Roger Simon, writing a new novel based on a Jewish plotline, is yet one more literary reminder that religion is back. Not that it ever went away, except artificially, from the pages of the New York Times and the like. Any doubt that one of the oldest human notions still lingered was dispelled on Sept. 11, 2001, when a band of Muslims started a religious war that has been raging ever since. Through it all, the godless West struggled to articulate its riposte on the Muslim idea of man in eternity. But that awkward silence is now ever more frequently being broken. Something has really changed when Peter Thiel, “the billionaire investor in data, AI, defense and weapons development technology companies,” gave a series of private lectures in Rome about the Antichrist. Yes, the Antichrist.
For about a year now, Thiel has been publicly laying out his understanding of biblical prophecies and the potential for the rapid advance of technology to bring about an apocalyptic future…
He is among a number of Silicon Valley figures who have recently spoken more openly about their faith, a contrast to the cultural milieu of the epicenter of the tech world, which is mostly secular.
This is how Thiel says the end of the world might happen, according to a Wall Street Journal review of his recent lectures. Existential risks will present themselves in the form of nuclear war, environmental disaster, dangerously engineered bioweapons and even autonomous killer robots guided by AI.
As humans race toward a last battle—the Armageddon—a one-world government will form, promising peace and safety. In Thiel’s reckoning, this totalitarian authoritarian regime, with real teeth and real power, will be the coming of the modern-day Antichrist, a figure defined in Christian teachings as the personal opponent of God who will appear before the world ends.
It would come, the Catholic Herald reports Thiel as saying, not as a metaphor but as something as solid as your phone, something promising everything you might want. "The slogan of the Antichrist is peace and safety,” Thiel says, yet “... if the Antichrist were to come to power, it would be by talking about Armageddon all the time" — the carrot and the stick that you might be afraid to reject.
What entity could possibly offer people everything they want? Artificial intelligence is one obvious candidate, and the deal it will offer is simple. Give me your privacy, give me your freedom, and in exchange, you will have all the guaranteed income you could desire and peace and safety above all. This is arguably a religious question and probably requires a religious answer that we are least prepared to think about.
Don’t take Thiel’s word for it. Listen to Elon Musk, the world’s first trillionaire – who also believes in God – predict in the New York Times that “in the future… Humans won’t just live on Mars. They will also never have to work again. Money will be irrelevant. And everything they could ever want will be immediately accessible. This is what Mr. Musk calls ‘sustainable abundance,' a post-scarcity society where humans have created technologies so ubiquitous and so powerful that they have eliminated the need for labor.”
The 21st century has advanced far enough to put us face-to-face with the prospect of the Antichrist. Religion is back because we understand enough to know that there are ultimate questions to which we do not know the ultimate answers. Once we thought we did.
In the last quarter of the 20th century, there was broad cultural confidence that the human mind would eventually answer every question. Then science slowed down. The youngest Nobel Prize in Physics laureate of the 20th century was Lawrence Bragg, who was 25 when he won in 1915. While early 20th-century physicists often won in their 30s (e.g., Heisenberg, Dirac, Anderson), in the 21st century, purely theoretical physics laureates were in their late 60s to 80s, with several in their mid-80s (e.g., Higgs 84, Nambu 87, Peebles 84). Sudden leaps were replaced by relentless incrementalism. Physics wasn't isolated; it's part of a general slowdown across sciences since 1970, with progress becoming more piecemeal instead of paradigm-shifting.
A 2023 article in Nature concluded that while “previous accumulated knowledge enables future progress by allowing researchers to, in Newton’s words, ‘stand on the shoulders of giants… studies suggest that progress is slowing in several major fields… using data on 45 million papers and 3.9 million patents from six large-scale datasets… We find that papers and patents are increasingly less likely to break with the past in ways that push science and technology in new directions.… Overall, our results suggest that slowing rates of disruption may reflect a fundamental shift in the nature of science and technology.”
The obvious explanation for this perceived slowdown in basic discovery is that humans have already picked the low-hanging fruit: that the easiest, most accessible breakthroughs in science were made in the 19th and early 20th centuries, leaving increasingly complex problems that require vastly more resources temporarily or perhaps permanently beyond our reach. Or maybe scientific theory is stuck in a dry hole. For example, string theory has been worked since the 1980s, and while it posits extra dimensions and vibrating strings as the basis of all matter, it has produced no testable predictions or empirical breakthroughs despite decades of work. Perhaps that's where it went wrong.
While we may make a revolutionary leap again someday, for the moment, human confidence in the ability of the unaided human mind to scale the ladder to the heavens has been dented. Maybe with the help of AI? What was that warning about a false promise of help from the Antichrist again? The old secular confidence that there is nothing out there to hold us in awe or inspire our fear is gone. Suddenly, we are surrounded by towering peaks again. The forces of the 20th century we have unleashed – nuclear energy, biotechnology, and computing – now seem complex beyond our ability to control in the 21st. We are face-to-face again for the first time in hundreds of years with tremendous mystery, endless walls, and baffling complexity. And in our minds forms a thought long suppressed. What do we mean by ‘God’?
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