The book emerged from Midgley's engagement with the AI research community of the 1980s and the physicists developing grand unified theories. She noticed that the language surrounding these projects had an unmistakable theological quality — promises of ultimate explanation, narratives of progress toward final truth, and visions of a transformed humanity liberated by technical achievement. In one review from 1984, she had compared an AI book by Donald Michie to a hymn book: 'They promise the human race a comprehensive miracle, a private providence, a mysterious saviour, a deliverer, a heaven, a guarantee of an endless happy future for the blessed who will put their faith in science and devoutly submit to it.'
The hymn-book line, delivered with characteristic wit, became one of Midgley's most quoted formulations. It names something structurally true about a certain genre of popular science writing — the genre that treats science not as a set of practices for investigating empirical reality but as a path to salvation. The Singularity narrative is the direct heir of this tradition: the prediction of a moment when technological progress produces a qualitative transformation of the human condition, analogous in every structural respect to the Second Coming.
The book is not a debunking exercise. Midgley respected science too much to treat it as a villain. Her argument is that the religious impulse — the longing for meaning, transcendence, and salvation — is a genuine human capacity that will find expression somewhere, and that when it gets smuggled into scientific discourse, it does damage both to science (which cannot deliver what religion promises) and to the religious impulse itself (which loses its honest expression when disguised as something else).
The contemporary AI discourse is the most prominent current instance of this dynamic. Artificial general intelligence, the Singularity, mind uploading, the elimination of biological limitation through technical transcendence — each of these is a secular theology, using the prestige of science to make promises only religion has traditionally made. Midgley's book is essentially a manual for recognizing this pattern and for asking the honest questions it obscures: What kind of promise is actually being made? What evidence would support it? What would it mean for the lives of ordinary people if the promise were honest?
Published by Routledge in 1992, the book drew on Midgley's engagements with the AI research community, with the physics community developing Theories of Everything, and with evolutionary biologists whose popular writing she had been critiquing since the Dawkins exchange. The book was well received by religious scholars, mixed in reception by scientists, and has grown in relevance as AI has replaced physics as the primary host of salvific discourse.
The salvific impulse persists. Religion's decline in educated Western culture did not eliminate the longing for transcendence — it relocated it.
Science has absorbed the impulse unsystematically. Popular science writing now carries religious structures without the theological vocabulary that would make them recognizable as such.
The hybrid is fraudulent. Science cannot deliver what religion promises, and religion disguised as science loses its honest expression.
The AI discourse is the paradigm case. The Singularity, AGI, mind uploading — each is a secular theology making religious promises in scientific vocabulary.