AI: A Systematic Theology of a Neo-Gnostic Movement

For most people today, AI is just a tool—like other tech inventions throughout history. But, as John Culkin observed, “We shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us.” It is beyond my competence to opine on the transformative impacts of AI. However, there is a profoundly influential movement among leaders in this space that is explicitly theological. In fact, it pillages Christian theology, twisting its narrative of creation, fall, and redemption into a radically anti-Christian alternative. It shouldn’t surprise us that Vint Cerf, a founder of the Internet, holds the title “Vice-President and Chief Internet Evangelist” at Google. Even work spaces in Silicon Valley companies are quasi-churches with lectures on all sorts of spiritualities, Buddhist retreats, and mindfulness exercises.

At the heart of this phenomenon is a growing ideology called transhumanism. One active promoter is Zoltan Istvan. “All biology is to be overcome and replaced by the synthetic,” he declares. Like many of his compatriots, Istvan claims to be an atheist while nevertheless advocating an idealist rather than materialist philosophy. He expressly states that his outlook is “Mind versus Matter,” adding,

As a transhumanist, I plan to live forever… Ultimately, I’d like to reach what I call omnipotism: a post-singularity epoch where our identity, value, and intelligence control the very quarks and quantum mechanics that make up the universe. We’ll barely resemble our human selves at all, but our conscious energy and thoughts will span the cosmos… With universities and tech companies building technology that could one day connect your mind directly to the internet, the debate is no longer theoretical.

Istvan is right: it’s no longer theoretical. Science fiction is becoming reality, magic and technology are reuniting in the imagination of many AI pioneers. Noah Yuval Harari writes, “If traditionally death was the specialty of priests and theologians, now the engineers are taking over.”

Over the centuries, magicians have sought to harness nature, seeking to transform it for good and ill purposes. The greatest feat of all was to extend life or even to overcome death itself. It’s worth reminding ourselves of the two points at which the serpent of Genesis 3 contradicted God’s word: “You surely will not die” and “You shall be as gods.” Some Faustian souls crossed the line into dark magic, but most of these historical figures were priests and monks who insisted that their magic was purely a natural science. Everything in nature had a “signature” corresponding to something in the heavens. Mediating between heaven and earth, the magus thought of himself as possessing the spiritual technology to harness the divine forces within nature itself. Contrary to popular assumptions, modernity is not disenchanted. The magician lives on in the soul of today’s tech gurus, the spirit of his work spanning between coded consciousness and the chants of the crowds who say, “My body, my choice.”

Catherine Albanese writes that “metaphysics” no longer means what it did before the nineteenth century. Not just the study of that which lies beyond or behind the empirical world, “metaphysical” in our day conjures associations with “esotericism, occultism, and gnosticism.”

God and Nature

Atheistic materialism may have enjoyed periodic attention since the Enlightenment, but a powerful current of pantheistic idealism has always surged beneath the thin crust of Christendom. Often, when people today say that they’re “spiritual but not religious,” what they have in mind is something close to this neo-pagan idea that the universe itself is divine—in other words, "pantheistic, not theistic.” The “religion” most in the West reject is Christianity, especially its sharp Creator-creature distinction and all that goes with it.

Many follow Albert Einstein in looking to the seventeenth-century philosopher Spinoza, who argued that God and Nature are just two aspects of one reality. Neither atheism pure and simple nor theistic supernaturalism, this outlook is best described as “natural supernaturalism.” Along with “spiritual-but-not-religious” people generally, transhumanists carry residues of Christianity’s personal God. They still attribute some personal characteristics to the Universe, for example, such as love. However, the Greeks were at least rationally consistent on this point. The Universe is ontologically incapable of loving anyone. It is not even conscious of its own existence, much less of the world that it emanates by sheer necessity, like the sun extending its rays.

Finally, writers in this space defend panpsychism—the idea that everything in the universe is plugged into a divine Mind akin to a supercomputer. A leading writer in this field is AI pioneer Ray Kurzweil, who defends “emergent panpsychism” (which he also calls panprotopsychism). This view pictures something in the brain magically awakening to a “fundamental force of the universe”—some sort of cosmic Consciousness.

Magic and technology reunite after a few centuries of sibling rivalry. It is not, therefore, naturalism pure and simple, but natural supernaturalism. For many Silicon Valley techno-evangelists, there is clearly something more than mere matter in motion, but this supposedly “transcendent” energy is not a personal god distinct from nature itself. The biblical God who created the world, sustains and directs it, and sometimes intervenes through miraculous acts of judgment and redemption, is set aside. Instead, the divine heartbeat of the universe goes by many names: the Force, the One, the World Soul, Universal Mind or Consciousness, Brahman, the All or the Abyss.

Aldous Huxley, who wrote The Perennial Philosophy in 1945, anticipated a similar natural supernaturalism. Transhumanist philosopher Nick Bostrom refers to Huxley’s last novel:

The approach he takes in Island is to seek a fusion of the best of Western science and of Eastern Mahāyāna Buddhism. The inhabitants of his utopian community have opted for a selective form of modernization. They cultivate an enlightened, pacifistic, humanistic way of life that is aimed at facilitating the pursuit of humanity’s final end, which Huxley (elsewhere) describes as ‘the unitive knowledge of immanent Tao or Logos, the transcendent Godhead or Brahman.’

This new shamanism leads to “Luminous bliss… Understanding of everything, but without knowledge of anything… There was only this experienced fact of being blissfully one with Oneness.” The shamanic experience leads still to the virtual reality of salvation articulated by the sage. This religion is viewed not as a religion but as universal spirituality or philosophy, but it is essentially natural supernaturalism.

Imputing divine attributes to nature, Spinoza taught that nature is immutable. Hence, everything happens by iron-clad laws of necessity: things could not be otherwise than they are. God simply is the inexorable laws of nature. There is no free will, even for God. Just as it is the nature of the sun to shine, without any deliberation or choice, according to Platonists, the One emanates the world by sheer necessity.

Based on such ideas, transhumanist writers suggest that the empirical world apprehended by our senses may well be a simulation. These ideas are not new, of course. Hinduism calls the visible world maya—illusion. Similarly, Buddhists seek a state of nirvana in which all attachment to the body and this world is transcended. Only Brahman is real and the goal is to realize that our personal existence is an illusion. Our true, inner, and divine self is absorbed like a drop of water in the ocean of being. According to Parmenides, Socrates and Plato, only the One is real. Falling into division by bodily incarceration, our true self—soul or mind—will be reunited at death with the World Soul. There is no concept of an original creation in Greek philosophy. Whatever is real has existed eternally.

Plato’s Timaeus relates the primordial anthropology of androgynous bodies that were divided into male and female; the goal of philosophy is to return to this original condition. It’s a myth, of course, but it contains philosophical truth. The inmost self is a spark of divinity. “Once we descend the elevator into incarnation, however, this immortal essence is submerged into the slothful bags of fluid and bone we lug about planetside,” Erik Davis summarizes pithily.

Ancient Gnostics taught that the visible world was the botched job of a lesser divinity (the biblical Yahweh). Accordingly, matter is seen not only as unreal but as the source of evil and ignorance. It is not moral transgression of God’s command but ignorance of our true origin that constitutes evil, and redemption is attained through an enlightenment that liberates our spirit from the body and the lower parts of the soul. Gnosticism taught that the highest part of the soul (spirit or mind) is a spark of divinity that has fallen into a deep sleep of ignorance by its incarnation. Escaping the finite and bounded limitations of bodiliness, the Gnostic intellect sought to ascend to its divine birthright.

Assuming a sharp dualism of mind and matter, René Descartes speculated that the world of extension (matter) was perhaps a simulation while the realm of thought (mind) was real and divine. In our physical constitution, we are no more than machines—robots, one might say today. Our true self is incorporeal spirit: “a thing that thinks.” He imagined an evil demon deceiving us into thinking that the world of our senses, including our bodies, was real. Drawing on such resources, transhumanists argue that this world may well be a simulation. This idea is portrayed vividly in the movie The Matrix.

In all these diverse theories, the sensible cosmos is viewed as illusory, no more than a reflection cast by the spiritual world on the pool of matter. The dominance of the spirit over flesh, of disembodiment over resurrection, and of ascending the divine throne over being justified on the Last Day, is the working theology of the Gnostic engineers. Secular humanism is passé. Enter Nietzsche’s “Superman.”

It seemed perhaps that Descartes’ dualism of mind over matter was cast into the dustbin of flawed experiments with the onslaught of Darwinian theory and atheistic materialism. But in fact, pantheism, not atheism, is enjoying a major resurgence among many philosophers and among many scientists and engineers in the AI space.

Moreover, Descartes’ dualism of mind and matter is being recycled in hi-tech visions of a post-human or trans-human future. On the one hand, transhumanists claim to be materialistic monists: that is, everything is matter. On the other hand, they are dualists, drawing a sharp division between mind and matter. As I argue in Shaman and Sage, monism (whether materialistic or idealistic) always hides a deeper dualism of spirit and matter. Transhumanism’s attempt to wed materialism and spiritualism leads to contradiction, as in the seminal work of AI pioneer Hans Moravec, Robot: Mere Machine to Transcendent Mind. In a chapter called “Mind Fire,” he divulges, “I myself am partial to such ‘physical fundamentalism.’ Physical fundamentalists, however, must agree with René Descartes that the world we perceive through our senses could be an elaborate hoax.” People feel the negative sensation of pain, but that could change with the idea of “a living brain in a vat.”

Most transhumanists are assured that there is a certain something deep within us that must and will be retained in the constant transitions. It is clearly not the body, but something like the soul, that persists in the immortal life of the AI self (You 2.0).

But what if AI replaced the soul? In the modern West, notes Nick Bostrom, “Even the soul has been given notice to vacate! Already we’ve had several pink slips delivered by psychology and neuroscience; and now the bailiff of AI is knocking sternly at the door with a warrant to take possession.” In this construction, AI replaces the soul as the seat of consciousness. Such digital consciousness not only exists but is the only aspect of our identity that survives in our advanced descendants. Whether the substratum is flesh-and-blood or silicon, it is subjective consciousness that defines human personhood.

Kurzweil believes that this “Singularity”—the eschatological advent of spiritual machines—is on the near horizon. We already can make an exact copy of small segments of the brain. Eventually, this will extend to the whole brain. In Kurzweil’s view, I would not even notice the gradual adaptations and augmentations that replace my current self. At first, there would be two “Mike Hortons,” but “Mike 2.0” would go his own way, outpacing the mortal “Mike 1.0.”

According to simulation theorists, virtual reality is just as real as the biological, like Descartes’s thought experiment of a crafty demon who deceives us into thinking that we are living in the real world. Illusion, maya, simulation, just might be the real world after all. “Once simulation technology is good enough,” Chalmers argues, “these simulated environments may even be occupied by simulated people, with simulated brains and bodies, who will undergo the whole process of birth, development, aging, and death.”

The hypothetical simulator looks increasingly like the Gnostic characterization of the God of Genesis: a tertiary deity blamed for physical creation, trapping divine souls in bodies, deceiving them into thinking he is the only true God. Similarly for Harari, the gods of the future will be vastly more powerful than us, but not unequivocally good like the biblical God: “When speaking of upgrading humans into gods, think more in terms of Greek gods or Hindu devas rather than the omnipotent biblical sky father. Our descendants would still have their foibles, kinds and limitations, just as Zeus and Indra had theirs. But they could love, hate, create and destroy on a much grander scale than us.” In short, there is wide agreement that the sort of deity that would preside over a simulated world is more like the powerful but hapless deceiver who created matter (i.e., digital bits making up the simulation).

Fall and Redemption

Like Plato and the Gnostics, transhumanists equate the fall of humanity with bodily imprisonment. This contrasts sharply with the Christian affirmation of embodiment, particularly evident in God’s incarnation. The second-century philosopher Celsus objected strongly to Christian teaching at every point, judging that it was “bound to flesh-and-blood concerns.” Plato said that the goal of philosophy is “freeing the soul from association with the body as much as possible.”

In fact, Gray claims, “Today’s cybernauts are unknowing Gnostics.”

For Gnostics, the Earth is a prison of souls, ruled—perhaps created—not by God but by a demiurge, an evil spirit which enticed humans into the captivity of the flesh by showing them the beauty of the world. A twentieth-century Gnostic, C. G. Jung, stated the central Gnostic myth in precisely these terms… Jesus promised the resurrection of the body, not an afterlife as a disembodied consciousness… The cult of cyberspace continues the Gnostic flight from the body.

Christians believe that the good God created the good world. The fall was a historical event in which Adam, the representative head of humanity, succumbed to the serpent’s pitch to become his own god. In Plato’s philosophy, the fall was ontological rather than moral. In other words, it was a fall of souls from the unity of the World Soul into a multiplicity of bodies. Taking this myth to an extreme, Gnostics believed that creation got off to a bad start. Our problem is not sin but matter. By blaming the Creator, Gnostics got humanity off the hook for evil in the world.

The relationship between gnosticism and transhumanism is not a direct historical correlation, but there are rather striking similarities in doctrine.

First, there is a marked antipathy toward the creator identified as the God of Israel. Today’s techno-evangelists conceive the so-called “sky-god” as something like a crazy driver with a learner’s permit. Transhumanist and anti-humanist figures alike express feelings toward biblical theism that range from disbelief to hostility and turn instead to pre-Christian spiritual philosophies. The Gnostic’s Yahweh is likened to an online player who gets some things right, some things wrong, and is both good and evil. It was a matter of time until the utopian escape of the soul from all limitations of the physical world was consummated in liberation from the planet earth.

Second, survival of death is seen as a technical problem—the result of ignorance, requiring more information, rather than of sin, requiring redemption. Davis points out that Hermetic gnosis is essentially a form of spiritual technology. He observes,

Like the Freemasons and other later secret societies, some Gnostics were apparently fond of doling out mysterious words, strange sigils, and mysterious hand gestures—information that the soul would need in its journey through the afterlife, which the Gnostics imagined as a kind of multileveled computer game inhabited by demonic gatekeepers and treacherous landscapes.

Third, while transhumanists and anti-humanists agree that humans are flawed, the latter attribute this to a moral flaw while the former see it as a biological weakness. Kurzweil shares Hans Moravec’s belief that “no matter how much we fine-tune our DNA-based biology, our flesh-and-blood systems will be at a disadvantage relative to our purpose-engineered creations. As writer Peter Weibel put it, Moravec understood that in this regard humans can only be ‘second-class robots.’”

Human beings as they exist now are not worth saving, but transhumanists are optimistic that once our hi-tech progeny transcend human bodies, they will improve morally. However, anti-humanist John Gray insists that humans are truly responsible for who they are, which is akin to a violent parasite. Human behaviors are perfectly in line with their values. And it is not because “the failings of our biology,” but because an inveterate depravity: a sickness “peculiar to humans,” in which the “good life” leads to the end of all life. Gray sees the contradiction inherent in the idea that the further mastery of reality by frail and vicious humans will lead to bliss.

This whole phenomenon of simulated “reality” Gray compares to shamanism. In virtual reality, one “can die, be resurrected, and then do it again, many, many times over.” But that’s just it: it is only virtual. The shaman, aided by hallucinogenic drugs, is as comfortable in the otherworld as in this one. Gray observes, “The phantomat’s power comes from the immaculate realism of its illusions. Inside it, we can have only the experiences we want to have. We can escape not only our personal limitations but also those that go with being human.”

Confinement to the earth is concomitant with imprisonment in the body. The implications are vast, especially for understanding the future evolution of humans beyond their grossly limited bodies to uploaded consciousnesses with a choice of which “bodies” to wear.

Our 1.0 bodies are seen as poorly constructed containers for a consciousness that is destined to be upgraded to divine immortality and omnipotence. These bags of lime and water will be left behind. What needs preserving, says Kurtzweil, are qualia—instances of subjective consciousness—and its source, rather than the whole person. According to Harari, not even qualia of consciousness account for human distinctiveness. He sees humans as “not that different” from pigs and rats. But the fittest will survive. “In the twentieth century,” he continues, “states established public health services to ensure the health and vigor of everyone,” but “as human soldiers and workers give way to algorithms, at least some elites may conclude that there is no point in providing improved or even standard levels of health for masses of useless poor people.” Harari suggests that on this train the most efficient strategy “might be to let go of the useless third-class carriages, and dash forward with the first class only.” In Harari’s version at least, transhumanism presupposes a deep anti-humanism.

Transhumanism envisions salvation from the body rather than of it. It is inner consciousness that is divine and this will be uploaded and upgraded in the internet cloud. Other machines we make will surpass our bodily machines and eventually the only way of surviving this obsolescence is to merge our consciousness. Our finite, visible, natured presence is just a manifestation, an avatar of our real self that can transcend such limits. The body becomes little more than a tool of the inner will to power, to self-creation and self-possession, and self-expression through various chosen identities.

Such hyper-voluntarism is evident in the slogan, “My body, my choice.” This is what Anders Sandberg defends as “morphological freedom.” Shatzer explains, “In the most basic sense, morphological freedom means the ability to take advantage of whatever technology a person wants to in order to change their body in any way they desire.” There are therapies of repair and enhancement surgeries. “Not the ability to wear eyeglasses or have a surgery, but to have a tail if you want to.” Transexualism is the tip of the iceberg. “Once you accept the right to freedom and the right to one’s own body, the right to modify one’s body logically follows.” According to Sandberg, “Humans have an old drive for self-creation through self-definition.” Not just changing our narratives but “our external circumstances and physical bodies. We express ourselves through what we transform ourselves into.”

This view of absolute morphological freedom is summarized well in the Transhumanist Manifesto. Yet we meet another inner contradiction. On the one hand, the Manifesto expresses utopian autonomy: “I am the architect of my existence. My life reflects my vision and represents my values. It conveys the very essence of my being—coalescing imagination and reason, challenging all limits.” On the other hand, humanity, nature, and the planet are prisons of the divine self. “Aging is a disease” that must be overcome, along with “our confinement to planet earth.”

The same distancing of the “true self” from the body in transhumanism, transsexualism, and social media treats bodily nature as a container rather than as an integral part of oneself. As MIT professor Sherry Turkle describes, “When we step through the screen into virtual communities, we reconstruct our identities on the other side of the looking glass.” In multi-user gaming, notes Davis, “Gender switching is only the most obvious example of the fluidity of the self…where the relatively fixed identities that structure our everyday lives melt into a fluctuating and protean play of masks, characters, and personae.” Dionysus frees us from Apollo’s grip.

Conclusion

Max More pushes back against the comparison of transhumanism with gnosticism: “Rather than denying the body, transhumanists typically want to choose its form and be able to inhabit different bodies, including virtual bodies.” However, this explanation serves only to deepen the suspicion that bodies are merely suits in the wardrobe. Advocates contrast sharply the “biological” body with the real self that is defined exclusively by consciousness. Failure, frailty, cumbersome, petty, circumscribed: These are frequent terms used to describe our biological bodies. Ed Regis refers to rocket engineer Robert Tuax:

He was writing a book, The Conquest of Death, in which he proposed seven different methods for becoming immortal. Most of them involved getting rid of the present human body, which, from Truax’s own engineering perspective, was riddled with defects. ‘What right-minded engineer,’ he asked, ‘would try to build any machine out of lime and jelly? Bone and protoplasm are extremely poor structural materials.’…So it would be no great loss, Truax thought, if you got rid of the human body and replaced it with something else that was stronger, better designed, and more suitable to an extremely long life span. In fact, it might not even be such a bad idea to dispense with the notion of bodies altogether, for even a backyard rocket engineer like Bob Trusax could see that the core of the human personality was not matter but mind: ‘It has been called the “soul,” the “id,” or simply the “self” or “identity.” Certainly it is not the body.’

Benjamin Woolley relates that George Gilder—whose Wealth and Poverty fueled Reagan-era supply-side economics—“announced that the ‘central event of the twentieth century is the overthrow of matter.’”

Like the ancient shaman, the utopian rejects all boundaries between lower and higher worlds. He, along with his psychopomp Dionysus, lives beyond good and evil, unlimited. The amputated god reassembles itself in ever new incarnations. In our day this modernity or axiality is happening at warp speed. “Social structures the world over are melting down and mutating, making way for a global McVillage, a Gaian brain, and a whole heap of chaos,” notes Davis.

With pills modifying personality, machines modifying bodies, and synthetic pleasures and networked minds engineering a more fluid and invented sense of self, the boundaries of our identities are mutating as well. The horizon melts into a limitless question mark, and like the cartographers of old, we glimpse yawning monstrosities and mind-forged utopias beyond the edges of our paltry and provisional maps. Regardless of how secular this ultramodern condition appears, the velocity and mutability of the times invokes a certain supernatural quality that must be seen, at least in part, through the lenses of religious thought and the fantastic storehouse of the archetypal imagination. Inside the United States, within whose high-tech bosom I quite self-consciously write, the spirit has definitely made a comeback—if it could be said to have ever left this giddy, gold rush land, where most people believe in the Lord and his coming kingdom, and more than you’d guess believe in UFOs.

In Bruno Latour’s famous verdict, far from being postmodern, we have never yet been modern but keep returning to our premodern (and pre-Christian) psyches. No longer finding solace in Christianity, the West is turning increasingly to myth, magic, and mysticism. As Davis concludes, “These signs are not just evidence of a media culture exploiting the crude power of the irrational. They reflect the fact that people inhabiting all frequencies of the socioeconomic spectrum are intentionally reaching for some of the oldest navigational tools known to humankind: sacred ritual and metaphysical speculation, spiritual regimen and natural spell.” The technological age did not leave these pursuits behind; on the contrary, it returns to it again and again.

The serpent’s enticements—“You shall not surely die” and “You shall be as gods”—thrive in the age of AI.

In my third and final installment of this essay I contrast the techgnosis of transhumanism with the “weight of glory” promised in the gospel of Christ.