“Can AI help us find God?”

That is the title of my latest Free Press piece.  Here is one excerpt:

Religious knowledge has become easy to access with as much detail as you might wish. You can learn about Vatican II or the Talmud ad infinitum. But it may mean something different to practitioners when it does not come from another human. An AI can write a sermon; in fact, if some confessional accounts can be believed, a majority of sermons are now at least co-authored with AI. But can it deliver that sermon and move worshippers to go out and do good works? With where things stand now, I doubt it.

One possible scenario is that our religions, at least as we experience them in person, become more charismatic, more heart-pumping, and more thrilling. We will want more and more of the uniquely human element, and to hold the attention of their audiences, churches will provide it. If so, AI will be riding a trend that we already see in the U.S., as older mainline denominations have ceded ground to evangelical ones.

That will not please everyone, and those looking for “information” from their religions may turn away from collective worship and spend more time with AI. We may be entering a “barbells” world where religious experience is either a) much more solo, but with AIs, or b) more immediate and ecstatic, with other human beings.

And this:

The ancient worlds of Greece and Rome had plenty of oracles, as did late antique Christianity, so an oracle-rich religious era is hardly impossible. It does not require the AIs to invent a new belief system out of whole cloth, but just to slowly morph from being good advisers into holding more spiritual significance for us.

There are further points at the link.