Artificial intelligence and the alienness of God

Abstract Skeptical theism attempts to address the problem of evil by appealing to human cognitive limitations. The causal structure of the world is opaque to us. We cannot tell, and should not expect to be able to tell, if there is gratuitous evil, that is, evil which isn’t necessary for achieving some greater good or for precluding some greater evil. At first, it seems tempting to think that the rapid development of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies might change this fact. Our cognitive limitations may no longer be a fixed point in responding to the problem of evil. But I argue that this won’t ultimately matter. The workings of any AI capable of rendering the problem of evil tractable will likely be just as opaque to us as the causal structure of the world God created. Interestingly, then, both God and a sufficiently advanced AI are alien intelligences to us. This reveals what is truly difficult, and perhaps intractable, about the problem of evil. For the evils to be defeated, we would need a relational understanding of why God permitted them. Yet such an understanding of an inscrutable God seems forever beyond our, and even our post-human descendants, ken.