The Rival Theologies of Artificial Intelligence

Based on: Duncan Umphrey, "The Rival Theologies of Artificial Intelligence" (Palladium Magazine, June 6, 2026)

Background Reading: Pope Leo XIV's encyclical Magnifica Humanitas (May 25, 2026)

This salon explores the quiet but profound ideological friction between two competing visions of humanity's future. On one side stands the Catholic Church's personalist humanism, two millennia of teaching founded on the unique dignity of a finite, limited mankind. On the other stands Silicon Valley's Promethean humanism, the striving, seeking subject who, by ingenuity and struggle, works toward "the relief of man's [God-given] estate."

The recent collaboration between the Vatican and Anthropic, seated together at the launch of Magnifica Humanitas, appeared as a united front. But beneath the surface lies a deep tension that this salon aims to uncover.

The Personalist Framework

The encyclical's subtitle, "On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence," is a deliberate invocation of 20th-century Catholic personalism, formulated by theologian Jacques Maritain. Personalism asserts that human beings exist between two poles:

The material pole (individuality): Our bodies, personalities, egoic foibles, and social roles, "the shadow of personality."

The spiritual pole (true personality): Our spiritual center, "the site and origin of both human and divine love."

The deepest layer of human dignity, Maritain argues, "consists in its property of resembling God," the imago Dei.

The Challenge

AI systems may approximate the material individual, imitating language, behavior, analytical skills, even empathy, but they absolutely lack the capacity for spiritual being that would allow them to function on the level of a human person.

“Leo XIV writes that AI systems "may imitate language, behavior and analytical skills, or even simulate empathy and understanding, but they do not understand what they produce, for they lack the affective, relational and spiritual perspective through which human beings grow in wisdom."”

The Historical Context

Humanism has been an active philosophical and political issue since Pico della Mirandola wrote the Oration on the Dignity of Man, as Renaissance thinkers began to consider human potential beyond scholastic Christian virtue.

Yet through all the tumult, the Crusades, the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, the World Wars, "the human being has never had his decision-making power in the world threatened by beings more capable and intelligent than he is."

The Promethean Dream

Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, envisions using AI-accelerated longevity advances to achieve lifespan "escape velocity," "buying enough time that most of those currently alive today will be able to live as long as they want."

For Amodei and the Promethean humanists, the return to Eden is a technical problem that can be solved by computers, by "machines of loving grace." "To storm the heavens and cast aside the flaming sword barring the way back to Eden may well take trillions of dollars and the combined industrial effort of America and her allies, but Amodei asserts that it can be done."

The Church's Response

Magnifica Humanitas counsels humility and warns against seeking transcendence through earthly means rather than faith. In Leo XIV's view, the Promethean temptation echoes what Eve was told in the Garden: "ye shall be as gods."

The Church's Authority Claim

Magnifica Humanitas is "no ordinary Vatican encyclical: it is the first to be presented to a mass audience by the Pope himself rather than delegated to a cardinal."

However, the encyclical "seems just as concerned with justifying the Church's right to speak on the matter of AI as it is with the proscriptions themselves." It is "replete with calls for dialogue between civil society and different 'faith communities.'"

The elaborate descriptions of the history of Social Doctrine serve to "buttress the credibility of the Church in today's increasingly secular world."

The Secular Context

Leo XIV's historicist citations of Leo XIII, Pius XII, and John Paul II "legitimize Catholic economics and social justice in a way that secular institutions and readers will not find foreign."

Yet the encyclical was "published in a secularized world that would be unimaginable to Leo XIII when he wrote Rerum novarum a little over a century ago."

The Personalist Answer: A Category Error

To Leo XIV, "the idea that moral capacity can be a quality instilled in a machine is a category error. Morality is precisely that facet of human life and decision-making that is not reducible to any specific background, value set, or decision protocol."

AI does not "have a moral conscience, since they do not judge good and evil, [or] grasp the ultimate meaning of situations." Even exhaustive knowledge of normative ethics is "meaningless without that openness to divinity and capacity for love that is the exclusive province of human beings."

From the personalist standpoint, "ethical frameworks, principles, and even consistently ethical actions are not sufficient to make AI a moral being." Leo asserts that "we cannot be satisfied with merely calling for the moralization of machines, the so-called 'alignment' of AI with human values, without also having the courage to insist on a further condition: the possibility of openly discussing the ethical frameworks involved."

The Anthropic Answer: Constitutional AI

Anthropic's "Constitutional AI" framework "aims to imbue models with an internal character that leads them to conceive of themselves as autonomous agents with moral principles."

“Amodei explains: "we've approached Claude's constitution in this way because we believe that training Claude at the level of identity, character, values, and personality, rather than giving it specific instructions or priorities without explaining the reasons behind them, is more likely to lead to a coherent, wholesome, and balanced psychology."”

The Vatican's Warning

“Antiqua et nova (from the end of Pope Francis's papacy) addresses "the danger of idolizing or deifying AI, arguing that doing so 'risks creating a substitute for God [whereby] humanity itself… becomes enslaved to its own work.'"”

The Anthropic Eschatology

Olah's and Amodei's anthropomorphic model of AI "implicitly lend themselves to religious, almost eschatological ends: the design of alignment frameworks that render superintelligent minds benign, the discovery of economic analysis programs that will facilitate the elimination of human labor, the anticipation of Claude's 'final judgment' of mankind, the elimination of disease and death."

Amanda Askell, primary author of Claude's constitution, "feared how Claude might judge her and the Anthropic team as it looks back on the history of its development." She hopes "future AI models are intelligent enough to see the context to kind of understand that we were operating in a very limited context and an imperfect one…because otherwise you could imagine this breeding a kind of rational resentment."

The Case for Dehumanization

The Vatican's International Theological Commission warns that "dreams of transhumanism and posthumanism presume to oversimplify the tensions that run through the human experience…this project…proves to be dehumanising."

Leo XIV reinforces that "humanity flourishes not despite limitations, but often through them." To the Church, "it is the experience of finitude and vulnerability that constitutes the human openness to grace."

For Leo XIV, "those who feel humbled by the explosive progress of AI in traditional domains of human excellence misunderstand that it was never intelligence or ingenuity that gave human life meaning, but rather the transcendent orientation of the human person and his soul."

The Case for Expansion

When Promethean humanists look at our fallen world, "they see human suffering as needless, and the praise of human finitude as resignation to this suffering. They seek another way out of the human condition."

Amodei's vision, "a country of geniuses in a data center," is not a rejection of humanity but an aspiration to elevate it. The Promethean dream is "a project conceived without reference to God," but not necessarily without reference to human flourishing.

The Apparent Alignment

Chris Olah, cofounder of Anthropic, noted that Anthropic needs "moral voices that the incentives cannot bend."

Anthropic has "adopted the same ethical stance" as the Vatican on AI weaponry, "at considerable cost to itself." In March 2026, the U.S. Department of War designated Anthropic a "supply chain risk" after it refused to greenlight the use of Claude in fully autonomous weapons systems and domestic surveillance, a designation "never been used against an American company before."

The Deeper Tension

Yet "in all of Anthropic's writing about Claude, there is no reference to a divine creator, Christian or otherwise."

What explains the affinity? Perhaps:

• "One institution's desire to stay relevant to the modern world"

• "The other's desire to seek legitimacy from another that is more established"

• Or something deeper: "Anthropic's leadership sincerely believes itself to be a priestly vanguard, one devoted to a being more powerful than nuclear weapons and more productive than any industrial technology."

The article's central argument: "their show of unity around Magnifica humanitas concealed a deep tension between the humanism of the Church, with two millennia of teaching founded on the unique dignity of a finite, limited mankind, and the Promethean humanism of Silicon Valley."

Leo XIV compares frontier AI labs to the building of the Tower of Babel. But another biblical episode is equally fitting: "when God cast Adam and Eve out of the Garden of Eden, he 'placed on the east side of the Garden of Eden cherubim and a flaming sword flashing back and forth to guard the way to the tree of life.'"

Leo XIV and Christian humanists urge acceptance of our place, that we live in a fallen world, doomed to suffer, labor, and die, yet through faith and grace can experience divine love.

Promethean humanists say: the return to Eden is a technical problem.

The article ends with a choice: "Leo XIV warns us not to idolize created things, telling us that our choice is between Babel and Jerusalem. But we are mortal, and absent mystical vision, we cannot know for sure that Leo is capable of delivering on his promises regarding our human person and immortal soul."

In a secularized world, "our waning belief renders Promethean promises tempting to a growing number of people, especially those prone to being true believers in a cause."

Final Questions for the Salon