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The primacy of faith may never have been more prominent than it is today in this post-postmodern, metamodern world. AI experts say that “hallucinations” are inevitable and unavoidable in the way AI works. Skepticism has already become the default posture of people in this social-media dominated world in which fake news is old news. It’s no longer what you trust, but who you trust. “Pick your poison, and go with it” is the metamodern response.

The advent of AI and its looming takeover may unravel the very foundation of our confidence in knowledge. If skepticism has long been the province of intellectuals in the know, it is now the common denominator of everyone who trusts only what they know from the people they trust and news outlets that feed them.

If we are not postmodern enough already, our skepticism will increasingly become more necessary than ever. In just a few years of the AI revolution, determining what content on social media is AI, not AI, or only partially AI is becoming increasingly fraught. The challenge will only get more difficult as AI gets better. Even college professors have difficulty determining student work product from AI work product

AI is only going to get better (or worse, depending on your viewpoint). The capacity of AI to churn out convincing content with great confidence (and lurking uncertainty) may overtake our ability to keep up with it. Over fifty percent of all social media content is currently produced by bots, a form of AI, and that statistic is likely to climb higher. Human productivity cannot keep up with the productivity of AI.

AI feeds on itself. Garbage in produces garbage out. AI repeats itself by design, and it will inevitably repeat the good with bad, leaving us ever attempting to discern and decipher which is which.

In a world like the one we are facing, faith becomes more important than ever. By faith, I mean trusting and having confidence in something. What we put our faith in will become more and more important.

This revelation comes as postmodernism is breaking down. That postmodernist, existentialist angst is hard to live with. We have to put our faith somewhere – and this is the meta-modern trend that we are now facing. Faith – where we put our confidence – is the question of the day.

Metamodernism has taken hold on our culture and psyche according to people who study these things. Despite the post-modern assumption that we can trust nothing, we choose to trust something in a metamodern world because the alternative is untenable and unsustainable.

Social psychologists say that we are living in a world marked by anxiety, depression, suicidal ideation, and isolation, and these problems are falling with heaviest weight on our youngest population. In a world like that, they learn they have to cling to something. They have to find something solid they can hold on to. If they don’t, everything is always falling away from them. They have nowhere to stand.

In a world like that, faith is inevitable and unavoidable. It is necessary for survival.

Perhaps we are arriving at this place too late. It certainly isn’t too soon. In fact, the place where we now stand, where it seems there is nothing solid to stand on, was foretold thousands of years ago in the Book of Ecclesiastes.

According to Ecclesiastes, meaninglessness, vanity, emptiness (technically “vaporlikeness”) has always been the human condition on this earth. We are from dust and to dust we will return, and we are painfully conscious of that fact.

There is no lasting pleasure in this life. There is no lasting possession. There is no lasting goodness and nothing solid we can grasp and hold on to at the end of our lives.

Happiness flees even as we experience it. At the end of our days, it all vanishes. It all passes away. It all ends at death. Like a flower that blooms in the morning and fades at night. Like a mist that appears and evaporates into the ether, it seems to pass as quickly as it comes.

We find no comfort, no satisfaction, no acceptance, nor peace in a world such as this. We are anxious because we long for something more. We are depressed because we long for something more. We are restless because we sense a peace we cannot attain.

The Bible explained this 3000 years ago in Ecclesiastes 3:11: “God set eternity into the hearts of men, but not so that we would know the beginning from the end.” This is – and always has been – the human condition. We sense and therefore long for something more, but the reality of our lives suggests it is not attainable.

As a skeptic, we throw up our hands and say, “No one can know.” We cannot know for sure that God exists. All we can do is make the most of our brief appearance on the stage of life, and then we are gone.

Faith says, “There’s got to be more than this.” I would not be anxious or restless or dissatisfied unless there was actually something else, something more, something better. If this is really all there is, why do I even care?

We could be the eternal skeptic – full of angst and anxiety – or we can stake out our position in faith on the turf that seems most solid to us and which makes the most sense out of life. Regardless of where we place our confidence, our ship “is embarked,” as Blaise Pascal says. We are afloat out on the ocean of this life, and we must choose to place our confidence in one or the other – that God exists or that God does not exist.

Not to choose to place confidence in the existence of God is to choose, because the existence of God puts us in a position of responsibility to such a God. To choose to live as if God does not exist is to choose to have no relationship or responsibility to Him – if in fact God does exist.

You are embarked. You are at sea. Where will you place your confidence – your faith?