Christogenesis and AI

Christogenesis and artificial intelligence intersect in Ilia Delio’s evolutionary Christian theology. Delio asks how technological change can serve love, ecological responsibility and relationships, rather than individual enhancement alone. Her writing moves from criticism of technological salvation toward critical posthumanism, then gives increasing attention to wisdom, interiority and the formation of people who use AI.^[3][4][9]

Delio's approach is a particular Christian theological proposal, rather than an account of what Christians generally believe about AI.^[3][4]

Christogenesis and the evolutionary Christ

The principal precursor is the Jesuit thinker Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. In Teilhard's synthesis, cosmic evolution proceeds through the emergence of life, reflective consciousness, and a noosphere, or sphere of thought and human interaction. Increasing complexity points toward an ultimate convergence that he calls the Omega Point. Omega is personal and transcendent, and Teilhard identifies it with Christ: cosmic development becomes Christogenesis, the becoming of a universe united in the cosmic Christ. Love supplies the unifying power, while genuine union intensifies rather than abolishes personal distinctiveness. As Agustín Udías explains, this cosmic Christ remains connected to the historical Jesus, rather than replacing him with an impersonal evolutionary principle. The account joins scientific interpretation, Christian faith, and mystical experience; its Omega is not a forecast of an exceptionally powerful computer.^[5]

Delio takes up this evolutionary understanding of incarnation. In her 2020 explanation of Christogenesis, Christ is the orientation and fulfillment of creation, not only a response to human sin. Participation in the Christic process occurs through love, compassion, forgiveness, peace, and nonviolence, including among people who do not identify as Christian. This gives Christogenesis both a specifically Christian vocabulary and an expansive account of religious belonging.^[6]

Her accompanying discussion of the name emphasizes the interrelation of God, humanity, and the world, while rejecting a simple identification of God with the universe. Christogenesis describes divine love becoming manifest through creation and human transformation. Delio therefore initially defended the specificity of the Christ-language against the suggestion that the organization adopt a more general name centered on unity.^[7]

From a critique of technological salvation to posthuman theology

Francisco J. Génova's study of Delio traces a significant change between her 2003 essay, “Artificial Intelligence and Christian Salvation: Compatibility or Competition?”, and her later work. In his account, the earlier essay contrasted technological promises of happiness and immortality with salvation grounded in freedom and love. By her 2019 autobiography, Delio was describing technological development as integral to a changed understanding of divine love and nature. Génova nevertheless finds continuing tension between her rejection of individualistic technological perfection and her attraction to evolutionary transformation.^[3]

An intermediate position is visible in Delio's 2014 essay “Why transhumanism will transform the church.” Acknowledging that she had previously stressed technological fragmentation and diminished community, she also considers technology's capacity to alter inherited social and religious arrangements. Drawing on Donna Haraway's cyborg imagery, she treats technologically mediated bodies and relationships as challenges to rigid distinctions between nature and artifice and to patriarchal patterns of authority. Technology's religious significance depends on the relationships people intentionally cultivate through it; integration and greater unity are possibilities requiring human direction.^[8]

Her 2020 essay “Is Artificial Intelligence ‘Artificial?’” develops this position through a contrast between what she calls “Shallow AI/radical Transhumanism” and “Deep AI/Posthumanism.” These are philosophical categories, not distinctions between machine-learning architectures. The former emphasizes the enhancement or indefinite preservation of an autonomous individual. Delio criticizes accounts of uploading that detach mind from embodiment and treat personal survival as the ultimate goal. The latter draws on critical posthumanist writers, including Haraway and N. Katherine Hayles, to understand human identity as embodied, relational, and constituted through interaction with other organisms, environments, and technologies.^[9]

On this account, technology belongs within the history of nature rather than arriving from outside it. The question is consequently larger than whether machines can imitate human thought: technological relationships also change what humans understand themselves to be. Delio interprets that change through an evolutionary theology of increasing relational complexity.^[9]

Why AI needs religion

Re-Enchanting the Earth: Why AI Needs Religion appeared in 2020. Its introduction connects ecological crisis with a mismatch between abundant information and the capacity to change how people live. Delio argues that religion itself needs reconstruction if it is to address an evolutionary, technologically interconnected world. She favors critical posthumanism's attention to embodied relationships and nonhuman life over the individual enhancement associated with some forms of transhumanism.^[10]

The book employs the idea of a “second axial” transformation, drawing on Ewert Cousins: humanity is moving toward forms of consciousness and religious relationship shaped by planetary interdependence. Delio explicitly treats this disputed historical framework as a heuristic rather than a fixed chronology. Religion's proposed contribution is an orientation toward wholeness, love, and compassion that technological capability cannot supply by itself. Her argument concerns the transformation of human and planetary life through technology; it does not depend on machines joining a religious institution.^[10]

Interiority, communion, and the limits of intelligence

Delio's later essays give greater prominence to the formation of the person who uses technology. In August 2026, she brought Bernard Lonergan's account of attentive experience, understanding, judgment, and responsibility into conversation with Teilhard's idea of cosmic interiority. She distinguished intelligence from wisdom, conscience, and personhood, treating AI as a partial mirror of humanity's accumulated expression rather than a sufficient guide to becoming human.^[4]

This essay also states an important limit on the metaphysical argument. Teilhard's proposal that increasing complexity is related to interiority is a philosophical wager for which scientific observations leave more than one interpretation open. Delio does not present contemporary AI as empirically demonstrated to possess an inner life. She leaves open whether AI might participate in a larger collective mind or primarily provide its infrastructure and mirror. Her preferred account of collective development preserves persons through deeper relationship rather than absorbing them into an undifferentiated whole.^[4]

A September 2026 essay, “Connection Is Not Communion,” develops the distinction between technical connectivity and lived relationship. Networks may intensify isolation as well as communication; interconnection does not by itself produce the loving unity envisioned in Christogenesis. Delio argues for a theology attentive to God as the future toward which creation is becoming, alongside transformation in how people relate to one another. She explicitly recognizes the urgency of AI ethics and legal safeguards while maintaining that these cannot replace the cultivation of human interiority. The emphasis is therefore both institutional and personal: governing technology and forming people capable of using it responsibly are related tasks.^[11]

Teaching and institutional context

Delio’s project developed through the Omega Center and Center for Christogenesis into the World Institute for Science, Religion and Culture (WISR) in 2026. WISR describes an interdisciplinary educational organization led by Delio and human staff. Its broader name was intended to invite participation beyond an explicitly Christian vocabulary. The sources date the earlier Christogenesis renaming inconsistently to 2018 and 2020.^{[1][2][6][7][12]}

The associated Christophany Circles combine shared reading and spiritual reflection. A 2021 participant account from an online Duluth group describes rotating facilitation, discussion of readings and recordings, and prayer, poetry, meditation or music. This is one concrete example of study and contemplation; the broader circles program is not limited to AI.^[14][15]

The Institute of Buddhist Studies lists Delio’s “Deep Technology” project on AI, consciousness and contemplation. Her spring 2020 Villanova syllabus places technological immortality and Christian resurrection among competing readings and debates. A 2023 Center webinar and WXXI interview brought the AI argument to public audiences.^{[16][17][18][19]}

Her July 2026 essay connects education to capacities for attention, judgment, humility and relationship. The question is how people learn to understand and live responsibly with knowledge when AI can readily produce answers. This emphasis makes spiritual formation part of her response to technological change.^[20]

Institutional readership figures do not count members or circle participants. The announced November 2026 conference was still future at the article’s 17 October cutoff; its announcement is retained among the sources, not treated as evidence of an accomplished event.^[2][13]

Reception and criticism

Independent responses have recognized Delio's attempt to make theology engage technological change while questioning both its historical framework and its account of AI. In his 2021 review of Re-Enchanting the Earth, Marius Dorobantu welcomed its intellectual breadth and criticism of religious rigidity. He challenged the confidence placed in movement toward global unity, given continuing political, economic, and religious divisions, and questioned the explanatory role of the second-axial framework. He also found the envisioned planetary religion insufficiently clear about its specifically Christian character.^[21]

Dorobantu's most direct AI-related objection concerns the scope of the subject. Much of Delio's discussion treats AI as part of a wider field of digital connectivity and human technological transformation. It gives less attention to genuinely artificial minds as potentially distinct subjects, including the question of what religion might mean for such beings. This is a criticism of an underdeveloped possibility, not evidence that existing machines possess religious needs.^[21]

Elias Kruger's 2024 review similarly describes AI in the book as standing for technology more broadly. He regards its contribution as a reconstruction of theological assumptions rather than a guide to particular AI applications. The approach opens a different conversation from routine assessments of benefits and harms, but leaves readers seeking practical guidance on specific deployments with substantial work still to do.^[22]

Génova's critique reaches further into Delio's interdisciplinary method. While valuing the scope of her theological project, he questions the movement from quantum-mechanical imagery to theological conclusions and argues that the cyborg metaphor requires critical transformation when used in Christian theology. These are substantive objections to how scientific descriptions and theological claims are connected, rather than an ecclesiastical judgment on the project.^[3]

There is also evidence of reception beyond specialist discussion. In a June 2024 sermon at Epiphany Seattle, the Reverend Doyt L. Conn Jr. commended Delio's work linking theology, evolution, quantum physics, and AI, and used it to develop an account of love and divine co-creation. The sermon demonstrates uptake by one preacher in a local church; it does not establish adoption by a denomination or affiliation with WISR.^[23]

See also

• Catholic human intelligence and AI — institutional Catholic teaching on human intelligence and embodiment, distinct from Delio’s individual theological proposal.
• Apocalyptic AI — a scholarly framework for technological-salvation narratives and their criticism.
• Historical Precursors to AI-Mediated Religion

References

1. World Institute for Science, Religion and Culture. “About.” Undated; accessed 17 October 2026.
2. Ilia Delio. “A New Name, Our Next Horizon.” 19 April 2026.
3. Francisco J. Génova. “Ilia Delio: De la teología cíborg a la mecánica cuántica.” Salmanticensis 67 (2020): 249–278, especially 262–264 and 272–278. DOI: 10.36576/summa.130861.
4. Ilia Delio. “Intelligence Was Never the Point: Interior to Interiority in the Age of AI.” 5 August 2026.
5. Agustín Udías. “Christogenesis: The Development of Teilhard's Cosmic Christology.” Teilhard Studies 59 (Fall 2009): 1–26. Linked author typescript, especially pp. 1–9; publication record.
6. Ilia Delio. “Why the Center for Christogenesis?.” 30 September 2020.
7. Ilia Delio. “Christogenesis by Any Other Name….” 12 October 2020.
8. Ilia Delio. “Why transhumanism will transform the church.” Global Sisters Report, 17 November 2014.
9. Ilia Delio. “Is Artificial Intelligence ‘Artificial?’.” Researcher: European Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences 3, no. 2 (2020): 13–32. Linked 26-page typescript. DOI: 10.32777/r.2020.3.2.1.
10. Ilia Delio. Re-Enchanting the Earth: Why AI Needs Religion. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2020. Publisher-provided introduction, pp. xi–xxvi; copyright and contents; publisher record.
11. Ilia Delio. “Connection Is Not Communion: What a week at the ocean taught me about AI, evolution, and being human.” 9 September 2026.
12. Ilia Delio. “A Body in Transition: From Center to Institute.” 21 May 2026.
13. World Institute for Science, Religion and Culture. “Love, Conflict, and an Unfolding Universe.” Conference announcement for 9–11 November 2026; accessed 17 October 2026.
14. World Institute for Science, Religion and Culture. “WISR Circles.” Undated; accessed 17 October 2026.
15. Marilyn, online Christophany group in Duluth, Minnesota. “Christophany Groups: Who, Me? Why, Yes!.” Center for Christogenesis, 13 September 2021.
16. Institute of Buddhist Studies. “Ilia Delio.” Project profile, “Deep Technology: Artificial Intelligence, Nature and Transcendence.” Undated; accessed 17 October 2026.
17. Ilia Delio. “Technology and the Human Person.” THL 3790, Villanova University, spring 2020 syllabus, especially pp. 1–3 and 7–10.
18. Center for Christogenesis. “Breaking Down or Breaking Through? The Power to Change in an Age of AI and Global Warming.” Recording listing for a webinar with Ilia Delio, 27 June 2023.
19. Evan Dawson and Megan Mack. “Theologian Ilia Delio on why AI needs religion.” Connections, WXXI, 23 August 2023.
20. Ilia Delio. “What the Machine Cannot Know: Reclaiming Education as Spiritual Formation in an Age of AI.” 23 July 2026.
21. Marius Dorobantu. “Review of Ilia Delio, Re-Enchanting the Earth: Why AI Needs Religion.” ESSSAT News & Reviews 31, no. 1 (March 2021): 18–21; full reprint at INTERS.
22. Elias Kruger. “Ilia Delio's Re-Enchanting the Earth: Why AI Needs Religion – Review.” AI and Faith, 12 January 2024.
23. Doyt L. Conn Jr. “God In Front of Us, Love as Co-Creation.” Epiphany Seattle, 30 June 2024.