DANIEL GREENFIELD
INVESTIGATIVE JOURNALIST, CHIEF PROGRAM OFFICER AT DAVID HOROWITZ FREEDOM CENTER
Born in Jerusalem, Daniel Greenfield is an investigative journalist and columnist whose work has been covered by the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Voice of America, and discussed by Ben Shapiro and many others. He has been quoted in Congress and his op-eds have appeared in Newsweek, the Jewish Journal and the Jerusalem Post.
Greenfield serves as the Chief Program Officer at the David Horowitz Freedom Center and is a Shillman Journalism Fellow.
God Is The Humanistic Alternative To AI
DANIEL GREENFIELD
Some think that man is empowered by the absence of God, but a godless world is a void where man has nothing to strive to become and nothing to teach him how to transcend his limitations.
The imitation of God is at the heart of Judaism and Christianity because a true moral order demands a higher source of morality. A godless world is a land of fatherless children who have no role models and nothing to teach them how to become leaders and parents. A world that is anxious, insecure and searching for self-realization rather than aspiring to greatness.
And that is a mirror of the flaws of our society.
A godless model of existence tells us to pull ourselves up by our own bootstraps and assures us that evolution will eventually compensate for our refusal to imagine a higher form of life than ourselves. Exchanging the study of God for the study of man has failed to make mankind better. It has only made us narcissistic, frustrated with our own limitations and convinced that biological determinism has blocked us off from any further growth except through some AI transcendence.
Some philosophers now argue that mankind’s future is to incorporate and merge with computers that will become so advanced as to be godlike in a technological singularity of flesh and silicon.
God is the ultimate alternative to some imagined machine singularity which tells us that we can only advance by becoming less human and more like the inferior digital creations that we are building to rule over our world. The promise of God is that we do not have to become inhuman to progress because we are already made in the image of our Creator. Transcendence is built into us. Instead of merging with our machines, we can aspire to merge with the highest form of life.
By embodying the best of humanity, we become more godlike. Learning from God, we embrace compassion, charity, justice, and the best creative impulses of the universe around us.
Our future is not digital; it’s spiritual. And without God, we risk losing that future, imitating the machines we create, instead of the One who created us and has a special plan for us.
Building a relationship with God also puts us in touch with our own humanity. It forces us to think about other people as moral beings, not just as sets of impulses and stray data. The closer we come to God, the more we are inspired to build families and communities, to change the world to be more human and less artificial, to build real connections and not just artificial ones.
The choice we face is not between man and machine, it’s between God and machine.