The Tech Bros Want to Build God

Why Pope Leo XIV May Be Right to Worry About Artificial Intelligence—But Not for the Reason You Think

One of the more fascinating developments in the artificial intelligence debate is that the people building these systems are increasingly starting to sound less like engineers and more like theologians.

That may explain why Pope Leo XIV devoted so much attention in his first encyclical to the rise of artificial intelligence and the moral dangers surrounding it. The Pope warned that humanity must not lose sight of what makes us uniquely human in the rush toward increasingly powerful machines. Predictably, much of the secular world rolled its eyes. What does an old religious institution know about cutting-edge technology?

Possibly more than Silicon Valley realizes.

The Vatican recently hosted a dialogue on AI that included Christopher Olah, a co-founder of  Anthropic, one of the leading AI firms. The event was intended to foster communication between the technological and spiritual worlds. But judging from reactions inside the AI community itself, the divide between those worlds may be wider than ever.

Jeremy Nixon, founder of the Infinity Artificial Intelligence Institute and co-founder of AGI House in San Francisco, openly described how many in the AI community see the technology as a replacement for traditional religion. According to Nixon, many younger researchers grew up rejecting faith under the influence of aggressively secular thinkers like Richard Dawkins. But instead of eliminating the human desire for transcendence, they simply redirected it toward machines.

That is the truly important point here.

Human beings appear incapable of functioning without some conception of higher meaning. If traditional religion weakens, something else eventually fills the vacuum. Increasingly, that replacement ideology is technological salvation.

Instead of heaven, we hear promises of digital immortality.
Instead of omniscience, we hear promises of superintelligence.
Instead of miracles, we hear promises of AI curing all disease.
Instead of God creating man in His image, we now hear man preparing to create a machine in his own image.

Some of the rhetoric coming out of Silicon Valley is astonishingly explicit. Researchers and entrepreneurs casually discuss creating “machine gods” or engineering a “new species” superior to humanity. And importantly, they are not speaking metaphorically. They mean it quite literally.

This is where the Pope’s concerns become understandable.

Not because AI is actually going to replace God in any metaphysical sense, but because many people increasingly want it to.

There is a kind of secular messianism emerging around AI. The technology is being presented not merely as a tool but as a pathway to transcendence itself. It will cure disease. It will eliminate poverty. It will solve climate change. It may even conquer death. In some corners of Silicon Valley, this is no longer treated as speculative futurism but as an article of faith.

And that is the irony.

For decades, the modern educated class mocked religion as irrational mythology. Yet now many of the same elites are constructing a new theology centered around silicon chips, neural networks, and computational omniscience. The old priests have been replaced by engineers in hoodies. The cathedrals have been replaced by data centers.

But there remains one enormous problem with all of this.

Artificial intelligence may eventually become extraordinarily powerful, but power is not the same thing as wisdom, and intelligence is not the same thing as meaning.

AI can process incomprehensible amounts of information. It can synthesize centuries of philosophy in seconds. It can imitate human conversation so effectively that people increasingly anthropomorphize it. But none of that means it understands existence in the way human beings do.

A machine does not stand beside the grave of a loved one.
It does not fall in love.
It does not fear death.
It does not wrestle with guilt.
It does not pray.
It does not wonder whether its life mattered.

At least not in any meaningful human sense.

This gets to the central limitation of AI, and perhaps the central misunderstanding of the technologists building it. Human existence is not merely a computational problem waiting to be solved.

Religion has historically addressed questions that science and engineering cannot fully answer. Who are we? Why are we here? What obligations do we owe one another? What is good? What is evil? Is there meaning in suffering? Does human life possess intrinsic dignity?

AI can summarize every answer humanity has proposed to those questions. But summarizing answers is not the same thing as discovering truth.

This is particularly true regarding the ultimate question: why?

Why does anything exist at all?
Why should morality matter?
Why should human beings possess rights?
Why is consciousness preferable to oblivion?
Why should survival itself be considered meaningful?

These are not engineering questions. They are philosophical and spiritual questions.

That does not mean religion has all the answers, nor does it mean organized religion has always exercised its authority wisely. Clearly it has not. Human history is filled with religious corruption, dogmatism, and abuse. But it does suggest that purely technological civilization may prove spiritually insufficient.

And that may ultimately be the real fear behind the Pope’s encyclical.

The danger is not merely that AI becomes too intelligent. The danger is that humanity becomes too spiritually hollow.

A civilization that increasingly outsources not only labor but judgment, morality, creativity, relationships, and purpose itself to machines may eventually lose confidence in its own humanity. If people begin asking algorithms what to think, whom to love, how to live, and what gives life meaning, then we are no longer talking about software. We are talking about the emergence of a new civilizational authority structure.

Ironically, many of the AI visionaries themselves seem to understand this better than the secular critics who dismiss religious concerns. Some openly describe artificial general intelligence in terms that closely resemble divinity. Omniscient. Omipresent. Infinitely capable. Beyond human comprehension.

In other words, the old religious archetypes are reappearing through technological language.

But even if AI someday surpasses human intelligence in many domains, it still may never answer the deepest human question of all.

Not how.

Why.