By Ugochukwu Ugwuanyi
This extrapolatory perspective may be quite a stretch, but if you follow carefully, you’ll see that there is a premise to the surmise. At the just-concluded World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Yuval Noah Harari, a distinguished research fellow at the University of Cambridge Center for the Study of Existential Risk, shared some startling thoughts adopted by the participating world leaders. In a session themed: “An Honest Conversation on AI and Humanity,” the professor of history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem theorised that major religions of the world will soon be taken over by artificial intelligence.
In his words, “If religion is built from words, then AI will take over religion. This is particularly true of religions based on books like Islam, Christianity, or Judaism… No human can read and remember all the words in all the Jewish books. But AI can easily do that. What happens to a religion of the book when the greatest expert on the holy book is an AI?” Surprisingly, what is common knowledge in Christianity beats this decorated historian hollow. Aren’t professors meant to have a deep knowledge of the discipline they profess? Added to that, he’s even a research fellow!
Let’s solve man’s ignorance by letting him know that what the Word represents in Christendom isn’t how He is perceived elsewhere. Yes, we mostly use the pronoun ‘He’ for the Word because we are talking about our Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ! Here is how John 1:1, 14, introduced Him: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God… And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us, (and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father,) full of grace and truth.” If still not convinced, how about Revelation 19:13, which explicitly calls Jesus Christ the Word of God?
It’s hard to believe that the academic of Cambridge University’s acclaim doesn’t know this truth! That is why we can’t entirely dismiss the conspiracy rationality online that Harari is deliberately propagating misinformation that feeds into the Antichrist agenda. After scheming unsuccessfully to cancel Christ in words per Xmas and Xtian, they now want to take Him out altogether through their agent known as AI. The agenda is kicking given that a 2025 study from the Pew Research Center found that the share of U.S. adults who identified as Christian dropped by 16 percentage points from 2007 to 2019. You can imagine what obtains in other Western countries or what a more recent survey would show.
Here’s Horari again, “As far as putting words in order is concerned, AI already thinks better than many of us. Therefore, anything made of words will be taken over by AI.” That’s so untrue; the synthetic can never beat the authentic! Find out for yourself by comparing the originality of this essay with an article generated by a ChatGPT bot on the same subject matter. Expressing his frustration with AI writing in a Facebook update, Professor Farooq Kperogi, who heads Kennesaw State University’s Journalism and Emerging Media programme, observed that outsourcing an entire act of writing and thinking to a machine results in stilted and exhaustingly banal AI-esque prose.
According to him, “The writers feed a prompt to a chatbot, which returns hackneyed, predictably stereotyped AI prose full of stock phrases and Americanized turns of expression. Once I notice this, I lose the desire to read further, suffer second-hand embarrassment and often ignore the message altogether. In my mind, a soulless bot wrote to me, not a human being and certainly not a Nigerian voice with its own texture and personality. And so I move on.” In light of this realism, how then will the same bot deliver what can take over the word in major religions of the world? Even global conglomerates, corporates and startups have realised the futility of formulaic AI slop. This is making them steadily search for storytellers and copywriters to hire. What an insult to compare AI with the Word, which, according to Ezekiel 3:3, “tasted as sweet as honey in my mouth.”
King David wrote in Psalm 119:162, “I rejoice at Your word As one who finds great treasure.” This reinforces Jeremiah 15:16, where, “Your words were found, and I ate them, And Your word was to me the joy and rejoicing of my heart.” We’re still talking about the Word, which, according to Acts 20:32, has the capacity to build up the believer, giving them an inheritance among those who are sanctified. This word remains “spirit and life” per John 6:63, and is “quick, and powerful, and sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing even to the dividing asunder of soul and spirit, and of the joints and marrow, and is a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart”. (Hebrews 4:12)
The above is to cite a few scriptures that affirm the centrality of the Word to Christianity. Horari first missed it by classifying the Faith as one of the world’s religions. When we tell them it’s not, they will think we are talking baloney. Well, by the time Christianity continues waxing strong as AI strives to take over religions of the world, it would be a reenactment of the Mount Carmel contest through which Prophet Elijah established the supremacy of Jehovah over Baal.
But we don’t have to wait until then to prove that AI can never arrogate the word as far as Christianity is concerned. Note that after lauding the larger-than-life attributes of AI, Harari charged the world to stop referring to the machine as a tool but call it an agent instead. Here’s how he puts it: “The most important thing to know about AI is that it is not just another tool. It is an agent. It can learn and change by itself and make decisions by itself. A knife is a tool. You can use a knife to cut salad or to murder someone, but it is your decision what to do with the knife. AI is a knife that can decide by itself whether to cut salad or to commit murder.” If we concede that AI is an agent, then there is no way it (was almost going to call it a ‘he’) can supplant or take over the Master of Jesus’ caliber!
AI, which requires regular updates and modifications of its features, can never survive Jesus Christ, who, according to Hebrews 13:8, is the same yesterday, and today, and forever. Pray, what level of high can make someone compare a modern-day invention with the God who was around at the very beginning, by whom all things were made, and who has remained relevant even until tomorrow? For all its smarts, AI can only be an information specialist, certainly not an expert in illumination! This introduces us to the person of the Holy Spirit whose boots futuristic AI dare not lace. Where will the agent start from when a Holy Spirit carrier is an authority in decoding mysteries?
Indeed, the person led by this Spirit of God will be far more intelligent than artificial intelligence. The difference between them can be likened to this citation in Daniel 1:20, “And in all matters of wisdom and understanding about which the king examined them, he found them ten times better than all the magicians and astrologers who were in all his realm.” The Spirit that makes this difference is the same One that activates the written word into phenomenal wonders in the life of the believer. Like the utilitarian value of a Gold-backed currency, Scripture is unimaginably potent because of the breath of the Holy Ghost upon it!
According to a Newsweek report, Churches now enlist the help of artificial intelligence to reach worshippers and personalise sermons. The publication added that there has been an increase in AI-powered religious apps that enable users to text with Jesus or talk to the Bible. Be that as it may, the point must be made that 1 John 4:17, which says “as Jesus is, also are we in this world,” refers to the saints. This privileged status can never be usurped by some agent without a heart and soul, no matter how cutting-edge the technology that gives it wings!
*VIS Ugochukwu, a Sage, Storyteller and Media Trainer, attends to DMs on X (nee Twitter) @sylvesugwuanyi