Megan O’Gieblyn’s God, Human, Animal, Machine is not a book about technology so much as a book about belief—specifically, what happens to belief when God disappears but the habits of faith remain. Its animating insight is that much of our contemporary language about artificial intelligence, consciousness, and human enhancement is recycled theology. O’Gieblyn is unusually well positioned to see this, because she did not arrive at the subject as a detached critic. She was raised in a Christian fundamentalist household, homeschooled for much of her youth, and enrolled in the Moody Bible Institute, one of the most conservative evangelical Bible schools in the United States, with the intention of studying theology and entering ministry.
That formation matters. Moody is not a vague spiritual environment; it is doctrinally orthodox, Scripturally literalist, and saturated in eschatology. O’Gieblyn absorbed a worldview in which truth was absolute, history was teleological, and human life had cosmic significance within a divinely authored plan. When she lost her faith and left Moody, she did not leave those habits of thought behind. Instead, God, Human, Animal, Machine shows how they reemerged—transposed into secular keys—when she encountered the metaphysics embedded in modern technological discourse.
The book’s central claim is blunt and persuasive: many of the grand promises surrounding AI and digital consciousness are not scientific conclusions but metaphysical inheritances. When technologists speak of “uploading” minds, achieving immortality through data, or creating systems that transcend human limitation, they are echoing Christian doctrines of resurrection, salvation, and divine omniscience. O’Gieblyn does not argue this as a cheap debunking move. She understands the appeal. Having once believed in a world governed by transcendent meaning, she recognizes the emotional force of narratives that promise continuity, purpose, and escape from death.
What gives the essays their bite is her refusal to sneer. She knows from experience that belief systems are not held because they are foolish, but because they answer real human longings. At the same time, she brings a former-believer’s suspicion to secular dogma. She examines metaphors—mind as software, brain as hardware, self as information—not as neutral explanatory tools but as formative commitments. Once adopted, they quietly reshape ethics, politics, and how we value human life. Optimization replaces dignity; intelligence displaces wisdom.
Throughout the book, O’Gieblyn reads technological futurism the way a theologian reads doctrine: testing coherence, tracing hidden assumptions, and noting where rhetoric outruns evidence. Her fundamentalist background sharpens this instinct. She knows how totalizing systems protect themselves from doubt, and she sees similar mechanisms at work in certain strains of techno-utopianism.
God, Human, Animal, Machine ultimately resists easy conclusions. It does not argue for a return to faith, nor does it celebrate disenchantment. Instead, it offers something rarer: an account of intellectual afterlives. The gods may be gone, O’Gieblyn suggests, but the structures of worship persist. Technology has not freed us from theology; it has given it new names.
