AI and Silicon Valley’s “Spirituality Without Religion” | Modern Reformation

Essay<br>AI and Silicon Valley’s “Spirituality Without Religion”

Michael S. Horton<br>Tuesday, January 20th 2026

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.<br>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.<br>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.<br>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.<br>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.<br>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.<br>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.<br>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.<br>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.<br>Have We Been Here Before?<br>One might assume that no one...