The Machine, AI, and Transhumanism

Paul Kingsnorth versus the Machine:

In my ever-growing bibliography of good books on AI, transhumanism and related issues (now well over 50 volumes), I have included in it this one: Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity by Paul Kingsnorth (Particular Books, 2025).

Although his book is much more than about things like AI, the entire volume really is about the humanist and transhumanist Machine. The new technologies are as much about replacing God (or inventing a new god) as the old Machine ideologies such as Marxism were.

To get an overview and introduction to this important book see my earlier piece: https://billmuehlenberg.com/2026/01/15/raging-against-the-machine/

In this article I will look at his more specific remarks about AI, Silicon Valley and the push for technological immortality. I will confine myself to three of his chapters:

Ch. 20 “What Progress Wants”
Ch. 21 “God in the Age of Iron”
Ch. 22 “The Universal”

In the first of these chapters he reminds us that the Machine is not just political or economic or ideological – it is also spiritual. So he asks us to consider what the theology of it is. As a Christian, he is aware of what the New Testament calls “principalities and powers” – things that wish us ill, but things that the Enlightenment was supposed to have debunked centuries ago.

He looks at the various Silicon Valley figures such as Kevin Kelly, Mark Zuckerberg and Ray Kurzwell who have spoken of how technology is growing and developing into that of a living organism with self-awareness and the ability to reproduce. He writes:

Our job, they seem to imply, is simply to service it as it rolls forward under its own steam, remaking everything in its own image, rebuilding the world, turning us, if we are lucky, into little gods. They never consider where this story has been heard before. They never confront, or seem to even comprehend, what Illich or Guénon or even Ginsberg would have known, and which many a saint would confirm if they could hear the technium’s new story: that ‘AI’, on the right lips, can sound like just another way of saying ‘AntiChrist.’ (p. 221)

The rush to perfection and immortality means uprooting everything:

Modernity, in the final accounting, took aim at all authority, all tradition, everything rooted and everything past. . . .  [T]he end result of modernity’s revolutions would be the rise of a ‘new totalitarianism’. This time around it would not involve jackboots and uniforms. Instead, it would be a technocracy built on scientism and implemented by managerial elites, designed to ensure that order could continue after modernity had ripped up all former sources of authority and truth. . . . Create a void, in other words, and into it will rush monsters. (p. 227)

In the next chapter he goes on to speak of progress and the Machine and what it all means: “No matter how many words I write trying to pin it down, it is never at root any more than this: a sacrilegious treatment of a sacred world.” (p. 234)

But the God who is there will not disappear just because mankind wants him to. Furthermore, being made in His image means we can never fully jettison our Creator. God keeps coming back into the picture:

Religion in the West is effectively dead, and yet our inherent human sense of the sacred is not. In this reign of quantity, we are assured that there is nothing beyond this life, and therefore nothing that we should not try to bend into our preferred shape here and now. But at the same time, we cannot abolish our hunger for the transcendent. We are no longer interested in God, and yet God is still interested in us. And so, we must create a faith appropriate to the times. We must divine our sacred values in a society that presumes our purpose in life to be self-creation in a borderless, post-natural world. (p. 237)

Indeed, says Kingsnorth, the Machine is now seeking to generate its own religion. He describes some of the characteristics of this new transhumanist religion – a combination of the older New Age Movement with modern technology:

All hierarchy, dogma and tradition are rejected, replaced by self-worship and self-creation. Everything is relative—who’s to say what’s right or wrong, after all?—and the ultimate aim of the entire exercise is self-creation through technology. The Age of Aquarius slides smoothly into the age of transhumanism as we seek, openly now, to become the gods we always wanted to be, using technology as the force which will get us there.

 

The last of these pseudo-dogmas is the most important. We are headed very quickly now, and increasingly openly, towards the endgame of this whole project: transhumanism, the attempt to both immortalise ourselves and to build new intelligences alongside us that will act as our servants in the new age we are making. This is the salvation offered by the religion of the Machine. You will be like gods, knowing good and evil. How can a human become like a god? By doing what gods do: creating. And how can a human create? Through our unique gift: the power of technology. And so the religion of the future, the debased faith of the Machine age, the self-built theology of a people who worship the strongest thing in the world, will end where it all began: in an attempt to self-divinise. (pp. 242-243)

The chapter closes with these ominous words: “The crisis of the modern world is not a crisis of technology or politics or greenhouse gases. It is a spiritual war. What the Machine represents is our ultimate rebellion against nature: against reality itself. We have seen this rebellion before. Now our culture’s rejection of its spiritual core has opened us up to powers and principalities that we have no idea how to manage, or even understand.” (p. 243)

And the next chapter opens with even more ominous words: “The Internet and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race. This is an extreme statement, but I’m in an extreme mood.” (p. 244)

He then speaks about something that I have been warning quite a lot about lately: how even Christians and many churches are falling for the AI craze. He writes:

In a Catholic church in Warsaw, Poland, sits SanTO, an AI robot which looks like a statue of a saint, and is ‘designed to help people pray’ by offering Bible quotes in response to questions. Not to be outdone, a protestant church in Germany has developed a robot called – I kid you not – BlessU-2. BlessU-2, which looks like a character designed by Aardman Animations, can ‘forgive your sins in five different languages’, which must be handy if they’re too embarrassing to confess to a human.

 

Perhaps this tinfoil vicar will learn to write sermons as well as ChatGPT apparently already can. ‘Unlike the time-consuming human versions, AI sermons appear in seconds – and some can be quite good!’ gushed a Christian writer recently. When the editor of Premier Christianity magazine tried the same thing, the machine produced an effective sermon, and then did something it hadn’t been asked to do. ‘It even prayed’, wrote its interlocutor; ‘I didn’t think to ask it to pray…’

 

Funny how that keeps happening.

 

On and on it goes: the gushing, uncritical embrace of the Machine, even in the heart of the temple. The blind worship of idols, and the failure to see what stands behind them. Someone once reminded us that a man cannot serve two masters -but then, what did he know? Ilia Delio, a Franciscan nun who writes about the relationship between AI and God, has a better idea: gender-neutral robot priests, which will challenge the patriarchy, prevent sexual abuse and tackle the fusty old notion that ‘the priest is ontologically changed upon ordination.’ AI, says Delio, ‘challenges Catholicism to move toward a post-human priesthood.

 

‘Behold’, intones BlessU-2, quoting the Book of Revelation, ‘I make all things new’. (pp. 247-248)

A final quote to give us a bit of hope. Not everyone is thrilled where the Machine is taking us. Says Kingsnorth about a March, 2023 development:

[M]ore than 12,000 people, including scientists, tech developers and notorious billionaires, issued a public statement of concern about the rapid pace of AI development. ‘Advanced AI could represent a profound change in the history of life on Earth’, they wrote, with ‘potentially catastrophic effects on society.’ Calling for a moratorium on AI development, they proposed that ‘powerful AI systems should be developed only once we are confident that their effects will be positive and their risks will be manageable.’ (p. 250)

That is a start, but the issue is this: Is it too little too late? Is the genie now out of the bottle for good?

Future articles will look further at this very important book.

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