In technology we live and move and have our being …

This edition of Sensemaking is a collection of reflections on the nature and role of religion in our technology-bound culture. Religion is hard to define, and in what follows it is often used broadly and loosely. More suitable terms might be pseudo-religion, worldview, or ideology. In any case, a variety of religious sensibilities are shaping how we think about what it means to be human.

These reflections should provoke all Christians to consider how technology shapes our thinking, our lives, and our identity. These articles also introduce new entrants into our mission field—the techno-utopians, techno-pagans, transhumanists, and post-humanists.

“What happens in California doesn’t stay in California” is a cliché that may need updating. I’ll suggest one possible revision: “What happens in California doesn’t stay in California since the ‘California Ideology’ travels on the Internet.”

Mike

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Is technology the new religion? Well, yes and no.

~ Brent Waters, Emeritus Professor of Christian Social Ethics, Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary

Religion meets a need for belonging, rituals, and meaning. Today, modern technology fulfills many of those same needs. It connects us to each other and gives us a sense of direction.

~ Greg Epstein, “When technology becomes religion: How Silicon Valley is reshaping faith”

Science and religion, technology and magic, have always been closer bedfellows than they might appear. …

The techno-utopians dream of a world in which we are all rendered optimally efficient machines. … [This] new faith claims a powerful, transformative vision of the world, rooted not in transcendent meaning but in human thought, feeling, and will.

~ Tara Isabella Burton, author of several books, including Strange Rites: New Religions for a Godless World

The publication of Strange Rites in 2020 established Tara Isabella Burton as one our leading authorities on new religions. For that reason, I’ve chosen to include two of her pieces in this collection of articles about the religious sensibilities produced by technology, tech entrepreneurs, and allied thinkers.

• Tara Isabella Burton, “The View from Here: Is Silicon Valley a bastion of rationalism? Or the cradle of a strange new faith?” (AIR MAIL)

Ours is an era of rationality and technocratic control, where science and engineering have given us the answers we once sought in sacred texts, or in magic, or in the stars. God is, if not dead, irrelevant.

In fact, what we are witnessing is not a decline in American religiosity but rather its transformation from dogma to “vibes.” A growing number of young believers choose neither to embrace nor reject religion, and opt instead to “remix” it, curating their spiritual identity the way they might their social-media feed. And there are few places in America where that remixed religious sensibility is as prevalent, or as powerful, as Silicon Valley. …

Among [the tech rationalists of Silicon Valley] the most pressing issues is the “singularity,” the point at which A.I. exceeds human intelligence.

And as rapid expansions in A.I. have made the singularity seem, if not likely, at least more plausible, so too has a religious sensibility infused A.I. spaces. OpenAI founder Sam Altman has gone on record referring to GPT-5 as a “magic intelligence in the sky”; another, anonymous A.I. engineer told Vanity Fair that “we’re creating God.” One former Google engineer, Anthony Levandowski, went so far as to formally register the Way of the Future, his new A.I.-worshipping religion, as a church with the I.R.S. Levandowski told one interviewer that A.I. “will effectively be a god.... If there is something a billion times smarter than the smartest human, what else are you going to call it?”

This new religious sensibility has its own vocabulary, its own images, its own end-time scenarios. …

The alliance between Silicon Valley and the spiritually esoteric is hardly new. Tech journalist John Markoff has written at length about the relationship between the counterculture of the 60s—with its interest in Eastern religions, psychedelically assisted trance states, and consciousness expansion—and the development of personal computing. But while the psychonauts and technopagans of the early Internet era were relatively fringe, today’s techno-utopians have managed to turn transhumanism into the closest thing the United States has to a civil religion.

Even those of us who aren’t planning to cryogenically freeze our heads or implant chips into our bodies have, whether we’re aware of it or not, absorbed the spiritual and metaphysical assumptions of this new religiosity, which preaches the gospel of self-transcendence. From wellness culture to New Age witchcraft, from lifehacking and “self-optimization” to the growing ubiquity of “manifesting”—whereby influencers claim they can magically will their desires into existence—America’s most prevalent spiritual-but-not-religious practices center around a kind of magical transhumanism, which contends that those with elevated technological or spiritual potential have the right to reshape reality in their own image. …

As traditional religious institutions have lost the public’s trust, the neo-religions of Silicon Valley are perfectly situated to fill the gap. While traditional religion has often explored the complexity and tragedy of being human, with all the limitations that entails, today’s new faiths offer, instead, the promise of the post-human, when we at last hack away the last of our mortal limitations.

It’s a compelling vision. And if you assume that intelligent and powerful human beings are also morally good, and prone to making decisions for the benefit of the whole human race, it might even be a convincing one. But if there’s one thing transhumanism hasn’t yet managed to do, it’s come up with an account of human moral frailty, or what Christianity has traditionally called “sin.” And that might be the hardest hack of all.

Mark Harris has his eye on all things tech. He is an award-winning freelance journalist originally from the UK but now based in Seattle. His work has been published in The Guardian, Scientific American, MIT Technology Review, and Wired. In the following two articles, he turns his attention from technology to a new religion devoted to artificial intelligence.

• Mark Harris, “God Is a Bot, and Anthony Levandowski Is His Messenger” (WIRED)

  AI is this engineer's religion. But it’s his all-too-human behavior that sits at the heart of Waymo’s lawsuit against Uber.

Many people in Silicon Valley believe in the Singularity—the day in our near future when computers will surpass humans in intelligence and kick off a feedback loop of unfathomable change.

When that day comes, Anthony Levandowski will be firmly on the side of the machines. In September 2015, the multi-millionaire engineer at the heart of the trade secrets lawsuit between Uber and Waymo, Google’s self-driving car company, founded a religious organization called Way of the Future. Its purpose, according to previously unreported state filings, is nothing less than to “develop and promote the realization of a Godhead based on Artificial Intelligence.” …

• Mark Harris, “Inside the First Church of Artificial Intelligence” (WIRED)

  The engineer at the heart of the Uber/Waymo lawsuit is serious about his AI religion. Welcome to Anthony Levandowski's Way of the Future.

The documents [filed with the IRS] state that WOTF’s activities will focus on “the realization, acceptance, and worship of a Godhead based on Artificial Intelligence (AI) developed through computer hardware and software.” That includes funding research to help create the divine AI itself. The religion will seek to build working relationships with AI industry leaders and create a membership through community outreach, initially targeting AI professionals and “laypersons who are interested in the worship of a Godhead based on AI.” The filings also say that the church “plans to conduct workshops and educational programs throughout the San Francisco/Bay Area beginning this year.” …

“What is going to be created will effectively be a god,” Levandowski tells me in his modest mid-century home on the outskirts of Berkeley, California. “It’s not a god in the sense that it makes lightning or causes hurricanes. But if there is something a billion times smarter than the smartest human, what else are you going to call it?” …

With the internet as its nervous system, the world’s connected cell phones and sensors as its sense organs, and data centers as its brain, the ‘whatever’ will hear everything, see everything, and be everywhere at all times. The only rational word to describe that ‘whatever’, thinks Levandowski, is ‘god’—and the only way to influence a deity is through prayer and worship. …

Levandowski does not expect the church itself to solve all the problems of machine intelligence—often called “strong AI”—so much as facilitate funding of the right research. “If you had a child, you knew was going to be gifted, how would you want to raise it?” he asks. “We’re in the process of raising a god. So let’s make sure we think through the right way to do that. It’s a tremendous opportunity.” …

[Way of The Future] differs in one key way to established churches, says Levandowski: “There are many ways people think of God, and thousands of flavors of Christianity, Judaism, Islam...but they’re always looking at something that’s not measurable or you can’t really see or control. This time it’s different. This time you will be able to talk to God, literally, and know that it’s listening.”

• Tim Shriver and Tara Isabella Burton, “Spiritual Realism in a Divided America: Human Purpose in Pursuit of the Common Good” (Plough)

Over the past few years, and in particular during the Trump Presidency, which saw so many rhetorical and procedural norms of liberalism break down, we have seen a number of different ideological groups emerge, each with an ambiguous relationship to the liberal order.

The first of these camps we might call broadly the “techno-utopians”: those optimistic that technological advances, in rendering literal – often via digital avatar – the subtextual force of our desires, can help people become their best selves. It is the successor to what critics Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron identified in 1995 as the “Californian Ideology”: a distinctly American, philosophically libertarian technocracy.

In this camp we find the bigwigs of Silicon Valley, people like Google’s Sergey Brin or Tesla’s Elon Musk. We may find, too, explicit transhumanists, like the notoriously contrarian venture capitalist Peter Thiel: those who believe that through technological advance we might, for example, indefinitely postpone aging or death, or use computer technology to enhance our cognitive power. We find it in the rationalist community, with their conviction that – with the right tools and training – human beings can “hack” our wetware.

But we find it, too, in behemoths of modern corporate wellness culture and in commodified practices of self-care. These cultural practices are massively enabled by the smartphone, that tool of untrammeled self-creation. This self-creation can be purely personal, or can be used for economic ends, or else for that increasingly porous space in between: the influencer economy.

What unifies these groups is a fundamental optimism about a particular understanding of the aspirational self as we have defined here: a self [that is] defined primarily by its wants, whose telos is self-making, and secondarily by its faith in instrumental reason. Human ingenuity is best used in the service of the creation of products and strategies to be used, in turn, to optimize individual human life (and, of course, to do so profitably): to improve productivity. We “life-hack” in order to free up the maximum amount of leisure time – leisure time which is, in turn, dedicated to the kind of self-care that boosts our ability to be efficient workers, or to the events and adventures which, recorded on social media, enhance our influence, or provide us with “experience” as a consumer commodity.

• Brent Waters, “Is Technology the New Religion?” (Word & World, Luther Seminary)

Is technology the new religion? Well, yes and no.

No, because technology per se is not ordinarily the direct object of religious devotion, worship, piety, and spiritual disciplines. Even the most enthusiastic proponents of using technology to transform human existence, such as the transhumanists, do not portray themselves as leaders of a new religious movement.

But the answer is yes if religion is understood in less formal terms. As Martin Luther insists: “That to which your heart clings and entrusts itself is, I say, really your God.” We can either have faith in the “one true God” or in false gods and idols, such as wealth, knowledge, and prestige.

Following Luther, perhaps a better question to ask might be something like: Is technology the predominate faith of many, if not most, late moderns? Technology is certainly a ubiquitous feature of late modern life. Our lives are cluttered with machines and gadgets, and increasingly our bodies are monitored, repaired, and maintained with the aid of medical technologies. As Martin Heidegger contends, technology “enframes” the world, or in George Grant’s more vivid words: “In each lived moment of our waking and sleeping, we are technological civilisation.” …

The penultimate act of faith in technology, then, is to use it to overcome finitude and mortality. This is precisely the goal of transhumanists and posthumanists, namely, to progressively and significantly extend longevity, and in the process to greatly enhance the physical and cognitive performance of individuals. This goal will be achieved through a combination of anticipated developments in biotechnology, nanotechnology, bionics, and digital technologies. The hope—the Holy Grail, so to speak—is to achieve immortality. The combination of flesh and machine will progressively enable humans to overcome finite, and eventually mortal limits. More radically, there is the prospect of uploading the underlying binary information constituting one’s personality or identity—mind, will, and soul, to use antiquated vocabulary—and then downloading the data into robotic or virtual reality hosts. Presumably the process can be repeated indefinitely, achieving virtual immortality. Technology, nature, and human nature meld into a singular reality or singularity.

According to the “California Ideology,” it is in technology that we live and move and have our being.

Indeed, a mission field like none other in the history of the church.

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The one resource not linked above:

Greg Epstein, “When technology becomes religion: How Silicon Valley is reshaping faith” (CTECH)