Sometimes the link between AI and religion is explicit. Think of Yuval Harari’s predictions that AI will take over religion, especially now that it can create religious texts and start new cults, Elon Musk’s warnings about an uncontrollable “Digital God,” or Peter Thiel’s lectures about “the Antichrist,” where theology and other theories are mobilized in defense of his libertarian, anti-regulation position. Organized religions, too, are experimenting with AI chatbots. Some begin to see AI not just as a conversation partner but as a conduit to the divine. What could possibly go wrong? AI enters religion and religion enters AI.
But more often than not, the entanglement of AI and religion runs deeper and is more subtle and far less visible and known. This is not just about dropping theological lingo in an AI sales pitch or using apps for religious purposes, but about patterns in our conversations and thinking about AI that are quietly, unintentionally inherited from religious traditions. Religion does not enter AI or vice versa; it was always entangled with them. We do not just build machines. We narrate myths in and through them.
A striking example is apocalyptic thinking, one of the most powerful narrative templates in Western culture and very much alive in U.S. technological and religious discourse. When people ask the question “How many years until AGI or superintelligence?” this carries the weight of a countdown, not unlike earlier expectations surrounding the Second Coming. The future is already known and becomes compressed into a decisive moment when everything changes at one and when history, as we know it, ends. Silicon Valley, it turns out, does not only sell tech but also deals in eschatology.
Transhumanists, longtermists, and existential risk mongers, then, are modern-day prophets that predict the future of AI as a pre-destined trajectory towards superintelligence and a Singularity, after which everything will be different. The models are computational, but the narratives are unmistakably theological. Catastrophic AI scenarios become secularized version of Judgment Day. There is no place for anything as mundane as continuity or gradual improvement. There is going to be a radical break.
In these visions, humanity is either doomed – obsolete, replaced, or swept up into something greater: intelligence expanding into the cosmos. The latter reflects a vision influenced by Russian cosmism and is indifferent to the interests of current humans in the light of the “glorious potential” of intelligence. Alternatively, we imagine a utopia where scarcity, labour, disease, and even death have come to an end. A radically better order is waiting for us.
All we need to do, it seems, is help AI to grow up, and if possible “align” it with our goals. Entangled with religious imagination, the conversation about AI thus becomes one about preparing for the apocalyptic future. The oscillation between fearing AI as apocalypse and praising it as salvation is not an engineering problem; it’s about culture, in this case Western religious and mythological culture.
Starting from the insight that technology is never purely technical but always shaped by culture, Artificial Religionhelps to map this terrain and analyses what is at stake. If we want to really understand AI, it argues, we must first understand the religious imagination that shapes it. AI is not an alien force arriving from the future. It is a mirror held up to a past we have not fully acknowledged. It’s time we get to know ourselves – even if we may not like what we see in the mirror.
That means, for example, realizing how the dream of creating intelligence in our own image echoes ancient creation stories, which already thematize the struggles between creator and creation that currently structure the discussion about controlling AI. It means acknowledging that master-slave thinking, rooted in ancient myths about gods and humans, still shapes our current fantasies about AI assistants. It means connecting the chatbots to oracles, prompts to prayers. It means seeing how the hope that machines might end human suffering or even death recall long-standing religious aspirations. It means understanding the religious “grammar” of AI, that is, the grammar of Western thinking and its links with power. This enables us to gain a more critical relation to AI and, ultimately, to ourselves.
What we are witnessing, then, is not simply the rise of a powerful new technology, but the re-enactment of an old human drama that we continue to stage and narrate through AI discourse and practice. The language has shifted, at least sometimes, but the structure has not. Some of the most interesting questions about AI today, therefore, are not technical but theological. Not because AI is divine, but because our thinking about it is still anchored in religion.
But the book does not stop at diagnosis and pushes further: it asks why these patterns persist in a supposedly disenchanted age (see also New Romantic Cyborgs). Why do people still reach for these religious narratives for their thinking about AI, albeit without always being aware of it? Religion is all over the place today. But wasn’t tech supposed to be secularized? How could it happen that tech did not erase religion but re-coded it?
The answer is that AI and the religious narratives and practices it reproduces resonate with us because they speak to our existential needs as humans. Each chapter traces how these existential aspirations take both religious and technological form. They help to explain why we feel compelled to build these machines and why we think we need them at all. The machines promise the answers, but our questions are ancient.
Artificial Religion thus reframes the debate. The question is no longer whether AI will become godlike, but why we are so ready to imagine it that way. The real mystery is not AI; it is our religious hopes, including our hope for a deus ex machina that will save us. The mystery is us.
What the book reveals, then, is not so much that AI is a new religion, but rather how much of religion we never really left behind. The religious hopes, fears, and dreams that shape even our most advanced technologies continue to echo the deeper existential yearnings we have as humans. The former might change to some extent, although as the book shows such cultural narratives are very persistent. The latter will stay with us, also in the age of AI.
