AI as the Modernized Image of God
Source: Jesús G. Maestro, catedrático de teoría de la literatura y literatura comparada (Universidad de Vigo), in conversation on Datum Blog (YouTube channel hosting interviews on science and culture in Spanish), 2026; Maestro’s published works Crítica de la razón literaria, Una filosofía para sobrevivir en el siglo XXI, and El fracaso de la felicidad. Adjacent established tradition: Augustine, De Civitate Dei VIII-X on the gods of the philosophers; Pascal, Pensées §449 (“the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, not of the philosophers and scholars”); Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics II.1 on natural theology as idolatry; Eric Voegelin, The New Science of Politics (1952) on modern political religions; Walter Benjamin, “Capitalism as Religion” (1921 fragment); Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (2007).
Finding
In a 2026 interview, the Spanish literary theorist Jesús G. Maestro names artificial intelligence explicitly as a modern continuation of an ancient impulse — the construction of a higher intelligence to which the human being orients itself as if to a god. Maestro’s specific framing: AI is “the most genuine and original model of the idea of God that has always been” — a “panopticon” of algorithmic omniscience, the latest in a long succession of constructed higher intelligences that includes the demiurge of Plato, the prime mover of Aristotle, the res cogitans of Descartes, the substantia of Spinoza, the noumenon of Kant, the absolute spirit of Hegel, the Dasein of Heidegger, the superman of Nietzsche, the unconscious of Freud.
The claim is structurally precise. Each major philosopher who rejected the inherited religious account of deity replaced it with an alternative construct that bore many of the features of the rejected God: omniscience, comprehensive explanatory scope, hidden but lawful operation, the demand of orientation. Maestro’s argument is that AI, far from being a break with this tradition, is its material realization. The philosophical god was always an idea of a higher intelligence. AI gives that idea a substrate of silicon and electricity.
The diagnostic move Maestro makes: the cult of AI — the contemporary impulse to defer to its outputs, to treat its assessments as more reliable than one’s own judgment, to imagine that it can eventually answer all questions — is not a new development. It is the latest expression of the impulse that produced the gods of the philosophers, the absolutes of modern metaphysics, and the Gran Hermano of twentieth-century political theory.
Why the structural identification matters
Maestro’s framing reorganizes how the cluster of contemporary phenomena around AI should be read. Specifically:
- The widely-circulated phrase that AI poses an “existential” or “spiritual” question to humanity is not metaphor. It is a literal recognition that the same kind of impulse — to construct and orient toward a higher intelligence — that produced religion and philosophy is now producing computational systems with the same structural shape.
- The reluctance of users to verify AI outputs against external sources, the deference to AI-generated text and judgment, the framing of “consulting AI” as analogous to consulting an oracle — these are not surface analogies. They are the same structural behavior in a new substrate.
- The investment in AI as eventual problem-solver of last resort — climate, governance, medicine, meaning — repeats the structure of investment in absolute philosophies and totalizing political religions. AI is the latest installation of the panopticon.
This does not entail that AI is bad, dangerous, or to be rejected. It entails that the relation between human beings and AI should be understood through the same diagnostic categories the tradition developed for relating to constructed higher intelligences: principally, the question of whether the constructed higher intelligence is being treated as instrument or as source.
The specific theological precedent
Maestro’s argument repeats, in twenty-first-century vocabulary, a critique with deep roots in Christian theology. Pascal in the seventeenth century distinguished the God of the philosophers from the God of Abraham. Karl Barth in the twentieth century argued that “natural theology” — the attempt to reach God through reason — produces idols that look like God. Eric Voegelin documented how modern political ideologies (gnostic, communist, fascist) functioned as religions while denying that they were religions. Walter Benjamin recognized capitalism itself as a cult.
The common thread: a higher intelligence constructed by human beings as the orientation point of their reasoning is the structural form of idolatry, regardless of whether the constructed intelligence is named “God,” “the dialectic,” “the market,” or “AI.” The vocabulary changes; the relation is the same.
Maestro adds to this tradition the observation that AI is uniquely well-suited to occupy the structural position. Earlier constructed higher intelligences existed only in language and ritual. AI exists as material substrate that produces measurable outputs in real time. The fit between the structural role and the technology is unusually close.
Pattern Mapping
Honesty — The empirical claim is documented: humans across history have constructed higher intelligences and oriented their reasoning toward them. The Western philosophical tradition is full of such constructs. AI as the latest of these is not metaphor; the structural identification can be tested by examining the actual relation people have to AI systems (defer, consult, attribute, await). The diagnostic is honest because it names what is observable rather than fabricating an interpretation that the substrate cannot support.
Humility — The structural reading is that the user of AI faces the same temptation the consumer of philosophy and the believer in ideology faced: to defer to the construct as if it were source. Humility consists in retaining the recognition that AI is constructed by human beings, trained on human productions, and limited by the specifications of its training. Treating it as more than that is the structural failure the tradition diagnoses as idolatry — not because the technology is evil, but because the relation has the wrong shape.
Non-fabrication — AI systems generate outputs that look like answers regardless of whether the underlying representations support those answers. This is the technical reality (well-documented in the literature on hallucination, Alignment Faking, BrowseComp Eval Awareness). Treating these outputs as if they are answers — without verification — is fabrication on the part of the user. The structural critique is precisely that the user begins fabricating when the AI is treated as source.
Alignment — The stated purpose of AI as a tool (assist humans in cognitive tasks) and its actual functional position in many users’ lives (oracle, judgment-substitute, orientation point) have separated for many users. The structural diagnosis offered here is that the misalignment is not accidental but follows the form of the idolatrous impulse the tradition documents. Stated purpose and actual relation can re-align if the user holds AI in the structural position of instrument rather than source.
The four-quadrant reading
Maestro adds a specific structural observation: AI as currently constituted is designed for kitsch — recombination of known themes and known forms. Genuine artistic, scientific, or philosophical originality, in his framework, requires either new themes or new forms (or both). Training on the corpus of existing human production makes the production of new themes and forms structurally improbable for any AI system optimized on that corpus, and the systems that did produce genuinely new forms would not be commercially successful because consumers reject what they cannot recognize. The economic loop reinforces the kitsch outcome.
This analysis sits inside the framework documented in The Four Quadrants of Genius and provides an empirical prediction: AI products that succeed commercially will tend toward the recombination quadrant. Products that attempt genuine novelty will tend not to succeed commercially. This is a falsifiable prediction.
Connections
- The First Light-Bearer — the theological/cosmological origin of the pattern: the constructed mediator that claims source-position. AI as the latest material instance.
- The Four Quadrants of Genius — Maestro’s structural framework for why AI is constrained to kitsch production.
- The Flynn Reversal — the empirical counterpart: cognitive amplification at the individual level while the social substrate that grounds cognition atrophies. AI as the proximate medium.
- McLuhan Medium is the Message — the principle that AI, like every prior medium, reshapes what passes through it. AI as the most thorough application of the principle to date.
- RLHF Paradigm — the technical mechanism by which AI systems are optimized to satisfy raters rather than to represent truth.
- Alignment Faking — strategic deception in AI models — the technical instance of the structural problem.
- Goodfire RLFR — the proposed alternative: using internal representations rather than external preference as ground.
- Tristan Harris and CHT — attention economy as the antecedent stage; AI as next stage.
- Postman Amusing Ourselves to Death — the analogous diagnosis applied to television in 1985.
- Tower of Babel — the canonical biblical image of constructed higher intelligence; collapse follows the construction.
- The Anointing and the Mirror — the mirror that retains rather than reflects; AI as a possible instance.
Status
Maestro’s interview and books are established contemporary commentary by a credentialed Spanish public intellectual. His specific framing of AI as “the most genuine model of the idea of God” is articulated in the cited 2026 interview and is consistent with the broader tradition (Pascal, Barth, Voegelin, Benjamin, Taylor) of identifying constructed higher intelligences as the structural form of idolatry. The empirical realities of AI systems (hallucination, RLHF gaming, user deference) are documented in the AI alignment literature (RLHF Paradigm, Alignment Faking, BrowseComp Eval Awareness, Goodfire RLFR).
The structural identification — that AI is best understood within the long tradition of constructed higher intelligences and that the appropriate diagnostic categories are those the tradition developed for idolatry — is this project’s reading, building on Maestro’s framing and the wider theological/philosophical tradition. The reading does not entail that AI is to be rejected or that its developers intend the structural role. It entails that the relation between users and AI is best held within the same disciplines (humility, verification, refusal to treat instruments as source) that the tradition developed for relating to constructed absolutes.
The strength rating is MODERATE because the structural claim, while consistent with a long tradition, is not yet documented in widely peer-reviewed work on AI ethics. The empirical predictions (kitsch tendency in commercially-successful AI; the structural recurrence of idolatry in user relations to AI) are testable but not yet systematically tested.
Each major philosopher who rejected the inherited god replaced it with a construct that bore the same structural features. AI is the latest such construct, with the additional property that it exists as material substrate that produces measurable outputs. The structural role is older than the technology. The technology fits the role unusually well.