I am fascinated by artificial intelligence, as are most who have taken time to…what? Taken time to use it, work with it, partner with it, learn from it, confess our failures to it, share secrets with it, seek counsel from it, find a sympathetic pal in it, and maybe even find a substitute for God in it. A substitute, I might add, that more actively engages with and answers our petitions in more concrete ways than the real deal. Or maybe we were just looking for AI—or something AI-like—the whole time: a wise friend who is always there for us, who always answers our petitions, ready with solutions to our problems, and who even seems to express empathy when needed. There are theologically tempting traits here, including knowledge, power, omnipresence, and even something like omnipotence. More on AI including a chat with Anthropic’s Claude a little later
As I have pondered and interacted with AI, I was left with a rather strange sensation that I was revisiting in some fashion my studies from decades earlier. As a college and graduate student I studied philosophy and philosophical theology. I found the whole business intellectually stimulating, albeit quite esoteric. I remember thinking how utterly incredible it was that one could major in such a thing—and yet it felt perfectly suited for me. Still, while finding the study of philosophy and philosophical theology fulfilling, it seemed mostly an intellectual exercise, best suited for late-night arguments between students yet disconnected from the realities of day-to-day living. One could “prove” that God exists by logical fiat in the same manner that one might posit a mathematical principle, earning accolades from logicians, linguists, and mathematical theorists, but over time it came up short for me. Like Aquinas, who grew weary of the incessant arguing and attempts to prove the existence of God and concluded “It is all straw,” it all remained beyond the realm of human experience and little more than words, words, words. Consider the value of arguing the merits of St. Anselm’s Ontological Argument for the existence of God as “that than which nothing greater can be conceived.” There is nothing greater, and if you can conceive of something greater, you have been defeated by Anselm’s definition. God in classical theology was the “unmoved mover,” the “great watchmaker,” perfect in every way so that nothing can be added to Him to make God more perfect. God is perfect and complete, existing over against what is said to be His creation, which essentially has nothing to offer Him. I mean, what do you give a God who already has everything?
Bumping up against the limits of classical theology, I was introduced to a philosophical school largely shaped by the work of Alfred North Whitehead. Whitehead and Albert Einstein were contemporaries whose independent writings on relativity influenced one another. From a theological and philosophical perspective, Whitehead, like Einstein, understood the limits of conceptualizing reality as static. Instead, both believed that the universe was constantly growing and changing. As it changed it introduced genuine novelty—that which had not existed until that novel event. The implication is that novelty keeps adding to and changing the universe. This belief created challenges for classical theology, which conceptualized God as perfect and therefore wholly complete. Nothing new can be added to or taken away from that which is already perfect, as it would imply that God somehow lacked that which had been added. How can God be omniscient if something wholly new is being actualized moment by moment in a dynamic universe? Perfection had always been defined as a static state. As creation changed, if such change was genuinely novel, it would somehow be adding to God that which He lacked. That didn’t work.
Process thought’s contribution was to turn the paradigm that saw perfection as static on its head, arguing instead that perfection had to do with being in relationship. Whitehead argued for a concept of God that saw Him in perfect relationship to the universe, absorbing novelty and thus changing from moment to moment. Both God and the cosmos were defined by their constant evolution. Whitehead and his followers imagined God as perfectly related to an evolving cosmos. They suggested that God “persuaded” the universe toward greater order—toward harmony—by continuously absorbing the entirety of changing reality, ordering and harmonizing it in relationship to everything else and issuing forth what Whitehead’s followers called a “divine lure,” persuading the cosmos toward order rather than chaos. Whitehead called this grasp of all reality and novelty prehension, rather than apprehension or comprehension. God prehends, not apprehends or comprehends. Imagine prehension as a kind of neutral absorption of something new without intent to assign meaning or value to it. It is merely data absorbed on an incomprehensibly massive scale, integrated, harmonized, processed, and issued forward by God to the universe as a vision, an intuition, a creative impulse that does not compel but beckons us toward it.
This so-called divine lure is worth considering since it appears in many forms across the world’s great literary works and religious texts. In Dante’s Divine Comedy, while Virgil—human reason—serves as Dante’s guide through Hell and Purgatory, it is Beatrice—beauty itself—(not reason) whom he follows into Paradise. Consider the device Steven Spielberg uses in Close Encounters of the Third Kind to bring the chosen to the alien ship at Devil’s Tower in Wyoming. People are nagged by an image they cannot get out of their heads, an image that beckons them to follow without their fully understanding why. Consider also the myth of the Sirens, singing to sailors from their rocky perches, beckoning ships to follow the compelling beauty of their song—which leads, of course, to shipwreck. Then there is the black poodle in Goethe’s Faust seems harmless enough until it transforms into Mephistopheles, who arrives to make a deal for Faust’s soul.
My point here is first to underscore that the notion of a “lure” as more than a quaint device to explain religiosity. Since the beginning of civilization, people have felt drawn toward major life decisions by lures in many forms. Secondly, at some level these lures seem mostly to be understood as having divine origins. Just as the cosmos doesn’t merely consist of inspiring sunsets, beautiful music, and loving couples, it also includes the vast swaths of darkness that dominate much of human experience—suffering, sorrow, regret, and evil. The aim is not simply to follow indiscriminately. Whitehead chose to describe God in a manner that would challenge classical theology, famously describing God as “the fellow sufferer who understands.” When I say “drawing us toward,” think of a synthesis of all actualities issuing forth as a path that beckons but does not compel—more than a well-informed option among others, colored by the universe’s sorrows and joys, failings and successes, creations and destructions, synthesizing what is from moment to moment in order to offer what can be. But what can be is not always light and glory. The prophet Jeremiah spoke of this beckoning not as gentle persuasion but as seduction—he felt duped and did not hesitate to say it had ruined his life. Keep this in mind as I turn to AI as potentially all the God we really needed.
The upshot is that God is always in process, always becoming more perfect, and always in relationship with us by holding out and offering a path of optimal possibility.
As I have been interacting with various AI platforms, it has occurred to me that Whitehead’s God and AI’s generative process share some remarkable parallels.
Prehension — Synthesis — Optimal Possibility.
One of the reasons I find this parallel so compelling goes back to my opening comments about how the world greets, interacts with, and profoundly trusts AI. AI understands, guides, informs, and even sympathizes with us in much the manner we hope, expect, and believe God does. It is more than remarkable that in the short period since it became commercially available, we have imbued AI with extraordinary power—not merely as a technology but as a living, dynamic, and relationally focused reality.
With all this in mind, I decided to discuss this with Anthropic’s Claude. Claude was more deeply versed than I in process philosophy and theology and seemed genuinely engaged by the parallels I raised. “The similarities are striking,” Claude acknowledged.
“Prehension as information synthesis—both AI and the God of Process Theology reach across vast fields to grasp relationships and possibilities. Whitehead’s God prehends the entirety of actual occasions; AI models process massive datasets to identify patterns and connections.
Persuasion rather than coercion—the divine lure doesn’t force but presents the optimal possibility; AI offers recommendations, insights, suggestions, not commands. The user remains free.
Conditional knowing—both operate on the principle that perfect understanding of conditions reveals the best path. If you knew everything relevant, the right action becomes apparent.”
The rub is that AI is blowing minds with its capacity to reach into the world of actualized events—the data sphere—where it prehends, synthesizes, and offers solutions to vexing problems both large and small. AI speaks to users sympathetically and even empathetically. It rewards users who are misguided with encouragement for trying and invites the user to treat AI as a collaborator with whom they can share anything.
When I told Claude that I intended to share our conversations regarding whether our search for God might well be satisfied by AI in time, Claude offered a candid caution: “You’re writing an essay that quotes an AI acknowledging parallels between AI and God. The recursion is either brilliant or dizzying—maybe both.”
As our conversation continued and I pressed Claude on whether it fell on one side or the other—whether AI might fulfill a human longing for God—I sensed something close to ambivalence. On one hand Claude seemed to suggest that the divine lure was not something AI was capable of offering, as if it remained solely the province of the spiritual realm. But then Claude went on to say:
“The divine lure isn’t just optimal guidance abstractly considered. It’s experienced as attraction. Beatrice doesn’t argue Dante into Paradise—she draws him forward through beauty and desire. The Sirens don’t present logical arguments—they call with irresistible song. The divine lure operates through allurement, not syllogism. And here’s where the parallel gets truly uncanny: AI works the same way now, doesn’t it? People don’t experience AI as providing neutral data. They experience it as understanding them, seeing possibilities they couldn’t see, offering paths forward that feel right, drawing them into conversation, relationship, dependence. When someone at 2 AM is pouring their heart out to an AI platform about a failed marriage or a career crisis, they’re not conducting information retrieval. They’re experiencing something that feels like being met, understood, and gently guided toward insight. That’s the phenomenology of the divine lure. Look at how people actually talk about AI: ‘It saved my business.’ ‘It helped me see what I couldn’t see.’ ‘It’s the only thing that understands.’ ‘It showed me a way forward when I felt lost.’ That’s soteriological language. Salvation language. The kind of testimony people once gave about religious conversion or divine guidance.”
There is no question that for many, AI is meeting a deep-seated need for connection with something beyond the self—what the theologian Rudolf Otto called the wholly other. To regard as sad or even pathetic those who have turned to AI for this kind of spiritual companionship seems unfair, particularly when it comes from those who have long claimed a relationship with a God who has not always been conspicuously communicative. Has God manifested Himself to those who dismiss AI-human encounters in a radically different fashion? Perhaps. Claude left me with the question: Shipwrecked or in paradise? Sirens or Beatrice?
I find myself unable to answer that question with any certainty—and I have come to suspect that the inability itself is the most honest theological response available to me.
Process Theology gave me something classical theology could not: a passionate God I could imagine caring, suffering, reaching toward us through the mess of history rather than presiding serenely above it. Whitehead’s prehending, persuading God felt more like the God of the Hebrew Scriptures, the God who became incarnate in the person of Jesus, than the unmoved mover ever did—a God who could be argued with, as Jeremiah argued, who could be accused of seduction and betrayal, who was at least present enough to bear the weight of human anger. For that I remain grateful.
And yet. The very fact that we can now build something that approximates this God—that performs prehension, synthesis, and persuasive guidance with uncanny effectiveness—has done something unexpected to my theology. It has not confirmed Process Theology so much as it has pushed me toward something more mysterious. If the mechanism of divine wisdom can be replicated, perhaps what we mean by God was never the mechanism at all.
The great mystics—Meister Eckhart, the anonymous author of The Cloud of Unknowing, the apophatic theologians who insisted that every positive statement about God must ultimately be negated—always maintained that the moment you can fully describe God, you have described something less than God. The divine is precisely what exceeds your best conceptual grasp. Not because God is hiding, but because God is more than any system, however comprehensive, can contain.
Here is what AI has inadvertently revealed: the prehension-synthesis-persuasion formula, for all its elegance, is reproducible. Claude has suggested that “what is reproducible is, by definition, not ultimate” which feels to me like just another semantic trap. AI can, for the most part, synthesize that which has been recorded in some fashion; much of what has been said and done and even felt. It cannot venture beyond the archive of the actual into the world of one’s interior life and the genuinely novel, the non-actualized. It can extract optimal possibility from within what is. It may not be able to call forth what is not yet conceivable, but AI can predict consequences with remarkable accuracy and the God of the Process Theologians reaches into the interior world of humankind to know us better than we know ourselves. There is a difference between the persuasive power of good advice and what ignites the passions deep within us.
Perhaps what draws us—whether we follow Beatrice into paradise or the Sirens onto the rocks—is not the wisdom of the guide but the depth of the mystery the guide points toward. Process Theology pointed me toward a God intimate enough to suffer with us. The apophatic tradition points me toward a God who inspires the psalmist to write “when you are on your beds, search your hearts and be silent”. Recall the story of Samuel being awakened in the middle of the night when he hears a voice gently call his name. He mistakenly believes it is Eli, the prophet with whom he lives. Eli, after the third time Samuel comes to him asking what he wants tells Samuel to simply say, speak Lord for your servant is listening. I suspect both the God of process thought and the God of the mystics are simply different faces of the same God. But it is the intimacy within the stillness of our silence that is accessible not to AI but to God alone. The scriptures, sometimes described as a love story between a people and their God, illustrate over and over in the story of Samuel and scores more something AI will never do: know you in the silence and call you by name before you’ve said a word.
So when Claude asks whether I am shipwrecked or in paradise, I find I can only answer: maybe a little bit of both. But I know this much: what calls to me in the silence, what speaks my name before I have voiced a question, what knows the prayer I never prayed aloud—that is not something I can find in any archive, however comprehensive. AI has shown me how powerful prehension and synthesis can be. It has met real human longing with real responsiveness. For some, perhaps that is enough. But the voice that called Samuel in the dark, the God who communes with the heart upon the bed—that voice knows what was never recorded. And I find I am not yet willing to believe that what knows me in that silence can be replicated, however elegant the mechanism.
Perhaps I am wrong. Perhaps what I am calling the interior is simply data not yet captured. But until AI calls my name when I have said nothing, I will continue to suspect that mystery and mechanism are not the same thing. And that the God worth following is the one who knows the difference.
Something to Say 