Religion and Artificial Intelligence: An Introduction (Engaging with Religion)

International Society for Science & Religion's 2025 Book Prize recipient, in the category of books for professionals and educators

Artificial intelligence (AI) is rarely out of the news or the public imagination. Images of red-eyed Terminators illustrate press accounts of incremental advances in medical diagnosis, facial recognition, natural language processing, and robotics. Such advances are transforming society through measurable impacts on people’s decisions and opportunities.

Religion and Artificial Intelligence: An Introduction explores an emerging field with a religious studies approach, drawing on cultural and digital anthropological methods to demonstrate the entanglements of religion and AI, our imaginaries of these objects and our ideas about their utopian or dystopian futures. It addresses key topics, including the following:

• What AI is and is not.
• How religions are reacting to AI with examples of rejection, adoption, and adaptation.
• How established religions understand creation and place human-like AI within that.
• How overtly secular and even ‘new atheist’ groups understand AI as a tool for liberation from human evolution and religion.
• Religious visions of superintelligent AI.

This engaging book is essential for anyone considering the relationship between religion, science and technology, and interested in the questions raised by transhumanism, posthumanism, and new religious movements.

The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under A creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

Beth Singler is the Assistant Professor in Digital Religion(s) at the University of Zurich (UZH), Switzerland; co-lead of the Media Existential Encounters and Evolving Technology Lab at UZH; an Associate Professor at the Digital Society Initiative at UZH; a Fellow of the International Society for Science and Religion; and a member of the Human Augmentation Research Network.