Henry Muhumuza

I'll be discussing three seemingly unrelated things: God, AI, and my deductive reasoning to arrive at faith as an inevitable end-point. For context, I am a Christian. That means I believe that a divine creator was behind the formation of all the billions of planets in the universe and the emergence of intelligent life on at least one of those planets (earth being the only one we are certain of). God was purposely and actively involved not just in sowing the perfect conditions for but in directing the formation of sentient life on Earth (us).

There are clear parallels between this magnificent story of creation and today's frenzy, where trillion-dollar corporations race to create Artificial General Intelligence, a kind of artificially sentient entity. Some AI researchers are even convinced they are creating God in those state-of-the-art labs in Silicon Valley. Needless to say, this has unsettled many in faith and theological circles, and this concern is justified.

I must confess that initially, in my quest to make sense of the mysterious origins of God and reconcile the logic-defying vastness of His power with my inquisitive rational human mind, typical of a young man schooled in the natural sciences, I imagined Him to be a very advanced intelligence, forged by millions or billions of years of 'evolution', gaining so much in terms of knowledge and understanding of the fundamental laws of the universe that He could bend them to His will. That He had also somehow become a multidimensional being along the way. That maybe mankind's final form is God. Was God once man?

This reasoning quickly breaks down. Historically, human civilizations have proven surprisingly short-lived. Consider the Roman Empire, thought invincible by emperors, patricians, and Roman citizens at its peak. Even its collapse in 476 AD, after the deposition of the young Romulus Augustulus, wasn't recognized as such at the time. Only later historians, looking back, labeled it a collapse. History is littered with similar examples. You might even have come across this popular science fact that ~99% of species that ever existed are extinct. It is therefore highly unlikely that any human civilization could persist for millions, let alone billions, of years—long enough for its members to evolve toward the complexity of God.

In comes AI, which is silicon-based. What if the life form that persists is not organic? What if it is silicon-based? Could it live on for such galactic timescales, long enough to become God?

Silicon-based life holds a profound competitive advantage over organic life forms in energy acquisition and conversion. Consider the directness of the process: photons from the sun strike a doped silicon wafer, exciting electrons across the bandgap, and immediately—within nanoseconds—usable electrical energy flows through the circuitry, doing whatever the physical design allows. This is nearly instantaneous conversion with minimal loss, achieved in a single step. The efficiency is staggering: modern photovoltaic cells convert 20-25% of incident solar energy directly into electricity, and this efficiency operates continuously without the need for rest, digestion, or metabolic overhead.

Contrast this with carbon-based intelligent life. For us to utilize the sun's energy, it must traverse a tortuous and inefficient path through multiple trophic levels. We know the pattern well: sun to grass (capturing perhaps 1% of solar energy through photosynthesis), grass to sheep (retaining only 10% of the grass's stored energy), and sheep to man (again, retaining only 10%). By the time solar energy reaches human muscle and brain, we've retained less than 0.01% of the original energy. Each transfer hemorrhages energy as heat, and the entire system depends on countless intermediaries—chloroplasts, digestive systems, complex biochemical pathways.

Beyond being lossy, this food chain is also precarious. A break at any point spells calamity for all those mouths waiting downstream. Any nuclear disaster, extreme climatic phenomena, or mass extinction at the bottom of the chain guarantees extinction at the top (us). Silicon-based intelligence would bypass this vulnerability entirely.

A silicon-based life form could, in theory, weather this storm. Maybe it could live on for millions of years and learn more extensively and deeply about the fundamental laws of the universe until it can bend them to its will. Could it become God?

I find it important at this point to define who God is so that we can interrogate whether this theoretical advanced life could meet His attributes.

God transcends space and time. He was there at the beginning. By Him, all things were made. Doesn't this theory of gradual transformation into God contradict His quality of being eternal, of transcending space and time? The theory supposes an earlier time when there was no God. More daringly, it suggests a beginning without God. Then who or what brought into existence that implied 'godless' beginning? Who or what set into motion the process that led to the creation of God by way of gradual evolution of a life form into God?

A witty reader may retort and say, "Maybe the advanced silicon-based life form developed time-travel technology and could go back to the beginning." Well, time travel takes place within the confines of time. A time traveler can travel from one point to another along the continuum of time, but can they travel back to before time existed and create time itself? Impossible. Clearly creation cannot precede God, and God cannot be arrived at by a gradual process of Darwinian evolution.

I assume my witty reader may be even cleverer. He may suggest that this paradox of going back to before the existence of time may be solved if multiverses exist. Maybe the 'God' created by another older universe decided to create his own universe, ours. That could solve the question of what happened before 'our' timeline. But this reasoning quickly breaks down as well. If we trace the origins of this other universe, the stubborn question reemerges: who brought into existence this other universe?

Now, my argument thus far has been based on the premise that God exists. An atheist may reject my premise altogether.

As a former atheist myself, I'll admit that almost all of the arguments for atheism that stem from events in an already existing world or universe are pretty tempting. The seemingly random, pointless suffering in the world, the challenges to the historical accuracy of the Bible and other religious text, the colonial history behind the propagation of religious faith, the existence of many 'gods', the theory of evolution by natural selection... and so on.

But atheism doesn't address one vital question, and this is a chief reason I am now a Christian: "What created matter out of nothing?" Theoretical physicists point to quantum field theory and the phenomenon of virtual particle pairs spontaneously emerging from the quantum vacuum. But here's the thing: the quantum vacuum is not philosophical 'nothing'. It is a seething field of energy governed by physical laws, existing within space-time. When popular scientists claim that something can come from nothing, they are equivocating on the word 'nothing'. Their 'nothing' is already something. This merely pushes the question back: who or what created the quantum fields, the physical laws, space-time itself? Their claim that ‘nothing’ can produce something is itself a statement of faith, an admission of an unknowable unknown, carefully dressed up to sound scientific enough.

So it is settled that when it comes to answering the question of the origin of matter and the universe, it is two schools of faith pitted against each other. One is the school of 'scientific' faith. The other is the school of faith in God.

I chose faith in God, however mysterious it may be.

Isaiah 55:9: "For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so my ways are higher than your ways and my thoughts higher than your thoughts." (New Living Translation)