In late March, researchers from the University of California San Diego reported the results of a study in which ChatGPT4.5 was found to have passed the Turing Test, or as Alan Turing called it in 1950, “the imitation game” — the long-standing metric of AI finally being so intelligent as to be indistinguishable from a human in conversation. And now this Rubicon has been crossed. There are doors in space you look for, Françoise Gilot once said, and doors in time that you wait for. And a major door in time has just opened.  

The Age of AI is creating ripples of anxiety about every aspect of our lives: how we’re going to work, how we’re going to live, how we’re going to relate to others. Will the new technology augment human connection, or will relationships with chatbots replace it? These are all important questions, and of course the existence of a technology that can mimic so many aspects of humans opens up endless possibilities as well as endless unintended consequences. But for me, the most exciting possibility is that AI will usher in an awakening about the essential and unique aspects of humanity that technology can’t and will never replicate. While AI transforms everything about our outer world, we have exclusive dominion over our inner world. 

Times of crisis, turmoil and disruption — and ours definitely qualify — are always the biggest opportunities for growth and renewal. And you can feel it happening. People are increasingly hungry to answer our fundamental need to connect with something larger than ourselves. It’s that deep and primal urge to become all that we were intended to be, to take that next step in our evolution toward both understanding and living life’s true purpose.

And there’s evidence that this is what lies on the other side of the door that’s opening. In April, Lauren Jackson reported in The New York Times that “the country seems to be revisiting the role of religion,” while “secularism is on pause in America.” In the last few decades, 40 million Americans left churches and now around 30% identify with no religion. But now, a new survey by the Pew Research Center found that a staggering 92% of adults say they have a spiritual belief in God, the afterlife, in “something spiritual beyond the natural world,” or in the existence of a soul. “In a country where most people are pessimistic about the future and don’t trust the government, where hope is hard to come by, people are longing to believe in something,” writes Jackson. “People also want to belong to richer, more robust communities, ones that wrestle with hard questions about how to live. They’re looking to heady concepts — confession, atonement, forgiveness, grace and redemption — for answers.”

There have been several religious awakenings in American history. What’s new about this one is that it’s not attached to any particular dogma or organized religion. That’s not surprising given the many abuses and scandals that have plagued organized religion. Now people across demographics are trying to save the baby from the bathwater. As Tammy McLeod, president of the Harvard Chaplains, put it, “I have served as a chaplain at Harvard for 25 years, and the interest in and openness to religion and spirituality has never been higher on campus.”  

In the age of small armies of successful influencers devoted to helping us optimize everything — our morning routines, our evening routines, our to-do lists, our meals, and even our Netflix queue — we seem to have forgotten that the most essential question is not how to optimize our circumstances but how to optimize ourselves. Optimizing ourselves — connecting with who we truly are, uniting with what makes us whole — is bigger than a goal, it’s the purpose of life. And when we neglect it, even when we “have it all,” we inevitably feel incomplete. “No one in our time finds it surprising,” Solzhenitsyn wrote, “if a man gives careful daily attention to his body, but people would be outraged if he gave the same attention to his soul.”

There are many benefits of attending to our soul. A recent Pew study found that religiously affiliated Americans were more likely than non-religious Americans to experience gratitude, spiritual peace, and a “deep sense of connection with humanity.” But these tangible benefits are still not the real reason why we should answer our fundamental need for spirituality. That’s the thesis of Ross Douthat’s new book, Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious. Douthat notes that more and more of his readers seemed unhappy with their unbelief. So in many quarters the age of cool atheism is being replaced by the idea that, as Serious Modern People, we can’t believe in the “magical nonsense” of religion, but we can nevertheless acknowledge that it has significant social utility and thus might be a good thing. This is the argument Douthat’s book is pitched against.

For Douthat, the reason to believe in religion is quite simply because it’s true. Or at least the likeliest explanation for our reality. In other words, faith doesn’t actually require a leap. It is a rational decision. As Douthat put it to Bari Weiss on her podcast, “this world presents itself first as an ordered, structured, mathematically precise, predictable, universe governed by physical laws that turned out, based on the best of modern science, to be incredibly precisely calibrated to yield stars, planets, and life itself.” The odds of this happening by chance are, as he says, extremely slim. So the simplest explanation is the one that’s largely held throughout all of human history: “the basic idea that there is some being called God or some higher power that created and ordered the universe.” It's not just the uncanny harmony of the universe but our consciousness itself which gives us the chance to understand the universe.

 In fact, as Douthat notes, the idea of science and spirituality being locked in zero-sum tension is antiquated, as recent science has increasingly revealed a universe that broadly supports, rather than refutes, a religious explanation — for instance, quantum physics, in which mind, matter and energy seem to be entangled. And the drive to connect with something larger than ourselves is actually encoded in us. Andrew Newburg, a pioneer in the neurological study of spiritual experiences, describes the brain as having two primary functions: self-maintenance and self-transcendence. And in The God Gene: How Faith Is Hardwired into Our Genes, geneticist Dean Hamer notes that humans “have had spiritual beliefs since the dawn of our species” and identifies a specific gene that plays a role in how open we are to spiritual experience. “We think that all human beings have an innate capacity for spirituality and that that desire to reach out beyond oneself, which is at the heart of spirituality, is part of the human makeup,” says Hamer. “The research suggests some people have a bit more of that capacity than others, but it’s present to some degree in everybody.” 

Combined with his analysis of studies done on identical twins, Hamer concludes that “contrary to what many people may believe, children don’t learn to be spiritual from their parents, teachers, priests, imams, ministers, or rabbis, nor from their culture of society… Spirituality comes from within. The kernel must be there from the start. It must be part of their genes.” Or, as Ecclesiastes puts it, “God set eternity in the hearts of men.” Of course, as with all aspects of our behavior, our genes are not our destiny, and it’s up to each one of us to bring this genetic predisposition to life.

“Materialism,” neuroscientist Mario Beauregard argues, “has stalled” and is “unable to answer key questions about the nature of being human.” Even worse, it “has also convinced millions of people that they should not seek to develop their spiritual nature because they have none.” 

This urge for transcendence, to connect with the real nature of the universe, is thwarted by the belief that science and its methods for gathering information are the only valid sources for true knowledge. As neurophysiologist and Nobel Prize winner John Eccles said, “The human mystery is incredibly demeaned by scientific reductionism, with its claim in promissory materialism to account eventually for all of the spiritual world in terms of patterns of neuronal activity. This belief must be classed as a superstition… we have to recognize that we are spiritual beings with souls existing in a spiritual world as well as material beings with bodies and brains existing in a material world.”

It’s no coincidence that this flourishing of the spiritual impulse is happening as AI outstrips humans in intelligence, putting into stark relief the spiritual truth encoded within us. In the age of AI, this cutting-edge technology can paradoxically help us reconnect with ancient truths. As Douthat writes, “Mystery and magic and enchantment seem to be rushing back into the world.” 

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