Deus in Machina: AI and Divine Rhetoric
- Tobias Wilson-Bates
- 21 hours ago
- 6 min read
On a recent episode of his show, podcaster Joe Rogan expounded on his theory of an artificial intelligence second coming: “Jesus was born out of a virgin mother. What’s more virgin than a computer? If Jesus does return, even if Jesus was a physical person in the past, don’t you think he could return as artificial intelligence?” Internet meme culture responded to the quote with the expected eye-rolling, but Rogan is far from alone in collapsing technology and religious philosophy. Indeed, some of the chief proponents of this view are the leaders of the artificial intelligence industry itself.
In October, Patrick Gelsinger, the ex-CEO of Intel (the beleaguered chip-manufacturing giant), declared that his new venture (Gloo) will be focused on AI alignment such that it will “hasten the coming of Christ’s return.” Peter Thiel, founder of Palantir—a software company that just signed a $10 billion contract with the Department of Defense—has spent the last year on a secretive lecture tour in which he expounds on his theory that regulating AI is the work of the anti-Christ. Sam Altman has openly claimed that his platform, OpenAI, is on its way to constructing omnipotent superintelligence. “We are creating god,” declared one of the company’s LLM engineers in September. In other words, it may be amusing when Joe Rogan theorizes on the virginity of electronics, but his linking of the divine and mechanical is quickly being adopted by the technocratic wing of the billionaire class; this should concern all of us.
Taking up the usual scholastic banner, I am here to relate that none of this is new. The machina mundi (the machine of the world) concept can be traced back to the twelfth century Catholic monk, Johannes de Sacrobosco, whose ideas can be followed still further back to Lucretius and Ptolemy. However, the grounding of discourses on the divine within a single technological apparatus, as opposed to a broader mechanistic metaphor, is more properly located in the seventeenth century. Thomas Hobbes Leviathan begins by comparing human life to the motions of a watch: “For what is the Heart, but a Spring; and the Nerves, but so many Strings; and the Joynts, but so many Wheeles, giving motion to the whole Body, such as was intended by the Artificer?” The allegorical method, ultimately dubbed the “Clockwork Universe,” would find its most lasting Enlightenment articulation in the famous Clarke-Leibniz correspondence in which Isaac Newton (via his intermediary Samuel Clarke) debated Johannes Leibniz concerning the mathematical and physical properties of God and Nature.
Leibniz muses in the exchange that Newton’s description of a God that “needs to wind up his watch from time to time” depicts an oddly inept deity. Clarke argues back that Leibniz’s “notion of the world's being a great machine, going on without the interposition of God” dispenses with the necessity of a god altogether. While ostensibly a debate on the philosophical underpinnings of calculus, the two thinkers were employing the analogy of a clock to consider hierarchies of power during a period of profound social upheaval.
Leaving to the side the specific philosophical perspectives articulated in their dispute, it was a major shift in mechanistic discourses that seventeenth-century thinkers began to ground their philosophies specifically in a single technology. Clockmaking had undergone a concomitant sea-change in the seventeenth-century, first with the pendulum motion pioneered by Dutch mathematician Chistriaan Huygens and later in the century through the work of English clockmaker John Harrison, and the first successful marine chronometer that ushered in a new era of longitudinal navigation. In the nineteenth century, the pairing of religious philosophy and technology took quite a different turn that can help us understand why podcasters today might feel inspired to consider the sexual purity of computers. Our infrastructure, be it time systems or information systems, is vulnerable to ideological capture, and its metaphorical rearticulation can help us understand how those who are intent on reframing the idea of infrastructure are also intent on shifting social relations.
In 1802 Anglican priest William Paley published his best-known work on the nature of God. In Natural Theology or Evidences of the Attributes and Existence of the Deity, Paley frames his argument entirely on the social understanding of clocks. Paley describes crossing a heath, noting how different the experience must be when happening upon an unremarkable stone, as opposed to happening upon a watch: “when we come to inspect the watch, we perceive (what we could not discover in the stone) that its several parts are framed and put together for a purpose.”
Paley devoted many painstaking chapters to the watch analogy. In subsequent sections he considers watches that are only assumed to exist, watches that sometimes go wrong, watches in antiquity, and even watches that (by some contrivance) produce other watches. The watch is not an incidental physical analogue to Paley’s arguments concerning the divine; it is a load-bearing interface with his arguments, intricate enough that it is indispensable to Paley’s thinking.
Reflecting on the public use of time in the nineteenth century helps clarify why Paley makes this choice. In possibly his most cited essay, “Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capital,” EP Thompson locates the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth century as the period when clocks had become so culturally ubiquitous that we are forced to ask: in what ways the new temporal order restructured “the inward apprehension of time of working people?”
Thompson’s argument takes as its locus the concept of “task orientation,” the idea that completion of any particular act of labor belongs to the internal processes and desired outcomes of a task. This orientation is disrupted, or perhaps dismembered entirely, by industrial temporality that rearticulates tasks into work done during an employer’s time versus one’s own time. An employer must get the most work possible out of a laborer during the work period so that the apportioned labor time is not wasted. To Thompson, this signaled a radical shift in how technologies of time were applied to disciplining workers: “Time is now currency: it is not passed but spent.”
In Time, Labor, and Social Domination, Moishe Postone describes the process of using clock time to organize labor as “the temporal dimension of the abstract domination that characterizes the structures of alienated social relations in capitalism.” The act of labor is dislocated from its task or social context and placed into the broader context of national or even international labor that inevitably drives down the laborer’s ability to bargain for wages against the vastly distributed abstraction of the market. Our current economy, with its many forms of micromanaged gig labor and ubiquitous evaluation surveillance, is one outcome of this history.
When Paley compares God to a clock, then, he was no longer appealing simply to the divine clockmaker concept espoused by thinkers like Robert Boyle and Johannes Kepler. Instead, he spoke to a new form of social contract that readers would associate with the rhythms of hierarchical domination that increasingly formatted life in the industrial period.
When artificial intelligence is invoked with the divine, I would argue that this same mode of technological metaphor is at play. One of the stated central goals of the rush to sink hundreds of billions in investment capital into data centers has been the idea of developing Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). This hypothetical technology would reproduce the full functional capability of the human mind in a computer. The resulting discourses about consciousness, intelligence, and agency have invoked the philosophical tradition concerning the identities of God and man. Meta has even dubbed their nuclear-powered gigawatt AI datacenter project, “Prometheus.” However, recent leaked documents from OpenAI reveal that the industry has eschewed philosophical definitions of intelligence for a far simpler metric: "AGI will be achieved once OpenAI has developed an AI system that can generate at least $100 billion in profits."
The urgent message from history concerning the process of forcing the metaphorical deus into his machina is that social domination readily takes up the language of philosophy or religion when seeking to reset social norms. We must respond accordingly because there is no AI Jesus coming to save us.
Tobias Wilson-Bates is an associate professor of English at Georgia Gwinnett College, where he specializes in Nineteenth-Century Literature. His areas of expertise include eco-criticism, time studies, and critical theory. He is chair of the Digital Humanities Lab, and Grizzlies On-Air student podcasting. His work has been platformed on NPR, Newsweek, and The Chronicle of Higher Education. His podcasts and writing have appeared in Victorian Studies, Studies in the Novel, Victorian Literature and Culture, and Modernism/Modernity. His current book project on time machines and extraction is titled, Holes in Time.
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