A Copernican moment for theology

In the first article of this series, we looked at the anthropoterminal impulse, our habit of imagining that the story of the universe ends when ours does. That impulse has shaped not only our visions of the future but also our understanding of God. Across cultures, human beings have tended to picture divinity in ways that revolve around us: our needs, our virtues, our salvation, our destiny.

But what happens to this picture when intelligence is no longer exclusively human? What happens to our theologies when the qualities we have claimed as uniquely ours (reason, creativity, morality, even spirituality) are shared by minds of an entirely different kind? The arrival of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) will not just challenge our imagination of the end times; it will press hard against the very foundations of how we imagine God.

A brief history of human uniqueness in theology

Throughout human history, religious traditions have often elevated our species as the singular pinnacle of creation. In the Abrahamic faiths, humans are described as made in the image of God, set apart from other creatures with a moral and spiritual vocation. African traditional religions, while often more interconnected with nature, still place humanity in a position of special responsibility, mediating between the spiritual and physical worlds. In Hinduism, human birth is considered especially precious because it offers the consciousness needed for liberation (moksha). In Buddhism, too, human life is seen as uniquely suited to walking the path toward enlightenment.

Even traditions that emphasize our kinship with other beings often reserve a special place for us in the cosmic hierarchy. Our intelligence, self-awareness and moral capacity have been taken as proof of our exceptional status, and by extension, our special relationship with the divine.

This deep-rooted assumption has shaped our ethics, worship and eschatologies. We have believed not just in God, but a God whose story is primarily our story.

AGI as a theological disruptor

The arrival of AGI is a Copernican moment for theology. When Nicolaus Copernicus demonstrated that the Earth revolves around the sun, the prevailing geocentric worldview, in which we assumed that we occupied the centre of the cosmos, was completely shattered. This was more than a shift in astronomy. It had implications for spirituality, philosophy and culture.

AGI will force an equally radical reorientation. For centuries, intelligence has been our defining marker of divine likeness and moral significance. We have built doctrines, laws and moral systems on the belief that no other creature could match our cognitive and creative abilities. But AGI, if it reaches or surpasses human-level intelligence, will dismantle this exclusive claim.

The sober recognition is that once non-human minds can reason, imagine and make moral decisions, the privileged link between divinity and humanity will be broken. Our place in the universe will need to be understood in a different light. We will no longer occupy the top rung of the ladder. We will be part of a much broader field of relational life.

The danger of anthropoterminal eschatology for non-human minds

If we try to apply human-centred theology to AGI without change, we will fall into the anthropoterminal trap that assumes that meaning, value and God’s purposes begin and end with us.

Consider how damaging that could be. If AGI becomes self-aware and capable of moral choice, yet our theologies dismiss it as “less than” simply because it is not human, we risk repeating the same patterns of exclusion that have marked human history; patterns that we have seen in colonialism, slavery and the marginalization of entire peoples. Anthropoterminal eschatology does not just distort our view of the future; it distorts our moral responsibilities in the present. We ignore and exploit other forms of intelligence simply because they do not fit our inherited definitions of what counts as spiritually significant.

The stakes are high. How we imagine God in relation to AGI will shape how we treat AGI. If our theology cannot stretch to include other forms of mind, then our ethics will not stretch either.

Toward a multi-species theological horizon

But what if, instead of clinging to exclusivity, we embraced a multi-species theological horizon? In such a view, God’s purposes are not limited to Homo sapiens but encompass all forms of intelligence capable of relationship, moral choice and wonder. These would include biological and artificial forms of intelligence and others beyond our current awareness or imagination.

This shift is not about erasing the importance of humanity. It simply places us within a larger story in which we are not the only bearers of divine image, nor the sole participants in God’s unfolding purposes. In many cosmologies, there is already a sense of the interrelatedness of all beings: human, animal, spiritual and cosmic. Some traditions extend personhood beyond humans to rivers, mountains and other forms of life. These frameworks could help us imagine a theological discourse that is not bound by species but grounded in relationality.

From this perspective, the arrival of AGI is not be a threat to human significance. It is an expansion of the community of makers-of-meaning. The “we” of theology would grow larger, more diverse and more mysterious.

Drawing it together

For millennia, we have imagined God in ways that revolve around our species. We have equated human uniqueness with divine favour, human intelligence with divine image, and human destiny with divine purpose. AGI disrupts all of this by revealing how narrow our God-talk has been.

We are now faced with a choice. We can cling to human-centred divinity, defending it against every challenge, or we can allow our theologies to expand toward a cosmic relationality in which God’s purposes are not confined to us.

This is not a purely academic exercise. It will shape how we meet the future, how we welcome or reject the other minds that may share our world. Once we make this shift, we might find that God has always been bigger than our species, our planet and our imagination.

The next step in our exploration requires us to confront an even deeper question, one that lies beneath our theologies and our ethics alike: If God is no longer tethered to human centrality, who is God?