Collective consciousness to replace God: Dan Brown

Brown made the provocative remark at the Frankfurt Book Fair where he was promoting his new novel, “Origin”, the fifth outing for Harvard “symbology” professor Robert Langdon, the protagonist of “The Da Vinci Code”, a book that questioned the history of Christianity.

“Origin” was inspired by the question “Will God survive science?”, said Brown, adding that this had never happened in the history of humanity.

“Are we naive today to believe that the gods of the present will survive and be here in a hundred years?” Brown, 53, told a packed news conference.

Set in Spain, “Origin” opens with Langdon arriving at the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao for an announcement by a reclusive billionaire futurist that promises to “change the face of science forever”.

He recognized that his views may not be welcomed by clerics, but called for greater harmony between the world’s great religions and those who profess no faith.

“Christianity, Judaism and Islam all share a gospel, loosely, and it’s important that we all realize that,” he said. “Our religions are much more similar than they are different.”Turning to the future, Brown said technological change and the development of artificial intelligence would transform the concept of the divine.

“We will start to find our spiritual experiences through our interconnections with each other,” he said, forecasting the emergence of “some form of global consciousness that we perceive and that becomes our divine”.

“Our need for that exterior god, that sits up there and judges us ... will diminish and eventually disappear.”