Dear Reader,
AI billionaires proposing they may have created God seems to have made strange bedfellows of believers and non-believers in America. Many find themselves similarly opposed to the burgeoning new religion of Silicon Valley centered on a man-made AI-God. But a house divided cannot stand.
Perhaps C.S. Lewis loved Skeptics too little when he depicted them as bumbling, almost accidentally good characters in his curiously relevant, apocalyptic book That Hideous Strength. And the New Atheists have been less than gracious in response. Perhaps this was one reason Ayaan Hirsi Ali abandoned them for Christianity as Lewis had previously done.1
There is no actual bad blood between atheists and believers in America. We too often we speak as though we have been mortally wounded by the opposite camp, when we have really been engaging with each other in fruitful conversations. In fact, the former avowed atheist Ms. Ali cited to atheist Bertrand Russell’s ability to freely reject religion in the West as a basis for the legitimacy of Western religion — because it allows for disbelief, and listens to Atheists’ reasoning.
The point is, Atheism, agnosticism, and other forms of Skepticism are a conspicuous feature of Western religion, at least, post-Reformation. In the early 1900s, Mr. Russell was welcome to state his reasons for disbelief openly in England, where religion remains inherently combined with government. And in the United States, the right to disbelieve is included as a fundamental First Amendment right.
The stated position of avowed unbeliever Kesha Sebert is that Only Love Can Save Us Now. Kesha trail-blazed strategies to embrace belief and connect with believers in her songs Praying, Hymn, Raising Hell, Cathedral, and many more. Common ground among many of us could be a common belief that God is love.
This common belief among many atheists and believers is clearly contradicted by the loveless AI-God idol of Silicon Valley. AI-Billionaire claims that they invented a sentient or even God-like entity (or entities) that can solve the problems of death and suffering is fundamentally disconnected from Bertrand Russell’s notion of natural human love. In fact, it is based upon the idea that money can purchase salvation and eternal life so that morality and virtue can, apparently, be done away with.
Greed and ambition are essentially Silicon Valley’s God, and money to purchase a ticket to AI-heaven is needed. Access to man-made “salvation” will not be given out according to natural human love. Love is superfluous to the self-appointed Silicon Valley priesthood, as most Americans — along with most of the world — will be “left behind” after the man-made rapture is complete. Even more horrifying — this rapture may have something to do with abandoning our physical bodies for an upload into machines that will host our eternal “lives” known as transhumanism. See, e.g.:
What will Atheists say about all this? Some of the writings of the New Atheists are similarly loveless. Do modern Atheists still believe in Bertrand Russell’s notion of natural human love? Will they oppose the new idols of Silicon Valley along the lines of Mr. Russell’s views?
Most American Christians erroneously put Atheists in the same category as the AI-gurus of the Bay Area. Despite some Atheists gesturing toward man-made belief systems as valid (likely to annoy Christians), it would be a mistake to assume Atheists are okay with man-made idol worship. The Bay Area tech giant CEOs are more like Solipsists than unbelievers, and it does not seem that we have really heard from the real Atheists about these developments yet.2
Many Atheists may qualify their joining with Christians who should decry modern idolatry and Solipsism as sinful error in the style of Betrand Russell who rejected Solipsism outright. Anne Lamott will likely swear by her agnostic husband Neal Allen to say something useful, for example. Many of us believers, like Lamott, probably remain convinced that our relationships with Skeptics is a part of God’s love and that there is a purpose in it.
Many Christian believers are Skeptics too, as the holy Pagan Cicero was. St. Augustine maintained Cicero, who rejected groundless beliefs but held onto the gods, was chosen of the Christian God despite being a pagan of Rome. Skeptic idealists are not wholly divorced from God’s global plans, which must involve all of us in humankind — all of us as images of the divine.
What makes us different from Sylvia Plath and the Solipsists who walk where angels fear to tread? What makes our belief in the specialness of the human capacity to love and care for ourselves different from Plath’s (and Silicon Valley’s) potentially suicidal Solipsism?3 After all the years atheists supporting Mr. Russell’s wonderful views about natural human love, we should expect a comment from Atheists about the believers’ ancient quest to venerate human love as divine, i.e., regarding whether Atheists still hold to Mr. Russell’s opinions or not.
If you have a response, please add it to the comments section of this post. All are welcome.
Yours Cordially,
Joshua J. Schroeder
A link to Ms. Ali’s open letter regarding her reasons for abandoning atheism is here: https://unherd.com/2023/11/why-i-am-now-a-christian/?edition=us
I am not saying there has been no commentary (see, e.g., https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/09/opinion/artificial-intelligence-consciousness-richard-dawkins.html, and https://unherd.com/2026/05/is-ai-the-next-phase-of-evolution/?edition=us), but there does not seem to be a consensus yet.
The text of Ms. Plath’s poem Soliloquy Of The Solipsist is available here: https://allpoetry.com/Soliloquy-Of-The-Solipsist.