A consideration of AI’s religious status can be found in some of the earliest discussions of modern computing. In his 1950 paper ‘Computing Machinery and Intelligence’, Alan Turing considered various objections to what he called “thinking machines.” The first objection was theological:

Thinking is a function of man's immortal soul. God has given an immortal soul to every man and woman, but not to any other animal or to machines. Hence no animal or machine can think.

Turing confessed he was “unable to accept any part of this” objection, but because the religious imagination did and still does loom large in the minds of the popular public interacting with his ideas, he thought it necessary to answer the objection. The argument, he says, “implies a serious restriction of the omnipotence of the Almighty … should we not believe that He has freedom to confer a soul on an elephant if He sees fit?”