Uploaded September 2026 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago
Why does AI sound so much like religion?
For years, the debate about AI was mostly about what it could do, whether it could write, make convincing art, or beat us at our own games.
The questions now are older and harder. What makes us human? How do we find meaning? If a machine can do more of the things we thought made humans special, where does that leave us? These aren’t new questions, but rapid advances in AI have made them feel a lot more urgent. Even Pope Leo XIV chose artificial intelligence as the subject of his first encyclical.
Greg Epstein, the humanist chaplain at Harvard and MIT and author of Tech Agnostic, has been asking these questions long before the machines showed up. He argues that we’re living in a moment with too much certainty, and that the most useful thing we could embrace right now might be doubt.
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Why does AI sound so much like religion?
For years, the debate about AI was mostly about what it could do, whether it could write, make convincing art, or beat us at our own games.
The questions now are older and harder. What makes us human? How do we find meaning? If a machine can do more of the things we thought made humans special, where does that leave us? These aren’t new questions, but rapid advances in AI have made them feel a lot more urgent. Even Pope Leo XIV chose artificial intelligence as the subject of his first encyclical.
Greg Epstein, the humanist chaplain at Harvard and MIT and author of Tech Agnostic, has been asking these questions long before the machines showed up. He argues that we’re living in a moment with too much certainty, and that the most useful thing we could embrace right now might be doubt.
Subscribe to The Globe and Mail's Morning Update to get stories directly in your inbox: theglobeandmail.com/newsletters/subscribe-morning-update
