What It Means to Create God
Igbo cosmology as a mental model for thinking through this AI moment
This shouldn’t be new information, but I’m Nigerian.
What may be new information to you is my tribe; I’m Igbo.
Anyone who’s read Nigeria’s most famous writer, Chinua Achebe, shouldn’t be a stranger to the Igbo tribe or the word chi. For us Igbos, chi means ‘spirit’.
The most powerful spirit, we call Chineke, meaning the ‘spirit of creation’. It represents the supreme deity, often interpreted as a dual force of thought and action, as creation is what happens when both forces intersect.
Defining ‘God’
The Igbo understanding of the supreme being is not as a ruler sitting on a throne in perpetuity, but as the all-knowing force that fuses thought and action. For us Igbos, God is just as much a noun as He’s as a verb.
Creation, happening.
The book of Genesis shows Christians something similar as God’s first act is manifesting the thought: ‘Let there be light.’ The resulting action, an explosion of light which scientists explain to us as The Big Bang, is believed to have happened at the same instant as His thought. He then spends the next few days creating the universe with nothing but His thoughts, like a vibe-coder today barking requests into Claude Code.
Except that, for God, thought and action are simultaneous.
Now, I know the parallels aren’t airtight. A physicist will likely say that the Big Bang wasn’t instantaneous but unfolded over billions of years, and a theologian might insist that God’s ‘thinking’ isn’t quite the same as cognition in the human sense. Fair.
But the convergence is still striking as, across traditions, the highest conception of a creator is one for whom the distance between thinking and doing is zero, representing the pinnacle of omnipotence.
That’s the definition I want to work with for now.
‘God’ is the state where the thought-action distance (measured by time) is zero.
Our History of Creating God
If we are to ‘create God’ (as blasphemous as that may sound), then we must build tools that bring the distance between our thoughts and our actions closer to zero.
We’ve kinda been doing exactly that, for centuries with technology.
Every technology humans have ever invented can be understood as a device for compressing the thought-action distance. The printing press compressed the thought of ‘I want to tell someone far away what I’m thinking’ from weeks to days. The telephone compressed it further to minutes. Then the mobile phone and the internet shrank it to seconds. Each invention found a gap between wanting and having, between thinking and manifesting, and closed it.
But those were all simple thoughts paired with simple actions. Wanting to hear grandma’s voice. Wanting to see a friend’s face. Wanting to know what the weather will be tomorrow. One thought, one action, little complexity. We’ve already solved those.
Today’s technology lets us turn messy, complex thoughts into a few simple actions that, taken together, create outsized outcomes. But the next frontier is technology that allows us to perform complex actions directly from our complex thoughts without any translation or simplification.
For example, wanting to get the unpublished Harry Potter manuscript found, printed, bound, and in your kids’ hands before their train pulls out of the station to grandma’s. (Ten points if you caught the ‘The Devil Wears Prada’ reference). That thought contains a dozen sub-actions, each requiring coordination, context, judgment, and the ability to manipulate the physical world.
While we’re not quite there yet with AI, what makes the current moment feel different from every previous technological leap is that we’re not just building another tool. We’re building a tool that makes other tools.
Psalms 82:6.
Ye are gods, children of the most high.
If that Bible verse (one of my faves) is right and we are indeed godlike, then the compounding of human progress with each generation inevitably moves us closer and closer to the god-state of having null thought-action distance.
Maybe that’s what we talk about when we talk about AGI: the moment when we create an entity capable of performing complex actions at the speed of its complex thoughts. Although the digital thought-action gap is fast-compressing thanks to the dance between our gadgets, the internet, and AI, the gap in the physical world hasn’t quite budged.
While AI can prepare your fancy product images in a minute, it can’t yet manufacture, test, rework, and ship the product on its own. Second, so long as we interact with AI through an interface, whether a keyboard, a screen, or even our voice, there’ll always be a thought-action lag as we’ll have to translate our thoughts into words, then into keystrokes, then wait for a response.
This leads me to an uncomfortable conclusion.
The Cost of Creating God
To truly create God, to collapse the thought-action distance to zero, we’d have to put the tools for complex action directly in the seat of complex thought: the brain. No interface. No translation. Thought meeting action at the speed and site of its formation.
To create God, we’ll have to create the singularity—that dreaded fusion of mind and AI, of man and machine. The apex earthly force of thought married to the apex earthly force of action.
What keeps me up at night is whether the distance between thought and action is itself what makes us human. And if, by closing it, we erode something at the core of our humanity.
What if that thought-action gap isn’t a problem to be solved, but a needed space for us imperfect thinkers to weigh the consequences of our actions, and choose differently?
Creating God requires removing humanity entirely from the decision-action loop that follows our thoughts because our deliberation slows down speed, efficiency, and agency—the three bastard demigods of the capitalist machinery upholding our societies.
Every spiritual tradition, including the Igbo one, teaches that the distance between thought and action is where morality lives. It’s where we deliberate; where we exercise judgment; where we get to choose to become more than just rule-following bots.
Chineke can afford zero thought-action distance because His thoughts are supposed to be perfect. Ours are not. “Ye are gods,” yes. But young, reckless ones.
With every new invention marching us closer to that single fated singularity moment, sooner than later, we’ll need to reckon with what it means to wield godlike powers of zero thought-action distance before acquiring the godlike wisdom needed to not self-destruct.
So the real question isn’t whether we can create God (we’d likely get close), but should we?
Thanks to Jeremiah Nnadi and Temitope Stephens for reading earlier drafts of this.
Interesting essay that reminds me of some thinking I've been doing lately about what it means to build in this age, and what we choose to do with the power we now have. I think the question is less about "should" we create god, and more about the end goal, the reason for creating god. If the motives aren't aligned now for a general wellbeing / flourishing, any superintelligence created will exist to serve the selfish goals of a select few, leaving everyone else to be lackeys at their mercy.
It's not all doom and gloom, though. The first step is awareness, which makes us consciously decide what we want to create, why, who it's for, and the impact it should have.
Well done Arinze!
My favourite part of reading this was the refresher on the importance of humanity in the thought-action gap. It’s deeply fascinating that that’s now a debatable topic.
Loved reading this, thank you for writing it!