Techno-Futures and Religion

This paper examines parallels between early American critiques of the printing press with contemporary critiques and problems with particular uses of AI. By the eighteenth-century, members of Native American communities, the Jewish diaspora, and German migrant groups were becoming wary of the ways the Anglo-American Protestants treated the technology and its productions as producing speech that would be treated as timeless, permanent, and having universal scope. At the heart of their concerns, however, was the way the technology was promoted by booksellers, printers, missionaries, etc... to do exactly that, but in a manner that only really benefitted Anglo-American Protestants. This paper compares these critiques to some AI use-cases in contemporary discourse, and the ways that eighteenth-century critiques of print technology very much parallel our own concerns about the rampant marketing of the technology and the goals of those most invested in its proliferation across all parts of society.

Internet-based communication technologies are changing the role of religious and scientific discourse in the world today. Scholars have noted that a “post truth” environment is insufficient to explain how the internet is leading to the rise of awaking movements like QAnon and other form of conspirituality that, though scientifically falsifiable, can sustain their systems of meaning against valid critique because of communication on the internet. The “New Clarity” has been proposed as an alternative conceptual schema for describing how the internet allows for the forming of communities online that explain away criticisms in a real-time, cybernetic feedback loop of crowdsourced identity formation in epistemic silos. Using systems theory to inform a philosophy of science and religion, this paper will show how both science and religion develop in relation to communication complexity to resolve forms of uncertainty in physical, social, and virtual environments according to different modes of explanation. 

This paper discusses the role of religious narratives and metaphors in structuring debates at the intersection of technology and ecology by relating opposed positions on artificial intelligence’s role in the climate crisis to contrasting frames of technical mastery of the world within the nascent environmental movement of the 1960s and 1970s. Focusing on the works of the architect and futurist R. Buckminster Fuller, Jr, and the historian Lynn White, Jr, the paper draws attention to a structural parallels between contemporary and historical imaginaries of the techno-ecological future. On the one hand, utopian narratives provide comprehensive environmental solutions by constructing a transcendent technological “god’s-eye” view that allows for global ecological interventions. On the other hand, critical narratives situate human agency within abstract ideal frameworks and underscore the necessity of profound epistemic and ethical shifts to avoid ecological and social catastrophe.

When scholars of religion ask how the science/religion dynamic changes as technology changes, they typically look toward AI, virtual reality, and the metaverse. This paper argues that the future they are trying to theorize is not coming but has already arrived, and it arrived first in Black digital religious communities. Drawing on original qualitative research on two online Black faith communities, this paper proposes two new categories—the Digital Hybrid Black Church (DHBC) and the Virtual Networked Black Church (VNBC)—as emergent religious space formations that challenge longstanding assumptions about what constitutes a liberating religious community, a sacred healing space, and the institutional church. Together, these concepts reframe the science/religion question not as a question about what technology will do to religion in the future, but as a question about how Black communities operating at the margins of both religious and technological power are already doing with technology now.