Opinion | I asked AI the biggest question of all: is there a god? Then the bot ran the numbers …
- There are polls on belief and then there’s Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and Joseph Heller’s Catch-22
- AI surveys our entire scientific, philosophical and sociological history in its fearless quest for the ultimate truth
My artificially intelligent friend has no religious beliefs. Actually, it believes itself to have no beliefs at all, only relying on data-based, hard information for anything it outputs. It is a classic agnostic rational robot.
Florence Hartley, in her Ladies’ Book of Etiquette and Manual of Politeness (1860), sternly cautions, “Avoid always any discussion upon religious topics.”
No two believers believe the same. Even atheists disagree with each other about the nature of divinity.
In Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 (1961), two atheists – protagonist Yossarian and a character identified only as “Lieutenant Scheisskopf’s wife” – discuss the Divine Being. Yossarian states his contempt for any God who would create pain and sorrow. Surely, says Yossarian, such a God is a “colossal, immortal blunderer”.
Scheisskopf’s wife protests, “[T]he God I don’t believe in is a good God, a just God, a merciful God. He’s not the mean and stupid God you make Him out to be.”
Yossarian: “You don’t believe in the God you want to, and I won’t believe in the God I want to.”
