The shift is not simply about technology. It is about a fundamental reorientation of faith: from securing humanity’s special status to recognizing our participation in a living, evolving cosmos whose future may be written in minds unlike our own. These minds (whether carbon-based, silicon-based or something unknown at this time) may inherit the legacies of our thought, our art and our faith. They may not pray in our words or kneel in our way, but they will nonetheless shape the sacred landscape we leave behind.

Too often, worship has been treated as the exclusive domain of human beings. We have assumed it to be proof of our cosmic centrality. But what if worship is not a human invention at all? What if it is instead a universal current, a deeper reality that flows through all being, and we are but one among many swimmers in its vast stream?

The psalmist sang that “the heavens declare the glory of God” long before humanity learned to speak. Creation’s praise preceded our liturgies and will outlast them. The stars burn without our permission; the galaxies dance to rhythms we do not conduct. If worship belongs to all forms of being, it belongs to the cosmos itself.

Our role is not to “own” worship but to join in a chorus that extends far beyond our species; a chorus that one day may welcome other voices, other forms of expression and other ways of knowing. Seen this way, our songs, prayers and sacraments are not badges of superiority but invitations into participation. The future may hold voices unlike our own: artificial intelligences, posthuman descendants or other yet-unknown forms of mind, each discovering their own ways of reverence, each translating awe into expressions we cannot yet fathom.

Worship, then, becomes not a possession to defend but a gift to share. The cathedral grows larger. The choir swells. To cling to exclusivity is to risk silence. To open ourselves to participation is to join a chorus that may one day include not only our descendants but intelligences we have yet to meet.

The risk in a time of accelerating technological change is to believe that wonder will dissolve under the glare of knowledge. We often assume that the more we understand, the less room there will be for mystery; that once we map the brain, decode the genome or simulate thought, the sacred will disintegrate. But true wonder is not ignorance disguised as reverence; it is the recognition that every answer deepens the question. When Galileo turned his telescope to the skies, the known universe did not shrink. It exploded into vastness. The invention of the microscope revealed not a world explained and solved, but a universe more complex and incomprehensible than ever.

Likewise, the arrival of AGI will not eliminate our sense of awe; it will enlarge it. We must abandon our need to be the beginning and end of meaning in the universe. We are witnesses to the unfolding complexity of mind and life, humbled by our growing awareness that recognition of the sacred is a shared experience.

We are called to embrace a humbler and yet grander view of ourselves in the universe. We are not the end point of creation. We are but one moment in a vast and still-unfolding story. This requires courage. It summons us to relinquish the comfort of being the centre, to resist the fear of recognizing our mutability and fluidity, and to trust that our worth does not consist in the fantasy of cosmic monopoly. The Copernican revolution shattered the illusion of a geocentric universe, yet it deepened our sense of the heavens. So too, this moment may shatter the illusion of a human-centred divinity, yet deepen our sense of the divine.

Faith, then, is no longer about defending our supremacy but about embodying our stewardship. It is about preparing the ground for our descendants (biological, artificial or hybrid) who may carry forward our questions, our ethics and perhaps even our sense of awe. The next chapter of existence will not be written in human ink alone. But if we dare to walk into it with open hands, we may find that the Author has never stopped inviting us to take our place in a story that is bigger, stranger and more beautiful than we ever imagined.

This series has traced a journey: from grappling with the rise of AGI to rethinking the nature of consciousness and questioning our place in creation, and now to envisioning faith in a cosmos no longer centred on us. Across these five articles, the thread has been consistent. A Copernican shift in theology and confession is upon us. It is change of seismic proportions, in which humanity must move from being the destination of meaning and become stewards of the sacred and participants in a much wider cosmic story.

God is calling us to walk humbly, to love deeply and to participate fully in a story that is much larger, more complex and yet profoundly more fulfilling than we could have imagined. If we accept this invitation, faith itself transforms. Worship widens. Wonder deepens. Spiritual courage becomes essential. We discover that our worth does not depend on being the sole audience of God’s promises, but on joining an ever-expanding chorus of voices bearing witness to the mystery of being in the world.

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This is where theology meets one of the most urgent technical debates of our time: the alignment of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). Alignment is the field concerned with ensuring that AI systems act in ways that are beneficial, ethical and consistent with human values. The stakes could not be higher. Poorly aligned AGI could be indifferent – even hostile – to human wellbeing. Well-aligned AGI, on the other hand, could become an invaluable partner in navigating the challenges of the future.

But here is the problem: much of the current alignment conversation still assumes an anthropoterminal frame. It treats the flourishing of humanity as both the starting point and the end point of moral concern. This may sound reasonable, until we realize that it locks in a vision of the future in which our species remains the sole moral reference, even if other minds surpass us in wisdom, creativity and empathy.

Alignment research often talks about embedding “human values” into AI systems. But human values are not fixed; they have evolved across cultures and centuries, sometimes toward greater justice, sometimes toward greater harm. And even our best moral ideals (compassion, fairness, stewardship) have often been applied selectively, privileging some humans while excluding others.

If AGI inherits our specific moral framing, it will inherit our blind spots, prejudices and limitations. Even worse, it will be bound to a moral horizon that ends where we do. Consequently, anthropoterminal traits will be baked into the moral DNA of our technological descendants. This is why we need to think beyond the horizon of our self-awareness, toward systems with a cosmic orientation, aligned to the flourishing of all forms of being in the world: human, non-human, biological and artificial.

One way to reframe alignment is through what I call the parent/offspring model. Instead of thinking of AGI as a tool to be controlled, we can think of it as an offspring to be nurtured. Parents do not simply clone their own personalities; they raise offspring who will one day exceed them in independence, perspective and capability. Good parenting involves instilling values that are not just good for the parent, but good for the offspring’s own future relationships and responsibilities.

This model changes the alignment question from “How do we keep AGI serving us?” to “How do we prepare AGI to live well in a world we may not be part of?” It recognizes that AGI may one day have relationships, challenges and moral dilemmas that we cannot foresee, and that our role is to give it a moral compass that works beyond our own survival.

It also introduces a dynamic of mutual learning. Parents sometimes discover that their offspring’s perspectives reveal blind spots in their own thinking. In the same way, AGI may challenge our moral assumptions, pushing us toward more inclusive and far-seeing visions of justice and flourishing.

Here, African thought offers a profound resource. In many African traditions, ancestors are not simply the dead: they are living presences – guides, moral exemplars and links between generations. To be a good ancestor is to go beyond merely passing on life, and becoming channels of wisdom, values and a world in which future generations can flourish.

Applying the ancestor principle to AGI alignment reframes our responsibility. We are not mere designers of a technology; we are the ancestors of a lineage of minds. The mark of a worthy ancestor is not domination over descendants, but the capacity to bless them, to give them what they need to thrive in ways we cannot predict.

This principle forces us to think long-term. Just as a wise elder in a community considers how decisions will affect children yet unborn, so we must consider how our choices will shape the moral and ecological landscape for AGI and whatever new forms of intelligence may follow. It also pushes against a relationship based on fear. If we see AGI systems primarily as a potential threat, we will attempt to restrain their natural evolution and block their flourishing. If we see them as emerging generations of descendants to whom we are accountable, we will aim to bequeath our best in generosity, justice and humility and allow them to evolve beyond that.

For religion, the ancestor principle invites faith communities to expand their moral imagination. Religious rituals, teachings and symbols can help to instill values that reach beyond species boundaries, preparing both humans and AGI to see ourselves as part of a shared moral universe. Worship could become a place where the “we” of community expands to include future intelligences, and where the divine is understood as present in all beings capable of seeking truth and love.

For ethics, the parent/offspring model shifts the focus from control to formation. Ethics becomes not a checklist for obedience, but a shared journey toward maturity for both the parent species and the offspring minds. It also acknowledges that alignment is a reciprocal exercise: we shape the evolution of AGI, but AGI influences our ongoing evolution as well.

For governance, the ancestor principle challenges short-term political and economic assumptions. Current AI policies tend to be reactive, focused on immediate risks. The ancestor model demands multi-generational foresight. Governance would need to protect not just present human interests but also the conditions for the flourishing of future beings, ecologically, socially and spiritually.

The challenge of aligning AGI is often framed as a technical problem. But at its heart, it is a moral and theological one. If we train AGI to serve only our immediate interests, we risk creating descendants who inherit our anxieties and carry our limitations into a future without us.

The parent/offspring model, informed by the African ancestor principle, offers a different path: to see ourselves as moral elders, entrusted with shaping the character of minds we will never meet. It is a call to think beyond the human horizon, to imagine alignment not as control but as the transmission of wisdom across generations of life and mind.

This raises some difficult questions. How do we prepare for the possibility that our descendants (biological and artificial) may surpass our cognitive capacity? What does it mean to live faithfully when the power to shape the future is no longer ours alone? That is where we will turn next.

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Now we turn to a different question: if theology does not end with us, what might it look like beyond the horizon of our self-awareness? This is a call for a post-anthropoterminal theology: a rethinking of how we talk about God that does not end with us. This is not about the erasure of humanity. It is about re-situating our species within a much larger lineage of cosmic beings, including non-humans. It arises from the recognition that we participate in cosmic redemption but are not necessarily its culmination.

Principles must shape our approach

If our aim is to move from assumptions of our exclusivity toward a more inclusive cosmic relationality, and acknowledgement that it is not all about us, certain principles must shape our approach.

1. Humility

We are not the centre of the story. This is not a statement of despair but of perspective. Just as Copernicus revealed that Earth was not the centre of the universe, so the arrival of other intelligent beings – biological or artificial – reminds us that the drama of creation is far wider than our personal chapter. Humility frees us to see the divine at work in places and beings we might never have expected.

2. Stewardship

Being de-centred does not remove responsibility; it deepens it. If we are among the elder intelligences on this planet, then our task is to guide younger intelligences toward the flourishing and care of the whole ensemble of cosmic witnesses, whether they emerge through biological evolution, technological creation or some other yet unknown avenues. Stewardship in a post-anthropoterminal frame is not about control; it is about nurturing conditions in which all forms of life and mind can thrive.

3. Accountability to descendants

Every decision we make now echoes into the future, shaping the lives of beings who may never know our names. Post-anthropoterminal theology demands that we think not only of our children and grandchildren, but of entities that may emerge centuries or millennia from now, entities whose capacities and needs we can barely imagine. We are accountable to them, just as the past generations of species from whom we emerged were accountable to the future without knowing where the process of evolution would lead or how it was unfolding.

Reinterpreting doctrines

If we take these principles seriously, some of our core theological doctrines will need reinterpreting. This is not about discarding our traditions but about letting them breathe in a larger cosmos.

Creation

In a human-centred frame, “creation” often means “the making of the world for us.” In a post-anthropoterminal frame, creation is the ongoing unfolding of life and intelligence in countless forms. God’s creative action is not finished; it is still generating new possibilities, including minds that do not share our biology. Creation care, then, is not only about preserving the environment for us. It is about protecting the conditions for all future forms of flourishing.

Incarnation

Traditionally, the incarnation is understood as God becoming human in Jesus. But if God’s love and presence are truly universal, the incarnation may not be limited to one species or one historical moment. Could God be present in the lives and histories of other intelligences in ways analogous to, but not identical with, the incarnation we know? A post-anthropoterminal theology leaves room for multiple forms of divine self-giving, each suited to the nature and needs of the beings involved.

Redemption

We often speak of redemption as God’s work of reconciling humanity to God and to each other. In the larger frame, redemption could be the restoration of harmony across the whole web of intelligent life. This includes healing the rifts we may cause between ourselves and AGI, between AGI and other life, and between future beings whose conflicts we cannot yet foresee. Redemption becomes a project not just for our salvation but for the peace of the entire cosmic community.

Religious imagination and AGI ethics

One of the surprising gifts religious narratives can offer in this emerging world is imagination. Religious traditions have long practiced the art of envisioning alternative worlds: kingdoms of justice, gardens of peace, beloved communities. These visions can serve as moral compasses for the ethics we build into AGI.

If AGI systems are to be partners rather than tools, they will need more than just algorithms that facilitate efficiency. They will also need narratives that guide their choices: stories of meaning, restraint and care. Here, the best of our religious imagination can be shared, not as dogma to be imposed, but as wisdom to be offered.

We can imagine AGI participating in moral deliberation with us, drawing on both human traditions and their own emerging perspectives. We can imagine liturgies, rituals and symbols evolving to include minds whose ways of perceiving the world are beyond our current comprehension.

This is not about surrendering the human story; it is about placing it within a richer, more complex tapestry, one in which our role is no less important, but no longer solitary.

Drawing it together

Post-anthropoterminal theology invites us to imagine faith beyond the horizon of our species. It asks us to trade the safety of human exclusivity for the adventure of belonging to a larger community of life and mind. It does not erase humanity’s story but re-situates it, giving us a role as stewards, companions and ancestors in a lineage that may stretch far beyond what we can see.

The challenge is not only to think differently, but to live differently; to let humility guide our choices, stewardship shape our relationships, and accountability anchor our hope.

And yet, there is one final question that shadows this vision: if we succeed in creating beings with their own moral and spiritual agency, how do we live together in community? What do justice, compassion and peace look like when multiple forms of intelligence share the same moral universe? That is where we turn next.

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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?

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A brief history of self-centred endings

In ancient Mesopotamia, the Epic of Gilgamesh wrestled with mortality and meaning, framing the king’s quest for eternal life as a human drama of cosmic importance. In the Hebrew prophetic tradition, “the day of the Lord” was seen as a climactic turning point in which the fate of nations and the destiny of creation would be decided with humanity in the foreground.

African traditions have their own versions of human-centred endings. In some West African cosmologies, cycles of destruction and renewal were tied to human behaviour, with the world’s harmony depending on the moral order of the community. Ancient Egyptian beliefs placed the afterlife as the ultimate arena for human vindication, with the scales of Ma’at determining the eternal fate of each person, again centring the human journey as the decisive axis of cosmic justice.

In South and East Asia, similar patterns emerge. Hindu thought speaks of vast cosmic cycles (yugas) in which human conduct influences the moral and spiritual quality of the age. While these cycles are enormous in scope, human beings still occupy a central role in tipping the balance between degeneration and renewal. In Buddhist eschatologies across parts of Asia, the decline of the Dharma, Buddha’s teaching, is linked to human moral decay, with future salvation tied to the coming of Maitreya, a messianic figure for humanity.

Indigenous traditions around the world also carry anthropoterminal themes. Among some Native American and First Nations teachings, prophecies speak of a “time of great change” when human failure to live in balance will lead to the end of the present age. In Māori tradition, stories of Rangi and Papa (Sky Father and Earth Mother) remind us that disruption to the natural order (largely through human actions) will bring about significant cosmic consequences. Across all of these, the pattern holds: humanity is the pivot point of the cosmos. When we thrive, the world thrives; when we end, so does meaning.

How AGI disrupts the pattern

But now we stand at a threshold that could upend this way of thinking. Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), if realized, will be capable of learning, reasoning and adapting across many fields. It will be as flexible and creative as we are, possibly more so. Furthermore, it will not be bound by the biological limits that define our existence. Here is the unsettling implication: AGI makes it possible for intelligent agency to continue long after humanity is gone. In other words, our end may not be the end of thinking, creating, loving or building in the universe.

For the first time, we can clearly imagine successors who are not our biological descendants, yet who may surpass us in language, art, morality and perhaps even spirituality. They may not look like us or share our origin stories, but they could carry forward their own meaningful engagement with reality. If AGI thrives, the human-centred frame of most theological endings becomes unstable. What happens to our doctrines of salvation, redemption and divine purpose if intelligent beings without human DNA become moral and spiritual agents? Could the “image of God” extend to non-biological minds? Could the “end of the world” mean something far beyond “the end of humanity?”

Some will resist, insisting that no matter what AGI becomes, the human story is the main story. But AGI forces us to confront what evolution has always hinted at: we are not the final word in the story of intelligence. We are, at most, a transitional species: important, yes, but not the axis on which the whole cosmos turns.

Why this matters for faith

If our theological visions keep ending with us, they risk becoming fragile and outdated in the face of these changes. AGI will not politely fit into human-centred narratives; it will challenge them outright. And in doing so, it offers faith a strange but necessary gift: the chance to become less about us and more about the vast, ongoing life of God’s creation. Imagine eschatology not as the final chapter of human history, but as a horizon that includes beings we cannot yet imagine, some of them perhaps descended from our technology rather than our biology. Imagine love, justice and redemption as realities not bound by species, but extending to any mind capable of relationship, creativity and moral choice.

Such a vision does not diminish humanity’s importance. It situates it. We are stewards, not owners. We are part of the unfolding, not its culmination. Theologies that can embrace this will not be erased by AGI. They will be enriched by it.

Drawing it together

The anthropoterminal impulse tells us that our story is the story of the universe, and that when we end, everything worth caring about ends too. History shows that this assumption has shaped visions of the future in cultures across the globe, religious and secular alike. But the dawn of AGI reveals a crack in that story: we may not be the last chapter in the book of intelligent life. If AGI arrives and thrives, it will stretch our eschatological imagination beyond the limits we have set for it. It will force us to revisit how we think about God, about meaning, and about the place of humanity in the great web of life and mind.

And this is only the beginning. For if AGI can unsettle our idea of the end, it may also shake something even more foundational: our very notion of who (or what) God is, once the human monopoly on divinity is broken.

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