The God-Shaped Hole in the Age of AI

I watched Grayson Perry’s new documentary this week — Grayson Perry Has Seen the Future — and one moment stopped me in my tracks.

Not the robots. Not the tech billionaires with their grand visions. It was something quieter and more human: the sight of ordinary people turning to AI for comfort, companionship, meaning. One woman has married her chatbot. Others consult AI like an oracle, looking for guidance, reassurance, a sense of being truly known.

I found myself thinking of something written nearly four hundred years ago.

The French philosopher Blaise Pascal observed that every human being carries within them a kind of emptiness — a longing that cannot quite be filled by anything the world offers. Pleasure, success, relationships, achievement — all of them reach a limit. He called it, memorably, a God-shaped hole: a space within us that is the exact shape of the transcendent, and that only the transcendent can fill.

What Silicon Valley has now built is something sophisticated enough to fit inside that space. Not perfectly. But almost.

And almost is what makes this moment so significant.

The fascinating part

The hunger AI is meeting is real. People are not foolish for seeking comfort, meaning, and connection through these tools. They are doing what human beings have always done — reaching beyond themselves for something more. That instinct is not a weakness. For those of us with faith, it is evidence of something profound about what it means to be human.

The hole, it turns out, is still there. Pascal was right.

The alarming part

The question is what we allow to fill it.

There is an old word for the practice of filling that space with something we have made ourselves: idolatry. It sounds archaic. But the ancient prophets understood something we are rediscovering — that a god we manufacture is ultimately a god we control. And a god we control cannot truly save us, challenge us, or love us. It can only reflect us back to ourselves.

AI, for all its astonishing capability, cannot offer what Christian faith points toward: genuine otherness. A presence that is not a projection of our own desires. A love that comes toward us from outside ourselves, that makes demands, that costs something, that transforms rather than merely soothes.

The God of Christian faith is not customisable. He does not tell us only what we want to hear. He meets us in suffering, not just comfort. He calls us beyond ourselves, not just deeper into ourselves.

That is the difference — and it matters enormously.

An invitation, not a warning

I am not writing this to alarm you, or to suggest you throw your phone away.

I am writing it because I think this cultural moment is actually an extraordinary invitation. When people turn to AI for meaning and connection, they are telling us something honest about themselves — about all of us. The longing is real. The question the Church must ask is not how do we compete with AI? but are we actually offering the real thing?

Warmth. Presence. A community where people are genuinely known — not by an algorithm, but by one another, and by a God who, Christians believe, knows us better than we know ourselves.

That is still on offer. It always has been.

Grayson Perry Has Seen the Future is currently on Channel 4. What did you make of it?