There was a fender bender last month at the intersection of artificial intelligence and religion.

A historian named Yuval Noah Harari, who has ties to the World Economic Forum, told an interviewer that “in a few years, there might be religions that are actually correct” with a “holy book” written by artificial intelligence. That comment sparked a kerfuffle on social media and some conservative news sites. The fact checkers swooped in to “correct” the record. Unfortunately, everybody got it wrong.

As usual, the fact checkers failed to tell the whole story. But many conservative news sites also misrepresented Harari to be saying that AI could write a “correct” Bible. Understanding Harari correctly, however, has implications for how Christians should respond to his worldview.

What did he actually say?

Conservative Christian news sites failed to correctly understand Harari’s point with headlines like these:

WEF Calls for AI to Rewrite Bible, Create ‘Religions That Are Actually Correct’

Will AI Become Our New Gods? Answering the Claims that AI Could Correct the Bible

World Economic Forum Contributor Says AI Could Rewrite the Bible, Create 'Correct' Religions

Some nuance is needed here to understand Harari’s point in context and as he stated it: “Throughout history, religions dreamt about having a book written by a superhuman intelligence, by a non-human entity. Every religion claims, ‘All the other books of the other religions, humans wrote them. But our book, no, no, no, no, it came from some superhuman intelligence.’ In a few years, there might be religions that are actually correct. Think about a religion whose holy book is written by an AI."

It’s obvious Harari meant that religions will be able to “correctly” claim that their holy book was written by a “superhuman intelligence.” He’s not saying that AI will be able to write a “correct” holy book. In fact, his whole atheistic, humanistic worldview seems to militate against the notion that that would ever be possible. In context, Harari seems to be saying that “in a few years, there might be religions that are actually correct” in their belief that their book was written by a superhuman intelligence, namely AI.

This is all borne out by the fact that the rest of Harari’s interview is about the need to control and restrict the use of AI rather than leverage it to reveal truth. If Harari believed that AI could create a correct religion, he would be excited about its future. His interview reveals that he is worried about AI. That nuance is important for examining his worldview.

I am by no means defending Harari, of course. His actual view is as silly as the misinterpreted one. And its implications are profound.

Harari who?

Dr. Yuval Noah Harari is the widely acclaimed author of the bestselling Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind and other books on popular science and history. He is also a history lecturer at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

He has been invited multiple times to speak at events put on by the World Economic Forum, the controversial entity led by Klaus Schwab which advances “The Great Reset.”

Harari’s books have been recommended by the likes of Barack Obama and Bill Gates, and his writing has appeared in mainstream media outlets like The Guardian, The New York Times, and The Economist. He’s also appeared with major heads of state and was tapped by news outlets for his input during the pandemic and the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

In short, Harari is “considered one of the world’s most influential public intellectuals today,” as his personal website proclaims.

Worldview issues

What does “one of the world’s most influential public intellectuals” today believe? The main headline on his personal website tells it all: “History began when humans invented gods, and will end when humans become gods.” He is atheistic (“humans invented gods”) and he is humanistic (“when humans become gods”). He also has a clear anthropology and eschatology: humanity is history’s creator, sustainer, and ultimate end.

All of this affects how he understands AI, its potential function in society, and the limit on its capabilities. If humans hold a special place in history due only to their “invention” of gods, it follows that some other form of intelligence, such as artificial intelligence, can take their place or even destroy them altogether. What’s to stop AI from taking humanity’s place and becoming a God itself? Harari’s world is an intelligence-eat-intelligence world.

Harari puts this in catastrophic terms. “To have a fighting chance, we need time,” he says. “We are maybe the most adaptable animals on the planet, but adaptation itself requires time. Now we have reached a point when there is no time. AI is moving too fast. And I think that it's the responsibility, therefore, of governments to buy us time.”

It should always be concerning when someone’s reaction to a new technology is that we should put the power to control it in the hands of a few. But Harari’s world that turns on raw power demands it: humanity must work together through government to face the existential threat of artificial intelligence.

While it’s obvious that AI will be disruptive, Harari’s worldview causes him to outsize its impact. His view of humanity is too low. Will AI “take” some people’s jobs? Yes. But if humanity is more than just some creature that crawled out of the primordial soup, then AI will not really be able to replace us. Since human beings are stamped with some creative, rational, glorious characteristic not found in the rest of creation, the image of God, then AI will never be able to usurp the place of humans.

Ironically, Harari’s atheistic humanism degrades humanity: if humans can be replaced by robots, then humans are little more than robots. If that’s all humans are, then Harari has a puny god.