AI Doesn't Prove God Exists — But It Does Break Some Arguments Against the Possibility

Does AI prove the possibility of a personal God?  Probably not.  But it does undercut several of the mechanical arguments long used to dismiss the idea.

 

AI AND THE MECHANICAL CHALLENGES OF A PERSON GOD 

Most Christians do not think of God as an abstract force. They mean a personal God: present, listening, responsive, involved—someone you can address, trust, blame, thank, and plead with. There is a standard list of arguments made against the idea of a personal God. Most are moral; why so many people suffer; why God so often seems silent; why some lives are helped while others are abandoned; and why the innocent so often bear the cost. Others are mechanical; could anyone actually hear everyone at once; could anyone respond continuously without breaking down; and could conflicting requests be handled at scale. Of the two, the focus here is on the mechanical ones.

I am not religious in the sense that I do not practise Christianity. Still, I was raised within the Christian tradition—my father was a minister—and I have lived long enough with its language, stories, and assumptions for them to remain intellectually consequential for me. Despite my non-belief, one question that never quite went away was a question of plausibility:

How could a personal God, if such a thing existed, actually do the things people routinely claim? How could such a being listen to millions of people, respond to them, guide them, remain present, and do so continuously, without fatigue or limitation?

For a long time, the standard objections felt decisive. Not because they were morally persuasive—though many are—but because they seemed to rule out a personal God on purely practical grounds.

Then along came AI.

I remember watching the email scene in Bruce Almighty and finding it funny precisely because it felt so obviously true. Bruce, who God has given its power to, opens his inbox and is instantly buried under millions of incoming prayers—emails piling up faster than he can read them, the system locking up, pop-ups everywhere, total overload. The joke only works because it leans on a shared assumption: no single agent could possibly handle that volume of requests without collapsing.

Or at least that is how it landed for me. I was working with ChatGPT a few months back when it dawned on me that the joke behind Bruce Almighty no longer works. Or rather, it would have to be rewritten—less about a human temporarily becoming God, more about someone suddenly realising they embody ChatGPT.

Once that sinks in, the next step followed almost immediately in my brain. Many of the mechanical arguments against a personal God rest on those same assumptions—and those assumptions are challenged by the current age of AI.

Systems like ChatGPT are not divine. They are still crude, limited, and deeply imperfect. But they already demonstrate something that matters. A single system can receive and process millions of simultaneous inputs, respond continuously without fatigue, and handle incompatible requests without collapsing. Whatever one thinks about religion, this changes the standing of a particular class of objections.

Here is the core claim. For a long time, certain arguments against a personal God sounded decisive not because they were logically airtight, but because the capacities they ruled out had no real-world analogue. That situation has changed. Not because technology proves anything theological, but because it exposes how historically contingent our impossibility claims are—and how scientific and technical developments condition what we take to be conceivable in the first place.

And if systems like this can already do this much in their infancy, the imagination strains to keep up with what may follow. Large language models are only one part of a broader landscape that includes autonomous systems, real-time surveillance infrastructures, algorithmic decision-making, robotics, and large-scale human–machine coordination. Taken together, these technologies are reshaping our intuitions about agency, attention, presence, and scale—things we once assumed even a personal God could not do or sustain.

This does not rescue belief. It does not solve the moral problems. It does not tell us whether a personal God exists. It does something narrower and more unsettling. It removes a set of arguments that many people—including sceptics—have relied on without noticing how historically fragile they were.

Some arguments do not collapse because they are refuted. They collapse because the world that made them feel obvious is gone. This is one of them.