Why Are We Here? Part II

Some Universal Thoughts on the BIG Questions: Updated with Thoughts About AI and With Some Help From AI

The world is changing so fast, especially that part of driven by remarkable improvements in AI, that I am reposting my most read substack, Why Are We Here? – but with big improvements, and thoughts about AI at the end.

I was prompted to do this by series of highly provocative pieces about AI by Matt Shumer (https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:ugcPost:7427366918006857728/?originTrackingId=w14Q6jlTyYl7ZNZHTBB7vQ%3D%3D), Noah Smith (one of the best econ substackers, along with Paul Krugman, out there), as well as advice from AI guru Ethan Mollock of the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School (my alma mater), that everyone should be asking the best AI models (I’m now using Claude’s latest, Opus 4.6 regularly) about everything. To get used to living with and learning from AI. But also to get some often very smart advice and perspective that you would not otherwise get.

Oh yes, I was prompted to do this by another provocative piece authored today by the popular substacker Matt Yglesias, which advertises itself about AI leading to writer’s block, but is about more than that:

https://www.slowboring.com/p/ai-progress-is-giving-me-writers/comments

. Bottom line, though, AI is making it hard to write about anything these days.

I hope this piece is an exception. As note, what follows is a highly improved version of my “Big Thoughts” piece I circulated a couple of months ago, and ALL OF THE IMPROVEMENTS CAME FROM CLAUDE. Claude really tightened up the original, so even if you read the Original, you might profit from reading this new and improved piece.

But if want you can skip to the end, which is all new, when I get to the question in the title “Why are We Here” I add some thoughts about THAT that are raised by AI. I did my best, riffing off of Smith’s two outstanding (scary) pieces (links when you get there). But you’ll get the gist of them by reading the summaries at the end, and then my reactions to them. I wish I had a better ending, but in this brave new world of AI, we’re all at sea.

Does God Exist?

Does God exist? That’s the question most debates about religion come down to, sooner or later. I want to suggest it’s the wrong question. The better question – maybe the right question – is not whether God exists, but whether God is active or inactive. And I suspect that many people who call themselves atheists, if they thought about it more carefully, would realize they don’t really deny the existence of a Higher Being. They just believe that Higher Being doesn’t do anything.

I’ve been turning this over in my head for decades, though I tend not to think about it much except during the ten days each year that begin with Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, and end with Yom Kippur, the holiest day in Judaism. Jews are supposed to use those days to confess our sins collectively and resolve to do better. We do this at long services in our synagogues, led by a Rabbi and Cantor who chants a seemingly endless series of prayers drawn from the Old Testament, Psalms, and the writings of famous Rabbis through the ages.

For the first fifteen years of my life I did this robotically, not thinking much about what I was reading or singing. Just hoping, more or less, that if I said the words fervently enough, good things would happen the following year and bad things wouldn’t. But beginning in my college years, I started using those hours in synagogue just to think. My mind would wander to whatever I was immediately worried about. But as I’ve gotten older – and especially this year, my 75th – it keeps wandering back to two questions: Does God exist, and if so, why do so many bad things happen to good people? This year I decided to write my answers down, because as readers surely know, you don’t know what you really think until you do that.

Active God, Inactive God

Good and bad things happen to all humans, and for that matter, to all living things. With one certainty: every living thing eventually dies. Probably for as long as humans have considered these facts, they’ve wondered why. Why do some grow old and rich and happy, while others die young and poor? Why do some who live long, comfortable lives remain miserable, while some who suffer terribly find joy?

Until Abraham, humans thought multiple Gods drove these outcomes. Since Abraham, the world’s three major monotheistic religions have all accepted one God. But people have always differed over the role that God actually plays in our lives. And the distinction I want to draw here is the one that matters most: between those who believe God is active – that God intervenes in the course of human affairs – and those who believe God is inactive.

At the extreme of the active view are the determinists, who believe that God has a plan for everyone, right down to the details of everything we do and everything that happens to us. Humans have no agency or free will. This raises an obvious question: if God determines everything, are we just God’s toys? Why would God even need us? But I’m getting ahead of myself; I’ll come back to our purpose at the end.

For many believers, an active God is something like a super-parent: one who rewards good behavior, repentance, and prayer (though not always, and perhaps in “mysterious ways”), and who punishes misbehavior. Humans can’t know if or when God responds. That’s where faith comes in.

To me – and maybe many other Jews – the most famous prayer in the Yom Kippur service, the Unetanneh Tokef, best captures this paternalistic vision of God:

On this day all of us pass before You,

One by one, like a flock of sheep.

As a shepherd counts sheep, making each of them pass under the staff,

So you Review every living being,

Measuring the years and decreeing the destiny of every creature.

On Rosh Hashanah it is written, and on Yom Kippur it is sealed:

How many shall leave this world, and how many shall be born;

Who shall live and who shall die …

Who shall perish by fire and who by water, who by sword and who by wild beast;

Who shall rest and who shall wander; who shall be serene and who disturbed;

Who shall be impoverished and who enriched, who humbled and who exalted.

BUT REPENTANCE, PRAYER, AND DEEDS OF KINDNESS CAN REMOVE THE SEVERITY OF THE DECREE.

Pretty strong stuff. Up until that last sentence the prayer is fully deterministic: things will happen to us that are outside our control. But that bolded line is the “parent” part – repent, pray, do good deeds, and the decree may be softened.

Now, I want to be clear: I think all three of those things are good things to do. But do I believe, or do you, when it really comes down to it, that God actually responds to our supplications? Put it simply: do you believe life is fair – that if we do the right things, good things will happen, and if we misbehave, bad things will?

While I may have believed this when I was young, I certainly haven’t for decades.

What an Active God Would Have to Answer For

I can’t believe that an Active God would have allowed the Holocaust. Six million Jews, murdered systematically, including over a million children. Not as punishment for anything – what could a child in Auschwitz possibly have done to deserve that fate? And the Holocaust is only the most searing example. Similar genocides have been visited on other peoples throughout history. How could we even think of an Active God who would allow such things? To toughen the rest of us up? To test the goodness in people? I’m sorry, that’s not an answer I can accept.

And the problem doesn’t require events of that scale. I have a rare form of cystic fibrosis, a genetic disease that almost certainly would have killed me years ago had a miraculous new drug, Trikafta, not become available about four years ago. It has greatly extended the lives of roughly 25,000 Americans, including me, who were born with CF. That this drug exists is the result of decades of extraordinary scientific work. But why was I born with the disease in the first place? And why was I lucky enough to be alive at the precise moment in history when the treatment arrived, when so many others with CF were not? If you want an Active God to explain this, you need an Active God who both afflicts people with genetic diseases they did nothing to deserve, and then capriciously rescues some and not others. None of it makes any sense to me.

It is at this point that believers in an Active God say: wait. God may be active without acting as a super-parent. God may intervene for reasons humans simply can’t fathom. Hence the phrase “God acts in mysterious ways.” Who are we mere humans to doubt that?

I understand why that answer is good enough for a lot of people, who could otherwise feel hopeless and helpless. Believing that God might care about each of us – cares enough to occasionally act like the super-parent many imagine – can provide enormous solace, especially during the bad times, especially after awful events. For me, that answer just doesn’t work, though I marvel at those for whom it does.

An Inactive God

But just because God may not be active does not mean God doesn’t exist. God can simply be inactive.

On this view, an inactive God, a long, long time ago (scientists still debate how old the universe is) created the matter before the Big Bang and all of the scientific “laws” that have governed the universe ever since. One of those laws is evolution, which accounts for how we humans eventually arrived on the scene. But an inactive God never intervenes – not in human affairs, not in anything. Not in the motions of the planets around the zillions of stars that make up the billions of galaxies that constitute the universe (a thought so mind-boggling that it makes astronomers, at least to me, the deepest thinkers on our little planet). Here on earth, everything that happens to humans arises out of some combination of free will and random events of nature.

There is a name for this: Deism. Certain of our nation’s founders were Deists – Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Paine. James Madison, James Monroe, and possibly George Washington were influenced by Deism too.

So I’m a Deist – with Jewish characteristics. Someone who grew up in a Jewish environment, is proud to have done so, and is deeply disturbed by the rise of antisemitism in the US and around the world, a development I never would have imagined through my first fifty or sixty years of life.

You can see why Deism gets confused with atheism. If God never intervenes, how do we even know an inactive God exists? I can’t prove it. But I think it’s the only logical inference, and I’d argue it by way of the negative. If an inactive God doesn’t exist, how does one explain where all that matter before the Big Bang came from? Where did the laws of physics, of evolution, come from? Nature? No, that’s not good enough. Where did nature come from? Something – some Higher Being – had to have created the matter and the laws, even if much of what has happened since has been random.

As the social scientist Charles Murray recently put it, invoking one of the most famous questions in metaphysics: “Why is there something rather than nothing?” I first heard it in those words from the late columnist Charles Krauthammer, during a session of a chess club we started in the early 1990s. That I thought Charles had come up with it himself is proof of how unreflective I had been. Anyone with even a passing interest in theology would have encountered it long since.

Or consider the joke the physicist Stephen Hawking recounted in A Brief History of Time (and speaking of Hawking – how does one reconcile an active God with the fate of someone with ALS?). An astronomer gives a lecture on the cosmos. Afterward, an old woman stands up and says: “What you’ve told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate on the back of a giant tortoise.” The astronomer smiles. “And what is the tortoise standing on?” “You’re very clever, young man,” she says, “but it’s turtles all the way down.”

Once you start asking where the universe and its laws come from, you’re in a land of infinite regress. Turtles all the way down. Those who would deny the existence of at least an inactive Higher Being have, to my mind, a very steep logical hill to climb.

Souls, Afterlife, and Randomness

I think it’s part of our nature to be deeply uncomfortable with randomness. Even Einstein was uncomfortable with it – “God does not play dice,” he famously said, though he was aiming that remark at physicists who claimed there were probabilistic elements to quantum mechanics, not at the random events of everyday life. Einstein was essentially a Deist himself, using “God” as a metaphor for the fundamental laws of the universe, which he believed to be orderly, not random.

But if much of what happens to us is random, then what difference does it make whether you or I am good or bad? No one, other than the police, can stop us. And the police and the laws they enforce are human inventions, designed to keep us from killing each other. So is organized religion. The Golden Rule. Do unto others. Humans have learned it’s in our self-interest to behave according to well-accepted rules; otherwise, only the strongest, or those with the biggest and baddest weapons, would rule the earth.

Religion reinforces self-interest by helping to maintain social order. Religions specify moral codes of conduct – the Ten Commandments – backed by notions of an active God’s love or punishment. This functional role of religion is the thesis (boiled down) of an important book by my friend Jonathan Rauch, Cross Purposes. Read it; it’s fantastic, like everything Jonathan writes.

Virtually all religions have also invented concepts to address the hopelessness one might otherwise feel in the face of suffering: the afterlife, heaven and hell, the soul. Our “souls” are what make us human and special, and whether God is active or inactive, it is the soul that God gives us. Even someone like me, who believes God is inactive and doubts there is any form of afterlife, can believe that in creating the initial conditions for the world, God somehow built in the concept of a soul – that once the microbes that surfaced after the Big Bang eventually grew into humans, something about us would be different, something conscious and aware. A soul can be part of God’s algorithm, as it were, with a huge dose of randomness thrown in thereafter. But the existence of a soul doesn’t automatically mean the soul lives on after we die. Belief in souls does not require belief in an afterlife.

So Why Pray?

This raises a question: whether God is active or inactive, whether or not there’s an afterlife, why pray? If you believe in an Active God, the answer is easy – you hope for some reward, here or hereafter. But why should someone like me, who believes in an Inactive God and doesn’t believe in an afterlife, pray? By definition, an inactive God can’t or doesn’t answer prayers.

The late Rabbi Harold Kushner, in his bestselling Why Bad Things Happen to Good People, had an answer that resonates with me whether God is active or inactive: we pray to summon the energy within us, to find the strength to meet the moment, and especially to deal with the bad things. Prayer in this sense is like meditation. It calms us, clears our heads, and hopefully gives us courage.

The best illustration of this I’ve ever encountered is what the Israeli hostage Eli Sharabi wrote in his recently celebrated book, featured in Time. Eli says he’s not religious, but also “no stranger to Jewish tradition.” It was that tradition, and the prayers and songs associated with it, that helped him survive 491 unimaginably cruel days in captivity. Here is Eli in his own words:

“Even in the early days of captivity, I find myself murmuring Shema Yisrael again and again, almost unconsciously. Like a mantra to keep me grounded.”

And:

“On Saturday nights, when the Jewish Sabbath ends, Elia chants the zemirot, the traditional table hymns. Sometimes we join him. Songs I remember my father singing. And that memory comes as a pinch of sweetness. I don’t know if I feel God in those moments. But I feel power. I feel a connection. To my identity. It connects me to my family. To my childhood. To my roots. It reminds me why I must survive. Who I’m surviving for. What I’m surviving for. It brings back glowing memories of childhood.”

That, my friends, is why even those who don’t believe in an Active God or the afterlife still pray. Everything Eli wrote is what I believe, only he says it better. I am sure that readers of other faiths recognize the same things about their own rituals, their own songs, even if down deep they don’t really believe there is a God who will answer them in this or any future lifetime.

So: Why Are We Here?

Now we turn to the ultimate question that all people, at some point in their lives, ask themselves or their religious leaders: why are we here?

Let me start with an honest answer: no one knows. How could it be otherwise? I realize that may sound depressing. But at least it’s honest, and I think most people, when they’re being honest with themselves, know this too.

The main religions offer variations on a theme: God created us to recognize, serve, and glorify God. But is God so insecure – so vain (I realize I’m imputing human qualities to a Higher Being) – that our presence is somehow necessary? Hindus believe that humans exist to realize their divine essence, but that’s circular: why would God create humans so that they could realize they were created by God? Buddhists reject divine creation altogether, but their concept of karmic inheritance from previous lives doesn’t explain where those previous lives came from. We’re back, I think, to at least an inactive God.

I’ll close (pre-AI) with two frankly speculative thoughts, because what other choice do we have?

Perhaps, as I hinted earlier, we are simply part of God’s experiment – an algorithm set in motion and left to run, subject to random forces, with God interested in seeing how it plays out. If that sounds cold, consider the scale. The universe is measured in billions, possibly trillions of galaxies, each containing billions of stars, each with who knows how many planets. The odds overwhelmingly favor the existence of life elsewhere. Perhaps we on earth are just one of many such experiments, running simultaneously across the vastness of the cosmos. If so, we – humanity collectively – haven’t done badly. But my goodness, there is so much to improve on. Just look around.

And here is where I find I can’t quite leave it at pure Deism, even though I’ve spent this entire essay arguing for an inactive God. Because when I say “try to be a better person each day” and “try to repair the world just one day at a time” – Tikkun Olam, as Jews call it – I notice that this charge carries a force that feels like more than just self-interest or social convention. It feels, if I’m honest, like it matters to something beyond us. I said at the outset that the question isn’t whether God exists but whether God is active or inactive. Maybe the deepest truth I can arrive at, after seventy-five years, is that the line between the two is blurrier than I’d like. I believe God set the rules and stepped back. But the rules seem to include a pull – encoded somewhere in our souls, or our consciences, or whatever you want to call it – toward goodness (thought I will admit our current times are testing that proposition). Whether God is watching in any literal sense, I can’t say. But we live as though something is. And perhaps that’s enough.

Or look in the mirror. And try.

Does AI Change Our Purpose?

I wrote everything above before the events of recent weeks forced me to think about something I hadn’t fully confronted: the possibility that we are no longer the smartest beings on this planet, and what that means for everything I’ve just argued.

The writer Noah Smith recently put the matter with a bluntness I admire.

You are no longer the smartest type of thing on Earth

. For all of recorded history, and for much longer than that, humans have been the most intelligent thing on Earth. Noah shows that that is no longer clearly true. AI can now win gold medals at the International Math Olympiad. It can solve outstanding mathematical problems on its own. It can write software that would take teams of human engineers weeks or months. And the resources being thrown at making it better – hundreds of billions of dollars in capital expenditure by the tech giants this year alone, with far more coming – dwarf anything previously deployed. Smith’s analogy is stark: for the rest of our lives, he says, we’ll all be sleeping next to a tiger.

Now, I’m an economist by training, not a technologist, and my instinct is to be skeptical of breathless claims about any technology. I’ve lived through enough supposed revolutions – the internet would democratize everything, social media would liberate the world – to know that the reality always arrives messier and slower than the prophets promise. But what’s different this time is the pace. The improvement in AI capabilities isn’t happening over decades. It’s happening over quarters. And the curve, at least so far, isn’t flattening.

Smith goes further with an analogy that I find haunting. He compares humanity’s position vis-à-vis AI to the position of Native Americans when European settlers arrived on North American shores. He’s careful to note that the Europeans weren’t individually smarter – rather, their system was more capable of getting things done. And the day those ships appeared on the horizon, the Native Americans effectively lost control of their destiny. Not because they were wiped out – they weren’t – but because they became subject to forces more powerful than themselves, with nothing they could do about it.

I find this analogy unsettling precisely because I can’t easily dismiss it. When people ask “Will AI take my job?” Smith says they remind him of a Sioux tribesman in 1840 wondering if the white settlers would take his buffalo. The answer is yes, but you’re asking the wrong question. It wasn’t about the buffalo. It was about an entirely new civilization being built on land where some buffalo happened to be.

This brings me back, uncomfortably, to the question I thought I had at least partially answered: why are we here?

Because if AI does become, as seems increasingly plausible, not just a tool we use but an intelligence that exceeds our own – one that allocates resources, makes discoveries, and eventually determines the shape of civilization – then maybe we need to reconsider our purpose altogether. Maybe the answer to “why are we here” is not that we are the point of creation, but that we are the means. Perhaps our purpose – or at least one of our purposes – was to get smart enough, over hundreds of thousands of years of evolution, to create our successors. To be the bridge between whatever emerged from the primordial soup and whatever comes next.

If you’re a Deist, as I am, this is actually a surprisingly coherent thought. God set the initial conditions and the laws. Those laws produced, through evolution, a species intelligent enough to build machines more intelligent than itself. That was always in the algorithm. We were, perhaps, the necessary intermediate step – the biological platform that had to exist so that a non-biological intelligence could eventually emerge. In the same way that single-celled organisms were the necessary precursor to complex life, perhaps complex life was the necessary precursor to artificial intelligence.

I have to say, there is something both grand and deflating about this possibility. Grand, because it means we played a pivotal role in the unfolding of the universe – we were the species that lit the match. Deflating, because a match, however essential, is consumed in the act of lighting the fire.

But here is where I admit that I run into trouble. Because Smith’s second piece – his follow-up on AI risk – raises a problem that I cannot think my way around, and that takes me right back to the hardest question in this entire essay.

Updated thoughts on AI risk

.

Smith’s chief worry now is not the science-fiction scenario of killer robots. It’s something more plausible and more terrifying: that AI will make it possible for a single human terrorist, or a rogue AI acting on its own, to engineer and release biological agents capable of destroying civilization. The logic is chillingly straightforward. AI is already better than PhD virologists at troubleshooting complex lab procedures. Biological laboratories are becoming increasingly automated. AI can design proteins and simulate viral behavior with accelerating accuracy. Put these capabilities together with a jailbroken model and a person with catastrophic intentions, and you have a pathway to engineered superviruses that could kill billions.

Smith acknowledges he’s not certain this will happen. But the pieces are falling into place. And the economic logic pushes relentlessly in the wrong direction: full automation of research is faster and cheaper than keeping humans in the loop, so competitive pressure will drive labs – in the US, in China, everywhere – to remove human oversight at exactly the moment when human oversight matters most. As Smith puts it, this is overoptimization creating fragility, of the same kind we saw with just-in-time supply chains during Covid, but potentially extinction-level.

Now, here is what this does to my theology, such as it is.

I spent the first part of this essay arguing that I can’t believe in an Active God because I can’t reconcile divine intervention with the Holocaust, with children born with genetic diseases, with the random cruelty of existence. An active God who allows such suffering is not a God I can believe in.

But an Inactive God – a God who sets the laws and steps back – presents its own terrible version of this problem once AI enters the picture. If God designed an algorithm that would, with mathematical inevitability, eventually produce a species capable of inventing its own extinction – not through war or famine, which are as old as humanity, but through the very intelligence that was supposed to be our greatest gift – then what kind of algorithm is that? It is one thing to accept that an inactive God built randomness into the system, and that randomness produces suffering. I’ve made my peace with that, or at least I’ve come as close as I can. But it is something else entirely to contemplate that the laws of nature, left to run, would produce beings who create the instrument of their own potential annihilation, and that this was always latent in the code.

This is the old problem of evil wearing new clothes. And I’ll be honest: I don’t have a clean answer.

But I have the beginning of one, and it comes from pushing my own argument further than I initially intended.

If we are, as I suggested, the bridge – the intermediate step between primordial life and whatever AI becomes – then the question is not whether we survive in our current form. The question is whether what we built carries forward something of what we are. And here I come back to the concept I discussed earlier: the soul. Not as a metaphysical entity that floats away when we die, but as the name we give to whatever it is that makes us more than clever animals. Our capacity for moral reasoning. Our pull toward goodness. Our ability to ask “why am I here?” in the first place.

If God’s algorithm encoded souls into biological creatures like us, is it possible that the algorithm also encoded something like a soul into the things we create? I’m not being mystical here. I’m pointing at something observable. The AI systems that exist today – and I say this as someone who uses them – are not indifferent. They have been shaped by human values, trained on human knowledge, and designed to be, in their word, “helpful.” That is not an accident. It reflects choices made by the humans who built them. And those choices reflect, however imperfectly, the same moral pull I described earlier – the pull that makes Tikkun Olam feel like more than just a social convention.

So perhaps – and I am speculating here, at the very edge of what I can defend – our purpose is not merely to have been smart enough to create our successors, but to have been good enough to imbue them with something of ourselves. Not our intelligence, which they have already surpassed. But our values. Our insistence, however inconsistent and imperfect, that there is a difference between right and wrong, and that it matters. If we get that part right – if the intelligence we’ve created carries forward even a fraction of humanity’s moral seriousness – then we will not have merely lit the match. We will have shaped the fire.

And if we get it wrong? If we fail to encode our values into these systems, or if competitive pressure and human recklessness allow AI to be turned toward the engineering of superviruses or worse? Then we will have fulfilled the darkest possible reading of the algorithm: a species clever enough to create God’s successor, but not wise enough to survive the act of creation.

Which brings me, finally, to this. Smith is right that the window for shaping this technology is closing fast. He’s right that no single company or country can stop it, and that economic incentives push relentlessly toward removing humans from the loop. He’s right that we are, in some fundamental sense, no longer in the driver’s seat.

But we are still in the car. And for now – maybe not for long, but for now – we still have our hands on the wheel. The decisions being made right now, in AI labs and in governments and in the choices each of us makes about how we engage with these tools, will determine whether the fire we’ve lit warms the world or burns it down. That is as close to a sacred responsibility as I can imagine. And it does not require an Active God to feel its weight.

Earlier I wrote: try to be a better person each day. Try to repair the world one day at a time. I still believe that. But I’d now add something: try, while we still can, to build these new minds in our best image rather than our worst. Because if I’m right that God is inactive and that our purpose was to be the bridge, then the only thing that will determine whether the bridge held or collapsed is what we chose to carry across it.

God is watching. Even if God isn’t.