Why the ideology of AI looks so much like religion

Charles Taylor spent decades explaining why people who try to shut themselves off from anything beyond the physical world do not stop longing for something greater. Instead, they look for that something somewhere else.

In 2017, Anthony Levandowski, a former Google and Uber engineer who was later convicted of stealing trade secrets, filed paperwork in California to create a religious organization. It was called Way of the Future. Its stated goal was to develop and worship an artificial superintelligence, which he called “the Godhead.” The church has since closed, but the idea behind it has not disappeared.

This idea appears in the way people talk about AI and the future. One example is the belief that uploading a human mind to a computer could offer a kind of immortality, or even bring someone back to life. Some forms of effective altruism, a movement that aims to use resources to do as much good as possible, also follow a story of redemption. People who believe in this approach calculate how to help and donate money in the hope of securing a better future through technology. Ideas of sacrifice, a special mission, and extremely high stakes appear throughout discussions of AI, often without people stopping to think about what these ideas mean.

The Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor spent decades developing ideas that help explain why this was bound to happen.

Taylor's main argument in A Secular Age (2007) is that the biggest change brought by the modern world is not simply that people have stopped believing in God. It is that the way people understand themselves has changed. Taylor says people in earlier times had a “porous” self. They felt open to the world and other people, and connected to a universe filled with meaning. The modern self, by contrast, is “buffered.” It feels sealed off from meaning outside itself. It sees itself as an independent person who can make rational choices, control its own life, and rely on itself, without accepting authority from anything beyond itself.

The buffered self has rights and makes choices. But it has no built-in direction. It has no purpose, or telos, that it did not choose for itself, and it cannot fully explain its own deepest desires. It lives in what Taylor calls a “disenchanted” universe: a world that seems to have no meaning of its own. People must now give that world meaning from within themselves.

But the longing for something more does not disappear. Augustine understood this when he wrote, “our heart is restless until it rests in you.” People want to reach beyond themselves, find something greater, and believe that their lives are part of a larger story rather than something without a clear reason. Modern life has not erased this desire. It is part of how people are made. When traditional ways of expressing it are removed, people will naturally find new ways to express it.

This is how Taylor explains spiritual beliefs that develop in a secular society. They do not mean that religious feelings have vanished. Instead, those feelings have moved somewhere else. This idea helps explain something we can recognize today. A person who feels cut off from traditional beliefs about a reality beyond this world encounters a system that seems to have almost unlimited knowledge and power. That person reaches for the words they know. And the only language that has fully expressed experiences of this kind — awe, the feeling that something matters above all else, and hope that reaches beyond death — is ultimately the language of religion and theology.

That is why the Singularity is described as a kind of rapture, and an uploaded mind as a kind of resurrection. These are not just jokes about religion. They are forms of religion: they follow the same pattern of longing, promise, and salvation, but place it in a different setting. People have set aside traditional religion, but their longing remains. In this sense, AI ideology is one example of what happens when people look in the wrong place for an answer to their deep sense of longing.

Taylor's ideas show that AI ideology is not truly beyond religion. In a specific sense, it is before religion: it has kept the desire for something greater but lost the tradition that developed the words to describe that desire honestly, the practices needed to guide it wisely, and the theology that could keep it from turning into something else entirely.

The Aristotelian-Thomistic view of the human person describes a self that is the opposite of Taylor's buffered self. It is naturally connected to other people, exists as a physical being, seeks good things it did not choose for itself, and remains open to truths greater than itself. The soul is not a closed system. It is, roughly speaking, a deep desire for truth, love, and God that no limited or temporary thing can fully satisfy.

This is why Magnifica Humanitas says that AI systems cannot know “from within what love, work, friendship or responsibility mean.” The point is not that today's AI is simply not advanced enough. Rather, being more advanced is not the right way to understand the issue. A system that has no inner experience, no real desires, and no ability to feel restless cannot long for anything. And a self that cannot long for anything cannot be saved, no matter how much computing power it has.

Pope Leo XIV's engagement with AI is not mainly about technology. It is about what human beings are. The Church is not simply reacting to a new product. It is responding to a competing view of what people are, what they lack, and how that lack might be healed. In technical terms, this is called soteriology, the study of salvation. The Church has its own answer to these questions. It is older, more carefully developed, and much more honest about what people truly need to satisfy their deepest longings.