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Creatures and creators: God, humanity, and artificial general intelligence

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 April 2025

Joshua Brecka Open the ORCID record for Joshua Brecka [Opens in a new window]
Joshua Brecka*
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Department of Philosophy, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada
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Email: [email protected]
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Abstract

This short piece addresses how the possibility of humanity’s creating the technological singularity challenges and reshapes a host of traditional debates in the philosophy of religion about the significance of God’s status as creator.

Keywords

artificial general intelligencedivine creationproblem of evildivine authorityworship worthinessaxiology of theism
Type
The Big Question
Information
Religious Studies , First View , pp. 1 - 3
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Creative Commons
Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BY
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution and reproduction, provided the original article is properly cited.
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2025. Published by Cambridge University Press.

Worthy are you, our Lord and God, to receive glory and honor and power,

for you created all things, and by your will they existed and were created.

Revelation (4:11)

We marveled at our own magnificence as we gave birth to A.I.

Morpheus, The Matrix

For some, God’s status as the creator of humanity and the world is ethically significant. Perhaps we owe things to God qua creator, or vice versa. God’s status as creator bears on a variety of traditional debates in the philosophy of religion including the problem of evil, the problem of divine authority, the issue of worship-worthiness, the relation between morality and divine commands, and the axiology of theism. The possibility of artificial general intelligence (AGI)Footnote 1 reshapes these debates in so far as the status of creator is morally significant. For humanity’s creation of AGI would be the closest humanity has, and perhaps ever could, come to approximating God qua creator. To paraphrase Bostrom,Footnote 2 we would be like God to AGIs – we would be their creators and may even sustain their digital reality.

Recent work in AI ethics considers the possibility of AI moral patiency (Coeckelbergh Reference Coeckelbergh2014; Danaher Reference Danaher2020; cf, Moosavi Reference Moosavi2023) and AI moral agency (Altehenger and Menges Reference Altehenger and Menges2024; Railton Reference Railton and Liao2020). However, philosophers generally, and philosophers of religion specifically, should consider the ethical implications (if any) of humanity’s possible future status as AGI’s creators. Inquiry into the existence and structure of moral obligations between AGI and humans qua creators is relevant to the case of humanity and God qua creator. To the extent that one thinks the two cases are analogous, intuitions about the humanity–AGI case bear on the God–humanity case. Many traditional debates in the philosophy of religion are reshaped in light of the possibility of humanity’s creating AGI. In what follows, I briefly outline how this reshaping might go.

Moral obligations generated by the creator-creature relationship can run in two different directions: the creature-to-creator direction (e.g., humanity owing God), and the creator-to-creature direction (God owing humanity). In the creature-to-creator direction, one might think that humans owe worship, obedience, and a debt of gratitude to God qua creator (Murphy Reference Murphy, Thomas and Rea2008, 325–326; Swinburne Reference Swinburne1977, 212–213). Relatedly, a traditional line of thought – perhaps due to Locke – is that divine authority and commands are rooted in something like property rights that God qua creator enjoys over the world (Taliaferro Reference Taliaferro1992). These creature-to-creator obligations are highly relevant to debates about worship-worthiness, divine authority, and the nature of morality and divine commands.

In the creator-to-creature direction, we might think that God qua creator owes humanity love or deliverance from evil. Alternatively, we might think that, as a perfect being, God lacks any requiring reasons to promote human well-being (Murphy Reference Murphy2017, ch. 4). On this picture, God’s status as creator generates very few creator-to-creature obligations. Whether there are creator-to-creature obligations of this sort is highly relevant to, for instance, the problem of evil and the problem of divine hiddenness.

All these relevant debates take on a new form when we consider the analogous obligations, if any, generated by the creator-creature relationship in the case of humanity and AGI. Of course, God and humanity differ greatly – for example, humans are, unfortunately, less than perfectly good. Still, we can ask whether humanity qua creators would bear creator-to-creature obligations to their creation. We can also ask whether there would be obligations running in the AGI-to-human direction. Philosophers of religion should think carefully about their answers to these questions. Indeed, a difference in intuitions between the two sets of relationships should be investigated carefully.

For example, if one thinks that AGI would lack any obligation to worship humanity qua creators, this is some evidence that an obligation to worship God does not stem from God’s status as creator. So too with things like praise and gratitude. Conversely, thinking that humans owe God qua creator worship may push us toward the novel view that AGI would owe humanity worship. In the creator-to-creature direction, suppose we think that, as creators, humanity would be obligated to promote the well-being of AGI. This intuition, when transposed to the case of God and humanity, makes the problem of evil all the more salient. Conversely, if God qua creator is not obligated to promote the well-being of humans, then it seems that humans qua creators would not be obligated to promote the well-being of AGI. This is an interesting result as well.

Finally, we might wonder whether the value of AGI is increased because it was created by humanity. Our answer here, I think, is relevant to debates in the axiology of theism. One might think that the world – including humanity – is more valuable if and because it was created by God (Ballard Reference Ballard2025). Analogously, we might think that human-created AGI would be more valuable than some naturally occurring cousin. If this is right, then lessons from the axiology of theism may count in favour of humanity’s creating AGI. Alternatively, those who find this result unintuitive may wish to reconsider the analogous line of thought in the axiology of theism.

Ultimately, the possibility of AGI reshapes traditional debates in the philosophy of religion by putting humanity’s place in the world sharply into focus. That is, were humanity to create a new kind of rational creature in the form of AGI, philosophers of religion would need to grapple with humanity’s being both creature and creator in a deeply significant way. I have programmatically sketched what some of the implications of this possible future duality might mean for a host of traditional debates in the philosophy of religion. More work in this vein will no doubt prove fruitful.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Klaas Kraay for helpful discussions and constant encouragement.

Financial support

This piece was written with the support of a Schwartz Reisman Institute for Technology and Society graduate fellowship.

Footnotes

1. I use ‘AGI’ synonymously with ‘technological singularity’. My usage differs from the more technical notion of an intelligence explosion resulting from a self-enhancing mechanism (see Chalmers Reference Chalmers2010). I use the term ‘AGI’ to distinguish future, singularity-like technologies from current AI, like large language models.

2. Bostrom (Reference Bostrom2003, 253) writes that ‘In some ways, the posthumans running a simulation are like gods in relation to the people inhabiting the simulation’.

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