Sophia DeVita

Sophia DeVita works at the intersection of religious studies, religion and science, and the philosophy of technology. She is interested in how theological and metaphysical problems persist inside the sciences and technologies that claim to have left them behind, and what this persistence reveals about the conditions of knowledge and power today.

Sophia’s research asks what happens to inherited concepts of meaning, truth, and creation when language and reality are reconceived as statistical systems, a shift her developing dissertation project traces from the emergence of modern statistical reasoning in the nineteenth century through Claude Shannon’s information theory to contemporary predictive algorithms and large language models. She argues that this epistemic transformation cannot be understood without probing a longer theological and philosophical genealogy including the doctrine of creation from nothing, medieval and early modern accounts of the divine intellect as the ground of all possible forms, and Leibniz’s transformation of that architecture into a calculus that Norbert Wiener would later claim as the founding vision of cybernetics. Seen from this wider perspective, the central concepts of the Information Age and the forms of power they enable appear less as breaks that free us from our religious pasts than as migrations of metaphysical problems whose theological history offers a sharper account of what we are living through than the vocabularies of rationalization and disenchantment currently allow.

Sophia holds a BA from Reed College (2020) and an MDiv from the University of Chicago Divinity School (2024).