The LLM of the Gaps: AI, God and Death Angst

I want to unpack something I've been thinking about for a while; arguments in favour of the 'sentience' of LLM chatbots, and AI in general, bear a formal similarity to teleological arguments for the existence of God. These are more popularly known as 'The Design Argument' or most famously Paley's 'Watchmaker Argument'. Just as this argument asks us to conclude from the apparent intention and design in the world that it was created by a great intelligence, many people are asking us today to assume that the origin for chatbot sentences lies in such an intelligence.

People say that the conversations 'feel real', and therefore they probably are. If we say there's no reason to believe that, it's pointed out that there's no reason to rule it out either. They point to greater and greater achievements of LLMs to convince us that the intelligence must be greater and greater. Claims that such-and-such a model is 'PhD-level intelligence' are basically a meme now. Some make these claims because they're selling us something, some genuinely believe it, and some are in both categories. What I cannot deny, however, is that folk who are otherwise secular and even atheist are willing to lower their credulity to believe in the intelligence of AI purely on the basis that its products have a lot in common with what humans--also allegedly intelligent--are able to produce. This is the design argument. The product appears intelligently designed, therefore it probably is.

Now, before I fully get into this, I want to make two contextual points.

First, this is one example of a general problem I'm finding interesting, which is that much of the debate about Artificial Intelligence in general is grounded in very old metaphysics, more specifically early modern or Cartesian frameworks of thought. To give another example, the obsession with 'sentience' in evaluating AI is locked in a distinctively early-modern concern for demonstrating the existence of other minds. Further, questions that take the form of asserting or denying that a machine can ever form or support 'sentience' are grounded in early modern debates concerning thinking matter.^[1] This post might be the first in a loosely-defined series examining the metaphysics at work in contemporary AI debates. The important point for now is I'm not picking on these theology-adjacent arguments because they're religious, but rather highlighting them because they are metaphysical.

Second, identifying the origin of a set of concerns in presumably old metaphysics is not a criticism in and of itself. Genealogy is a form of critique, not refutation. I'm interested in the nature and limits of the discourse, not in--to borrow an image from Foucault--finding some original sin to provide an excuse to ignore the interlocutors in these debates. Instead, the point is to discover why this transfer has taken place. The fact that some sects, such as the so-called Rationalist movement, speak of the oncoming superintelligent AI in explicitly theological and eschatological terms may have something to do with it, and these features in their discourse may be reasons to be sceptical of their conclusions, but that's not what I'm getting into here.

The Design Argument

The Design Argument is the easiest argument for the existence of God to refute, but it is also the most compelling because it is an analogy. It only seeks to demonstrate that a designer is likely to exist, encouraging the listener to prefer this as an explanation over any other. That said, there are stronger and weaker versions of it that are more or less vulnerable to extant scientific knowledge. For example, the argument that a banana fits perfectly into a hand and therefore must have been designed is easy to reject on a high school understanding of evolution: the banana probably just evolved alongside the hand as a survival mechanism. A stronger modern-ish version is the 'fine tuning' argument. Here, the proponent points to various scientific discoveries that are unnervingly precarious and asks us to imagine if, say, the freezing point of water was two degrees kelvin lower or if the Earth was only five percent further away from the Sun. The advantage of this argument is the proponent can use scientific discovery in their favour, rather than trying to avoid it. Indeed, the more knowledgeable they are about science the better. Physicists do serious work on the apparent fine-tuning of the universe because it is so unnerving. A popular secular response is the anthropic principle, which is simply to say the reason our universe is like this is that there wouldn't be observers in any of the other universes. This statistical argument is not intuitively satisfactory, making the temptation to just say 'well a designer fine-tuned the universe' all the more compelling.

All versions of the design argument, however, boil down to this logical structure:

The universe appears to be similar to things we know have a designer, and therefore it is likely to be designed itself.

The argument can only be ever one of probability, the universe is just likely to be designed. There are too many counter examples. For example, boats and cars have steering wheels but cars cannot float. The trick with the design argument is to load up so many shared properties to make the listener relax their credulity and concede that a designer is beyond reasonable doubt. This is not the case, however. It is always reasonable to doubt an argument from analogy. They're extremely unreliable.

Design and the abyss

However, the argument remains extremely compelling because the core experience at its basis, that the universe appears designed, is completely true. More precisely, we can say that it is very difficult to deny the apparent intention behind aspects of the world when we regard it uncritically. We find our world beautiful and well suited to us, at least most of the time. However, just like on a cursory glance we may miss the fact that the Earth is a globe, it is possible to find secular explanations for each example of beauty and apparent design. Indeed, it is also easy to find counter examples, such as illness, suffering, vestigial organs, etc. However, following the secular view to its conclusion leads us to less comfortable places.

The anthropic principle in physics, for example, massively multiplies the scale of existence. Not only do we live in a vast, uncrossable universe, in a shrinking observable bubble, but we are posited to be one of an infinity of universes in an infinity of time. Eternity piles upon eternity making us feel insignificant, hitting what Kant called the mathematical sublime: an awe at the contrast between the massiveness of the numbers of the universe and the quiet finitude of our own existence. The large numbers of the universe are such that a rare Earth like ours, with all its complexity, can come into being spontaneously and even if Earth is the only inhabited planet in the whole universe, there could be an infinite number of such universes in the greater infinities of the multiverse. This scale is, to put it mildly, uncomfortable.

On this, we have a choice to make. We can believe we are creatures of a designer or creatures of the void. Or, we can try not to think about it. The latter option isn't really an option for a philosopher, however. So, let's continue.

LLM text and the sublime

LLMs are truly remarkable. As David Gerrard is fond of saying, they're a 'cool tech demo' even if they're not intelligent.^[2] Everything I've been able to learn about how this technology works leads me to conclude that they are excellent next word generators, and as such can produce passable emulations of human writing and speech most of the time. It would be inhuman not to feel wonder and awe at this. And, where there is wonder and awe, there's an attempt to try and understand.

In the watchmaker argument, we imagine the cargo cult scenario of a pre-industrial culture finding a clockwork watch and, while not understanding its principles or nature, at least being able to conclude it is produced by an intelligent designer by comparison with their own tools and crafts. Similarly, when we use a chatbot, we see a scattering of meaningful sentences. It is tempting to conclude that such sentences are a product of humanoid intelligence, since until now all meaningful speech we have encountered has come from humans or animals that humans have taught to speak. However, the true origin of the speech is hidden from us. It would seem we have to take part in educated guesswork, such as in the found watch example.

When I first played my kitten some 'cat TV' on YouTube, which was a long recording of various birds swooping down to a bird feeder, she was absolutely enraptured. After a few minutes, she looked behind the television, as if to see if the birds were really there. I'm comfortable concluding that, to her, until that point, the TV had been a window. Only now did she realise it was a window of lies. If we follow my cat's example and look 'behind the window' of the LLM chat bot, everything we can learn points to a total absence of anything humanoid. Unlike with the watchmaker, we can actually ask the people who made the device and critically evaluate their conclusions. We can learn about neural networks, transformers and model training and all the rest. However, even engineers developing this technology have found themselves compelled to anthropomorphise it.^[3]

My existentialist take on why is this: in LLM generated text, we face the same choice as we do in the face of the design argument. We can either ascribe to the LLM the role of 'designer' of these sentences, to read in their meaning genuine telos, purpose and intent, or we can recognise the same void we face when we look up to the infinity of the cosmos. Just as the gargantuan scale of the cosmos can produce our seemingly fine-tuned world an infinite number of times, the also large, though embarrassingly smaller, statistical model that is this LLM can generate meaningful sentences. Not only that, but it can produce sentences that constitute art. That what has been seen to be the highest of human achievement can be run off a probability machine with what seems like little effort (thought is actually incredible complex and power hungry calculation) is, frankly, terrifying and challenges the meaning of human existence to its core. Behind the chatbot's chirpy manner and idle chatter lies the trigger for the greatest form of existential angst: the recognition that there is no divine cause, no great meaning that we can blame for our existence and our choices. There is only us, we creatures of the void.

The lesson of all existentialism is that humans really, really do not want to think about that. So, it is only natural that the choice we make is to ascribe to these artificially generated sentences a full conscious intent, like our own. Some will go in the opposite direction, and claim that actually we're also statistical models, and we don't have conscious intent either.^[4] This is no less a flight from the void, as it seeks to dismiss our capacity to even be a bit worried about the challenge this technology poses to our conception of humanity.

We are not like LLMs. There is no rational evidence to support anything other than a superficial similarity. Claims that their flaws are also found in humans are amusing but lack earnestness. For sure, humans lie and make things up, for example, but I've yet to meet a human that was inherently incapable of grasping the conception of truth. In the spirit of the design argument, let me close by pointing out some dissimilarities between us and the chatbots:

• Humans do not release huge amounts of carbon every time they write an email
• Humans can lie on purpose
• Humans cannot instantly emulate the writing style of any random author they've 'read'

In truth, a statistical model based on human language could never produce a linguistic being. If we wanted to produce such a being, the simulation we need is one of the universe itself, since that is the only system we know of that can produce a creature like us. The only possible exception we're aware of is the theological one.

Only a god could make an artificial intelligence.

---

1. I suppose you might ask exactly what I mean by 'grounded' here. I'm being deliberately vague as I don't want to get into a debate about the exact mechanism or medium that leads to these Cartesian debates cropping up again and again out of the mouths and pens of people who haven't read a word of Descartes. What I mean is that these questions are repetitions of arguments from hundreds of years ago that the broader philosophical tradition has already left behind, and that is peculiar. This is a phenomenon that has been discussed in various forms in nineteenth and twentieth century philosophy. ↩︎

2. It comes up frequently in his excellent Pivot to AI blog and YouTube channel. In lieu of me giving you an exact reference, you should just follow and subscribe, and I'm sure he'll say it within a week. ↩︎

3. See, for example, Kambhampati, S. et al. Stop Anthropomorphizing Intermediate Tokens as Reasoning/Thinking Traces! arXiv (2025) doi:10.48550/arxiv.2504.09762. ↩︎

4. See Elan Barenholtz's beautifully written, but totally unconvincing, You're an LLM. Deal with it ↩︎