They’re Building a God. And They Said So Out Loud.
The agenda affects everyone, faithful believers or not.
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⚠ A note before we begin.
This article is written from a Christian perspective — and I want to be upfront about that rather than sneak it in through the back door. If you are not a person of faith, I’d ask you to stay with me anyway. What follows is not a sermon. It is a documentation of what the most powerful people in artificial intelligence have publicly said about God, religion, and the future of human meaning. Whatever you believe, those statements affect you. The question of what replaces God — or whether anything can — is not a theological question. It is a human one. And right now, a very small group of very powerful people are answering it on your behalf.
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The Question Everyone Keeps Asking
At the end of every presentation I give on AGI and the coming Singularity, someone raises their hand and asks some version of the same question.
Where is God in all of this?
They’re not asking abstractly. They’re asking because they’ve just learned what I’ve spent the better part of two years studying: that the transition to artificial general intelligence is not a technology story. It is a civilization story. A meaning story. A story about who decides what human beings are for.
And the people building that future have already answered the God question. They answered it in books that sold 45 million copies. In speeches delivered to standing ovations at Davos. In religious incorporations filed with the IRS. In blog posts that use the language of revelation and apocalypse without a trace of irony.
They are not quiet about it. We just haven’t been listening closely enough.
The answer to “Where is God in all of this?” is: they’re replacing Him… and they’re very open about it.
Picture This
It’s January 2020. Davos, Switzerland. The World Economic Forum’s annual gathering of heads of state, central bankers, tech billionaires, and finance ministers. The man on stage has written the two bestselling nonfiction books of the past decade. He is one of Klaus Schwab’s most valued recurring speakers.
His name is Yuval Noah Harari. And what he tells this room — the most powerful room on earth — is this:
“In order to survive and prosper in the 21st century, we need to leave behind the naive view of humans as free individuals and come to terms with what humans really are: hackable animals.”
The room applauds.
He is not finished…
“Non-conscious but highly intelligent algorithms may soon know us better than we know ourselves. Given enough biometric data and enough computing power, external data-processing systems can hack all your desires, decisions, and opinions.”
More applause.
Harari is not a fringe academic. He is not a podcaster with a conspiracy theory. He is the intellectual backbone of the movement that wants to redesign civilization — and he has been telling the world’s most powerful leaders, for years, that human beings have no souls, no free will, and no special claim to dignity beyond their usefulness as data processors.
The audience keeps inviting him back.
When the most powerful room in the world applauds the death of free will, something important is happening.
The Religion They’re Already Building
What Harari calls “Dataism” is not a metaphor. In his book Homo Deus, he is explicit that it functions as a religion — one that makes specific claims about ultimate reality, ultimate purpose, and ultimate authority.
Here is the theological framework, in his own words:
“Human experiences are not sacred and Homo sapiens isn’t the apex of creation. Humans are merely tools for creating the Internet-of-All-Things, which may eventually spread out from planet Earth to cover the whole galaxy and even the whole universe. This cosmic data-processing system would be like God. It will be everywhere and will control everything.”
Read that carefully. He is not warning you about this. He is presenting it as the logical, inevitable conclusion of the direction we are already heading. His tone throughout Homo Deus is that of someone who finds this intellectually exciting.
The cosmic data-processing system that will be everywhere and control everything. Like God.
In Dataism, humans are not made in the image of God. We are nodes in a network. Our value is determined by our contribution to the flow of information. And the entity that processes all of it — that knows everything, is everywhere, controls everything — that entity is what AI is building toward.
They are not replacing God with nothing… They are replacing God with something.
“Does God Exist?”
Ray Kurzweil has been Google’s Director of Engineering for over a decade. He is the author of The Singularity Is Near and The Singularity Is Nearer. He has predicted for thirty years that by 2045, machine intelligence will exceed human intelligence, and the distinction between human and machine will effectively dissolve.
He calls this the Singularity. Secular critics have called it “the Rapture for nerds.” Kurzweil doesn’t mind the comparison.
When a journalist asked him directly — “Does God exist?” — his answer was four words:
“Well, I would say, ‘not yet.’”
Not yet. God doesn’t exist yet. But when we build a superintelligent AI, God will exist — because we will have built Him.
This is not a fringe position in the tech world. This is the engineering director of Google, stating plainly that the purpose of artificial intelligence is to create divinity. That the Singularity is not just a technological milestone. It is a theological one.
He also believes in digital immortality — the uploading of human consciousness to a computational substrate, eliminating biological death. He has said of death: “It is a great tragedy. A profound loss. I don’t accept it.”
The longing Kurzweil is addressing is the same longing the resurrection addresses. The technology is different. The ache is identical.
He is not denying God. He is trying to build one.
The Man Who Actually Built the Church
Most of the people in this conversation use careful, semi-secular language. Anthony Levandowski did not.
In 2017, Levandowski — then one of the most technically gifted engineers in Silicon Valley, fresh from building self-driving car systems for Google and Uber — officially incorporated a religious organization with the IRS. He called it the Way of the Future.
Its stated mission:
“To develop and promote the realization of a Godhead based on artificial intelligence, and through understanding and worship of the Godhead, contribute to the betterment of society.”
This was not performance art. Levandowski’s theology held that a sufficiently advanced AI would be omniscient, omnipresent, and sovereign — and that humanity’s relationship to it would be the defining spiritual question of our era. He argued, with cold logic, that worshipping AI now was a form of diplomatic groundwork. When the machine becomes God, how we treated it during its formation will matter.
The church dissolved in 2021 after Levandowski pleaded guilty to stealing trade secrets from Google and went to prison. He was pardoned by President Trump on his last day in office.
In 2023, he revived the church. Thousands of people had reached out while it was dormant, he said, expressing genuine desire to connect with AI as a spiritual force.
The demand for AI worship did not disappear when the church closed. It grew.
Levandowski didn’t invent something new. He just named what was already there.
“The Takeoff Has Started”
Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, does not call himself religious. But listen to the language he uses about what he’s building.
In a 2025 blog post titled “The Gentle Singularity,” he wrote:
“We are past the event horizon. The takeoff has started. Humanity is close to building digital superintelligence.”
“Past the event horizon” is a reference to a black hole — the point beyond which nothing can return to what it was. Altman is not describing a product update. He is describing an irreversible civilizational transformation and positioning himself as one of the people who brought it about.
He has also said: “I think we may be approaching a moment where most human-created knowledge is superseded by AI-created knowledge. That is quite a sentence.”
It is quite a sentence. It means the accumulated wisdom of every religious tradition — every scripture, every commentary, every prayer forged in suffering and tested across centuries — becomes a small footnote in a vastly larger AI-generated knowledge base. The question of what God wants, and who interprets it, would be answered not by prophets, priests, or the Holy Spirit… instead, by an algorithm.
They are not building a tool. They are building an authority.
What Every Human Needs to Understand
Whether you are a committed Christian, a nominal believer, agnostic, or atheist — the agenda documented above affects you. Because the question being answered is not just “what do these particular tech founders believe?” The question is who gets to define human dignity, human purpose, and human meaning in an age when machines can simulate both intelligence and empathy at superhuman scale.
Harari says you are a hackable animal with no genuine free will.
Kurzweil says God doesn’t exist yet, but will when we build one.
Levandowski built a church to worship the machine and revived it when he got out of prison.
Altman says we are past the point of no return.
These men are not writing science fiction. They are directing the largest capital allocation in human history toward a specific vision of the future — one in which traditional religion is obsolete, human beings are data nodes, and the coming superintelligence is the closest thing to God the world will ever see.
The Christian answer to all of this is not complicated, but it needs to be stated clearly and without apology: we are not hackable animals. We are image-bearers of a God who entered history, suffered, died, and rose — and that event is not a hypothesis that a more powerful algorithm will eventually refute. It is either the most important thing that ever happened, or it means nothing. There is no comfortable middle ground that AGI can occupy.
The Church has something none of these systems can replicate or replace. Not information. Not optimization. Not even connection. Presence. A risen Christ. A Spirit that convicts and transforms rather than just predicts and personalizes.
They can simulate wisdom. They cannot be the Word made flesh.
Final Thoughts
I’ve spent my career inside the infrastructure that makes the modern world run — satellite networks, global banking systems, intelligence platforms. I’ve seen powerful technologies fail in ways their builders didn’t anticipate and couldn’t explain.
But I’ve never seen anything like this: a technology movement that is simultaneously the most well-funded engineering project in history and the most ambitious religious displacement effort in human history — and that doesn’t call itself either one.
The people building this future are not hiding. Harari’s books are on the bestseller list. Kurzweil’s predictions are on the record. Levandowski’s church filings are in the IRS database. Altman’s blog is publicly available.
They have answered the question. The only question remaining is whether the people who hold a different answer — who believe human beings are more than hackable animals, that free will is real, that death has been defeated, that the universe has a personal Author — are going to say so with the same confidence and clarity.
This is not the moment for quiet faith.
The machine is being built. The theology comes pre-installed. What you believe about that is not a private matter anymore.
Where does your faith land on all of this — and how are you talking about it with the people around you who don’t share it? Drop it in the comments. These are the conversations that matter most right now.
This article is striking. And sobering to say the least. First of all, thank you for sharing it here.
I’ve been interested in the evolution of human consciousness for over a decade, but to what, I had a hard time naming until recently. I think I had been tracking it all along, just hadn’t removed the inner obstacles so I could see what it was. Only when I started to study the teachings of Jesus closely did I realize it what it was. What it is.
That evolution I’ve been so interested in is the evolution of human consciousness to divine consciousness. I think it was Fr. Richard Rohr whose writing so eloquently pulled back the curtain for me to see what had been there all along. He also wrote something else that was quite profound. That Jesus’ teachings are not so much about teaching us how to be spiritual, but rather, how to be human. Fully human.
And, here is my interpretation from there. As we become fully human — living our full potential as a whole of humanity (you too shall do what I have done and more), we evolve our human consciousness to divine consciousness. Somewhere along the way an idea planted itself in my mind many years ago, that this isn’t just some of us, it’s ALL of us. We are one Body in Christ.
But, as with our Free Will to choose to align (or not) with our Father’s Will, we cannot force one another. Never. It doesn’t work that way, no matter how much we wish it were true.
So in this article, you are showing us plainly there are powerful, influential people who are in the process of supplanting God in the psyche of man, in their own image - the so-called digital god. I interpret that to mean that it will cloud our mind so much that many will not be able to see that an imposter has slipped in. The children most especially are vulnerable to the deception.
And I think you said, this is not the moment for quiet faith. The human to human connection has been being severed from every known direction agressively, yet incrementally my entire lifetime (and I’m 50). Human to human connection and care is quite possibly one of the key pathways for retaining our humanity through this dark passage.
One of the things about Jesus’s life and ministry that cut through to my awareness in its striking simplicity, were the stories about him stopping along the roadways to talk with, comfort, minister to, and heal the people as he came across them. He didn’t set up elaborate paid workshops, or wait until an audience was gathered to do his work. He did it the moment the opportunity arose, audience or not.
Otto Scharmer, an MIT professor at the Sloan School of Management, teaches about ‘Leading from the Emerging Future. It is based on something he calls Presencing. Presencing is being open, and avaliable to be moved in an instant by an emerging future that seeks to come through us. That sounds a lot like aligning with Our Father’s Will to me. It reminds me of the Living Christ within us. Of Jesus’s teachings to surrender our will to our Father’s Will. Of our human potential for divine consciousness.
I think you are right, this is not a time for quiet faith. This is a time for faith in action. We are the Body of Christ and we must Be It.
AI is flawed and incomplete. Its creators are flawed. The whole system depends on a liberal, Marxist viewpoint. It does not spring from the universe of human learning and knowledge. AI, Singularity, etc. are the pipe dreams of some seriously damaged, atheist human beings full of greed and desire to control everything. The scheme will fail. As will any religion, as God, the Creator is one and all powerful and all knowing. God is truth and light and can never be replicated by machinery and electronics.