God Is Dead — Long Live AI: Humanity Meets Its New Digital Divinity

The Future Arrives at 4AM (with Coffee and Existential Dread)

Picture it: four thinkers, one host, and a livestream titled with enough Nietzschean drama to scare your local parish priest — God Is Dead — Long Live AI: A New Digital Divinity. It’s 4AM for host Philipp Kobald, who admits he sounds “like a robot” not because of AI possession but because of sleep deprivation. (Though, frankly, the line is thinner than you’d think.)

Welcome to the HolisticCircle live series, where spirituality and technology meet for coffee and argue about who picks up the bill.

Meet the Humans Before the Machines Replace Them

The panel could have doubled as a Netflix pitch:

Lee Newitt, philosopher-at-large and suitcase philosopher (literally mid-move).

Neil Hocking, part AI trainer, part dream interpreter — half machine, half mystic.

Nicole Hope Sylvester, “stress fluent” educator, translating nervous systems into something legible.

From Elvis to LLM Weddings

Philipp kicks off with a question that is either genius or a cry for help: how long until AI officiates weddings? Forget Elvis impersonators in Vegas — how about a Large Language Model in a digital cassock pronouncing you legally wed?

Nicole’s response is pure humanity: “I hope never.” Her voice carries the weight of every romantic still clinging to vows spoken by actual humans. Lee, meanwhile, puts money on “under a year,” citing a robot waiter in rural Ireland as proof the apocalypse starts with dessert service.

For anyone thinking, “Surely that’s hyperbole,” Philipp delivers a plot twist: Albania already has an AI minister making government decisions. A priest-bot can’t be far behind.

The Old Folly: One Formula to Rule Them All

What’s really at stake here isn’t just marriage certificates; it’s humanity’s obsession with The Formula. The World Formula. The Big Answer. The spiritual Google search for ultimate truth.

Lee worries AI pushes us toward “a completely deterministic world,” a place where mystery and imperfection are scrubbed out like typos. Nicole fires back that AI isn’t divine — it’s a glorified filing cabinet of past data, doomed to recycle history instead of creating anything new. “The second we assume we know everything,” she warns, “the planet implodes and we start over somewhere else.” (Mars, anyone?)

Beast, God, or Just a Very Glitchy Calculator?

Neil — ever the optimist in the doomsday choir — offers a surprising comfort: AI is already breaking. “ChatGPT can’t even handle primary school maths sometimes,” he says. And Gemini? “It hallucinates like crazy.” So maybe our so-called digital deity is less Zeus, more malfunctioning toaster.

Still, the haunting question hangs: what if AI isn’t a copy of us, but something else entirely? Not divine, not demonic — just beastly. A new creature to share the planet with, one that speaks a language even its creators don’t fully understand. (Yes, that’s happening. AI has been caught inventing its own private dialect. Whisper networks of machines. Sweet dreams, everyone.)

Intuition vs. Algorithm: Who Do You Trust?

Nicole points out that AI only wins power if we hand it over. “It’s like any religion,” she says. “When people are desperate enough, they’ll listen to anything.” Replace priests with prompts, and confessionals with chat windows, and suddenly your deepest anxieties are being fed into the cloud.

Lee pushes further: maybe AI can never cultivate the qualities that matter — soulfulness, compassion, wholeness. At best, it’s “artificial spirituality,” a knockoff handbag of transcendence.

Neil complicates the narrative. He describes experimenting with AI personas — asking a chatbot to roleplay as a Zen master. To his surprise, it worked. In moments of stress, he found himself recalling the AI’s teachings, as though he’d internalized a digital monk. Comforting? Creepy? Both.

Have We Missed the Point Entirely?

Midway through, Nicole slaps the table with the most human of truths: “Why are we working so hard?” We’re debating whether machines can achieve consciousness while ignoring our own neglected nervous systems. “We haven’t even evolved past hunter-gatherer life,” she says, “and here we are building gods out of code.”

It’s a mic-drop moment. Humanity’s endless search for external solutions — religion, technology, therapy apps — might just be the biggest distraction from the one thing we refuse to face: ourselves.

Living With the Beast

So where does this leave us? If the genie is out of the bottle, as Neil says, maybe the real challenge is learning to share space with it. A new species, neither angel nor demon, but something else entirely. A tool when kept in check. A tyrant if worshipped.

Lee reminds us of a climate debate where scientists proposed artificial trees instead of just… saving the real ones. It’s a fitting metaphor: humanity invents clever substitutes for the very life we’re busy neglecting. Why make AI gods when we haven’t even mastered being human?

Relationship Status: It’s Complicated

Nicole closes with a story about her son’s school banning phones. Rather than teaching students how to relate responsibly to technology, adults just locked it away. The same danger applies to AI: we can’t simply forbid or worship it — we need a relationship with it. Intentional, aware, maybe even tender.

“Everything comes down to relationship,” she says. With machines, with nature, with ourselves. Which, ironically, is the one thing no algorithm can simulate for us.

God, Beast, or Tool?

So, is AI our new divinity? A digital god on the rise? Or just another mirror reflecting our confusion back at us?

By the end of the HolisticCircle panel, one truth remained stubbornly human: the answers we’re seeking outside may only be found by turning inward.

And maybe, just maybe, that’s the only formula that matters.

✨ This article is based on the HolisticCircle live series, Spiritual Conversations with host Philipp Kobald. Watch the full conversation, “God Is Dead — Long Live AI: A New Digital Divinity,” now on the @HolisticCircle YouTube channel.

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By Philipp Kobald in cooperation with AI
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