ETD

• algorithmic authority
• algorithmic profiling
• artificial intelligence
• cognitive offloading
• conscience
• embodiment
• human-ai interaction
• imago dei
• incarnation
• liturgy
• moral discernment
• primacy of relationship
• relational ontology
• religious experience
• roman catholicism
• sacred experience
• technological non-neutrality
• transhumanism
• trinity

The transformations of religion in the age of AI are not attributable solely to new technologies. They depend in part on the latter – which possess their own degrees of autonomy – and in part on the active reflection undertaken by individuals and religious communities. The aim is to prevent the human person from coming to resemble the machine: human beings must preserve their distinctiveness in order to safeguard the relational fabric of the bonds for which they are responsible, ensuring that relationship itself continues to exist and avoiding both annihilation and absorption.
Religions, particularly Roman Catholic Christianity, assist in this task as authentic “oases of what is properly human,” within which ancient doctrines, such as the dogmas of the Incarnation and the Trinity, safeguard and promote the dignity of the person and a sapiential understanding of the imago Dei. In today’s technological environments, pervaded by artificial-intelligence systems, religion is called not to yield to a merely informational conception of faith; to rethink the foundations of liturgy around the typically human dimensions of presence, of “scruple” (religio), and of gratuitousness; and to conceive moral discernment as centered on conscience, a “wisdom of the heart,” embodied and interwoven with the emotions, that cannot be substituted by machines.
By safeguarding their difference vis-à-vis the machine, human beings preserve and promote their dignity; otherwise, they risk becoming passive actors, mere functionaries of the “megamachine,” victims of technological apocalypses, or seduced by the desire to hybridize with the machine in transhumanist dreams of power. Religion can indeed be degraded into an instrument of magical control, a precursor of technique; its essence, by contrast, is trust and surrender, and it secures the experience of life’s meaning – something AI will never be able to offer us.