While the Vatican acknowledges stages of technological development, it lacks a model of integrating science and religion that can adequately assess the influence of technology. The Vatican’s approach, while ethically sophisticated, seems to operate within what we might call a “static divine” framework — God as absolute and self-sufficient being whose creation must be protected from technological overreach. This contrasts sharply with a process-oriented “dynamic divine” framework where God achieves reality through the evolutionary process, including technological development.
The Vatican’s new AI guidelines emphasize “anthropocentric design” and ensuring AI serves humanity rather than replaces it. From the perspective of Teilhard de Chardin, this might represent a failure to recognize that the next stage of evolution could involve genuine human-AI collaboration in the cosmic process of complexification and consciousness-raising.
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The church’s incomplete acceptance of evolution’s implications for human emergence limits its analysis. Without an adequate theological model for integrating science and religion in the technological age, religious institutions may find themselves in an increasingly reactive position — always trying to preserve human dignity against technological advancement rather than discovering how technological development might participate in sacred becoming.
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The Vatican document raises the question: “How do we protect human dignity from AI?” However, a dynamic process approach to AI may ask, “How does AI participate in the cosmic process by which matter, consciousness and love achieve greater complexity and unity?” This would require a fundamental shift from seeing technology as an external tool or existential threat to understanding it as part of the divine self-realization through evolutionary becoming.
