---
title: "Untangling Religion From Our AI Debates"
description: "Thomas Moynihan, a historian of ideas at Cambridge's Centre for the Study of Existential Risk, argues in this February 2024 Noema essay that the \"boomer versus doomer\" quarrel over artificial general intelligence recapitulates a schism inside Christian theology."
type: "reading-notes"
authors:
  - "Thomas Moynihan"
published: "2024-02-27"
original_url: "https://www.noemamag.com/untangling-religion-from-our-ai-debates/"
canonical_url: "https://antikythera.wiki/work/media/noema-untangling-religion-from-our-ai-debates"
md_url: "https://antikythera.wiki/md/work/media/noema-untangling-religion-from-our-ai-debates"
last_updated: "2026-08-23"
site: "Antikythera Wiki"
---

# Untangling Religion From Our AI Debates

> Independent, unofficial reading notes from Antikythera Wiki (https://antikythera.wiki). Written with AI from the published text, with citations; not by the work's author and not affiliated with Antikythera (https://antikythera.org). Read the original at the link below.

- **Authors:** Thomas Moynihan
- **Published:** 2024-02-27
- **Kind:** Essays, talks & interviews · Essay
- **Venue:** Noema Magazine
- **Original:** https://www.noemamag.com/untangling-religion-from-our-ai-debates/
- **Length:** 4.3k words
- **This page:** https://antikythera.wiki/work/media/noema-untangling-religion-from-our-ai-debates
- **Notes generated:** 2026-08-23

## Summary

[Thomas Moynihan](https://antikythera.wiki/people/thomas-moynihan), a historian of ideas at Cambridge's [Centre for the Study of Existential Risk](https://antikythera.wiki/people/cambridge-cser), argues in this February 2024 Noema essay that the "boomer versus doomer" quarrel over artificial general intelligence recapitulates a schism inside Christian theology. Both sides assume that history is the perfecting of mind, that the perfection is imminent, and that reaching it endangers everything human; they differ only on whether to hasten or forestall it. Moynihan traces that schema from the Greek link between perfection and death through Neoplatonism, Augustine, and medieval debates on omnipotence to Teilhard de Chardin and today's accelerationists and safetyists. He then uses Hans Blumenberg's reply to Karl Löwith to argue that finding theological residue does not discredit a concept, and that existential risk is real even where its framing is distorted. The essay is a companion to Bratton's After Alignment: both reject "alignment" understood as fixing AI to a snapshot of human values, Moynihan on the grounds that values exist only inside an unfinished history.

## The argument

Moynihan begins with Teilhard watching the moon over the trenches in 1918 and concluding that intelligence would one day have to shed human flesh to survive entropy. Teilhard was a Jesuit and never disguised the theology behind his planetary brain; Moynihan asks whether the same structure persists in secular AI discourse, where the OpenAI upheaval of late 2023 produced accusations of "secular religion" on both sides. His aim, he says, is not to undermine AI safety but to find what theological inheritances are present and what can be done with them.

The shared premise he identifies is perfection. Superintelligence is routinely imagined as perfected intelligence, the limit of instrumental power approached through explosive self-improvement, and perfection in the Abrahamic tradition has meant the complete fulfilment of what a thing is, with no moral component required. The genealogy runs through a linguistic accident: words for spiritual perfection in Sanskrit, Arabic, Pali, and Greek also mean extinguishment or death, and teleios sits beside telos and teleute. Neoplatonism made annihilation of the delimited self the condition of perfection, and Augustine made perfection attainable only in death. Gregory of Nyssa warned against arriving at the limit too quickly; the Brethren of the Free Spirit tried to enact unaligned godliness by abandoning moral restraint. Moynihan calls them the accelerationists of their day and reads effective accelerationism's thermodynamic vocabulary as the same schema in a different idiom.

The safety side is not exempt. Late-medieval theologians extremized divine omnipotence into a super-agent beyond anthropomorphism and governance, and distinguished God's ordered power from his absolute power; Moynihan matches this to paperclip maximizers and the aligned/unaligned distinction. Hopes that an aligned AGI would close history and fill the light cone with consciousness mirror millennial stasis and the principle of plenitude.

The essay then asks what follows from these resemblances. Löwith in 1949 argued that progress is illegitimate because it is secularized eschatology. Blumenberg replied in 1964 that progress is not stolen but reoccupies a conceptual role Christianity created and then left empty when the apocalypse failed to arrive; what distorts the heir is the parent's unfulfilled promise of total answerability. Moynihan applies this to existential risk. His own 2020 book argued that extinction is a distinctly modern idea, the ending of sense rather than a sense of an ending, but he now concedes that existential questions are especially liable to overstretch into theological shapes, and that he may have done so himself. The risks remain real; the vigilance concerns framing.

The conclusion is that history will not end even after safe alignment. Values exist only in the histories that produce them and must be revisable to be one's own, so alignment as supergluing synthetic mind to a current picture of humanity would betray the fact that humans are a work in progress. Moynihan cites Isaiah Berlin on incompatible goods and proposes aiming for a world that is survivable rather than solved. He ends by admitting that no viewpoint is free of theological residue, including the one that scorns secular religions.

## Section by section

### Opening and Heresy & Faith In The Age Of Intelligent Machines

Teilhard's trench epiphany sets up the claim that secular and sacred remain hard to disentangle. The section surveys accusations of secular religion in AI, climate politics, and Silicon Valley, and states the essay's purpose: acknowledge the inheritances and ask what to do with them.

### The Ancient Pursuit of Perfected Intelligence

Accelerationists and safetyists share belief in an imminent threshold that dissolves the human; Moynihan identifies the recurring European split between wariness toward the climax and impatience for it.

### Thermodynamics & Applied Theogony

Effective accelerationism's language of dissipative technocapital is matched to Teilhard, who wrote that apotheosis demands "evacuation" of the old mankind and compared the posthuman to a tumor.

### Death By Perfection

The philological and theological genealogy, from perfection as extinction across Indo-European languages to Golgotha as the perfecting of Christ and the Free Spirit antinomians as spiritual accelerationists.

### Superintelligence, Omnipotence & Millennium

The safetyist echoes: Ashʿarite and Ockhamist omnipotence as super-agency, ordered versus absolute power as aligned versus unaligned, Descartes's cogito as a response to that dread, and aligned AGI as millennium and plenitude.

### On The Genealogy Of Worldviews and Defining Secularization

Löwith's genealogical undermining of progress is set against Blumenberg's reoccupation thesis, with Bertrand Russell's self-pity about heat death as the illustration: one feels cut off from an inheritance only if part of one still expects it.

### Apocalypse Versus Extinction

Moynihan distinguishes apocalypse, which consummates moral order, from extinction, which terminates it. Existential risk is "treacherously well-shaped" to fill the gap left by frustrated eschatology, which is exactly why care in framing is required.

### Will History End?

The constructive close: history continues so long as rational agents exist, values must remain revisable, strong alignment is a premature reification, and hope should be a lodestar rather than a black hole on the doorstep. One may act as if a perfect answer exists, since that expectation motivates self-correction, without believing it imminent.

## Key concepts

- **Perfection-of-mind schema** — the conviction that history is the perfecting of intelligence, that perfection is imminent, and that it endangers the human; shared by accelerationists and safetyists.
- **Death by perfection** — the entanglement, rooted in Greek and Sanskrit vocabulary and cemented by Neoplatonism and Augustine, between fulfilment and extinguishment.
- **Reoccupation** — Blumenberg's term for a modern concept filling a role Christianity vacated; the heir is legitimate, the parent's overpromise is the distortion.
- **Apocalypse versus extinction** — consummation of moral order versus its irreversible termination; Moynihan's marker of what is modern in existential risk.
- **Survivable, not solved** — the proposed aim for alignment: a world resilient enough to survive and free enough to disagree.

## Connections

- [After Alignment](https://antikythera.wiki/work/journal/afteralignment) is the declared companion. Bratton and Moynihan agree that alignment as reflection of present human values is a mistake; Bratton's argument is about the orientation of synthetic intelligence, Moynihan's about the historicity of values.
- [The Five Stages Of AI Grief](https://antikythera.wiki/work/media/noema-the-five-stages-of-ai-grief) diagnoses Doomerism and accelerationism as moods; Moynihan supplies the intellectual genealogy those moods inherit, while insisting, against Bratton's tone, that the risk itself is not dissolved by the diagnosis.
- [Don't Denigrate The Dinosaurs](https://antikythera.wiki/work/media/noema-dont-denigrate-the-dinosaurs) is Moynihan's earlier Noema essay on extinction and contingency; the apocalypse-versus-extinction distinction comes from his 2020 book X-Risk, which both essays draw on.
- [The History of Now](https://antikythera.wiki/work/journal/historyofnow) carries Moynihan's history-of-ideas method into the Antikythera journal.
- [The Noocene](https://antikythera.wiki/work/journal/noocene) and Vernadsky's [The Transition from the Biosphere to the Noösphere](https://antikythera.wiki/work/journal/noosphere) share Teilhard's vocabulary; this essay is the corpus's clearest statement of what that lineage owes to theology, and the reoccupation test can be turned on those works.
- [Is European AI A Lost Cause? Not Necessarily.](https://antikythera.wiki/work/media/noema-is-european-ai-a-lost-cause-not-necessarily) is in tension with this essay: Bratton there treats "existential risk" as inherited nuclear-era rhetoric, where Moynihan grants the inheritance and keeps the risk.