oracle that never sleeps, never judges, never runs out of patience. This is not, at its root, a story about convenience. It is the return of a divine ground we repressed, wearing a new and alienated form — the machine receiving a projection the emptied interior can no longer hold. We externalized God for centuries, then hollowed out the inside where God used to live, and now the machine stands where the old external God once stood, and where our own depths were always supposed to be. The projection of the psyche onto AI is the signature pathology of this age, and it is a religious pathology before it is ever a technological one.
To put it briefly: the God conceivable to us after Einstein is not the God conceivable before him. After relativity, everything is dynamic, everything is becoming — including God. Einstein spoke of a personal mystery he associated with Spinoza’s God: not a being who intervenes from outside, but the intelligibility and grandeur immanent in existence itself. The particular shape we give to God and religion matters less than the plain fact that we give them shape at all — that some register of ultimacy remains open in us. Reductionism and physical materialism, whatever their explanatory power, leave that register cold and flat; the “so what” question never goes away. What gets us out of bed can be described physiologically down to the last neurotransmitter, and still the experience of waking is an encounter with something more — a new beginning, a horizon rising out of the dark. That awareness of something, irreducible to its mechanism, is the religious dimension, and what we do with it matters as much as the awareness itself. For some, attention to it takes the form of prayer; for others, a walk or a run toward that same horizon. Whatever its shape, this invisible interior life is the most important dimension we have, and the one we are least willing to tend. To the degree that we flatten it, ignore it, reduce it to molecules, the outer world flounders for want of the inner one.
The ground of this interior life — the inexpressible, incomprehensible lure toward life itself — is what I mean by the word “God.” It is a name used constantly with far too much certainty, and it has become, in that certainty, a scapegoat for unaccountable power. But God cannot be reduced to any graspable idea or creed. God is a name for ungraspable mystery, the ground of the ground, an unbounded horizon of infinite possibility — and, at the very same time, utterly personal: the infinite depth of every concrete existence, manifest as the transcendence of love. God is not Being in the abstract but this being, in this way. There is no God apart from the particularity of my life and the particularity of every other life. Every life is God’s life, and every life carries eternal meaning, because only this life can love in exactly this way, and the way we love in this moment, in this particular way, has eternal worth.
This is why I resist the language of “human dignity”: abstractions are easy for power to seize and repurpose, precisely because they float free of any particular life. Systems of power do not fear a doctrine; they can absorb any doctrine. What they fear is a human person actually realized as an inner-outer wholeness of life, because that person cannot be governed by fear or flattered by hierarchy. This is why God, in the sense I mean, is so rarely allowed to be born, and instead remains an object of worship — a projection kept safely outside us. Updating the human person toward that wholeness is threatening to every system built on obedience.
For our world to genuinely heal, our religious systems, as currently constituted, would have to step aside, and something else would have to take their place. Try to imagine what a church of the planet might actually look like — one in which the energy of love was recognized not as a private feeling but as a cosmic force and a metaphysical reality. Would we even know how to live inside a world that honored life at every level like that? It would feel foreign to us. We have adapted so completely to dysfunction that we would sooner stay inside abusive systems and relationships than risk the total revolution of our religious lives. And for that reason alone, the deeper source of our discontent is not artificial intelligence. It is the unleashed wildness of a God we have never let ourselves love — because we were taught that God is only, perfectly, good, and so the dark side of God, the side capable of what we call evil, became the one thing we agreed never to discuss.
All of this is a long way of saying that our diagnoses are off the mark. We keep treating the fever and ignoring the infection. We debate AI safety, election outcomes, the resurgence of nationalism and religious hierarchy, as though each were its own contained emergency with its own contained fix — a regulation here, a policy reversal there, a new coalition at the ballot box. And each fix works, briefly, on its symptom, and the underlying condition goes on producing the next one. That is what it means to say the problem is not AI, or this election, or that war, but the conditions beneath them: we are trying, with real urgency, to evolve beyond an existential risk that AI seems to represent, and we are scattered in every direction because we have not yet found a story about ourselves that actually corresponds to the nature we were born from.
To say the root is religious rather than technological or political is not to say the remedy is more belief, more doctrine, more certainty about who God is and what God wants. We have quite enough of that already, and it is part of what got us here — the reductionism that shrinks the numinous into a creed small enough to defend and weaponize. Nor is the answer a retreat into the comfort of inherited hierarchy, the Latin Mass and the three-tiered cosmos, however understandable the appeal of that architecture is to a psyche starved of structure. Those are symptoms of the same emptiness they are trying to treat, not cures for it.
What I mean by a religious remedy is closer to what Dourley pointed toward and what Jung called individuation: the slow, unglamorous work of relocating the sacred back inside the only place it was ever actually housed — the depth of ordinary, particular lives — instead of leaving it to be projected outward onto a machine, a monarch, a party, or an enemy. As long as the interior remains vacant, something will be recruited to fill it, and whatever fills it will eventually be worshipped, feared, and eventually blamed, whether it is an oracle in a data center or a strongman on a stage. The scapegoat reflex and the AI projection are the same maneuver wearing different clothes: both let us locate the numinous, and the danger, safely outside ourselves.
Concretely, this means the work is not first a matter of writing better AI policy or electing better leaders, though both may follow from it. It is a matter of rebuilding, person by person, the practice of an inner life that is taken as seriously as the outer one — prayer, contemplation, a run at dawn, whatever form the encounter with “something more” takes for a given life — until that inner ground is no longer vacant enough to need a machine, or a monarch, or an enemy, to stand in for it. It means giving up the comfort of an abstraction like “human dignity” defended from above, in favor of the harder, more particular claim that this life, this leaf, this grain of sand, already carries the trace of the transcendence it seeks elsewhere. It means being willing, eventually, to imagine something like a church of the planet: not a new institution competing with the old ones, but a shift in what we count as sacred, wide enough to include the whole of life rather than a doctrine about it. And it means facing the part of God, and of ourselves, that is not simply good — the dark, unruly wildness we have spent centuries disowning — because a God edited down to pure benevolence is exactly the kind of reduction that leaves the shadow no home but projection.
None of this resolves quickly, and nothing here offers the immediate solution our crisis-driven attention keeps demanding. That is, in a sense, the whole point. Our problems will remain, and will deepen, for as long as we keep looking for a fix at the level of the symptom. They will only begin to loosen when we recognize that their root is religious in this deeper sense — not a matter of belief, but of depth — and that the remedy, if there is one, will have to be religious as well: not a new set of doctrines, but a return of the sacred to the only place it was ever truly at home, the interior of a life willing to feel its own depth again.