The Jesus Incident
From the back cover:

Frank Herbert, author of the world-famous Dune, is one of today's leading futurist thinkers.  Bill Ransom is a poet, a Pulitzer and National Book Award nominee.  Together, in a bold and unprecedented collaboration, they have crafted a book that combines the outward sweep of SF at its farseeing best with the intense inward laser of the poet's eye.  As demanding and spectacular as the vision it serves.  The Jesus Incident is as much a voyage as a novel: a breakthrough work of speculative fiction that leaps to the end of evolution, to the surface of a poisoned planet as profoundly realized as Dune's Arrakis... to witness mankind and his creations trading places in a ceremony that illuminates the shimmering connections between free will and destiny that will determine the ultimate course of our future.
Fiction in English, Science fiction, Free will and determinism, Fate and fatalism, American Science fiction
Frank Herbert, Bill Ransom
Real name: Franklin Patrick Herbert Jr.