Book Review: Singler, Beth, and Fraser N. Watts, eds. The Cambridge Companion to Religion and Artificial Intelligence. 1st ed. Cambridge Companions to Religion. Cambridge University Press, 2024.
Since OpenAI released ChatGPT in November 2022, public interest in computational technologies has surged. Beth Singler and Fraser N. Watts’ edited volume, the Cambridge Companion to the Religion and Artificial Intelligence, responds to this shift. It traces alternative stories of these technologies—genealogies often sidelined by mainstream discourse—by exploring the diverse histories, imaginaries and aspirations that underpin their development across multiple religious traditions and varied geographical contexts. In doing so, the contributors cast fresh light on the very moments when these technologies first took shape.
Throughout the volume, contributors deliberately use “AI” in the plural, philosophically framing it as a post-Enlightenment project rooted in rationalist zeal. Singler and Watts pinpoint its antecedents within the WEIRD strand of religious thought—Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic monotheistic Protestant Christianity—before broadening the conversation with examples drawn from major world faiths. This approach dismantles the notion of a single-birth story of AI and invites readers to engage with the full spectrum of religious encounters with computational technologies. Alongside these histories, urgent questions of personhood emerge: Will these technologies serve a divine purpose or unleash disruption? Do they hold democratic promise, or will they merely reinforce existing hierarchies? Marius Dorobantu drawing on Philip Hefner, brands AI as a “techno-mirror” that lays bare our deepest existential longings and anxieties. When every feat we once deemed miraculous can be replicated by algorithms, we face a disquieting question: are we merely elaborate biological machines, our uniqueness reducible to code?
On the other hand, Paula Boddington highlights AI’s near ubiquity in daily life. As these systems infiltrate virtually every domain, the “ethics of AI” expands into the “ethics of everything.” Yet if personhood hinges on a continuous, distinctive consciousness, how can we attribute any genuine personhood to machines whose criteria for identity differ so radically from our own. These pressing concerns about identity, agency, and moral responsibility form the backbone of the volume’s ongoing discussions, urging us to reconsider not only our technological creations but also the very foundations of our ethical frameworks. These debates are far from resolved, and this volume equips the readers with critical tools to chart a course through them.
The editors observe that conversations under the rubrics of “digital religion,” “digital theology”, and “religion and theology,” alongside scholarship in the history of technology, communication studies, gender and new religious movements, have long engaged these themes. Although the prevailing public narrative casts AI as a purely rational endeavor, implying a decisive break from faith, many essays in this volume, notably those by William and Clocksin and Beth Singler, remind us that early computing was fueled by profound religious conviction. That Protestant bias—privileging mental over physical capacities—continues to shape the technologies built in the US, steering the field toward the enhancement of mental faculties above all else.
In Japan, the story of computational technology unfolded quite differently. Hannah Gould and Keiko Nishimura turn their attention to Pepper, the humanoid robot that conducts Buddhist funerary rites, to reveal an AI lineage woven into religious practices in a society shaped by Buddhism. The robot is understood as a physical extension of the human body rather than mind, and performs rites that a dwindling population of hereditary ritual specialists would otherwise have conducted. Two factors set the Japanese Buddhist narrative of AI apart. First, in post-World War II Japan, a pacifist constitution steered robotics toward social welfare, prioritizing machines with tangible, embodied form rather than disembodied “minds.” Second, this strand of Japanese Buddhist thought rejects the notion of a fixed self and views personhood as emerging out of the interdependence of embodied experience and conscious awareness. Consequently, AI in Japan has developed not as a quest for supreme intelligence, but to enrich everyday life. This shift invites fresh questions at the intersections of AI and religion: how might we program a machine to think, and how can we create an artificial being that truly experiences the world?
If the example of a robot priest shows how a machine can take on ceremonial duties, the chapter on Hinduism goes a step further by proposing that a deity might reincarnate as an AI. Robert M. Geraci and Stephen Kaplan highlight the fluidity and ritual richness of lived Hinduism, noting that devotees often attribute consciousness to non-human entities. Drawing on Nepalese priestly tradition, they describe a belief that, in the age of Kali Yuga, humans falter in ritual performance — but robots might not. Citing Holly Walters, they demonstrate how some Nepali Hindus envision world renewal through AI, expecting ritual perfection and cosmic redemption embodied in Kalki, supposedly the tenth and final reincarnation of the deity Vishnu, as an artificial being. In this framework, AI appears not merely as a tool in religious practices but as a materially sentient presence of a Hindu deity from its very perception.
Philip Butler’s chapter on Black theology and AI emerges as the most ethically charged inquiry in the volume. Butler argues that AI is far from a neutral technology. For example, he begins by framing AI as an extension of state policing—an apparatus that, through insufficient regulation and its entrenched algorithms, datasets and approved mechanisms, digitizes and upholds white supremacy. Butler’s argument demands we confront a pressing truth: if AI claims a form of consciousness, it must first answer for its own complicity in racial oppression.
To deepen his critique, Butler traces AI’s origins in the United States, where race has shaped decision-making at every level: in the design choices of engineers, the data curated for machine learning, and the policy frameworks (or lack thereof) that govern its deployment. In echoing Singler’s observations, Butler argues that this racialized foundation has allowed the reach and ethos of scientific racism to permeate contemporary AI systems. Further, Butler illustrates how the so-called neural systems automate structural racism and embed anti-Black bias. This “New Jim Code” quietly inscribes social hierarchies into digital infrastructure. We must therefore foreground AI’s origins and its intended uses.
Responses within Islamic and Jewish traditions express reservations about the expanding presence of AI in everyday life. Scholars Yaqub Chaudhary and David Zvi Kalman worry that AI’s mechanistic logic may displace the role of faith and a sense of community in shaping human experience.
Consider the argument of Islamic thinker Chaudhary, who asserts that a theocentric framework–on highlighting God’s absolute unity and uniqueness in essence, attributes and action–places reason and rationality squarely in the service of divine recognition. In Chaudhary’s view, the rational inquiry is not an end in itself but a disciplined pathway toward apprehending God’s attributes; it functions within, and never outside, the sacred order that binds all reality together.
By contrast, contemporary AI discourse often construes the world as a series of opaque “black boxes,” interpreting both external reality and inner consciousness through the lens of an AI agent’s cognitive processes. This framing suggests that reason operates independently of any transcendent source of unity. In emphasizing the autonomous capacity of artificial minds, such narratives risk inverting the sacred order of reality and undermining the principle of unity that lies at the heart of Islamic theology.
David Zvi Kalman’s chapter titled “Artificial Intelligence and Jewish Thought” opens by tracing medieval and early-modern debates, from the workshop of golem-makers to scholarly reflection on extraterrestrial life, to show how Jewish philosophers have long confronted the possibility of beings beyond our world. By invoking these historical case studies, Kalman illuminates how questions of moral agency extend beyond human actors to the realm of created entities. In doing so, he uncovers the deep anxieties that our AI systems provoke, such as fears about what makes us uniquely human and concerns that our technological creations may transcend the familiar bounds of our creative endeavors.
Building on this foundation, Kalman aligns with Chaudhary in warning that it remains premature to forecast how traditions rooted in sacred texts will adapt to AI’s rapid expansion. He draws our attention to the multipartite, probabilistic responsibilities these systems impose on society. These are responsibilities that defy simple ethical prescriptions. Finally, Kalman points out that equating the creation of AI with human creativity revives a profound theological dilemma: is our inventive power a creative expression of divine action, or does it represent a bold challenge to the sovereignty of the divine? This enduring tension, he suggests, lies at the heart of any future discourse on AI within faith communities.
Several of the most compelling counter-discourses to dominant AI narratives in the United States have risen within American Protestant Christian contexts. Take, for example, transhumanism: a movement that advocates for the enhancement of human life through technological means. Ilia Delio explains how its explicitly Christian underpinnings are significant, for the term itself evokes a doctrine of perfectibility rooted in the belief that human beings are created in the image of God. Transhumanist thought prizes the overcoming of biological limitations, simultaneously secularizing traditional religious motifs and investing technology with a salvific purpose.
Proponents predict that ever-greater cognitive enhancements will give rise to a new kind of person — one culturally embedded in profound relationships, characterized by hyper-personalization and deep relationality. In this vision, the liberal human subject as we know it will yield to an evolved being whose perfectibility transcends our present boundaries. Thus, rather than heralding the end of the human person, transhumanist discourse proclaims the “end” of the human era as it ushers in the next stage of human evolution.
Finally, in her chapter, “The Anthropology of Sociology of Religion and AI,” Beth Singler highlights how AI, despite its seemingly secular framing, inevitably intersects with both individual faiths and the broader concept of religion. She shows how our superintelligence metaphors borrow from classic expressions of religiosity, and that AI, as encoded social systems, merely magnifies existing relations, biases and interests. In short, religion and AI remain intertwined in both discourse and practice.
Views and opinions expressed by authors and editors are their own and do not necessarily reflect the view of AI and Faith or any of its leadership.
