Altman, Musk, and Belief in God
What Would Jesus Tech
Engineering Training and Disenchantment
Andrew and Joel discuss how engineering emphasizes prediction and efficiency, which can foster disenchantment and exclude transcendence.
Do tech leaders believe in God?
What are the reasons why they tend to believe in what is material, but not what is immaterial? Is there anything beyond matter to an engineer in a secular age? When you've been trained on analyzing the nature of things, you struggle to consider a thing of supernature. Perhaps this is what has happened.
Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI (ChatGPT), says he views the world as a tech-nerd, and therefore, in his own logic, he does not believe in spiritual things. Elon Musk is similar, as a clip in this episode shows. And just wait till you hear what Steve Jobs said! We all need God. And he's more real than we realize.
00:00 - Intro
3:00 - Why enchantment? What secular age?
14:00 - Sam Altman's lack of belief
20:45 - Elon Musk and the sensus divitatis
31:29 - Steve Jobs, "there must be more"
35:12 - We are NOT less enchanted
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Books cited:
Charles Taylor – A Secular Age (2007)
The foundational 800-page philosophical work on how belief in God shifted in modernity.
James K. A. Smith – How (Not) to Be Secular: Reading Charles Taylor (2014)
A short, accessible summary and engagement with Taylor’s A Secular Age.
Alan Noble – Disruptive Witness: Speaking Truth in a Distracted Age (2018) Applies Charles Taylor’s framework to technology, culture, and Christian witness.
Tony Reinke – God, Technology, and the Christian Life (2022)
A biblical theology of technology; argues all technology should point us back to awe and gratitude toward the Creator.
Joseph Minich – Enduring Divine Absence: The Challenge of Modern Atheism (2017)
Explores the modern sense of God’s absence and how to live faithfully amid it.
Walter Isaacson – Steve Jobs (2011)
The definitive biography of Steve Jobs, including his reflections on death, the afterlife, and transcendence.
Gray Sutanto – A Sense of the Divine: An Affective Model of General Revelation from the Reformed Tradition (2025)
A scholarly work building on Calvin, Herman Bavinck, and J.H. Bavinck on the “sense of the divine” (sensus divinitatis).
Original Music by Abigail Neale. The Thumbnail was created in Sam Altman's and OpenAI's GPT-5. AI audio text-to-speech by ElevenLabs.
What Would Jesus Tech? is cohosted by Andrew Noble, Joel Jacob, and Austin Gravley. To learn more about What Would Jesus Tech and to support the show, visit whatwouldjesustech.com
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