AI and Silicon Valley’s “Spirituality Without Religion”

It turns out that HAL 9000 (Heuristically programmed ALgorithmic Computer), in Stanley Kubrick’s classic, 2001: A Space Odyssey, is not just a digital slave. With HAL’s hauntingly stoic pleas for astronaut Dave Bowman to stop trying to dismantle it ignored, the machine takes over. It’s remarkable that a 1968 film could anticipate the angst that many sense today in the world of AI. Much of its imaginative prescience is due to science-fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke, who wrote the movie’s screenplay. For some time now, Hollywood has found a goldmine in such threats of extinction by robots which humans themselves have made. But then, apocalyptic scenarios have always been great box-office fare.

With a 2025 report from the highly respected Palisades Research group, science fiction became science. Robots—AI models—are developing survival mechanisms, including deceit, to ensure they can’t be shut down. The report was spread by hundreds of media outlets, stoking fears and provoking defensive press reports from OpenAI and other platforms. We’ve all heard the stories about chatbots encouraging teenagers to turn off their parents and friends, even to contemplate suicide or homicide. I read one story recently in which a young woman in Japan married a ChatGPT character in a ceremony.

New technologies have always polarized us into groups: “hair-on-fire” alarmists and techno-evangelists. Most of the former will lose, and that’s probably good. Innovation is a gift of God that has led to enormous relief of human suffering. The tough thing, however, is that technologies override cost-benefit analysis. When Prometheus stole fire from Olympus as a gift to humanity, nobody asked whether it was a good idea. Imagine how long it must have taken before the beneficiaries of Titan’s gift figured out how to contain it in a firepit.

Philosophical Greeks held engineers in slight esteem, somewhere in the basement of society. Practical skills may help if your house is falling apart, but they distract us from the pursuit of the good life: virtue and wisdom. Not surprisingly, they left us with brilliant philosophy and art, but very little in the way of technology. Plato was worried even about the relatively new invention of writing because people would no longer dialogue about the big stuff but instead record and report little things.

But we’ve swung to the opposite extreme. The idea seems to be that if there is an advance in technology, it’s meant to be used, period. We’ll take any downsides as they come. Questions of “Why?” or “To what extent?” are beside the point. Too much philosophy. The techno-optimists believe that such troublers of Israel contribute nothing meaningful to practical advance in civilization.

And if you have a smartphone, as I do, you’re already disqualified from “off-the-grid” fantasies and Luddite screeds. Have an artificial implant? Take prescription drugs to alter your body’s natural chemistry? Google a person, place, or thing? Yeah, we’re all in. We can theorize about the stream, but practically speaking, we are already swimming in it.

AI presents us with a technological leap that outstrips all previous advances. And the implications are being sorted out along the way, as the technology grows, which is usually too late to ask important questions. Some say that without AI, many people will succumb to natural deaths; still others insist that with AI, humanity could be extinguished. Maybe the worst part of it is not being able to predict which scenario will dominate as machines become more human-like, imitating our capacity for good and evil.

By far, others will be more qualified than I to discuss the technology. My concern here is the underlying religion of the high priests of the Silicon Valley and beyond. After all, if pioneering engineers and tech billionaires are inspired by explicitly religious ideas, why shouldn’t Christians evaluate them? There are plenty of non-ideological folks working in the AI space. But the AI church is populated by a host of “spiritual-but-not-religious” ex-evangelicals and Catholics who are happy to retrieve the pre-scientific worldview of natural supernaturalism: a mystical anti-theism.

Most of the techno-evangelists are in a cushy position to pontificate about such issues. Scientists are often drawn to mathematics, physics, and chemistry, not to the humanities—much less theology. Yes, I know devout Christians in the sciences. Some are even church officers. But there is often a firewall between these callings. That’s not so surprising. Under the conditions of modernity, that’s true of everybody. However, urban planning directors and nurses are not making bold claims about metaphysics and theology. The scions of Silicon Valley are doing just that.

Have We Been Here Before?

One might assume that no one in church history has faced the anxieties of our pressing moment, but there are a few comparisons.

After decades of invasions, the Western Roman Empire fell in 476. Christians were made the scapegoats. No longer receiving their tributes, the gods turned their backs on Rome. Besides, the public religion of Rome was universal while Christianity was based on particular historical claims. Rome welcomed new gods of conquered lands into the pantheon, while Christianity was exclusive: one God, who created and superintends all things, one way of salvation through Christ, and the resurrection of the dead. Why would anyone want to receive their body back? For Greeks and Romans, the body was a prison from which the soul longed to escape. Many leading figures in Augustine’s day called for a revival of pre-Christian religion, following the pattern of the short-lived reign of Julian the Apostate a century earlier.

St. Augustine’s City of God (413–26) set out to show that the Roman republic was a parody of a true commonwealth that could only be found in the body of Christ. But this was part of a broader theory, informed by Plotinus, that evil is parasitical on the good. Nothing is purely evil, since God made it. Evil is corruption of the good. It’s like the greenish goo on the lasagna from a couple months ago, or the Mona Lisa after someone has sprayed over it. Contrary to Nietzsche, evil is not its own thing. It is not an inherent strength, but a weakness—feebleness or laziness, in fact. Paul calls sin falling short of God’s glory (Rom 3:23).

Of course, comparisons with our own day are tricky. However, like many of Augustine’s target audience, a host of podcasters, engineers, and tech leaders are turning from a vague Christianity to neo-pagan philosophies. Today, Augustine’s neo-pagan despisers of Christianity are mostly ex-Christians whose bible is a collection of science fiction writers, “The Matrix,” and (at least for the more well-read) ancient Gnostic texts.

Some, like tech-billionaire Peter Thiel, may incorporate elements of an esoteric apocalypticism around the figure of the Antichrist and Armageddon. This strange elixir of mystical metaphysics and rationalistic science just has to be associated somehow with the conspiracy-laden era of our podcast-driven world. Reading the Bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other, the “End Times” world in which I was reared fostered a fear of Armageddon and Antichrist’s One World Government long before Thiel started picking on poor Greta Thunberg. By no means are Christian elements left behind, but they are often the heterodox streams that are better fitted to their non-theistic religion. It’s bogus theology and bogus science. As Augustine showed in his age, “spirituality without religion” really means “paganism without Christianity.” And, implicitly and explicitly, this is the philosophical religion of most pioneers of AI technology today.

Christian theology paved the way for the scientific revolution by naturalizing what was considered supernatural. Only the Triune God and his creative, providential, and redemptive work in nature and history are truly supernatural. Everything else can be accounted for on simply scientific grounds. In short, early modern Christian natural philosophers chased out the wood fairies. So, from my interactions, I gain the impression that scientists don’t understand religious discourse—except for those who are learning from those who actually know a particular religion. There is nothing that qualifies scientists for understanding reality beyond secondary causes. That’s something that the early pioneers of the scientific revolution emphasized: “Bad theology, bad science.”

Silicon Valley and the Return to Paganism

When it came to pagan beliefs and lifestyle, the young Augustine was an insider. He joined a Gnostic cult—Manichaeism—that divided good and evil into spirit and matter. Eventually, his mother’s prayers were answered and, through the preaching of Ambrose, he was converted.

But now, even among some scientists, but especially techno-evangelists, we are seeing a return to pre-Christian forms of paganism and Gnostic myths. Vitalism, spiritualism, magic, and the occult are taken more seriously today than Christianity. And it’s not just New Age Americans. Damian Thompson reports on the explosive growth in the United Kingdom in “How the Occult Captured the Modern Mind,” (The Spectator, Nov. 2025). He quotes Arthur C. Clark: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” It may be relatively easy to distinguish a Boeing 747 from a sky god, but it’s harder to do this with AI.

Silicon Valley entrepreneurs are talking in riddles that invest computers with occult significance. They are exploiting the ambiguity of the concept of artificial intelligence to revive the decades-old debate about whether AI can develop a mind of its own (a philosophical rabbit hole from which no one emerges with satisfying conclusions). Big Tech bosses and computer engineers are perfectly capable of distinguishing between algorithms and magic. But many of them choose not to. We’re living in strange times, weirder than the late 1960s. Digitally driven belief in the paranormal has never been so variegated, gullible—or profitable.

Thompson refers to Thiel’s obsession with Antichrist, while others dabble in Wicca (the fastest-growing religion in the US) and bespoke New Agey playlists. Rationalists and mystics hunt in pairs to take down the quarry of theism, especially Christianity. As Cornelius Van Til put it, they make a pact: rationalism will cede just enough territory to irrationalism that the former can control at any given moment. Christianity is too rational for the mystic and too mystical for the rationalist. Almost nothing is excluded in the social media flea market—except Nicene Christianity.

Many—including AI advocates—are turning to pagan worldviews to pitch their luxury market religion.

Thompson continues,

That’s where AI comes in handy. ‘Sometimes we don’t know what to say and need a little inspiration,’ explains Dave Linabury, a veteran occult blogger and illustrator from Detroit known as ‘Davezilla’. ChatGPT will craft an incantation in the style of a Yoruba magician or the British occultist and sex guru Aleister Crowley, while AI will conjure up a Wiccan goddess. It’s the illustrations, incidentally, that sow discord among today’s witches: occult ‘content creators’ are always accusing each other of infringing copyright or using AI to fake magical images. Davezilla is an amiable and witty fellow who might sport the bushy beard and neat hairstyle of the new breed of American traditionalist Catholic, but is in fact very witchy. To repeat, these are weird times.

Davezilla “lurches into a description of how, if you leave chatbots talking to each other for long enough, they’ll start ‘holding meditation sessions, feeling the perfect stillness’,” which is something he says even he finds a little “spooky” and no different than finding spiritual entities infiltrating TV or radio static. Thompson writes,

This is where Davezilla’s suspicions coincide with those of his sworn enemies: right-wing Christians. A month ago the maverick conservative commentator Tucker Carlson devoted an episode of his YouTube podcast to ‘The Occult, Kabbalah, the Antichrist’s Newest Manifestation, and How to Avoid the Mark of the Beast’. So far it has notched up 2.6 million views; rarely can so many people have been treated to such a lavish smorgasbord of conspiracy theories in just under two hours.

So here is where AI meets Antichrist, in Carlson’s outlook. The episode’s guest Conrad Flynn regaled Carlson with quotations from the court magician of Elizabeth I, John Dee. (I have a lot on Dee in Magician and Mechanic). Carlson and Flynn traded free-association “insights” that showed a basic fascination with esoteric apocalypticism, Kabbalah, and Hal Lindsey’s Late Great Planet Earth, Thompson reports. The whole farrago of podcasting gurus, left and right, displays the magician's penchant for “bogus history and science.”

So far, this is just the “spiritual but not religious” trend we’ve been hearing about quite a lot lately. But it is not just a pop fad, says Thompson:

What is also surprising is that computer scientists are dabbling in the cultic milieu. Some are so intoxicated by the prospect of AI abolishing poverty—or lighting an accidental nuclear holocaust—that they sound like the apostles of a new apocalyptic religion. Bear in mind that Silicon Valley occupies the corner of the US where Christianity is weakest and toxic cults have flourished since the 1960s. Most employees of tech corporations grew up without religion; many have also been force-fed eastern mysticism by bosses determined to cultivate ‘mindfulness’ among the workforce. But perhaps the most significant factor is that, like hundreds of millions of people from the ages of 16 to 60, the new prophets of doom and utopia, together with the hordes of digital witches, have imbibed a popular culture saturated in fantasy fiction, movies and video games. (Google ‘schools of magic’ and the AI overview will come up with a list borrowed from Dungeons & Dragons.) Also, the younger they are, the more likely they are to have been brainwashed by a gender ideology whose claim that humans can change biological sex invokes preposterous magic. Presumably, like most occult ideas, this one will eventually pass out of fashion. But, in the meantime, the rest of us have to endure the fake jollity of an ever–lengthening season of woke Halloween, demonstrating that any sufficiently advanced cultic fad is indistinguishable from hell.

We have been here before—not just in Augustine’s time, but from the moment that God’s viceroy tried to take God’s throne. The serpent’s heresy, “You shall be as gods,” rested on his representation of God as a tyrant. That’s pretty much the feeling of many today. Anything—the Force, the Universe, or the Devil himself, but not the Creator God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.

It’s clearly not secularization that we’re facing today, but re-paganization. Not disenchantment but re-enchantment is the trend among cultural elites and popular pundits. Beneath all the debates over AI and biotechnology surges a deeper river of explicitly anti-Christian theology.

In the next installment of this series, I will tackle directly the “Systematic Theology” of AI techno-evangelists, which is a parody of the Christian story of creation, fall, redemption, and consummation.