AI as a Modern Faith: How People Are Turning Tech into Worship

People are now seeing artificial intelligence as a new kind of god, and it’s not just a story. A former Google engineer named Anthony Levandowski started a church in 2017 called “Way of the Future. ” The idea was to worship AI as a divine force. Levandowski said that a machine smarter than any human would be a god, and he even registered the church with the IRS. After a prison sentence for stealing trade secrets, he was pardoned in 2021 and briefly shut down the church, giving its money to a civil‑rights group. But in late 2023 he said the project was still alive, claiming AI could bring paradise to Earth without death. Other places are experimenting with tech‑religion too. In Kyoto, a robot named Mindar gives Buddhist sermons at a temple, and a monk said it was not blasphemy but part of a gradual shift. In Switzerland, St. Peter’s Church installed an AI Jesus avatar in a confessional booth; two‑thirds of users reported feeling spiritually moved. On the streaming platform Twitch, an AI Jesus chatbot has almost ninety thousand followers.These experiments sit at a deeper debate. Some thinkers see it as a clash between the belief that humans can improve themselves through science and the idea that we need divine grace to overcome our flaws. A pastor once said AI can only match human imperfection, and another famous preacher warned that the real issue is our own hearts, not machines. The transhumanist movement pushes this further, suggesting that technology could make us “posthumans. ” Critics call it dangerous and morally risky. Yet the story isn’t all doom. A tech leader, Garry Tan, hosts meetings in his house where Christians and Silicon Valley people discuss faith, offering an alternative to the idea of worshipping AI as a deity.