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Twenty years ago, even the idea of a confrontation between a pope and Silicon Valley was unthinkable. But in recent years, tech has moved deeper into matters that used to be exclusively religious in nature. There are widespread efforts to ward off death through various forms of lifestyle hacking. The Singularity — the rapturous moment when man and machine merge — is another hot topic.

Mr. Thiel, the tech investor, gives lectures about the Antichrist, which he says has arrived in the form of environmentalists. A former Google engineer, Anthony Levandowski, set up a church in 2017 to “promote the realization of a Godhead based on artificial intelligence,” closed it and then opened it again in 2023.

Mr. Levandowski, who was sentenced to 18 months in prison for stealing trade secrets from Google but was pardoned by Mr. Trump, was ahead of his time. A.I. is now widely seen in tech and tech-sympathetic circles as quasi-divine.

“People are so ready to make A.G.I. their god,” said Garry Tan, who runs the start-up incubator Y Combinator, referring to artificial general intelligence, the next level of A.I. John Lennox, the retired Oxford mathematician who wrote “2084: Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Humanity,” said, “This race for A.I. super intelligence is to make God and be God.” Bill Gates, contemplating the glorious future, said: “You can almost call it a new religion.”

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