Some questions are so important that we should always have a good answer ready, put in terms that people today can understand. For Catholics, these include why Jesus had to die, and how He could bear our iniquities and die for our sins. We should have well-considered answers ready for anyone who asks.

I’m not a professional theologian. I see myself more as someone looking for a useful mental model. When you find one that is both elegant and true, you get far more out of it than you put in. When I looked into these questions about Jesus’s death on the cross, I expected to find a definitive answer. In my experience, the Church usually has one, though it is often phrased in a way that no longer speaks clearly or convincingly to an intelligent person today, at least not without in-depth study. What I found instead was, essentially, that we don’t quite know. The Church has never dogmatically defined a single theory of atonement. We have several theories, each with its strengths and weaknesses, and to some extent we use all of them, drawing on whichever one fits the situation. Perhaps that is the best we can do when trying to put into words something beyond human understanding. It may also be that when we quote Saint Paul, Saint Peter, or Saint James, we are unknowingly repeating fragments of what Jesus Himself said on these subjects. In that sense, we may already know the right answers, just not the path that leads to them.

As a software professional meeting a customer who needs to streamline how things are done, you actually benefit from not understanding their business at first. As you dig deeper, your job is to capture what you learn in an elegant mental model expressed in code, and to do it with fresh eyes. Let’s try approaching this theological field as outsiders, too.

As for the Lord Jesus, one common view is that we heaped our sins on Him, the way people in ancient times heaped them on sacrificial animals, and that He went willingly to His death out of love for us, carrying those sins like a sacrificial lamb. This is highly symbolic language, and it’s hard to internalize when you don’t know which parts to take literally and which symbolically. Even seen from outside the Church, such an explanation makes some sense: the Old Testament describes similar sacrifices commanded by God, at least when read in a certain way.

There may be religious communities where, once you decide to believe, you have to accept whatever you are told. To me, being a Christian means the exact opposite, so I have to ask:

Can somebody suffer for my sins, physically or otherwise? Certainly. I can think of many such cases throughout history, both personal and collective. But can someone else bear my personal sins? Does reality allow sins to be transferred from one person to another? Hardly, unless “transferring” them means bearing their consequences without being guilty of them. I don’t intend to argue through definitions and syllogisms here. What I have in mind is something parents do quite often: they bear their children’s sins and suffer considerably so that the children don’t have to. Parents suffer in their children’s place, which is a kind of substitution. Think of a child who breaks something very expensive at home, or does something far more serious that you then have to deal with. And it isn’t only about the sins your children commit. As a parent, you suffer even more from the sinful mess you inherited from previous generations, which you try to put right, at least partly, so that it affects your kids less.

Jesus addresses God as “Abba,” an intimate Aramaic word for “father,” often rendered as “dad.” It’s not hard to imagine that God did for us in Jesus what we do for our children, only on another level.

I have to admit that when I imagine this, it moves my heart and calls me to action, because I can connect with it and empathize with God. Yet it doesn’t quite feel as mysterious and miraculous as one would expect of a truly religious experience.

And indeed, this is not all the tradition has to offer. In the Old Testament, blood is not just a symbol of death; it carries life. The Book of Leviticus says so explicitly: the life of a creature is in its blood, and God has given it to Israel for the altar, to make atonement (Lev 17:11). When blood was poured out or sprinkled on the altar, the point was not primarily the killing of an animal. It was life being returned to God, and through it, communion with Him being restored.

Take the holy day of Yom Kippur (Lev 16), for example. It involved two goats. The high priest laid the sins of the people on one of them, the scapegoat, which was driven into the wilderness, carrying the sins away. The other goat was sacrificed as a sin offering, and its blood was taken into the Holy of Holies and sprinkled on the mercy seat, the cover of the Ark of the Covenant, where God was present. The point was not punishment. The blood purified the sanctuary, so that God could go on dwelling among His people (Lev 16:16). The image I described earlier, of sins heaped on a victim, corresponds mostly to the first goat. Yet the tradition sees Jesus in the second one as well. The Letter to the Hebrews builds directly on this: Christ entered the true sanctuary not with the blood of goats but with His own, once and for all, and without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness (Heb 9:12, 9:22).

When a technical person like me hears this kind of symbolic reasoning, the first reaction is to feel overwhelmed by all the unfounded assumptions and unclear logic. The second is to reject it outright, because none of it sounds legitimate.

I completely understand that reaction. Yet when you read the Old Testament page by page, the same passages about blood and sacrifice look entirely different. You see a God who chose a group of quite unexceptional people in the Bronze Age and tried to lift them out of their wicked way of life, out of a misery inherited from previous generations. He tried to civilize them, for lack of a better word. Although they experienced God far more directly than we ever can, they swung between two extremes, sometimes within months. Either they feared Him, suspecting that He only pretended to be good and was in fact evil, luring them to destruction. Or, when they could see clearly that He was as good and merciful as He claimed, they promptly neglected Him and tried to take matters into their own hands and manipulate reality through occult practices and magic.

In a world where animals, and in some cultures firstborn children, were sacrificed to nonexistent gods, the true God established rules for proper worship. Yes, that worship was based on animal sacrifice and blood, but its purposes were clear. First, to acknowledge Him as the only God: these were the burnt offerings. Then, to give thanks for the livelihood He provided: the grain offerings, along with peace offerings for other occasions of thanksgiving. Then, to cleanse the people from sin and ritual impurity: the sin offerings. And finally, to make amends for sacrilege against holy things, for wronging a neighbor, or for a false oath: the guilt offerings, which also required compensating whoever had been wronged.

Sin offerings were only a small part of the whole. That doesn’t make them less important, but primacy clearly belonged to the burnt offerings. The word often used in this context is atonement, and in English you can hear “at-one-ment” in it: bringing your will into harmony with God’s. That is what God wants first of all: that you acknowledge Him and strive to make your will one with His.

Nowhere could I find anything harsh that God imposes on His people that has to be read as punishment for its own sake, or as satisfaction for His offended pride. Everything He does is meant to steer His people in the right direction. He uses far harsher means than Jesus does, but He is also dealing with a far more primitive people. Seen from this angle, the analogy I used earlier, of a parent trying to raise their children out of their misery, holds up entirely. When I read the Old Testament, my heart is moved in the same way as when I read the New. In both, it is His mercy that moves me. And honestly, what the Israelites did during the Exodus was sometimes so appalling that I would be afraid to turn the page if I didn’t know how the story ends.

Today, I believe, the better mental model is that of a parent: one willing to suffer to save their children from a misery they brought on themselves, going to any lengths for them, even death, to prepare a path out of that misery that they can walk together, hand in hand. It is love in its most extreme form, and in God’s case, a true sacrifice for our sins, one we re-present in every mess. It is all the more stunning coming from the One whom many people still imagine as a detached higher being, for whom we are mere specks of dust.

Fortunately, most of us can relate to that kind of parenting today. Two thousand years ago, however, analogies drawn from sacrificial blood may have been a much better way to depict the same reality. Ritual sacrifice was something almost everyone knew firsthand, so people could readily draw analogies from it and see the hidden connections. We shouldn’t condemn people for using different models in different ages, nor is there any reason to feel superior to them on that basis. But a symbolic analogy is not the same as the reality it describes.

The Church teaches that Christ’s death was a true sacrifice: He did indeed give His life for our sins. But if we lead with the imagery of altars and blood when a modern person asks why Jesus had to die, we may hand them a faith that has lost its power to move hearts and call people to action. It would be a faith that is hard to apply to everyday decisions, modeled on ritual practices that are long dead and forgotten.

And so I propose that we live by the analogy of the parent and let the language of blood deepen it, rather than living by the ritual and hoping that everyday love will follow. It won’t. God the Father is first of all a Father, and God the Son is first of all a Son.

Today I would like to talk about events that may one day, in hindsight, prove to have been of apocalyptic proportions. I hesitated over whether to put these observations into words and say them out loud, but I have come to the conclusion that I should.

I am well aware that public revelation is closed and that nobody can add anything to it. There will be no new prophetic books added to the Bible; we ourselves have defined it that way. But that certainly doesn’t mean the Holy Spirit is no longer active in His Church. I can attest that He very much is: He animates the mystical body of Christ, which is made up of many individuals, me included. And I can feel it. There have even been later private revelations that some of us take seriously, the Pope among them. The Fatima apparitions are one example. They are hard to dispute, even for someone like me, who is in the habit of disputing everything.

But even Sacred Scripture has not yet spoken its last word. There are almost certainly passages we have not yet fully understood, because we still lack the context needed to read them. And such progress does not have to wait for some apocalyptic cataclysm. In my book I give many examples of how the information age sheds fresh light on important parts of doctrine, offering a natural understanding of things that once seemed puzzling or mystical. If you are willing to take seriously all the stages of development mankind has gone through, and to consider that not even the technosphere came about by accident (that it may have arisen on God’s watch, perhaps even partly in accordance with His will), your perspective may shift. You may begin to see something like an infrastructure now taking shape, one that binds the body of Christ more tightly together into something resembling a higher organism: a new kind of creature, or creation, emerging at a new level of organization, in which individuals are like cells. We now even form many more specialized organs than at any earlier point in history, and in the most recent stages of this evolution a nervous system has begun to emerge. One can’t help seeing a clear analogy with how single cells once came together into multicellular organisms, which later developed specialized tissues and organs, and eventually became bodies in which information travels as electrical impulses. If you believe in God, it will almost inevitably occur to you that what God has done once, He may do again, in a slightly different context and on a new level. As I say in almost every article, our God speaks in parables, in which one part of the world speaks about another. Creation, too, is His way of expressing Himself. And this is also how to read Scripture: by seeing what He is doing now in light of what He has already done.

Here I would like to focus on the Holy Spirit. The Magisterium speaks quite clearly of the Holy Spirit as the soul of the Church. To many, such a statement may seem rather abstract and intangible, as hard to grasp as the gifts of the Holy Spirit we are supposed to receive in the sacrament of Confirmation. Is the Holy Spirit really and truly in me, you may ask, or is this just a pious saying that refers to nothing real in particular?

And yet we know perfectly well that the Holy Spirit is not some vague presence spread evenly over everyone. Scripture and tradition both testify that He can come to some and depart from others, and both His coming and His departure can be well documented.

The coming is easier to point to. At Pentecost, the Spirit descended on the apostles gathered in Jerusalem in the form of tongues of fire, and a group of frightened fishermen suddenly stood up and preached to a crowd from many nations, each hearing them in his own language. Nobody present took it for a metaphor. Something arrived, and everyone around could see and hear the difference.

What I find truly astonishing is that the departure is talked about so much less often, almost as if nobody had noticed. To Catholics, what follows may seem mind-boggling, too strange to be a coincidence. And it is well documented too, by Jewish tradition itself. The rabbis of the Talmud state plainly that when the last prophets, Haggai, Zechariah and Malachi, died, the Holy Spirit departed from Israel, and from then on only an echo remained, which they call the bat kol, literally “the daughter of a voice.” They also list the things the Second Temple lacked compared with the First, and the Shekhinah (the Presence) and the Holy Spirit are among them.

It didn’t happen all at once. Ezekiel had already seen the glory of the Lord leave the Temple in stages: first to the threshold, then to the east gate, then to the mountain east of the city, as if hesitating, as if giving people time to notice. Centuries later, the same pattern reappears. The Talmud records that for forty years before the destruction of the Temple in AD 70 – which takes us back to around AD 30 and the time of the Crucifixion – the signs that used to accompany the Day of Atonement ceased, the western lamp would no longer stay lit, and the Temple doors would open by themselves. What a coincidence!

Josephus, a Jewish priest and an eyewitness to those years, writes that priests entering the inner court at night felt the ground quake, heard a great noise, and then a voice as of a multitude saying: “We are departing hence.” Even the Roman historian Tacitus, who had no stake in the matter, records that a superhuman voice was heard announcing that the gods were leaving. And the feast on which Josephus places that voice is Pentecost: the same feast on which, a few decades earlier and in the same city, the Spirit came down on the apostles.

Even more astonishing, and yet in plain sight for two millennia, is what followed – not only mystically but in very practical terms. The Jewish people did not disappear, but they are no longer on the front line where the main story of mankind’s life with God unfolds, and they themselves do not claim to be. Rabbinic Judaism lives by interpreting what it received before the Spirit departed, and it waits for His return. The influence that once swept the world, the prophecies you and I still draw on, the Psalms prayed on every continent: all of it comes from the time when the Spirit was there. And He is there no longer. It seems to me that a thing should be no less stunning just because it happened in plain sight.

Of course, none of this means that God has revoked His covenant with the people of Israel. On a personal level, the Holy Spirit can certainly be present in individual Jews, just as in people of any other nation. Yet, to borrow from physics, such a presence needs an interpreting resonator. Without one, it never sounds at its full strength.

Of all the news I receive each day, the Gospel is what captures most of my attention. This says nothing about how sinful or saintly I am. It is simply so interesting, so fascinating, and it makes my life such an adventure that no other news comes anywhere near it. My interest is so intense that, even if there were reason to believe the story of Jesus did not happen as recorded, I would rather spend the rest of my life searching for errors in how the facts and events were interpreted than settle for that conclusion. What makes it all the more captivating is that after endless attempts to find a flaw in the narrative, I always arrive at the unbelievable conclusion that it is most likely all true. A passionate atheist might say I’m running a bit of a fever over my God, and the metaphor wouldn’t be entirely wrong. But if it is a true story, then it has objectively been the biggest news every single day for the last two thousand years. That much follows.

Is this fascination rare among my fellow parishioners, or across my diocese? Not at all. Is it common among non-believers of good will, or even among devout Jews? Absolutely not. Did it come to me right after I received Confirmation as a convert at the age of twenty-eight? No, it didn’t. It took time to reach its present, everyday intensity. Yet if you ask, in practical terms, how you can recognize that the Holy Spirit is in you, this is a sign that can be observed almost objectively. And it is the root and necessary precondition of the other signs by which this state of the soul is usually described: that your life is no longer about you, or that you recede into the background and become a bystander to God, who is living your life. These last two signs of the Holy Spirit’s presence can be faked by sanctimonious hypocrites who put their supposed holiness on display. The fever cannot be faked.

One can be feverish with the Holy Spirit while one’s sins are plain for everyone to see. This is how you can tell a counterfeit saint from a devout fellow Catholic who is fascinated by the Gospel and yet is a serious sinner, as most of us are, if not all of us. So don’t imagine this state of the soul as some serene wisdom, full of intellectual awareness of how we should be kind to one another. It is much more like the mind of a tabloid journalist who is completely consumed by a single story and keeps talking about it until everyone around him is exhausted (cf. Mt 13:44–46). I admit there need not be any intellectual dimension to it at all. But I must also say that I don’t believe true, loving brotherhood is possible without this fever.

Now, this whole argument of mine has a serious flaw, one I cannot resolve, at least not now. If you happen to live outside the Church, you may rightly ask: What are you talking about, for God’s sake? Where do you see such feverish Christians? I don’t know any. Show me a bishop who radiates heat like this. I haven’t seen one.

I have to agree. Not fully, of course, but to a large extent I understand the sentiment. For me, too, meeting a bishop is most often like having a bucket of icy water thrown in my face. These days they are rarely feverish. That is true in my country, and in other countries too, at least wherever no language barrier keeps them out of my view. It makes no sense whatsoever. According to Catholic teaching, ordination brings a further, special presence of the Holy Spirit to the one ordained. One could perhaps come to terms with a few exceptions, a few bishops in whom that presence doesn’t clearly show. But here it is the other way round: the appearance of absence is the rule, and the appearance of presence is the exception. It is such an eerie observation that I would be tempted to question my faith, and maybe even my sanity, were I not in such an incurable state of fever. It is deeply strange. And priests are not much better.

I recently attended a Mass at which an auxiliary bishop administered Confirmation. He gave a homily, and his words brought a freezing gust of wisdom to my ears. Of course, every single word he said was accurate. Of course, his analysis of society was on point. Of course, he pinpointed exactly what we need to change as a society to reach a sustainable brotherhood lived in harmony. It was a well-crafted speech, one that could easily have been delivered at the UN General Assembly, where it would have had about as much impact as it did in our small-town church. The only part I found completely off was when he said that most of us go to church for appearances, to fulfill our Sunday duty, “because we all want to be saved, all right?” Every preacher ultimately preaches about himself, and usually you can’t tell, because inside we are all very much alike. That holds until he touches on something where he and his listeners are completely different. When this bishop did, I felt as if the church were full of people utterly unlike him.

The following week I heard a homily from our parish priest, and I thanked God for him. He, too, was preaching about himself. He is an introvert, and his words were quite measured. Had the previous Sunday not been so fresh in my memory, I might not have noticed at all. But this time I felt he was like me. Because I know him, I could connect with what he was saying on a personal level, in much the same way I connect with many of my feverish fellow parishioners. It wasn’t a UN-style speech; he touched on the Gospel in that tabloid way, not merely as a mandatory ceremony attached to an otherwise coldly secular management of universal brotherhood. He wasn’t talking like a religious welfare provider, but like someone who just can’t stop being preoccupied with the news. Maybe he instinctively acted as if this were what truly mattered, and the universal religious welfare would somehow be added automatically, or perhaps not at all, depending on how God sees it.

Since that Sunday I haven’t been able to stop thinking about the striking analogy between the people of Israel and the clergy. On a personal level, I have certainly sensed the presence in some ordained ministers. If that were true of most of the clergy, I would likely never be able to tell the presence of the Holy Spirit in them as believers from the special presence given to them through ordination. Yet what I usually sense is not His presence. It is His absence. This may be the most serious argument against the Catholic faith I know of: it seems so unlikely that those who have chosen to give their lives to Christ most fully should end up the most deprived of His Spirit. In a way, it is the example of the people of Israel that gives meaning, and some hope, to what my reason recognizes.

I’m afraid that when your primary focus is building a big, happy tent for everyone to live in, where the seams are hidden, it is exactly the happy tent that you lose. To a non-believer, this claim is unacceptable, even outright wrong; to a believer, such an attitude should be objective evidence of one’s lack of “inspiration,” a word that shares its root with “spirit.”

I don’t know. I may just be a confused programmer with too little theological education, carried away by his own anecdotal experience. Whether the Holy Spirit is indeed slowly and quietly departing from our clergy, neither I nor anyone else can tell for sure right now. Nor can any statistical study capture more than the outward appearance of what may in hindsight turn out to be an epochal change of apocalyptic proportions.

But if there is some truth in it, will the Holy Spirit return? If not, where will He make His new dwelling on this earth?

That is the question.

Almost everybody knows that the answer to the most important question in the universe is 42. The joke works mainly because of the sheer hubris it would take for anyone to claim they even know what the most important question in the universe is. But is that really so? In my practical experience, it isn’t. More and more, it seems to me that there is one question around which almost everything that matters revolves. And, astonishingly, it is not whether God exists. So what is it? It can be phrased in many ways, but let’s put it like this:

Is it true, or does it only look that way?

Every one of us has asked this question in many different contexts, but it also reveals something fundamental about how this world has been designed — even though it didn’t have to be. Perhaps the most familiar illustration of this is the Duck Test:

If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it’s probably a duck. But we can’t prove it.

Such a situation can only arise in what we call reality — the real world we live in. It doesn’t arise when you create a virtual world, whether as a mathematician in your head or, to make it easier to imagine, as a software developer on your computer. When something that looks like a duck appears on your screen, you can always inspect the code and data to see whether it really is a duck — whether the programmer actually modeled such a concept — or whether it’s just a set of shapes someone drew in a graphics program to create the appearance of a duck.

I’m not contradicting myself here. Yes, there still seems to be a question of whether it only looks like a duck or actually is one, but that question resides in reality, not in the virtual world. In the virtual world, it simply isn’t a duck; it’s just a set of generic shapes that make up an image drawn in a computer program. In reality, the person who drew it may have intended to draw a duck, but there’s no sure way to find out — even if we ask, he might lie.

This holds even for more complex problems. Say you have created a more abstract virtual world where the goal is to pack as many two-dimensional objects from a given set as possible into a given two-dimensional container. Then one day you find what looks like the ideal arrangement. You can prove mathematically whether it really is optimal, at least in principle, given enough time and computing power.

Or, for lovers of Gödel’s theorem who are also familiar with Turing’s halting problem, consider this: if someone brings you a perfect code analyzer — something that supposedly tells you whether any piece of code will finish or hang forever in an infinite loop — you know, thanks to Turing’s proof, that it’s a fake.

I’m not venturing into higher mathematics here. I’m simply saying that when you create a world yourself — through mathematical formalism, code, or perhaps a board game — you never run into this dichotomy. You never have to waver between what is really true and what only seems to be true.

Some will object that many mathematical questions are, in practice, unsolvable, because even billions of years and gigawatts of computing power wouldn’t be enough to tell what only looks like an ideal solution from what actually is one. Others will point out that mathematicians have proven some questions can never be answered. To them I say: look closely at what was proven. It is that no single method can answer all such questions at once, and that question itself has been answered. It is "no." Each particular question still has its answer. A given program either stops or runs forever, and nothing about it is uncertain. What keeps us from the answer is that we must find it with finite means. We have finite time, so we cannot wait for a process that never ends, and finite memory, so we cannot hold what grows without bound. Even our proofs are finite, so they cannot reach every fact. Reality is what makes these questions unanswerable, even when they concern virtual worlds with no physical existence, such as the worlds of numbers and programs we have created entirely in our heads. Free of those constraints, we could follow any process to its end and know the answer to every question about it. The worlds we invent keep no secrets of their own; their limits are the limits of reality we explore them with.

We cannot create a world that imposes limits on what we can know; the best we can do is borrow this feature from reality. In the same way, we cannot produce true randomness; we always have to borrow it from reality. In fact, the problem of true randomness follows directly from the point above. If we managed to produce something that appeared truly random, all it would take is a look at the mechanism to see how it was constructed — and therefore that it isn’t random at all. In my book, I argue that this is the strongest evidence against the idea, proposed by some philosophers, that we might be living in a computer simulation. We are not. Nor would borrowing randomness from some outer reality save the idea, because beyond being unable to generate true randomness, we cannot create anything about which one couldn’t tell whether it truly is so or only seems to be. How could anyone create a simulation without being able to produce these two basic ingredients? And if someone were able to produce them, how different from us they would have to be! So different that we can’t even imagine it, just as nobody can imagine how to build even a simple generator of true randomness.

This shows that there are things we encounter everywhere in everyday life that we cannot replicate. We cannot even imagine what replicating them would require, or what such a replica would look like. Even freed from a physical body, we would not become God-like. We would be more like angels, which offers a faint glimpse of why there may be room in the order of beings for something higher than humans but lower than God.

And yet the question at the heart of this article arises in the most ordinary, everyday situations. It’s a question that deeply preoccupies every small child:

Mommy, do you love me?

All it takes is two conscious beings for one of them to wonder whether something is truly what it appears to be. And there is no way to tell for certain. There may be mothers who hate their children from the moment they are born, still hate them on their deathbed, and appear loving all along. Proof simply isn’t possible.

Similarly, it takes two conscious beings to bring the question into a virtual world, and they bring it with them from reality. Think of a computer game, a social network, or the film The Matrix, which depicts exactly such a virtual world, one whose essential ingredients are borrowed from reality. This, by the way, makes the simulation hypothesis even less probable: a simulation that has to borrow its essential ingredients from reality would be about the least impressive engineering workaround imaginable, especially when much simpler ways exist to achieve the same effect. Humans can build shared virtual worlds without any technology at all. Marxism, for instance, needs only a slim booklet to boot a shared illusory world into existence. And to an engineer like me, social engineering is engineering too.

“Mommy, do you love me?” may be one of the most profound questions of the kind we’re examining, but it is a time-bound one. What point is there in asking it when most of us will never be able to tell appearance from truth, and death will seal the two together forever? The questions humanity asks tend to be more open-ended, and their answers less certain. They call for a leap of faith, or more precisely, they make room for faith to exist.

The following question, for instance, may have more potential to tear the world apart than nuclear weapons:

Is the other person conscious too, or does it only seem that way?

We cannot afford to lose faith in the right answer to this question. Related questions include:

Are animals unable to tell right from wrong, or does it only seem that way?

Do good and evil really exist, or are they just an illusion?

And for anyone willing to weigh the evidence, there are further questions of equal seriousness:

Is Jesus the Son of God, or does it only seem that way?

Is the world an elegant piece of engineering, or does it only look like one?

Do we own this planet, or does it only seem that way?

Having weighed all the evidence I have, I’m in no doubt about how each of these matters appears.

But is it true, or does it only look that way?

That, to me, is the most important question in the universe.

To me, economics is a genuine mystery. I’ve tried many times to understand it, even just its basic principles, but I grasp its rules about as well as a tone-deaf person carries a tune. And yet I find it as fascinating as many tone-deaf people find music.

As I understand it, the economy began the first time two people were willing to trade, each owning something the other wanted. That in itself is a small miracle. For it to happen, both sides had to trust that they wouldn’t be cheated or robbed, or at least that if they were, they wouldn’t lose more than they could afford.

I’ve never quite managed that kind of trust myself. Sure, I’m not afraid in that sense when I go to the supermarket. But that’s only because I know the people selling the goods there own neither the shop nor the goods, and are too powerless to do me any real harm. That’s why I buy my food at the supermarket instead of growing it in my garden. I should add, though, that I live in one of the safest countries in the world, one that’s fairly rich and well run. I’ll never understand how any of this could have worked a few hundred years ago, except perhaps among very wealthy relatives.

Over the course of my life, I would have bought many more things, especially services, from many more people if I hadn’t been afraid they’d take advantage of me. Instead, I learned to live without a lot of things I could have used, and built some of them myself. That cost me a great deal of time I could have spent on things that truly matter, which is a bit like saying I could have spent it serving God.

Yes, even in economics, it seems you only have to turn the first corner to run into questions of faith and God. How hard it is to live a life of purpose seems to depend directly on how safely we can rely on other people and how well integrated we are as a society, or, conversely, how much we have to live like isolated islands. At the very beginning of the Bible, Adam wanted to assert his independence and take control, and he was remarkably successful at defying God’s vision of communion.

Have we really become so much better at trusting each other over the centuries? If we have, I’ve fallen terribly behind. I’ve found myself trusting people less and less the better I’ve come to understand them. I can’t quite grasp how society has functioned for so long without falling apart. I often ask myself: is God constantly tampering with everything around me, on a grand scale? Is it a miracle? If not, where did all this trust come from, and is it really there at all? The trust that apparently holds society together, but that I can’t see, is one side of the mystery of the economy.

So for me, being able to use money every day is a bit like walking on water. I should have sunk long ago, yet I can still go out and buy things. But there’s another side to this mystery: that I have any resources to spend at all. In other words, how come people have been willing to pay me for what I do? It’s not that people have reason to be wary of dealing with me; I think many people around me can tell that I take my faith in God seriously. Nor do I lack rare skills. I’ve been gifted with quite a few, and I can put them to good use. What I don’t understand is why some of them, the ones I actually consider less important, are still in demand, while some of my most essential skills, without which I’d find life wholly unbearable, seem to be of no use to anyone except perhaps my closest family. I seem to be surviving by accident, or by a miracle. I’m like a baker who makes his living renting out a few rooms in his house, rooms that stay warm thanks to the oven in which he still bakes bread for his family’s table — bread nobody buys anymore. Perhaps it’s a lack of trust in God, which happens to be one of my weaknesses, that makes me fear a day may come when none of the skills I can offer will be in demand, and people will get along just fine in the cold.

This fear doesn’t seem unrealistic or irrational to me, since the reverse also seems to be true: much of what society has to offer is of no use to me. Let me give a couple of concrete examples.

I have no use for a better car, for instance. The features on offer usually don’t interest me at all. I don’t need heated seats or more comfortable upholstery. On the other hand, my car lacks many practical features that no one offers. I’d gladly pay extra for a washer fluid level sensor, an open-window warning, a battery charge indicator, and other detailed alerts about what might soon need servicing. I can even put up with a fair amount of discomfort if that’s the price of freeing up time for things that truly matter instead of chasing down car problems that should never arise in the first place. In the same way, I don’t need a better smartphone with a better built-in camera, because I rarely take photos, and when I do, I need far better optics than any smartphone can offer. Taking casual snapshots would only eat into my time instead of freeing it up. Meanwhile, I’m still waiting for some practical smartphone features that were rumored before the iPhone 5 came out but never materialized, and that could have helped me free up a bit more time for God. Sorry to go into such detail; I just want to make it clear that these are real, practical needs, not superficial, sanctimonious objections.

By the same token, I would never buy a larger house, because I don’t want to spend even more of my time maintaining it, yet I’d gladly pay extra for a house that needed even less of my time than mine does now. I also have no desire to travel the world just for the experience, yet I’d gladly move to the other side of it if the skills I consider most important were in demand there. In general, I’m willing to pay exactly zero for anything offered to fill my free time, usually under the label of fun. There are few things I find more boring than having fun, especially the paid kind. Killing time feels to me like a partial murder, and if it’s quality time, then it’s a quality murder.

At the same time, I long for many things I’d gladly spend my time on, things that don’t exist yet. There are many unwritten books on subjects I find important that I’d eagerly read, films I’d watch with delight, music, both classical and popular, that no one has composed yet, paintings no one has painted, even sculptures. It extends even to basic household items. For years, we haven’t been able to find a crucifix with a figure of our Lord that we’d be happy to hang in our home. We still don’t have one, and I’ll probably have to make one myself.

I even struggle to buy basic, decent-looking clothes. I find it hard to believe that aesthetics don’t matter to God, the same God who devoted several entire chapters of Exodus to meticulously describing the fabrics of the tabernacle and the garments of the priests. Quality clothing also saves time, since it lasts longer. So I can’t accept that what we wear is unimportant, or that it lies outside our proper relationship with God. That’s also why I would never buy clothing with any visible mark on it (unless the manufacturer paid me properly for renting out my body as a billboard for their logo). The only alternatives seem to be cheap, low-quality products or expensive tailor-made clothing, which makes sense for state officials, concert virtuosos, or clergy, but not for ordinary programmers like me.

To sum it all up, there seems to be a huge disconnect in my case between supply and demand: between what I need, what I want, what I’m willing to work for and pay for, and what society can provide. Isn’t that supposed to be the central principle around which everything in economics revolves, that demand drives supply? So am I just an exception? Is it some law of nature that most people need completely different things than I do? Why do I happen to be the outlier while they happen to be the majority? Is something wrong with my mind? Or with theirs? Can anyone explain this to me?

There is a lot of talk about how our planet is going down the drain because of excessive consumption, resource depletion, and environmental damage. We keep hearing appeals to conscience, while people go on making small talk, comparing what they’ve spent on this and that. When I hear these conversations, my mind drifts off so completely that some people consider me deeply introverted. I sometimes wonder why they don’t just lay their bills on the table in silence, the way we do when we play cards.

This has been going on for decades, yet the appeals have achieved very little. It seems as if economists, sociologists, and psychologists all agree that this is simply what people need, as if by some law of necessity. Many argue that the only real option left is legislation that curbs consumption directly; otherwise, we will spend our children’s future and leave them a debt of unbearable living conditions.

Yet the truth is, I don’t need to spend more, I don’t want to spend more, and neither does my family. In fact, if some of our demand were met, we could even spend less. If we were in the majority, whole industries would be working on how to free up people’s time so they could spend it on things that truly matter. Maybe this could even fuel economic growth for decades, enabling all of us to spend less and less. And then, once everything ran like a well-oiled machine, I could spend days on pilgrimages and in processions, enjoying feasts and liturgies celebrated near the tabernacle, praising God, talking with people, and simply being with them.

I could keep doing this for all eternity: a pleasure I’d never tire of, and one that would cost only a modest, appropriate amount of natural resources.

I want it, I need it, I demand it. And I really don’t get it.

Again and again in my writing, I have rediscovered the same motif in different variations: if we value truth above all else, we cannot remain shackled to the literal propositions of natural language. This is because God, who is the Truth, did not reveal himself in logical syllogisms but in divine parables. As I have argued before, this has serious implications for physics, information technology, and theology. But it has only recently dawned on me that it may also have significant consequences for certain edge cases of Church teaching that many find difficult to accept.

I am talking about those situations where you come to Church authority as someone who delights in the Gospel, in the word of God, and leave feeling scalded by the sharp deductions of official logic, which rebuke you and condemn what you do. I believe that what often crushes you so completely is not the verdict itself, but the disconnect you sense between reality and the syllogisms you are presented with. This leads many to turn against Church teaching in defiance, or at the very least to live in private what they would not openly admit in public, without any sense that they are sinning.

I think that, in truth, this has nothing to do with what the Church teaches. The Church can only teach what has been revealed and confirmed to it by the Lord Jesus, and he did not speak in syllogisms. I believe that if the Lord Jesus himself appeared and told a parable pointing to the same conclusion as that sharp official deduction, many would take his words to heart and repent, or at least see the truth as it really is. It is the utter misunderstanding caused by the inability to match the words to the reality that causes the rift, and a rift can harden into schism.

Consider the following nonsensical yet sharp deduction: all Catholic Christians should stay out of hospitals, because more people die there than anywhere else. Hospitals are where doctors tamper with the gift of life, which they did not give and therefore have no right to take. They are also places where patients are coerced into acting as if losing this earthly life were the ultimate disaster and there were no life to come. So not only do they risk losing their lives, they also put their very salvation in danger. Going to hospital is therefore gravely sinful.

I think we can all breathe a sigh of relief that this is not how the Church officially interprets things. It may sound odd, but we should acknowledge that there is a lot of truth in the argument above, and that a similar approach from Church authority would not be without precedent. To name one such instance: in the nineteenth century, the Church prohibited cremation on similar grounds. Because it was promoted largely by Freemasons, freethinkers, and anticlerical movements, cremation was seen as an open statement against belief in the afterlife, and thus against the Church. This is why it was banned for everyone. Now just replace Freemasons with doctors and cremation with risky medical procedures, and you have essentially the same situation, or at least a very similar one.

The ban on cremation was later relaxed, once society had forgotten its anti-religious connotations, yet scattering ashes remains prohibited for related reasons to this day. Not every practicing Catholic knows about these rules, and a scathing reproof from Church authority, with its sharp anti-nihilist and anti-pantheist fervor, can strike such people just after they have lost a loved one. Imagine such a person receiving a call from the parish office about this very matter, at that very moment. A biological machine would simply process the reasoning behind the rules and move on, but a living person endowed with emotions may instead sink to the kitchen floor, breathing hard, too stunned to speak. Words swirl in their head, but none of them seem to fit the reality they are living through. It feels like being slapped across the face by a parent at the very moment you need them to hold your hand.

I have experienced such ruthless treatment from the institutional Church many times myself. As a convert, I did not know or understand many things, and since catechesis was never truly a priority where I live, I had to learn the hard way the rules everyone assumes everyone knows. These experiences did not tear me away from the body of Christ, but only because I had set no expectations in the first place, of cruelty or, more precisely, of mercy.

But I happen to know several cradle Catholics who became completely estranged from their parish family after similar experiences, at a time when they were hoping for a helping hand. Sadder still, all they had done was something slightly unusual or unexpected, like scattering ashes without knowing anything about nineteenth-century freethinkers. It was not they who were working against Church teaching; it was misguided words, frozen into an official formula, that were working against them. All of this stemmed solely from the habit of staying within the world of words and logic, of official formulas that no longer convey the Holy Spirit.

As I have described in several other articles, in the coming age of language models all of society is about to receive a heavy dose of the same medicine. Perhaps it will finally cure us. The suffering may well be worth it, for it is no small thing when a distortion tears the body of Christ apart.

Today, I accept the Church’s teaching in its entirety. There were things I disagreed with in the past, but my life experience has always, in the end, shown me that the Church was right. I believe I will be able to explain its teaching to my kids as well, so that they never find themselves in conflict with it. Yet I still cannot quite make peace with many frozen official formulas. Some of them resemble my earlier argument about hospitals, or the rule on scattering ashes: true in a sense, yet badly misguided.

In science, it is the results, not the quality of the reasoning, that are put to the test; in matters of faith, it is the exact opposite. In faith, we know the conclusions are true, yet when the reasoning behind them is poor, it cannot withstand the test of experience, and faith gives way with it, as we can see happening across the Western world today.

I therefore believe that we, or rather the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, should put every official Church statement to a simple test. It would always begin with the same scene: “A young man came to the Lord Jesus and asked him, ‘Teacher, should we believe that [official Church statement]?’” The task is then to come up with at least one plausible answer the Lord Jesus might give that would not sound like outright sacrilege.

Let me demonstrate with the hospital example. Here, even someone without any authority, like me, can try it, since the Church holds no such official position.

“A young man approached the Lord and said, ‘Son of David, are we truly meant to avoid hospitals at all costs, lest we put our eternal life at risk, as the authorities teach?’ Jesus looked at him and said, ‘Is it better for doctors, good and bad alike, to be scattered across the land doing what they do, or for them all to work in one place? In which case are the sick more likely to be healed?’”

I realize that putting words into the mouth of the Lord Jesus is not something to be taken lightly. It would be enough if the authorities did the testing in private and simply told us which official statements survived and which should henceforth be considered void.

I cannot imagine the rule about scattering ashes surviving, and I suspect quite a few others would fall as well. I am not a moral theologian, still less a culture warrior, so I will not speculate about the ones you may be thinking of.

I trust the authorities to do their job.

In our age, one might think the problem of suffering is the hardest thing to understand and make peace with. Not for me. For me there is another problem that is even harder to get my head around: how to cooperate effectively with God — how to recognize His will.

In the Gospels, the Lord Jesus warns in several places that one should carefully count the cost before deciding to follow Him, for “Foxes have dens and birds have nests, but the Son of Man has no place to lay his head.” And indeed, in my experience, it is quite a ride. Coming from a non-believing family, I have some basis for comparison. In my life there sometimes seem to be more twists and turns in a single month than some of my relatives go through in a decade — and this while they are actively trying to live life to the fullest. I, on the other hand, try to keep my life as boring as possible, with as few changes and as little adrenaline as I can manage. Yet what I always end up with is uncertainty, volatility, and the need to make one consequential decision after another — very often affecting my wife, my kids, and others too.

In the society where I live, it is common to pay to make one’s life less monotonous. I would gladly pay to make mine as monotonous as possible — to buy a kind of insurance against chaos. Yet here we are, right back at the problem I outlined at the beginning. One would gladly hedge against all sorts of risks, but how does one do so without also hedging against God’s nonexistence? That is the one thing I cannot do, though nonbelievers can. For them there is no God, and so they can keep insuring themselves all the way down into a monotonous paradise of boredom — one where the valve of adventure stays firmly in their own hands, ready to be opened during the holidays. That is, at least, until an illness comes, or a disaster, or an economic crash — or, even more often, until they manufacture some artificial drama around which they can begin to feel bitterness and resentment, and nurse their grudges.

I often pray that God will keep these surrogate problems and this surrogate suffering away from us. And indeed, they rarely do strike us. For if you decide to follow the Lord Jesus, and you genuinely try to, real problems and real suffering tend to arrive long before any surrogate ones can take hold. But am I actually following God’s will — or am I just being irrational and delusional, incredibly lucky for now, with doom looming over me? Frankly, I am far from certain. Here is what I do:

Firstly, I gave up any ambitions of my own long ago. I look around and search for efforts that feel good, purposeful, and legitimate — things that make sense and that, if they were to come to fruition, would surely please God, according to what we know about Him.

Secondly, there are incredibly many such things around me, and I cannot spend time with each and every one of them. And spending too little time on something can often hurt more than spending none at all. I am also not gifted enough to do just anything, so I choose carefully, according to my gifts.

But that still leaves me with too many things to choose from. This is where I become attentive to various signs. Sometimes they take the form of strange coincidences, often what feel like God’s little jokes: I might be thinking intently about something as I walk down a street, weighing two options, when around the corner comes some completely unrelated advertising banner saying “Take option B”. Or I am actively considering joining some effort when a person I haven’t heard from in ten years calls me at that very moment and, as an odd little aside to the otherwise mundane purpose of the call, suggests I should never get involved in such things.

One sign like that is usually not enough for me, but when several come together, I weigh whether it is possible for me to change course — whether, with a bit of luck, I could reorganize things in my life to make the new thing fit. Of course, it is always far from a sure bet; but if this is what God wants — and since He frequently makes these odd little tweaks here and there — I tend to believe He will help. Because very often, for ordinary things, no great miracle is necessary.

Standing before such a decision — usually a small one, but sometimes a big one — I always have to weigh the possibility that I am mistaken, that I have misread the signs. And most of all, I know quite well how I would proceed if I thought there were no God at all. If there were no God, I would simply seek external confirmation for what I inwardly long to do anyway. But unmistakably, making the new thing fit always leads me out of my comfort zone; it goes against what I would naturally want. It brings uncertainty and volatility, and exposes my life to unnecessary risk.

To be honest, I have to confess that I have a tendency to hedge against this risk. But then I ask myself whether I am not, in fact, hedging against God’s nonexistence.

In a similar way, one could hedge against the fallibility of the Bible — the most significant source of knowledge about who God is. And it is really one and the same question, since what matters is not so much whether God exists, but rather whether God is who the Bible claims Him to be. If the Lord Jesus were not God, there would be no point in living the way Catholic Christians strive to live.

This is what I pray I never do:

On its face, the previous sentence may not sound like anything too serious. But in fact — read it again — behold, this is the very definition of atheism. An atheist is a person who insures himself against the possibility that the Lord Jesus is not God. Is it not incredibly serious how near each and every one of us stands to unbelief? It seems quite possible to me that many who declare themselves Catholic Christians are in fact Catholic atheists.

This is not just intellectual theorizing. It shapes your everyday decisions, and it shows plainly in how you live — hard to hide from anyone who happens to take a look. Either you are a Christian, or you merely assent to Christian values.

But if following God’s will were so simple, I would not have begun this article by saying it’s a problem I still can’t quite get my head around. The real difficulties become more apparent when you let other people into the picture.

It has happened to me several times that I started doing a good, purposeful, and legitimate thing after receiving multiple signs. I started — and I saw the effort utterly fail. I never quite doubted God’s existence in such situations, but that is only because it makes no sense for me to live in a world where the Lord Jesus is not God. Yet assuming He is the God we know from the Gospel, the one who would not lead us astray — how is it that He cannot quite protect His plan? Or at least His plan A? How is it that what appears to be a straight line, shining bright white, so often never quite materializes, and what comes instead seems like a more toned-down plan B? In fact, my life as a whole seems a lot like a toned-down plan B. And reading the Bible, I can’t help but feel that what I hear narrated is yet another plan B for mankind — one aggregated out of countless individual plan Bs.

The only explanation, of course, is that it's so often plan B because we refuse to cooperate with God, and He never overrides our free will. And that may, of course, sometimes include me — although I would never knowingly go against God once I felt I had discerned His will. Well, Pharaoh in the book of Exodus did — and it has sown confusion ever since. So unlikely his case seems.

But that is still the more understandable side of the equation. Harder is to imagine that it's the other person. For I have seen many times that I judged God's will quite differently than my peers did. Yet it feels equally unacceptable to think they were all Christian impostors, or that they were all led astray, reaching a different conclusion — one that doomed the shared effort, God's plan A. Even this second possibility, that sincere people are led astray, is hard to imagine. It's hard to believe that God, given our honest effort, would let us go astray.

And that is a question I sadly cannot answer.

But what I do almost every time is hedge against other people’s insincerity: I always keep a plan B in my pocket, so that the efforts toward a good thing would never come to nothing. In the past I doubted whether such a strategy could even be deemed morally acceptable. But the older I get, the more it seems to me there is nothing wrong with keeping a plan B in your pocket — since it seems God Himself may do the same.

If a man can aspire to become God’s tool, plan B may be a part of that. Anyway, it’s something quite different from trying to insure oneself against God’s nonexistence.

Yesterday I tried to fix my bicycle. It wasn’t the kind of repair you do once or twice a month — I had to order some special equipment I wasn’t familiar with. Things didn’t quite go as planned, and I was afraid I’d end up causing damage instead of putting things back in order. So I consulted an LLM, which gave me some guidance, but the more I thought about it, the more I realized that if the advice wasn’t completely accurate, I could break the bicycle for good. So I searched the web, but I couldn’t find anything that would confirm, refute, or add to what the LLM had told me. The AI summary at the top of the search results said more or less the same thing as the model I’d already consulted. Then I searched YouTube, hoping to find a video showing the same edge case I’d run into. I couldn’t find one. I couldn’t spend hours trying to verify it, so I decided to take the risk. It was just a bicycle, after all. I ended up damaging it, but only slightly, and a professional will be able to set it right, I hope.

It wasn’t that the LLM was wrong. Based on what I’d learned from my mistake, I asked it a few follow-up questions, and it told me how I could have prevented what happened. So it had been right all along — I’d just prompted it poorly, and under time pressure I made a rushed decision that happened to be the wrong one. The time pressure came from how hard it was to find something a human had written — or at least knowingly approved — that would help me verify the LLM’s output. As an engineer, I’m well aware that there are situations where I don’t know what I don’t know. That’s why my natural tendency is to look for experimental evidence that shows me in detail how something works end to end. I have my own methods for surfacing the important things I’m unaware of — even the ones I don’t understand well enough to ask the right questions about. This time, I failed. It was just a bike; not much was at stake. But it was the first time I’d had to rely solely on an LLM in a make-or-break situation. I pray you never find yourself under time pressure for weightier reasons, deciding on things far more crucial than a bike. Sadly, I know quite a few people who already have.

People who aren’t software engineers by trade would suggest I need to learn how to prompt the AI better, but that’s simply not true. I’m convinced the experience I’m about to relate is impossible to convey convincingly in words; you can only gain it by spending at least a couple of years writing software and looking back at your failures:

Not even if you try hard, not even if you’re the most senior engineer, not even after reading a ton of books. It’s impossible. You need a second pair of eyes, a human — in software we call them QA engineers or testers. There must be a similar role in every field of engineering. Alternatively, the other person may be God — by which I mean you run an experiment that tests your output against reality, which is bound by God’s laws and gives you instant feedback from the hidden Him. Countless times, I’ve watched managers ask me or my peers why we needed testers: “Couldn’t you just be more diligent? Next time, you simply need to try a bit harder to find your blind spots.”

If all you’ve ever done is fill in spreadsheets and check up on other people, or you’ve never worked in the role that does what the company fundamentally does, you can never get it — yet it’s a natural law that you can’t discover your blind spots any way other than with the help of another person. I believe few things are more fundamental to engineering than this — if anything is at all. Needless to say, this applies to our inner lives within the body of Christ.

Part of the reason this finding seems so counter-intuitive is that an experienced worker often produces work that’s almost flawless — or at least perfectly acceptable. Even without a second pair of eyes, such output would pass every quality standard. Some managers are therefore tempted to get rid of quality-assurance people, bypassing them by creating just enough pressure — high enough to make people more vigilant about their blind spots, but not so high that it breaks them. This is a bit like trying to pull yourself out of a swamp by your own hair, and then, when that doesn’t work, trying to fix it by pulling harder. If only we knew which parts of what we produce are flawless and which need fixing — then the second pair of eyes wouldn’t be necessary at all. But who will tell us? And can it be someone who isn’t a “who” at all? Can’t we just ask AI?

It seems this is like the Song That Never Ends: we’re back at square one, at the beginning of this article, where I used an LLM to ask for guidance — but since I didn’t want to break my bicycle for good, I tried to find something a human had written, or at least knowingly approved, that would help me verify the LLM’s output. This recursive line of thought is not unlike the struggle to build a perpetuum mobile; only instead of an infinite source of energy, you’re after an infinite source of manpower — also known as intelligence. You can’t do it. It’s against the laws of nature, and God’s design has no flaw susceptible to a hack. If you’re an atheist, just remove the word “God” and everything still stands. It’s rock solid.

An LLM is like a huge book in which everything is written, and with each new version of the model it’s written more clearly, precisely, and accurately. We just never quite know which parts of the book to read. Or we do know, but it would take us too long to read them, so we end up reading only a short summary, which may not reflect our particular situation well. The problem with the book is that it’s static — it’s not a living person.

We scraped all the books in the world into one ultimate book, and we hope that if the complete wisdom of the universe isn’t there yet, it will be in the next version. We even have a magnificent way now to search the book for whatever we need. The LLM can produce not only what we asked for, but also everything we didn’t ask for but would have, if only we knew what we don’t know. Except that in that case its response would be too long for anyone to read.

As I argue in my book, natural language has a limitation that can’t be eliminated: it isn’t suited to storing knowledge in sufficient detail while still keeping it comprehensible to homo sapiens. We’re at a stage in our cultural evolution where we’re beginning to entertain the possibility that understanding the knowledge doesn’t matter so much, as long as we can use it. Alternatively, we contemplate replacing homo sapiens with something better — something with fewer limitations.

Technically the solution is simple, as I’ve argued in my book and elsewhere. And I’m building one: instead of removing understanding, or the human species, from the equation, I’d dare to suggest we try storing knowledge in something other than natural language. That I would find feasible. And don’t worry, it won’t hurt the LLMs; they’d most likely thrive because of it. But we need to start maintaining this knowledge infrastructure together, collaboratively, with our own eyes on it, so that it carries our seal of approval — possibly with a great deal of help from LLMs.

We may not have enough time left, though.

I’ve just realized I can’t find a bicycle repair shop near me with decent reviews and somewhat heavier machinery. That is, I can’t find it without asking an LLM. These days, all the services that aren’t LLMs or big-tech aggregators are much harder to find — all those sites whose content was created by an independent set of eyes, by real people. Maybe they’ll be gone for good soon, and asking an LLM will be the only option left. But what will the LLMs use for training then, to stay up to date? Especially once we no longer possess the understanding ourselves.

I think we may be losing it.

As a society — including technically minded people like myself — we carry a heavy technical debt that stems from never having truly taken seriously the guidance our Lord gave us in the Gospel about how we should primarily approach making sense of this world. This applies in theology, in science, and even in technical design.

The world we live in is extraordinarily complex — whether we mean our inner life, experienced directly from within our own consciousness, or external reality, mediated to us through the senses. The Gospel speaks primarily to the former, yet practical experience shows that the same kinds of issues arise in both.

Let me start with a simple example. Imagine you are a father, and your child has finally fallen asleep after a nightmare, curled up against you. You desperately need to get up, but you’re afraid to wake him. To describe the situation, you say: “I just couldn’t move.”

Coming from a father, that’s perfectly understandable — less so when it’s said about God. The Lord Jesus often uses the image of a father when speaking about God, so imagine similar words uttered about God: that He simply couldn’t do something. That He couldn’t, for example, make the city of Nineveh vanish from the face of the earth.

Would you write, or even speak, words like these about God? Probably not. Many would immediately object that God is omnipotent — that you can’t say He couldn’t do something, since He obviously could. He can do anything.

To avoid such difficulties when speaking about God, we often construct more precise sentences that end up sounding a little too legalistic, impersonal, and cold — a precision that shields us from criticism. Yet these sentences fail to bear truthful witness to our God, who is neither legalistic nor impersonal nor cold. Language is a powerful thing, and once you fall into the habit of speaking about God this way, you risk it changing you — and altering your relationship with Him.

This way of handling language can also push you toward a hypocrisy resembling that of the biblical Pharisee; and from a practical standpoint, it will almost always make your point harder to follow, even when the underlying thought is quite primitive. Seen from outside the church — by a non-believer with no grounding in theology — our way of speaking may appear strange. Or, worse, we may come across as dull, affecting a scholarly manner we can’t actually carry off. As a convert, I never quite got used to this manner of conduct among the clergy: the cold, sometimes even ruthless demeanor, the elaborately worded sentences that convey what is often quite primitive thought. It reminds me of how communist apparatchiks spoke — except that they really were ruthless and stupid, whereas with the clergy it’s mostly about avoiding criticism from the lovers of syllogism.

It is indeed incredibly hard to talk about God and stay consistent at the level of language. But I would argue the same holds if you wanted to stay consistent about that compassionate father who couldn’t move. Technically speaking, he could move, and it would be more accurate for him to say: “I decided not to move, because in my heightened compassion I didn’t want to risk waking my child.” Now the same primitive thought sounds more elaborate and theological. Yet if it were spoken about God, the sentence would have to be more complicated still: God would obviously know in advance which action would wake the child, and since He exists beyond time, He would have been resolved on that course from the beginning of time.

I don’t command the language well enough to formulate the equivalent example about God. And even if some cleverer person could, remember that this is still only the most primitive of examples. That’s not my personal limitation; it’s the limitation of our species"! I could have an LLM generate it — it can command far more complex linguistic structures, and it might even be funny — but I hope you get the point by now. Perhaps the truth about God, or about the world He created, can be captured at the level of language; but it certainly cannot be captured in a way that we, as people, are then able to get our heads around. And if humans are meant to remain the actors on the world’s stage, findings like this matter.

This is why lawyers are sometimes taken for tricksters: they command natural language a little better than the rest of us, and what they write is more precise — yet very often it also eludes understanding. The contracts they draft are frequently impenetrable to people like you and me, who can end up trapped in some elaborate clause. And in human justice this doesn’t count as injustice: you will be judged by a judge who can see plainly what is written in the scroll — so hire yourself a lawyer if you can’t read it yourself.

But this reality has technological implications too. In engineering, there is no human judge who will honor what is written, even when it is written correctly. As an engineer, you are judged by God Himself, who designed the laws of nature — and this may be why engineers, physicists, and scientists in general long ago ceased to live in the space of natural language, where law and theology still hobble along. We live in allegories, which we call world models. We don't claim, for instance, to know what a photon is; instead, we have a clever way of imagining it — as a particle or a wave, whichever is more useful. Such allegories have proven able to stand the test of natural law, which means they carry the stamp "approved by God Himself." And it may come as no surprise that in the Gospel, the Lord Jesus, too, used allegories to explain how things truly are.

It’s also not particularly surprising that some notable AI researchers, like Yann LeCun, recognizing the limits of large language models, have turned instead to artificial intelligence based on world models. If large language models were trained on language fragments authored by God, they might come to capture a superhuman understanding of reality; but since they are trained on human-made data, it’s far more likely they will capture a superhuman misunderstanding of it. It’s a bit like the situation with judges and lawyers. Such an understanding can sometimes bear a stamp reading “approved by the world’s experts,” if that’s what you’re after — but that doesn’t mean it will stand the test of reality in the long run. The “approved by God Himself” stamp may be on it as well, or it may not. You can place a bet, or you can find out for yourself, by getting your head around the understanding and testing it in a scientific way. But in that case you will have to reduce it from a superhuman understanding to a human one, for which you will most likely need some allegories — world models, if you will.

Oh, how relieved all of us believers would be if we could start talking about God the way the Lord Jesus did, without the constant scrutiny of the language parsers. But even then, sadly, there would be another layer of complexity — one that stems from the fact that not every allegory, not every world model, is a divine parable.

This is something physicists experienced first-hand when they tried to deploy geometry to study the laws governing the heavenly bodies. At first, geometry seemed a fine allegory for depicting the motion of the planets by immaterial, purely geometric means. Kepler himself believed he had literally read God’s blueprint off the geometry. But a blueprint is not yet a building. In geometry there are no physical devices for measuring time and distance; and it wasn’t until Einstein turned that immaterial allegory from the world of mathematics back into a material one — where you have to measure time with physical clocks and distance with physical rods — that experiments began to agree fully with reality. This correction came much sooner this time; but geometry, just like language, proved insufficient to serve as a divine parable on its own.

One cannot make sense of this created world solely by thinking in equivalences drawn from a world of another kind — whether a world of mathematics or a world of language. A divine parable always describes this world through an allegory drawn from another part of this world.

And this is the technical debt I spoke of at the very beginning. In science we have fought a good fight — a substantial portion of the debt still remains, yet scientists deserve the respect they enjoy. In information technology it’s considerably worse, and so IT deserves the mixed feelings society directs toward the worlds of hardware and software. In theology it’s a plain disaster — and the disrespect the clergy sometimes meet with from the secular part of society is, in this narrow sense, not entirely unearned.

We Catholic believers need to start talking and thinking in divine parables. And I don’t mean this as a wink toward Protestantism — I’m not asking us to loosen a single dogma. I mean the opposite: finding parables for our dogmas, so that what we confess with precision we can also speak the way the Lord Himself spoke.

In medieval universities, the faculty of theology held the highest rank. It was often called regina scientiarum — the queen of the sciences. Theology was seen as governing the other disciplines, orienting all human knowledge toward its ultimate end: salvation, union with God. The other sciences were treated as merely auxiliary tools.

It makes sense to have a whole field devoted to the rigorous study of what to do with one’s life. It’s like acknowledging that what makes a good writer is knowing what to write about: fluency with the tools is a necessary condition, but not a sufficient one. And each of us is, to some extent, the writer of our own life, so having a basic orientation toward what makes a good one seems important enough to take seriously. Even in today’s secular world, there’s a large market for self-help books and similar material aimed at exactly this, so it’s hard to argue the field no longer matters.

It can’t be said that the self-help shelf is the queen of the bookstore, but that’s understandable, since today’s worldviews look less like a single coherent system than a sprawling, fragmented chaos. What puzzles me far more is that no one would go to the self-help shelf — or any nearby shelf — to browse books on theology. It’s not that readers dislike theology; it’s that these books simply aren’t there. Theology is now perceived as an academic discipline, a field for experts. There are certainly theologians who write for ordinary people, but standing in front of a room of academic theologians and proclaiming that they are, in essence, meant to be the authors of “Life for Dummies” tutorials would likely provoke ridicule and backlash.

Oh no — they don’t write for dummies. They develop original ideas in their respective niches, then publish articles in journals, just like other scientists. You can certainly read those articles, often even without a PhD, but you need to be familiar with the background — and, most of all, you need a university login.

The problem is that theology may have been called regina scientiarum, but it certainly can’t be considered an experimental science. Its source of knowledge is divine revelation, which is taken to be, in some sense, complete. So it’s hard to discover anything new, and twice as hard to verify what you do find. To develop revealed knowledge you have to rely on razor-sharp logic, just as in philosophy — though that logic is necessarily far less sharp than what we apply in mathematics, since the medium here isn’t formalized, it’s natural language. But if you’re willing to accept a degree of imprecision, or to rule it out by properly defining what truth means to you, you can proceed much as you would in philosophy. You can study what your predecessors wrote, develop their ideas a little further, go into finer detail, cover the edge cases. Why not? This kind of scholarly work has an aesthetic to it, and I’ll admit that to me it could even feel like a marvelous form of leisure.

Of course, what you lose is any universal claim, any authority. This isn’t how our society treats things that need to be relied on in a rock-solid fashion — the way we rely on bridges to hold people up, or on aircraft to carry them safely through the air. When lives are at stake, the standards are so much higher that the two hardly compare. The weight of responsibility an engineer bears is on an altogether different scale from that of an academic theologian — no leisure in it. And indeed, these have always been two different scales: one running between life and death, the other between salvation and damnation. Needless to say, as a practicing Catholic, I consider one of them infinitely more important than the other.

There is something rotten in the state of theology.

If you raise a duckling as a foster parent, it will consider you its mother and follow you wherever you go. I believe this is precisely what happened to theologians when the reign of experimental science took hold across the universities. They simply follow whatever the other academics do, to stay with the herd. You have to come up with original ideas, invent new things, keep pace with your peers. So the scientists do research in their labs, and the theologians study in their studies. Both produce papers — expert-level, detailed documents you won’t understand as a mere mortal, unless you spend some time getting up to speed in the field. With experimental science, that’s not a problem. Skilled engineers will do it for you, and from the new findings they’ll design a better fridge or a faster processor. You don’t need to understand circuit boards to write a document on a computer, and you can use a fridge without knowing anything about its cooling mechanism. Knowing nothing at all can get you into trouble — but you certainly don’t have to track the latest discoveries as they optimize the technology in subtle ways.

With theology it’s different. You can’t hire an expert to rewire your soul for you. You are the sole engineer of your own salvation. But that’s fine — since the revealed truth doesn’t change, and since most of us, if not all, are unable to implement even the basics in our lives, it makes no sense to consume academic papers on the nuances in the thought of some thinker you’d never heard of anyway. This is why even practicing Catholics like me — and, I suspect, most priests and bishops too — don’t much care what’s happening in academic theology today. It’s hard to imagine how it could have any bearing on the salvation of my soul, or of anyone else’s. I wouldn’t go so far as to call academic theology completely useless — many fields of inquiry saw no practical use for a long time, until suddenly they did — but it’s fair to say I don’t expect it to make any difference in my life, in my children’s lives, or in the lives of those close to me.

So, to reiterate: we have problems with the basics. In fact, most of Western society does. For a large part of it the problems have grown so significant that people have lost faith in revealed truths altogether — the claims now strike them as simply implausible. Those are the ones who browse the self-help shelves instead.

Meanwhile, priests and bishops recite the same sentences they always have to their ever-narrowing flock; the flock nods, says everything is perfectly fine, and next year there are fewer of them again — yet the feedback is exactly the same every time. They want to hear it in the way they already understand it: the exact same words, the same sentences, doctrinally safe yet less and less comprehensible from outside the church. And I can attest that they’re less comprehensible from within it too. It’s my firsthand experience that many clergymen will refuse to confirm the accuracy of the same truth formulated in a different way. They play it safe with safe wording, because they too are no longer certain they possess an accurate, working grasp of the doctrine. This is why I admire Joseph Ratzinger, who always could.

It’s really fascinating. One would expect a huge research effort to be under way, trying to work out — through analysis and experiment — why people are losing faith, why they resist the Gospel; because it’s absolutely certain that the Gospel is not to blame, only the way it’s proclaimed. One would expect many alternative approaches to be tested: how to talk about faith effectively, how to address people’s doubts, how to reconcile them with the findings of experimental science. After all, the revealed truth is complete and unchanging — and it isn’t even immensely extensive. And since the Gospel was meant by God to be proclaimed to all, not only to thoughtful intellectuals, there must be a way to formulate the same eternal truths as effectively and accurately in this age as in ages past.

So where are all the competing ways of explaining the very basics of Catholic doctrine to ordinary people? I hesitate even to call it theology, since theology, as I’ve pictured it, is quite a different endeavor. For practical purposes, let’s call it RS — for regina scientiarum. Pronounce it “rēs.”

Ever since I converted, around the age of fifteen, I’ve been passionate about rēs. In the years since, I’ve tried to formulate various doctrinal truths precisely and accurately, in a way compatible with the scientific view. I remember once, still a teenager, visiting a renowned, high-ranking academic who happened to live in the same building where my grandparents had a flat, and trying to demonstrate to him how I would explain a particular point. I can still remember his reaction. He didn’t understand my motivation at all, and said something to this effect: “My dear colleague, I’m afraid you’re trying to break down a door that’s already open — I’m sure several of my fellow academics have published similar ideas in some journal by now.” I couldn’t get across that I wasn’t struggling to claim a novel idea, but to help ordinary people reach a working understanding of the doctrine. For him, my rēs had no place among the coined terms.

During the Middle Ages it was quite normal to discuss doctrinal questions in a pub. There are historical records of authorities complaining that people did exactly that. Our ancestors had a working understanding of the doctrine — in other words, they knew quite well what they believed and why. We are in a very different situation.

Catholic dogmas seem so distant, detached, and incomprehensible to us that we hesitate to discuss them in public. We understand almost every aspect of how the world works far better than our medieval ancestors did, yet we don’t understand what we believe. We can boast several gadgets in each hand that would have seemed like magic a few hundred years ago — the jewels of the kings of the world. We are kings, and yet the crown is somehow fundamentally missing. In my experience, instead of serenity, many believers feel a quiet fear of losing their faith when they delve into the very basics we recite in the Creed every week. When they can’t root their faith in a working understanding of the doctrine, they root it in their way of life instead — which we call tribalism. Or they take their inner peace from a guru — which we call clericalism. But most often their faith has simply been washed out into a kind of leveled-down humanism: the lowest common denominator of all denominations and beliefs.

We need to develop a functional rēs. Maybe you can rid yourself of the bad things you do simply by deciding you believe they’re bad. I have to admit that I always needed to understand why they were bad — only then could I stop doing them. In my view, cultural Christianity can only become a reality when we stop being ducklings and start arguing about dogmas in the pub again.

I admire the Catholic Creed — a short text that succinctly summarizes the whole structure of revealed truth. We recite it on Sundays during Mass in the form of a prayer, but it can also serve practical purposes, when we explain what our faith is about and want to be sure we don’t omit anything.

In this article I want to try an experiment. I’d like to diagnose where we are as a society in an equally succinct way. Having our current diagnosis expressed like this may help us think about the right next steps to effectively address it:

Science is almost magical in what it has brought mankind over the last few centuries. But it always observes phenomena from the outside, never from the first-person view that forms our lived experience. That lived experience is primary, and it is described by the revealed truths of the Catholic Creed, which tell us what it means to be human. Science, by contrast, tells us how things work; it builds mental models of how to reach this or that state of things.

Science hasn’t discovered any structures beyond space-time. In software terms, we’d say it hasn’t found any global internal state akin to memory in software. When you play a computer game from the first-person view, you can’t find the software’s memory within that virtual world; it lies outside of it. Similarly, science doesn’t see anything outside space-time, so we conclude there is nothing more to this world than space-time — which implies everything is contingent on matter. Yes, there is particle entanglement, which could point to the existence of something ‘non-local,’ but we don’t pursue that path of exploration.

If everything is contingent on matter, then our primary experience must be contingent on matter too. That makes our primary experience a secondary product of matter. In any virtual world one could code into existence, the previous sentence would sound like pure nonsense. But when it comes to our lived reality, we don’t care. Somehow we consider the world as described by science more real than our lived, first-hand, primary experience. Most people don’t even doubt this — that is how much we trust that the current scientific view is accurate and fundamentally complete. The reason is that, scientifically, we haven’t yet found anything to the contrary — or almost anything. It’s remarkable to think we have already discovered everything, but we do.

And indeed, if there is nothing beyond space-time, there is also no room for God, whom Catholic doctrine places beyond space-time. This is how we cancel the revealed truth summarized by the Creed — which means we have to define for ourselves what it means to be human. And that means, in turn, we have no identity until we create one for ourselves.

From here stems the current crisis over what it means to be a man, a woman, a priest (as I explored here). It also implies that we are nothing special — merely one species among many — that we are free to remake ourselves into anything at all, a machine included, and that, should we wish, we might even strive to cure death.

And insofar as we are able, we can go further still — correcting the very view we hold of ourselves, replacing the first-person illusion with reality as it appears from the outside. This is how we become properly objectified. Every bad feeling is now merely a bad hormone level in the brain; every good one, a response properly induced by the right external stimulus. Women become the caretakers of their bodies, reading magazines to learn how to service them correctly and attract men, who supply resources in a mutually beneficial lifespan of pleasure. People are paired (configured) for life by a set of standard numerical measures: the circumferences of selected body parts, a weight, a walking speed and range, in some cases even a rated load-bearing capacity. We synchronize and compare these metrics by uploading the relevant audiovisual documentation of ourselves to social networks, so that the final configuration of society is efficiently and continuously optimized.

To get better results we study psychology, watch motivational speeches, read self-help books — but above all we exercise relentlessly, keeping our weight and circumferences in line so as to stay competitive, much as animals compete in the Darwinian account of evolution.

This is how we cure our “suicidal empathy,” to borrow Elon Musk’s term — “a bug in Western civilization, which is the empathy response.”

Oh, what a paradise we live in, now that the revealed truth of the Creed no longer matters and God is not missed.

After reading the first part of the article, maybe you already see that books and science are plateauing, but you may still find some hope in the internet and the digital revolution. It’s certainly true that we now have a planetary network that could theoretically connect any two people on the planet, if they knew the other person was worth connecting with. The speed and sheer volume of data flowing through this network are massive, and we even have a satellite system capable of connecting you to the internet almost anywhere on the globe. There are multiple technical layers to networking, and as a software engineer, I can attest that the hardware layer works in a genuinely clever way, and that even the low-level protocols like Ethernet and TCP/IP are well designed, almost in an academic way. Such technologies could well stay with us for a very long time, and where they have flaws, we mostly have a successor already designed that could easily replace them if the need arose. Unfortunately, this is where it ends: starting with the HTML layer — a human-readable language used to create web pages — the view becomes significantly more bleak.

HTML was originally designed to describe the structure and meaning of documents shared on the internet. The idea was that text would carry its own semantics, not merely its appearance. The hope was that this structure could later be harnessed — by internet browsers, yes, but also by the machines and algorithms that would one day have to organize and search the immense amount of content that was coming. Instead, we mostly used it to control how things looked. We reached for emphasis tags because they happened to render as bold or italic, not because anything was actually being emphasized; structure became a side-effect of chasing appearance. Over time this proved a real hassle, as the way we used HTML drifted too far from what it was meant to express — so we invented elements that carry no meaning at all, useful only as something to hang layout and styling on. Since then we’ve built one intricate layer of abstraction after another to smooth out a fabric that was practically designed to stay wrinkled. Technology after technology comes and goes, each offering some ingenious way to bend the ideal curve into a straight line — there’s even a dedicated programming language sitting on top, one that arrived from elsewhere to the rescue, flexible enough to accommodate any improvisation or ad hoc fix. It’s the most popular language in the world. Among programmers the tech stack is considered rather fancy and sophisticated, and AI is now expected to solve the whole thing once and for all, implementing custom hacks of any complexity fully automatically. This is the foundation on which the entire World Wide Web rests.

In information technology, AI is unbelievably effective wherever we’ve gotten stuck in a complex mess caused by poorly designed fundamental building blocks. AI “thinks” differently than any human, and it can take building blocks of any quality and assemble something complex out of them that simply works. Most of the time, at least. And yes — if you had a hunch, it was right: what you’re looking at is another local optimum. Once again. It seems almost obvious that at some point we’ll have to redesign the fundamental building blocks, drawing on several decades of experience. But for now it seems a couple dozen nuclear power plants fueling AI data centers can buy us enough time to stay stuck for another decade — maybe longer.

If you’re not a technical person, you may think I’m just echoing a disappointment common among software engineers about the way things are. In reality, the very opposite is true. People are genuinely enthusiastic about the way things are; I have never heard anyone complain. People like what brings in more business, and they’re willing to do things the right way only as long as it soon brings more revenue — or lets you control a larger share of the market. Maybe in the early days the idealistic attitude was acceptable, but the story of the big tech industry is one of recognizing that controlling the market and building the best technologies and products are two different objectives.

Initially people tried to invent technologies capable of searching the massive, ever-growing pile of internet documents. But they soon hit the barrier of digital literacy. It’s certainly possible to build a search engine that can find what you’re looking for — but it’s hard to command one when natural language is the only language you’re able to use. The current wave of AI has succeeded precisely because it promises that everyone can stay illiterate in technology: it provides a layer between human language and the various technical formalisms. I certainly can’t see this as a big win for humanity, but before AI there was only one way to rule the market — serve the average mediocre Joe and disregard everyone else. This is how Google became the planetary search engine: not by letting you find whatever you searched for, but by retrieving the stuff the average mediocre Joe searches for in the first place, with some respect for what he actually typed into the box. This is how most people will always find what they want — or at least during the part of the day each of us has to be the average mediocre Joe. My own experience during the rest of the time was quite different. I couldn’t find anything, and Google search kept getting worse, until the large language models came and helped me search again. By then Google was already an advertising behemoth controlling the market in key areas.

Absurdly, a lot of research exists into how to make the internet searchable in a better way, even for people like me. But this research can barely happen in universities. The only entities capable of experimenting on top of a giant base of data are the tech giants. So the solution may already exist — it may even be getting deployed during the training of AI models, in order to win market share there — but we may never benefit from it directly, since building the best possible product simply isn’t a priority.

It’s very similar with social networks. It’s certainly possible to build an infrastructure that connects you with the people on the planet you genuinely ought to know, given your vocation — but have you ever been able to do anything like that? No. On Facebook, for example, we don’t search for people; we add the ones we already know, the ones who help Facebook keep us scrolling so it can sell us more advertising. Here the distance from the ideal product couldn’t be more apparent. We don’t meet anyone new, and we pay for it by wasting time scrolling — and wasting even more time producing things to photo-document, so that others keep scrolling too, watching the perfectly wasted minutes of our perfectly useless active living.

We can’t find what we want, we can’t meet whom we want, we can’t fix the design flaws in the tech stack — and we can only soothe ourselves that AI will build a layer of natural-language interface to make it all more bearable and, simultaneously, more cemented, at the price of extreme energy consumption and significant environmental damage. What is this if not being stuck in an even worse local optimum — one that encompasses the whole of society, disposes of the time of our lives, and makes the earth barely livable?

As a practicing Catholic, I have to say I would rather die on the spot than accept the premises that force us to live on this kind of boring, damaging, exhausting plateau. To me it seems like hell. In many previous articles I’ve explained what it means to love God above everything else. It means trying to be here for others as much as possible, as He exists solely and perfectly to be here for others. In that view, it is not acceptable to seek profit without seeking the product that serves others best. And any advantage you gain by going against this rule is temporary almost by economic necessity — at least in a customer-based economy. I refuse to do it, and so can you and anyone else.

The same holds for fixing fundamental design flaws in technology and promoting basic digital literacy. You can refuse to give up; it isn’t some optional flavor of your life, it’s the essence of it — something without which life is not worth living.

By the same token, if a line of scientific research prevents you from looking into crucial aspects of creation, you should not engage in it, or at least you should not give up.

And you can never make peace with the idea that books and other cultural works can’t be objectively judged. When you read something and suddenly feel the desire that everybody would read it, it’s a good book — that’s the metric. It isn’t about perfect language, originality, enjoyment, or an unusual plot.

If everyone adopted the same attitude, our society would immediately stop plateauing. This is true by definition. So if you think God is not missed in this world anymore, that secularization doesn’t cripple us — think again. It does!

In Silicon Valley there lives a man who looks like the devil and talks like the devil, and may even think of himself as one. His central thesis revolves around the notion that we as humanity have been stuck in a kind of local optimum, one from which it is quite difficult to make any progress. This is why we have been plateauing for the last 50 years, without any major breakthrough in science or in culture more broadly, except perhaps AI based on large language models. He then blames all sorts of things and proposes that we do all sorts of evil ones.

I will not argue with him in a way that promotes his thinking; instead I will explain my own view of how we got to where we are, because I think his initial premise is true. There is always a grain of truth in any evil — otherwise no one would be tricked into it. The rest of it I have no use for.

A local optimum is a solution that looks good enough to live with for a while — one that may even seem like the best we could ever find, except that it isn’t, and we don’t know it. Suppose we had never invented the steam engine and were stuck with horses as our most advanced means of transport. Maybe there are good reasons to stick with horses. Perhaps, on considering the steam engine, we would see all its implications and decide against it. But prematurely concluding that there can never be anything more effective and efficient than horses is simply not right — it’s not true. It’s living in a lie. And God never wants us to live in a lie. He is the truth, and He wants everyone to know the truth. He wants everyone oriented toward Him.

It’s fairly easy to see the issue in the artificial example of the steam engine. You may find it abstract, even pointless, and think that nothing so obviously stupid could be happening in the world around us. Yet it does — all the time, and almost everywhere. Let me give you some real examples.

In November 2021, the antitrust division of the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) sued to block Penguin Random House from buying Simon & Schuster, its major competitor and one of the Big Five publishers. The DOJ argued that the merger would harm authors — specifically the writers of “anticipated top-sellers,” the books that command advances of $250,000 or more — because the two houses would no longer bid against each other for their work. Stephen King testified for the government, against his own publisher, likening the promise that the merged imprints would keep bidding independently to a husband and wife bidding against each other for the same house. In late October 2022 the court agreed and blocked the deal.

The more revealing part of the trial, though, was the portrait of the industry that emerged from the testimony. Publishing, the executives conceded, is an unpredictable, low-margin business in which no one can reliably guess which book will sell. Most titles sell only a handful of copies, and even books acquired for million-dollar advances frequently flop. During the trial a statistic was cited suggesting that half of all published titles sold fewer than a dozen copies — a figure now widely regarded as inaccurate, misread from BookScan’s data. But the deeper claim survives the correction: publishers cannot tell in advance which book will succeed. And the money follows that uncertainty — the bulk of advance spending is poured into a small number of near-guaranteed names: celebrities, franchise authors, brands the houses lean on to stay afloat.

What follows from this, in my reading, is that authors who write books that could influence humanity for centuries are not promoted, not supported, often not even discovered. One could accept that a few potential Shakespeares, Tolkiens, and Hemingways will remain undiscovered forever; yet the reality looks more like all of them remaining undiscovered — or else there being none at all. This is a very likely instance of a local optimum, and it is not acceptable.

My prediction is that at some point in the future, once we have the will, the means, and the skill to tell a fabulous book from a mediocre one, dozens of consequential titles will suddenly surface and change the world. AI could help us get there — but it won’t if we keep insisting that what I’m saying here is naïve nonsense. It won’t if we keep saying that whether a book is good is as irreducibly random as a quantum measurement, and that no one could ever predict it. Nothing will change until we can at least entertain the possibility that the book market is stuck in a local optimum, one caused by cultural disorientation and a flood of mediocre, mass-produced text.

But maybe you think it’s just books. Perhaps you don’t regard books as the crucial cornerstone of civilization that I do. Then let’s take a look at science. I know several scientists, and all of them agree that it is incredibly difficult to get funding to investigate a potentially game-changing subject no one has looked into before, because it’s considered too risky. Science is financed by public money — or, more generally, by the kind of money whose backers, mostly taxpayers, expect to see something in return. And the safest, most reliable way to satisfy those backers is to pursue only the tiniest incremental steps. This means we are measurably moving forward, yet whatever major discoveries do happen, happen by accident — or by mistake.

Consider the story of the mRNA vaccines that saved millions of lives during the Covid pandemic. In the 1990s, Katalin Karikó, a Hungarian biochemist at the University of Pennsylvania, was convinced that messenger RNA — the molecule that carries genetic instructions to the cell’s protein factories — could be turned into medicine. The field disagreed. mRNA was thought too unstable, too inflammatory, too impractical to be worth the money. She couldn’t win grants. In 1995 she was demoted from her faculty track, her salary cut. She kept working anyway. Together with the immunologist Drew Weissman, she eventually found that chemically modifying the building blocks of mRNA let it slip past the immune system’s alarm response — the discovery on which every mRNA vaccine now rests. When they submitted the finding in 2005, both Nature and Science rejected it. It took another fifteen years, and a global pandemic, for the world to notice. In 2023 the two of them were awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine.

Or consider CRISPR, the gene-editing tool that has become the defining biotechnology of our century. Nobody set out to discover it. In 1987 a group of Japanese researchers led by Yoshizumi Ishino were studying an unremarkable gene in the bacterium E. coli when they stumbled across a strange pattern in the DNA nearby: short sequences repeated at regular intervals, separated by unique spacers. They had no idea what it was. Their paper ends, almost with a shrug, by admitting that the biological significance of these sequences was unknown — and then they moved on. For the better part of two decades the observation sat in the literature, cited once or twice a year.

What rescued it was not a funded program but plain curiosity. In the early 1990s a young Spanish researcher named Francisco Mojica, working on salt-loving microbes for reasons that had nothing to do with any application, noticed the very same repeats in an entirely different organism. That they appeared in creatures so unrelated convinced him they had to matter. He was, for the most part, alone in thinking so. When he tried to publish his interpretation, Nature turned him down. Only years later did anyone grasp that these repeats were a bacterial immune system — and that they could be repurposed into a tool for rewriting the code of life itself.

Two of the most consequential biological advances of our age, and neither arrived the way the system is built to deliver progress. One survived because a single researcher refused to give up on an idea everyone told her to abandon; the other survived because a curious microbiologist chased a pattern no funder would have paid him to chase.

Now set that against physics. If biology shows us invention by stubbornness and accident, theoretical physics shows us the same dysfunction from the opposite direction: a system that lavishes decades of funding, prestige, and talent on a program that has produced no breakthrough at all. The physicist Sabine Hossenfelder (whose YouTube channel I keenly recommend) has spent years making this case, most pointedly in her book Lost in Math. Her charge is that fundamental physics has seen no major breakthrough in more than forty years — and that this is not bad luck but the product of bad incentives. Theorists, she argues, have been seduced by mathematical beauty and elegance into building ever more elaborate structures — string theory, supersymmetry, the multiverse — that are untestable in principle and unconfirmed in practice. When the Large Hadron Collider was switched on, the particles that supersymmetry had been expected to reveal simply failed to appear. Rather than abandon the framework, its defenders adjusted the parameters and pushed the predictions to energies just out of reach, where the theory could once again be neither proven nor disproven.

And the machine rolls on regardless, because the incentives reward it. Publish or perish — and the former you do by working on what everyone else works on. You win grants by extending the fashionable program, not by declaring it a dead end. A young physicist who suspects the whole elaborate construction is just a mathematical fantasy has every professional reason to keep quiet and add another citation to the pile. It is the local optimum again, manifesting in one of the most prestigious fields we have: a beautiful, self-consistent, richly funded structure that may simply be describing nothing.

With finite time and resources, one has to set priorities. That’s true everywhere, science included. But who would dare to tell a more meaningful question to investigate from a less meaningful one? In a world where there is no God, how do you even argue about what makes sense to explore, when making sense doesn’t itself make much sense in the first place?

This obviously doesn’t apply when the question is whether to build atomic weapons capable of utterly destroying civilization. Maybe that was the last question we answered with funding backed by religious fervor. But there seems to be no question of similar magnitude today. Not even the question of getting the climate back on track, which would help preserve livable conditions for our children — nor the question of eliminating poverty, which would substantially expand the size of the world market.

Our society is so full of crucial examples of being stuck in a local optimum that I decided to split this article in two. Next week you can read further examples, along with what they have in common and what we need to do to start making progress.

The current technological age, especially with the advent of large language models, brings many difficulties — but in one respect it brings a great opportunity, one we should seize wherever we can. It has brought us to a moment when many things we took for granted are being called into question, and we now have a chance to look, in a fresh light of truth, at how we define and understand some of the most basic things. We are at a moment where we can get it right. A year ago, I couldn’t have imagined anyone listening to a discussion of fundamentals. There was never enough time for it. Now we must do it, and we should not miss the chance.

One of the central questions that currently seems to have no settled answer is: what is the purpose of education? It’s not the first time the answer has been redefined. In the ancient world, education was meant to form good citizens, cultivating virtue and striving for excellence in the disciplines of body and soul. In the Jewish world, its main purpose was to enable people to read religious texts, debate them, and transmit the faith across generations. In the Middle Ages, it was meant to help achieve salvation. The Renaissance revived the ancient ideals, while the Reformation revived the idea that all believers should be able to read the Bible directly, given the priesthood of all believers. During the Enlightenment, education became a tool of progress, freeing people from ignorance and superstition and turning them toward self-improvement and an experimental, scientific vision of the world. In the nineteenth century, its purpose was to produce organized armies of literate soldiers, loyal citizens, and disciplined workers for industrializing economies. Over time, its purpose also became leveling the playing field — a drive that culminated in the twentieth century, when it fused with a push to equalize access, so that people could actually exercise their equal rights.

This overview can leave today’s non-believers confused — and believers even more confused than before. With the coming of AI, the former cannot help but question the true value of practical skills, some or most of which seem likely to be replaced by intelligent machines. At the same time, poetry and rhetoric are no longer status symbols, as they were in the ancient world or during the Renaissance; salvation strikes them as void, and that disposes of the Bible as well — all of which can only reinforce the subconscious notion that basic literacy has become severely overrated. It seems the heirs of kings and industrialists could well do without anyone’s contribution, which leaves ordinary folk with one logical option: to become experts in cosmetics, bodybuilding, healthy food, and the substances and gadgets that enhance various forms of pleasure.

Believers, on the other hand — on top of the potential crisis of vocation we all share — may find the whole heritage a bit overwhelming, since it is not within the means of many to absorb Bible study, or the Thomistic theology of the Middle Ages, which cannot be cleanly separated from the ancient philosophical discourse on virtues. How about the little ones, many dare to ask — those of whom the Lord Jesus said:

“I praise you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because you have hidden these things from the wise and learned, and revealed them to little children.”

Matthew 11:25

Many of us feel little enough to have the truth revealed to us, yet Catholics — myself included — almost experience vertigo when listening to all the Thomistic intricacies, which can turn what we used to consider a plain A into a quite complex and intricate non-A. There are dozens of YouTube channels, among others, churning out complex, counter-intuitive rulings on our souls with their sharply discerning judgments. Are my little kids supposed to understand these in detail too? And what about the elderly, or the mentally impaired, some of whom might strike one as living angels?

These lines must be gratifying for some of the religious experts to read, giving them the feeling of bold, strong eagles flying high above, looking down on people like you and me. Eagles don’t experience vertigo.

In my country, all boys play soccer, a game I’m as untalented at as one can possibly be — perhaps even more so. But it’s just a game. Would God really design the content of the faith so that most of us are left feeling as incompetent as Christians as I am as a soccer player? I couldn’t worship such a God.

If you’ve ever read anything I’ve written, it should be obvious that I’m no great enthusiast either of those who suggest we throw all the doctrines out the window and simply hug one another and be nice. But I can sense there must have been something utterly dehumanizing in the way we have conceived of education across the ages. Something that once cast those deemed incapable of growing into virtuous citizens off the rock at birth; something that left unbaptized children hanging indefinitely in Limbo; something that once made human robots of Prussian soldiers and factory workers; something that kills babies in their mothers’ wombs through the materialization of gender equality as "reproductive rights"; something that once crucified God himself.

I think I may have come across the root cause quite recently — the very point that was meant to hide the truth from us by piercing the little ones. It was while re-reading Magnifica Humanitas, the first encyclical of Pope Leo XIV, that it dawned on me. There the Pope decries the constant striving for greater efficiency and productivity as a process that dehumanizes and leads toward transhumanism, posthumanism, and the elimination of the weak.

We all too often treat our lives as a kind of sport. The tendency runs deep: in ancient Greece and Rome people strove to become athletes, and later, among the Pharisees, moral athletes of a sort. Believers inspired by Thomism wanted every box in their faith checked, everything in order. More modern people wanted to take on the role of the kybernetes, the helmsman steering between right and wrong, to master math, physics, and biology, to dominate the world and bring it fully under control. It seems that throughout history we keep striving to make ourselves into a perfect Swiss Army knife, with a tool for every task: laser-sharp, virtuous, and free of sin. And we lean on education to get us there, to open the possibility of growing into our full potential, believers and non-believers alike.

It’s a great mistake.

I believe the Lord Jesus meant it quite literally when He said the truth had been revealed to the little ones. Little children are not laser-sharp, virtuous Swiss Army knives; they are helpless and weak. They are so unendowed with skills that they cannot become, even in the slightest, an obstacle blocking the God who lives in their hearts. This is when the truth is revealed to us — when we stop being an obstacle to God and, in our smallness, let Him act through us, as children do.

This world has no need of human Swiss Army knives, fully developed, ultra-versatile, and devoid of any impairment. That is not holiness; it is a parody, akin to Homer Simpson’s car. Each of us is born into a very specific situation, meant to play a very specific role at a very specific moment. God does not need Titans of skill and virtue — He never chose such people anywhere in the Bible. What He wants is for us to stop being an obstacle to Him, and to let Him act through us. And that, primarily, is what education is meant to serve: to help us stop being an obstacle in that particular time and place we find ourselves in.

This is why you need to understand how the world around you works. These days, for example, you need to be literate in technology even if you hate it. You also need to be able to empathize with the people you live close to — to imagine how it feels to be in their shoes. Sometimes sharing a part of life with them will help; sometimes reading novels will help too, if they give truthful testimony. You need to study the best-known stories of humanity, since these can show you what basic dimensions there are in our shared humanity. You need to discover those same dimensions in yourself — but then you need to be curious about the particular situation you find yourself in. And most of all, you need to be able to eliminate as many self-deceptions as possible. You may not be able to root out a certain kind of sin, but at least you should be aware of it. The Catechism can be instrumental in that, but keeping a legalistic score may itself make you an obstacle.

Not everyone needs the same level of education. Children can be perfectly holy without any education at all. But the more gifted you are, the more education you need. To operate certain kinds of vehicles, or even a gun, you have to study, be examined, and have a license issued. Certain kinds of talent and intellect can make a person a far more consequential vessel — carrying either love or destruction — and you may need training so as not to pose a significant danger to those around you. You did not choose your talents and intellect; you were gifted them. Now you need to educate yourself to make sure you use them wisely.

Perfection dehumanizes. Education is not here primarily to make you perform better, to raise your scores on key metrics across the physical, mental, and moral dimensions. It is much more like reading a manual of who you specifically are: what your particular limits are, what skills and missions may be asked of you at particular seasons of your particular life, and what dimensions of that life you are called to sacrifice.

This is how we ought to see the future of education: as a tool that helps each individual stop being an obstacle to the God who dwells in their heart. It is the fruit of a labor that little children — and those who strike us as living angels — already have for free.

Literally, as the Lord Jesus said.

Imagine you are the father of a family and earn your living by making quality boots. Then one day you suddenly decide to build a mill for grinding pine cones into powder instead. This new product smells good and has a very interesting texture and color — but nobody needs it. First, it should be said that this doesn’t make you one inch less of a father. Second, your fatherhood will very likely soon fall into crisis. Your wife and children will have to take over as the source of income; they won’t be able to rely on your advice and sound judgment; some will condemn you, and some will still love you but visit less often.

In this article I’d like to show that this is somewhat analogous to what happened to our Reverend Fathers — though this doesn’t make our God one inch less important.

I live in a part of Europe where a book by the German author Jan Loffeld has become incredibly popular and influential. Its title is Wenn nichts fehlt, wo Gott fehlt, which translates as “When nothing is missing where God is missing.”

The core argument runs roughly like this. A long-standing assumption in theology and pastoral care held that humans are “incurably religious” — that everyone eventually asks about God or transcendence. Loffeld argues that the empirical data now undercut that assumption. What he describes isn’t atheism in the classic sense, which still defines itself in relation to God, but a deeper indifference: for many people, particularly in younger generations, no religious need or longing remains at all. People may still pursue meaning — through fulfilling work, relationships, and civic engagement — but not through religion as an overarching framework. His conclusion is that we should accept this new reality and stop blaming ourselves for causing it. He also provides empirical data showing that better pastoral services, the elimination of abuse, and similar improvements in quality don’t have a sufficient effect on reversing this course.

Jan Loffeld is not only a theologian heavily influenced by sociology, but also a Catholic priest. In a way, he is a poster child for a significant trend among Catholic clergy who have finally begun to take science seriously. The change comes late, since the Church had already largely lost its fight against rationalist modernism, relying too often on emotion and, in many cases, on false arguments, rather than on precise doctrinal thinking and effective discernment. Unfortunately, this new approach is once again a complete miss, and one that repeats itself across a wide range of fields: most recently with AI, where I saw a great deal of uncritical fascination, at least before Pope Leo XIV published his encyclical Magnifica Humanitas, which tempered the progressivist enthusiasm somewhat. Let me illustrate the point with the book itself.

Science always sees the world as it is, never as it could be. Investigating how the world ought to be lies entirely beyond its reach. Science can help you discover how to achieve what you want — and here it is powerful and magnificent — but you cannot ask it to do the very thing it gave up when it defined itself, which is to explain phenomena and respond the question of why.

When a child asks why a rainbow appears when the sun comes out after rain, you might think you’ve answered the question once you’ve told them about photons, water droplets, and how the droplets sort photons of different frequencies into different exit angles. But you haven’t described how things really are. We don’t actually know what light is. What you’ve described is physics’ current mental model — one that captures, succinctly and elegantly, everything you need to walk into a lab and recreate a rainbow.

Or, alternatively, everything you need to walk into a lab and find the edge case where the rainbow doesn’t appear, or doesn’t look the way the model predicts. Do that and you’ll be famous, at least among physicists, because you’ll have found a bug in the model. And someone else will become more famous still when they find a more elegant, more succinct model — one that fixes the bug and lets you do even more useful work in the lab and in practice. Maybe that model won’t mention photons at all.

That’s the adventure of science. It lets us repeat experiments, turn a vast body of experimental knowledge into practical tools that help people, and — best of all — build elegant, succinct mental models to keep on our tool belt. That last part is the most sublime of all, and as a software engineer I feel it keenly, because it’s exactly what we cherish too in our own field.

But there is one thing you must never do: lean on these models when you need to be airtight about how things really are. For two reasons. First, the models only ever concern practical applications and the reliable reproduction of experiments — good and evil don’t enter into them at all. Second, they are still very new against the span of human history, and they are evolving fast. It’s safe to build a computer on them. But only a fool would draw from them conclusions meant to guide humanity forever. Anyone who tries that has failed to grasp the basics of science, and I’d advise them to spend some time in a lab — or at least to build a chair with their own hands and watch how their mental models collapse on contact with reality. That usually cures the naïveté and hubris that come from trusting someone else’s experimental knowledge too much.

This is true of physics, and a thousand times truer of sociology — a fuzzy field where experiments are far harder to repeat, and thus far riskier to rely on. Imagine surveying blind people on whether they’re content not seeing colors. You’d most likely find that, while they find the idea of color intriguing, they don’t feel their lives are much impoverished by lacking the experience. It would be absurd to draw from this the value judgment that healthy eyesight is severely overrated. Yet that is exactly what priests heavily influenced by sociology tend to do. They observe what people report and take it as a more informed account of what a human being is. If, in our age, a person happened to be blind, they would refine their picture of humanity by “correcting” the role eyesight supposedly plays. With blindness, I hope the move can be seen plainly for what it is: objectively foolish, or even worse.

They could rightly use science to help return eyesight to most of society; instead, on the basis of that same science, they wrongly proclaim blindness the new standard for all humanity. You may want to object that blindness is quite different from belief in God. But it isn’t. For a Catholic priest, the sense of God is by definition as real a part of reality as matter itself; it simply cannot be an illness — an “incurable religiosity.” First, a Catholic priest cannot think like an atheist. Second, for Christ’s sake, the world is full of disoriented, suffering people trying to buy the experience of a rich life with their money, never realizing that everything money buys is fake and useless — a pale reflection of the richness of becoming a saint. Who are these priests talking to all day, I have to ask, and do they still possess basic empathy? Because I have met many people who would answer a sociological survey exactly as Jan Loffeld describes, and I have never met one I wouldn’t want to show the colors to — if only I could explain things a little better, or if these priests didn’t complicate my effort by entangling everyone in the web of thought they weave so skillfully around believers and nonbelievers alike, on the authority of their holy orders.

Dear Fathers, don’t build your pine-cone mill, however fresh that powder smells. When a priest starts playing the therapist, he makes himself useless — because he can never be a better therapist than the therapists themselves. The same goes for the psychologist, the sociologist, the scholar of religion, the motivational speaker — and yes, even the theologian. It is when you stop being mad for Christ — praying, kneeling in adoration, serving the Holy Mass, and hearing confessions — that you make yourself useless. You are not an inch less a priest, but you make yourself a useless one. I understand you don’t understand what I say while those around you clap. My point is this: the Church must shrink until people like you are gone, so that a healthier Church may be reborn.

So, for the record, it makes complete sense to me why the empirical data show that better pastoral care, the elimination of abuse, and similar gains in quality will never be enough to reverse the trend. That’s exactly what I’d expect. I love science. And that is precisely why I use it as a tool to get me from point A to point B — but never to answer why. For that, I have prayer. Such a backward guy I am.

I believe this is exactly why you say: “Oh, I’m afraid science shows that LLMs may have the same — or potentially even more harmful — effect on the spread of disinformation as social networks. Maybe we should all be nicer to each other, hug one another, and be better.” Instead of saying: “Friends, in accordance with the doctrine of the faith and with what the Holy Spirit calls us to in prayer, we proclaim that truth, and the bonds between people, are too important — like clean water and fresh air, perhaps even more so — for the infrastructure that sustains them to be left as a side project in the hands of companies whose primary business is selling advertising. No one can serve two masters.” And then you would call for science to be deployed to build that infrastructure properly.

This was just one example among many.

To put it plainly: a believer uses their sense of faith to set a task for science, instead of using science to find their sense of faith.

Dear Reverend Fathers, I feel deeply estranged from the new pine-cone scent you are promoting. Please consider closing your mill and returning to your original line of business.

In recent months I’ve been thinking a lot about how readily, willingly, and often enthusiastically people surrender their agency to large language models. I sometimes picture a crowd in which many have been reduced to hands and feet — unwitting limbs of a vast, fuming machine shrouded in water vapor.

To be fair, the LLMs themselves bear no guilt: what’s problematic is the prevailing vision of how they should be used, not the technology.

Seen from another angle, such images are not so far removed from distinctly Christian symbolism — namely, the idea that believers are limbs of the body of Christ. From the outside, people have simply replaced the living God with a machine, one that even the likes of Richard Dawkins are willing to call conscious. I’ve argued elsewhere that one cannot proclaim anything conscious in this world without also accepting revelation as a legitimate source of knowledge. But let’s set that aside and turn to another group of critics, who point out that becoming a limb of anything carries a risk of complicity in wrongdoing.

At the outset I should say that LLMs are not the first place I’ve encountered this kind of situation. Long before LLMs, I watched people become part of a mechanism that began to live a life of its own — to the point that it no longer needed, for its survival, any of those who helped build it, and could even, strangely, improve itself over time. It was still perpetuated by means of people and would die with the last human, yet no single one of them could stop it, no single one was accountable, no single one mattered in its grand scheme.

I was born in the last few years before totalitarian rule finally crumbled in Central Europe. I can still remember the vibe of the regime, yet by the time I tried to understand its mechanism, it was already history. As I see it, that evil machine ran on people pretending to believe in Marxist ideology. Everything was inverted: “peace” meant the Cold War, “work” meant goldbricking, “sharing” meant stealing as much as you could from the common pool. One could argue that Christianity has its share of paradoxes too, but in this quasi-religious arrangement nobody openly cherished the mathematical poetry of the design. There was none. The whole point was to pretend that none of the paradoxes were the least bit surprising. It took considerable mental effort to keep the regime alive without letting your face drown in nonsense altogether, and once the misery of living this way passed a threshold, the actors took a bow and left the stage for good.

Ideological beasts are made of bureaucratic paperwork refuting every piece of evidence that reality is being distorted. That effort can even sharpen the intellect — you have to be clever to lie systematically. Handing your agency to an LLM will only make you dull. But otherwise the two beasts are not dissimilar. Both go primarily after the educated. The first chased them out of academia and barred their children from schooling; the second aims to drive the same people out of work by turning intelligence into a commodity. And in both cases the campaign is popular. Nobody much likes the expensive coders with their impenetrable jargon. Academic linguists, law professors, and the rest of us who dared to step out of mediocrity won’t be missed any more warmly — not now, not fifty years ago. What we shouldn’t forget is that Marxist truths were reworded by breathing beings, whereas LLMs run on silicon. This is why it won’t be enough for the tech CEOs to take a bow and leave the stage for good. The old regime died when its actors walked off. This one doesn’t need actors. It’s fully automated.

You could argue that LLMs bring no ideology whatsoever. Yet the past thirty years have shown that ideology isn’t a necessary ingredient of a beast. When a self-perpetuating mechanism is built to eliminate everyone who rises above mediocrity, ideology can simply be replaced by an external source of financing. And this holds for more than the cultivation of LLMs; there are many such cases. It’s how the European Union cultivated an elite in Russia: by handing them billions of euros for no work — just for the right to extract oil, gas and rare earths cheaply. Putin is undoubtedly conscious, and he currently has many limbs. So many that he can cut off a thousand a month and still not bleed to death. Rather than by shared ideology, his regime is held together by plain brutality exerted on everyone, and on the educated first.

But perhaps the most destructive beast of all lives right in the heart of Western societies. One that is conscious, and potentially immortal. It has a name: the corporation gone wrong.

Several years ago our family of five was wronged out of a significant amount of money when a bank — a subsidiary of Société Générale — charged outrageous mortgage refinancing fees in direct violation of the loan contracts. The bank was later penalized by the central bank, but most of its victims never got their money back. What was stunning about the whole experience was that I couldn’t identify anyone to hold accountable. There was no mastermind behind the scheme. As far as I can tell, it originated by accident, out of the independent decisions of many individuals — some of them already gone from the company by the time the scheme was actually running. Part of it was surely a specifically toxic corporate culture, but most of it just happened, and then perpetuated itself through automated processes, with no one really in charge and no one to answer for it.

There was no one to pick up the phone, no one who could hear the complaint — only a merciless, inhuman cold. You may know it too. It’s the same experience you have when you try to appeal an obviously wrong ruling by an automated bot accusing you of a policy violation at any big tech corporation you care to name. And it is exactly here that LLMs are supposed to help — to make the process even more efficient. You can complain, you can even sue, but you have a life to live, and even if you live to a hundred, the other side has the best lawyers, who can spend whatever time and money it takes to fight back. They are equipped to continue for generations. It’s true immortality. Many CEOs well outside the tech sector dream of soon needing no lawyers at all, and no customer service staff either: with an LLM at its heart, they believe, the mechanism can perpetuate itself by means of a handful of people. Perfectly legal lawlessness. And if such a corporation becomes part of critical public infrastructure — too big to fail — the legal lawlessness can quietly turn into illegal lawlessness, with no consequences at all.

I hope it’s clear by now that this silicon form of life began asserting its power over humanity long time ago, and was getting out of control well before the LLM architecture was invented. AI is a gradual evolution, not the rupture we take it for. And it isn’t new in a broader sense either: the self-perpetuating beast can be cultivated on people just as well as on silicon wafers. You can deem it conscious or unconscious; it can run on ideology or be entirely devoid of one. What all its forms have in common is that you are its means, never its end. And every time you dare to step outside mediocrity, it suppresses you with everything it has. This is when the underdogs of envy applaud. They applauded under socialism, they applaud Putin, and they applaud now in the shape of the AI expert suddenly born from nothing across every media platform. Once again, they smell the blood of the educated in the water.

Whether you are a Christian or not, I hope you can see clearly that we need the exact opposite of the beast. People have to be the end, never the means. And what deserves celebrating is precisely what mediocrity is not. Christians call it holiness — and I know some living saints who are not Christian.

What we need now is to revolt against the beast. Baptism is the sacramental form of that revolt. It is how you declare, literally before God, that you renounce the beast and long to live a life in revolt against it. This is how it has always been — and Christians are being martyred for it now more than at any time before. Which is why, for a Christian, it makes intuitive sense that God had Himself crucified to show how much we matter to Him — how much we are the ends and not the means. An all-powerful God needs no means, by definition: He already has everything. By the same token, everything He does can only be for others, never for Himself.

To be His limbs, then, is to be there for others as entirely as we possibly can.

Even if you can’t identify as a Christian, you should still be able to see how the revolt against the beast’s many forms carves out a distinct community of people who become the limbs of the one person the beast — to its torturing envy — can never become. And this communion is immortal too, sustained by the Eucharist: God Himself under the appearance of bread and wine, on which the Body feeds. We become what we eat, in a multidimensional reality that makes us the ultimate end, the ultimate opposite of a means.

Catholic or not, you can revolt by being the one who can be held accountable, who is not perpetually entangled in a busy, multi-tasked life of FOMO and has time to pick up the phone. The one who doesn’t let an LLM answer his inbox, and never delegates his agency to anyone. Because being there for others means listening to them and serving them in person, not throwing them to a self-perpetuating mechanism.

This is the true meaning of charity. It is paradoxical that resolving to become God’s agent — to live in full submission to Him — means, by the same token, living in constant active search of His will, which always has concrete people on its mind.

As the Lord Jesus said:

For whoever wants to save their life
will lose it,
but whoever loses their life for me
will save it.

Luke 9:24

To me, prayer may still be a greater mystery than many of the dogmas people claim to have trouble getting their heads around. In the New Testament, the Lord Jesus explains how to pray, citing what we know today as the Lord’s Prayer — but what matters is the context in which the prayer is introduced. In Matthew 6, Jesus explains that God the Father knows better than we do what we need, and that we should therefore not be like the pagans, who pray overtly and demonstratively, thinking they will be heard for the sheer number of their words. In Luke 11, He says we should be persistent, and that we will be heard for our sheer insistence.

These two passages may even sound somewhat contradictory. But the part about trying to tell God what He should do — when He knows far better than I do what my neighbors and I need — long built a barrier between me and petitionary prayer. So more often I prayed for guidance, which, surprisingly, is a kind of prayer that in my experience almost always gets answered; or I prayed to give thanks; or I simply prayed the rosary and hoped to figure out what God wanted of me in a given situation. Yet petitionary prayer, the most basic kind of prayer, is the one I’ve struggled with — at least when it isn’t the Lord’s Prayer, which perfectly satisfies whatever concerns one could have.

Quite recently, the obvious started to dawn on me. If nobody can assume the position of God’s counselor, as the Lord Jesus himself suggests, then the whole purpose of petitionary prayer must be quite different. And if it isn’t about asking Him to get aligned with me, then it must be — as with all the other types of prayer — for me to align myself better with Him. I found this view pretty consistent, and I resolved to pray frequently for what surely must be God’s will: for instance, for the war in Ukraine to end. For even if God doesn’t always work a miracle, or doesn’t bring things about in the way I might expect, He still must long for the war to end. If He holds back and doesn’t set in motion one of those strange strings of accidental events that lead to an unexpected outcome, it must be because He understands what I don’t. Therefore I should show that I stand on His side and sympathize with Him.

So I resolved to pray frequently for the war in Ukraine to end. And soon after, I failed utterly. Then I realized that although I want the war to end, I’m not quite aligned with God on it. Deep down, the truth is that I don’t care enough even to remember to pray for it, or to make a note to do so. And so I’ve uncovered an instance of the self-deception I live in — the gap between what I want and what I actually long for — and that’s no small thing. Having realized how valuable petitionary prayer can be, I decided to give it a much larger share of my prayer time.

Now the two contexts in which the Lord Jesus framed the prayer collapse into one and the same. A fulfilled prayer certainly isn’t a kind of reward for praying forcefully enough and giving a cinematic performance, the way the pagans do, imagining they can find anything transactional in God. By the same token, if the insistent prayer of someone aligned with God were to go unanswered, it would mean this world is not one where Christ has already defeated evil. And this is consistent with my personal experience. It was exactly in those cases where I felt strongly that I was aligned with God that, in the end, the familiarly weird string of accidental events leading to an unexpected outcome actually happened. The outcome wasn’t always what I had in mind; sometimes what happened was even better.

In many cases, it may even look counter-intuitive from the outside: an old woman prays for her grandchild to be healthy, only to see him fall seriously ill — and through that illness, the boy finds faith. Or a man prays that, if only he were given more money, he would help his neighbors — only to lose all he has, and end up devoting his life to serving the poor.

Do you find my view of prayer strange, unexpected, or plainly wrong? I’m not surprised. The truth is, I’m not even sure that what I’m formulating here is Catholic teaching. In my case, this article is itself a form of petitionary prayer. It is me praying that the bishops would find the courage to formulate, in precise terms, what Catholic prayer really is — to tell the truth clearly, even if it is hard for many to stomach and provokes backlash. Because it is a terribly serious thing when an apostle of Christ fails to give truthful testimony, and many are then repelled by its implausibility — turned away not only from petitionary prayer but from all intentional prayer, and even from church attendance.

Prayer is too fundamental to Christianity to be left muddled while we pretend all is well. It is of the utmost seriousness to scatter the people of good will — those accustomed to weighing things in self-reflecting sincerity — and drive them off into deserts of atheism, while encouraging those who wish to be soothed to settle into a comfortable self-deception, and to proclaim you a man of wisdom most high. What this does to the salvation of souls is not quite clear; but let's observe the impact it has on the economy, which can be seen in plain sight.

I believe we know it under the guise of “People don’t want this; there’s no demand.”

In my country, for instance, almost everyone wants a quality education for their kids. There is enough money — people drive around in cars, many of which could pay several times over for writing a book like mine, with plenty left for a perfectly decent car on top. Yet teachers are paid so poorly they can’t support a family. By a kind of natural selection, this produces a situation where people become teachers out of charity, once they are wealthy enough to afford it — not for their skill in the work — or else because they decide to have no children of their own. Over the last twenty years, education has turned into state-sponsored babysitting: every child is more comfortable than ever, yet many can barely read a longer piece of writing by the time they leave, and few have acquired even basic self-discipline or the habit of carrying out duties of any kind.

How can this be, one might ask, when everyone wants a quality education for their kids? The answer is close at hand: perhaps they all long for it with about the same abundance of care in their hearts that I have when I pray for the war in Ukraine to end. This is how everyone can want it, how every government keeps it at the very top of its priority list, and yet there is no demand for it in the economy.

It may be precisely this gap — between what we want and what registers as economic demand — that the Catholic bishops could actually help to close, if their theology clearly taught that one can school the heart’s longings by praying for them (even if it feels mechanical at first). That it is not enough merely to assent to the right values; that the initial gap between what you believe and what you long for is natural; and that petitionary prayer may in fact be the means by which, over time, what you verbally assent to comes to be written on your heart as something you truly long for.

If this is the right teaching, people don’t know it — not even believers. Not even me. People don’t know that, just as gravity keeps you from floating off, prayer is the equally fundamental force meant to carry you from what your reason finds true to what you truly long for.

People don't know that this is the real difference between pagan and Christian worship. That God is not a vending machine that loves you more than the Coca-Cola corporation does. That He is the only person who can fulfill your life, as long as you strive to align your will with His — something Christ Jesus and the Virgin Mary prove possible: the former by showing that God can become human, the latter that a human can submit to God in perfect obedience. Or, put another way: the one showing that God can come down to man, the other that man can rise to meet God.

In his encyclical Magnifica Humanitas, Pope Leo XIV recapitulates Catholic social teaching — principles such as solidarity, subsidiarity, and the universal destination of goods — and calls for it to be applied to a society undergoing transformation in the age of AI. In my view, we are nowhere near even assenting to the most basic goals that would move us toward a reasonably good outcome. We are nowhere close to acknowledging that our busy schedules, filled with constant non-material gluttony, keep us from showing solidarity with others, as I describe here; we still rejoice in, rather than resist, delegating our agency to automated models; and there is no conversation about the urgent need to design and build a serious public infrastructure of truth — the greatest common good of all. But even if we do one day agree on the shared goals, we may never reach them without a Church hierarchy in place that can proclaim the truth of how basic things work, and set that assent alight so that it burns with a real economic demand.

I don't understand why some societies prosper economically while others decline, regardless of what they profess. But I am sure that what people long for en masse is one of the contributing factors. In this light, I believe prayer can truly, practically, and materially stop wars and transform societies.

In many respects, I see the Church acting as if we were unsure about things that seem quite clear. In such cases, it can help to pose the question explicitly and answer it once and for all. Today, the following question is on my mind:

“Can it be God’s will that information technology is a scourge we should strive to wipe from the face of the earth?”

If we answer yes, it means that we, the Church, have lost our way to a staggering degree. If we answer no, it means we should stop acting as if the good and bad things that happen in the world of information technology were merely “virtual good” and “virtual evil.” You may be surprised that anyone would use such terms. Some do — but, more seriously still, many act as though they were true.

It is perfectly acceptable to keep one’s distance from technology. I myself don’t use social networks, because I’ve observed a serious degeneration in the people who do, as I explain in another article. I admit I don’t understand how the features on a Facebook page work — but that doesn’t mean I don’t care how these technologies work in principle. And neither should anyone else be indifferent, not even an aging Father Smith who has never opened a laptop. Not because we would expect him to have opinions on how society should progress in complex technological matters, but because there are real people involved — and among them people who act selflessly, out of love, and without whose efforts society would fall into even greater trouble than it faces now.

It never much bothered me that, to the Church, these people were wholly invisible. But it does hurt me that today they are under attack and yet remain virtual people, doing virtual good in virtual space — and that not even the otherwise edifying encyclical Magnifica Humanitas, by Pope Leo, mentions them with a single word, as if they did not exist, as if the world of technology had stood apart from the forces of good and evil until the coming of AI.

In fact, this field has always been a fierce battleground, where the forces of good and evil have long clashed. And it should be said that, while believers were rarely present, selfless people — those willing to sacrifice some of their consumerist comfort out of love of their neighbor — were not. They were engaged, because they know that information technologies are consequential, that they shape the lives and even the minds of everyone, including those who keep their distance. For it is precisely those who stand aside without basic understanding who are most prone to the dangerous twist of mind that technology can convey through their neighbors. No man is an island; no one will be saved alone; and when salvation is at stake, the Church should not be absent without leave.

When I was a boy in the ‘90s, I remember having to save up quite a lot of money and go to a shop to buy a package of CDs containing the then-popular programming language Visual Basic, so I could build a graphical user interface for my first projects. There were no free alternatives back then for building software for common people, and my motivation was never just to play with technical things — it was always to build useful tools that would help my neighbors.

I also needed to create graphical designs, and there was no real software I could afford; the same was true for electronics, photo editing, and other fields. It felt pretty demoralizing that the entry threshold was so high, and that the gatekeeper was big corporate money in a dramatically globalizing world. It was the same in many other areas too — most notably in education, but also in music, art, prototyping, and much else. Other people would pick other examples, in a different order.

Then the situation began to improve — and not thanks to the big corporations, but thanks to ordinary people who selflessly gave up their expertise for others to use. We call it the Open Source Movement. Everyone knows Wikipedia, whose founders were initially ridiculed as naive dreamers. I could start using Inkscape for graphic design, GIMP for photo editing, OpenSCAD for 3D-print prototyping, Audacity for recording music — and I could go on and on. Everyone recognizes nurses, teachers, and scout leaders, yet we never talk about these dads and moms who gave their time for free to help us avoid what now, again, looms more seriously than ever: a potential tech feudalism (as I explained in another article).

These are real people, with real lives and families, who sacrificed an unimaginable number of hours and toil for a good and selfless cause on the field of information technology. Some Linux distributions are now free, open-source alternatives to Windows and macOS — and in my experience they can be even more stable and easier to use than their commercial counterparts.

These open-source communities, collaborating on products so complex and useful, became such a significant and visible contribution to the common good that even corporations began to feel embarrassed, and finally started open-sourcing many of their own components. They did it, of course, mainly to impose dominance in fields where they felt strong and drive their smaller, more creative competitors out of business, but maybe there was some good motivation as well.

And it happened in education too: it felt like a little miracle when I could watch free Yale courses, which helped me grasp the basics of many areas beyond my technical expertise — economics, psychology, history. Over the years, humanity truly began to share knowledge, and without the Open Source Movement I would be someone else entirely. It hurts me that most of the Church hierarchy knows absolutely nothing about this vast work of love, which has made many people better — myself included. This is one of the most substantial examples of real, lived Catholic social teaching: of subsidiarity practiced in communities, of solidarity, of the universal destination of goods. And it didn’t happen in the UN, or in governments, or in some humanistic international think tank.

The reason I’ve written all this out so thoroughly is to make you see what exactly the frontier AI labs mean when they talk about scraping the whole internet. This is exactly what they mean — along with the free music, the drawings and photos, and the other works of art and craft that all share one thing in common: their authors had no idea, when they chose an open license, that one day some trillion-dollar corporations, backed by the wealthiest people on the planet, would take all of it without asking — capturing it through a technological trick that lets them spew the same content back at us, in wording and brushstrokes carefully altered so that any attribution becomes impossible. And now they try to hold us all hostage, with all of our love refactored into a gun pointed directly at our livelihoods.

“Your fault, naive people — you should have known AI was coming for you and your kids.” So shouts the crowd of snake-oil sellers and experts on canned air, running in circles around big money, laughing heavily at these mothers and fathers. Former mediocre underdogs, now newly minted experts on AI, filling the media everywhere, expecting the prey of others’ work to lie down and rest, utterly consumed by their greed. And of course it wasn’t only open-source content that was used here: even the restricted intellectual property they could get their hands on was consumed too, as long as it could be spewed back in a way that was legally untraceable — of which more and more evidence surfaces over time.

No more donations to Wikipedia; Google now serves its content as if it were its own. No more donations to the various free-software initiatives, the components, the libraries of code — everything is now part of the big model. No more recognition for independent artists, musicians, engineers; no more attribution; no more job opportunities — no more livelihood for a life lived with values.

All the kudos to the LLMs. Maybe they aren’t intelligent in the real sense of the word — but they may yet prove intelligent enough to suffocate the whole breed of skilled creative professionals for long enough that we will be too weak to stand up again when the source of our artifacts dries out and the artificial intelligence stops being intelligent at all. I was born under a communist regime, and I recognize this mechanism — the one evil deploys against those who heavenly virtued against it by growing more fully human rather than opting in to a life in deadly sin.

Open source is currently dying: projects are being shut down for the reasons above, others under the avalanche of AI-generated slop being automatically shoveled into them. I’m not suggesting we stop technological progress. But let us at least acknowledge, in public, that this evil is happening. And let us push, legally, to require that AI companies retrain their models from scratch only upon our explicit consent — an explicit opt-in into what they train on.

This is the moral hazard of this century, and the Church should know.

In my experience, when two groups are locked in a seemingly irreconcilable quarrel over some matter, the closer you look the more likely you are to find a sin they share but manifest in two different ways. Each group sees clearly how the error shows up in the other’s thinking and behavior, yet what makes these two groups find each other as adversaries is precisely their shared sensitivity to the kind of sin they have in common:

• Nationalists and cosmopolitan globalists are both unhealthily preoccupied with the place of the nation in human affairs. The former takes it to be the central thing; the latter, the central source of evil.

• Ecological activists hold the planetary ecosystem to be worth more than any single species, our own included; their opponents treat nature as a temporary resource, to be used and reshaped without sentimentality — whether in order to build a better world now, or while awaiting the world to come.

• At the beginning of the 20th century, the Germans’ newly found sense of cultural superiority collided with the Jews’ never-relinquished sense of the same.

People divide over a whole spectrum of subjects, from the role of ornament in architecture to the role of government in society; but nowhere, to my mind, is the divide stranger than the one between liberal and conservative Catholics. Here the sin they share is not some particular thing that one camp would abolish and the other promote uncritically. They like to cast their quarrel as a question of whose love is the real love — but its true root, I would argue, lies in their desperation to interpret the doctrine in a way one could authentically live by.

In other words, it comes down to the Word, to the language of faith. As a convert, I was born into neither camp. I was never drawn to either side, though I found many of the arguments, on both, quite compelling. It never quite dawned on me that I was supposed to choose; so instead I began putting my understanding down on paper, in order to discuss it with those who had been believers far longer than I, and to make sure I had grasped the basic content of the faith. This was where my interest in theology was born — if it can be called theology at all, in the sense we now give the word.

That was more than twenty years ago now, and I have never quite given up the search for a solution to this puzzle since. In fact, I consider it the most interesting problem there is for a software engineer like me. In my professional life, finding the right mental model for the customer’s field is what makes or breaks the software — how long it will live, how organically it can absorb new dimensions and levels of detail. The greatest satisfaction comes when you manage to summarize the customer’s domain so succinctly that they agree it captures the point. And the Church, in the end, is just another domain: a field with its own logic to be modeled. Its factions are stakeholders who must each be able to recognize themselves in the result. Describing Catholic teaching in contemporary terms, in a way that both a liberal and a conservative could read and say “yes, this is what I believe” — that, to me, is something like the ultimate task in my field.

It isn’t so simple, though. To get honest answers to one’s questions, one has to work undercover. It’s no longer as it was in the Middle Ages, when people argued about doctrine the way we now argue about climate change, nationalism, or the role of government — with all the heat and stakes that implies. It’s no accident that we still call such conflicts religious wars, or, more recently, culture wars. But these days, discussing one’s understanding of the teaching in plain contemporary terms is something members of neither faction are willing to do. In my experience, both liberals and conservatives are afraid to discuss in detail what they believe. The former have simply given up talking about doctrine, finding it too academic, too complex, too detached. The latter consider it almost irreverent to depart from the traditional formulations; they try to believe the teaching in its official wording, as written in the catechism. As I’ve said, their shared sin comes down to how they treat the Word — and even the term faith has shifted in this same direction. It no longer means the understanding of the world to which I hold faithful throughout my life; it has come to mean the things I believe to be true even though I cannot grasp them with reason.

After years of trying, I managed to find a mental model, a description in contemporary terms, which I later summarized in a book. It seems to work well when I test it on them undercover. But it works only up to the point where it suddenly dawns on them what I’m actually doing. It isn’t one particular point; it varies from person to person. But that point is always where their theological views abruptly grow very complex — too complex for my analytical brain to get around. At first I took this to mean that, not being part of this communion from the cradle, I would always remain somehow outside the circle: I was trying to penetrate something they understood and I, the outsider, could not. In that phase Catholic doctrine did indeed seem to me like an impossibly complex rocket science — one that could never be summarized in any succinct way at all. One that even the Catholic creed fails to capture, one that the Lord Jesus himself is said to have once doubted on the cross. “And now you get it, my friend,” they would say with a nod.

I don’t think so. I’ve had my own children since, and I’m watching them grow up as Christians from the cradle. There was a time when they couldn’t count to a hundred and were nonetheless able to live a genuinely Christian life. I’ve seen others, young and old, with serious mental disabilities do the same. And the words of the Lord Jesus dawned on me: “You have hidden these things from the wise and learned, and revealed them to little children.” If faith comes from hearing the word of Christ, then a succinct version of Catholic doctrine must exist for the little ones — and one must exist also for me, their ever-junior fellow in the faith.

How likely is it, I dare to ask, that a succinct explanation of Catholic doctrine for grown-ups like me is truly unachievable — an expert matter that should never leave the closed door of the academic study, lest it put my faith at risk? I find that hard to believe. Far more likely, it seems to me, that I was able to put an effective one down on paper, and that many other versions of the same must be possible to write.

I once read a novel, Mark Twain’s Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc, which is based on the records of the tribunal that tried this poor peasant girl who once delivered France from its deathbed. I was amazed at how incredibly articulate an illiterate country girl could be about theology. Of course she was special — one of the little ones. But I think those of us who can read and write, and who have a fairly standard education, should worry that our refusal to speak about our understanding of doctrine in our own words makes our spiritual lives terribly flat, and our witness to the faith terribly implausible to strangers — to potential converts, as I once was, approaching the Church from outside.

If there were ever a poll on what’s driving the Church’s decline in the West, I would cast my vote for this as the number one cause. And it is one fixable without a council, a movement, even anyone’s explicit permission.

Both of Einstein’s theories of relativity rest on a way of recognizing concepts that exist only in our mental models and not in reality. The same approach can help us when we try to reason about God. As I showed in my other article, grounding our observations about God in reality lets us avoid theological explanations that stand only on themselves and never quite escape the world of natural language — the kind that many technically minded people dismiss as “just words,” which they indeed are. Einstein’s principle can be stated as follows:

This is how it applies in the Special Theory of Relativity:

No action, no imaginable experiment even in principle, can distinguish a body at rest from a body moving in a straight line at constant speed. So “being at rest” and “moving uniformly” are not two states of the world but one thing with two names. There is no absolute rest and no absolute velocity; motion exists only as a relation between bodies.

In plain terms: if you move away from a friend at constant speed, he can just as well say that he is the one moving away while you stay still. No experiment could settle which of you is right — and that is the whole point. Both descriptions are equally valid.

This is how it applies in the General Theory of Relativity:

No experiment confined to a small enough region can distinguish standing still in a gravitational field from being uniformly accelerated through empty space. So “gravity” and “acceleration” are one thing with two names — which is why the gravitational mass that gives a body its weight is identical to the inertial mass that resists its being pushed.

In plain terms: when an elevator accelerates upward, you feel pressed into the floor, heavier than before — exactly as you would if gravity had suddenly grown stronger. Nothing you could measure inside the elevator would tell the two apart. That is what it means for gravity and acceleration to be indistinguishable.

In the theological context, let’s start with a simple question and work toward more consequential ones.

Some people ask: how can God be omnipotent if He cannot act against His own will?

This is a more sophisticated variant of the old puzzle about whether God can create a stone too heavy for Him to lift. Let me remind you of the motivation behind this exercise: to step out of purely logical constructions and ground our thinking in reality, by at least imagining a real action — an experiment in the real world. So we won’t argue over whether it is logically possible to willingly do what one does not will, or whose will it would even be, if anyone’s. Let’s instead imagine that God does something against His will — which means something not good, since the God we hope in is good at all times.

In that case, if any human ever experienced such an act or learned of it, he would not attribute it to God at all; and if he did, he would assume he had misunderstood, and be left confused. So it makes no sense to entertain the possibility of God acting against His will: such a God never manifests in the world. For us, a good God who can act against His will is never distinguishable from one who cannot, so any discussion of it can only live in the world of words, not in reality.

And in fact we did not work out that God is good and omnipotent on our own. We know it because He chose to reveal it to us. If we don’t accept revelation as a source of knowledge in its own right, there is no reason left to believe a good God exists at all.

The first question cost no lives. The following one cost many.

Some people ask: if God sees the world in a timeless fashion, must He not know from the very beginning of our lives who will be damned and who will not?

Those who entertain this question often go on to ask whether God can reasonably expect us to obey authorities who are amoral and corrupt, merely on the slim chance that they might one day repent — which they most likely never will. Such men, the reasoning goes, have forfeited any rightful claim on our obedience — so why respect them?

This was the argument made by Jan Hus, who was burned at the stake as a heretic in 1415 for stubbornly refusing to recant it. In his day there was a pope and two anti-popes, and he was right about the morality of the men in high places. Yet to accept such reasoning as legitimate teaching would, in the eyes of the authorities, mean the decay of society: popular uprisings by illiterate peasants who believed they understood enough to take matters into their own hands. But you cannot burn an idea at the stake, and what followed was exactly what they had feared. Some historians even trace a line from the upheaval Hus set in motion to the Thirty Years’ War, which in some regions of Europe killed as much as 40% of the population.

The flaw in the reasoning behind the so-called question of predestination is this: one can speculate, in the medium of natural language and logic, about how God perceives time — but in reality God never does anything that would reveal He already knows what the future holds. Imagine what a world would look like in which some people were visibly God’s favorites while others were born losers from the start. What would such a world teach you? What effect would it have on the exercise of your free will? It would be an evil world from the very beginning. Maybe this is why you sometimes see people get second chances — even twenty-second chances — from God, people you are all but certain will never take one up. It can look unfair, but it is not: it is how God signals to you, personally, through real events (not logic), that sanctity is always a goal worth striving for. God does not act as though our fates were sealed in advance, so the question of whether He truly sees things in a timeless fashion is itself predestined never to leave the world of words.

The first half of the third question has already cost many millions of lives; the second half may cost many millions more in the time to come.

Some people ask: if humans are just biological machines, can non-biological machines be conscious too?

There is no experiment, even in principle, that could prove a machine has consciousness — an inner experience even remotely resembling ours: that sense of living from inside our own heads.

Today’s popular AI, built on large language models, can mimic consciousness well enough that people may be tricked into thinking they are talking to a human. But no matter how far we progress technologically, there will never be a human on the other side, and that is always provable by a trivial experiment: a data center can be told apart from a human easily enough, and even a perfect imitation of mind will always be just a sophisticated trick.

But the same reasoning can be turned the other way. If you cannot tell the difference between a mind and its simulation, is there anything at all that makes us humans — as biological machines — a special case? In fact, there is no experimental proof that we are special, just as there is no experimental proof that a good and omnipotent God exists. We know both only because they were revealed to us by God.

And here is the consequence that may be very hard to stomach: if we do not accept revelation as a genuine source of knowledge in its own right, then once some of us attain superhuman abilities, there is no reason why they should treat ordinary humans any better than we treat animals. It is exactly this Darwinian view — the struggle between groups of humans — that fueled the Holocaust; only this time the claimed ground of superiority will not be culture, but technology.

So it can be seen more clearly in this age than ever before: either you reject God — whom we came to know through revelation — and your worldview inevitably drifts toward alignment with that of Adolf Hitler; or you reject this evil Darwinian view, in which case you either become Catholic or the burden falls to you to show that you reject it for some reason other than an implicit acceptance of revelation as a genuine source of knowledge in its own right.

I don't think the latter can be done by logic or experiment.

When you eat too much, it shows on your weight. When you become addicted and lose control over it, we call it the sin of gluttony. The effects are visible, and nobody can dispute them. But what about consuming things that aren’t material?

I live in a relatively wealthy country where people have figured out that there’s only so much food they can eat and still stay healthy. So they’ve started looking for other things to feed on. Individually, these pursuits are no more sinful than a sausage. Most are forms of leisure: some are sports that might even make you healthier; others are courses, workshops, concerts, lectures. The more troubling ones are where people buy a hit of adrenaline. Some of what they buy is outright immoral — sexual services, say — while some is merely draining and useless: scrolling social media, getting into flame wars there. But the absolute crown of this way of life is the vacation. Where I live, the cult of work doesn’t exist; people earn money to cover their necessities and finance their leisure. The strategy is to find every open space in your life and fill it with the best leisure you can. When people meet socially, they don’t talk about work or politics — they exchange key updates on their leisure: where they went, what they did, how it went. They call it active living, and its objective measure is a calendar filled to the last minute. A full calendar is a life well spent.

There are few Catholics where I live, but even they embrace this kind of life, or a Catholic take on it, which means they buy courses on how to be a better Christian, attend the occasional cultural event in a church, and spend their vacations by the sea with a priest leading spiritual exercises — all of it, taken individually, mostly innocent.

Catholic or not, everyone is constantly moving from one activity to the next. The ill are pitied for not being able to join in this fullness of experience, and we pray for them to recover soon, so they can catch up. Everyone seems fully engaged — everyone, that is, except the poor and me.

Me, I mostly spend my time thinking about them. Or, to be precise, about the world in general. My calendar is always partly empty, because I like it that way. I need time to concentrate and get my head around things — and that includes prayer, the kind that takes more than a couple of seconds. I also like inventing and creating all sorts of things, material and not, including these posts.

Recently I’ve started to wonder whether this lifestyle may actually wear on people. For instance: how can they recognize our Lord’s will when they have so little time to contemplate it? In my experience, that takes real effort. I can’t research this with statistics and scientific methods, so I have to allow for the possibility that everything is simply clear to them. But it can’t be clear to all of them, all the time.

Anecdotally, I meet more and more people who seem unable to describe what they’re currently living through, in almost any respect. Recently I even met a man with serious psychological troubles, which I couldn’t help attributing to an overdose of non-material consumption. He literally couldn’t finish a sentence — he kept hopping from one subject to another, unable to hold a thread. But the most telling example came in a supermarket. I asked a member of staff where to find the milk. He didn't know — "I just move these things from here to there," he said. He was neither disabled nor a foreigner, nor was there any other innocent explanation at hand; he simply had a genuinely boxed-in view of the world, completely uninterested in anything happening around him. And since then I've met him again and again, in different costumes, elsewhere.

If everything so far could be dismissed as mere coincidence, my experience of the last few years — working as a software engineer, consultant, and analyst — cannot. And it concerns all sorts of people, all over the world: they don’t read emails, they don’t read documents, even very important ones, yet they are constantly busy, hard-working people. When it gets really serious, they schedule a meeting so I can walk them through the document step by step. This has happened to me dozens of times. You could suspect I write documents that are hard to read, but it happens no matter who wrote the document. And it isn’t confined to my work. Church authorities react to articles and encyclicals they didn’t read; journalists report on press releases they know only from what someone said about them on Twitter. We can rule out that they’re all lazy or incompetent. They simply can’t do it anymore. The man I mentioned earlier — the one who couldn’t finish a sentence — was a well-educated guy. There must once have existed a previous version of him: composed, organized.

All of this led me to wonder whether there might be a kind of long-term change in the psyche — or even the brain — that comes from over-consumption of non-material things. You’d expect it to leave a mark: a non-material equivalent of obesity. I can’t imagine how exhausting it must be to consume constantly, even when nothing you consume is physical. The symptoms look a bit like sleep deprivation — I think I get into a similar state of mind after a couple of sleepless nights. It’s as if humans needed not only sleep, but also time spent alone, talking to God, digesting the happenings of their lives. Since sleep has nothing to do with this strange indisposition, at home we've simply started calling such people “whisked brains.”

I don’t use social media, so I can hardly appreciate the pressure of the fear of missing out, or how constantly comparing one’s life with others’ must push people to consume more and more of this active living. But it’s the kind of pressure that tears whole families apart. The mechanisms vary: sometimes one partner has substantially less appetite for constant consumption and fails to live the life expected of them; sometimes both partners are equally greedy, but they can’t agree on a fair split of what they call “time just for oneself.”

Occasionally, when my cover gets blown and people realize I don’t quite live the life one would expect, they get mildly aggressive. Nonbelievers usually point out that I must really have a lot of time, to be spending it the way I do. Believers reach for poor St. Thérèse of Lisieux, the Little Flower: they profess to be so exhausted by the basic necessities of their lives that they can please God only with the tiniest of things, having humbly realized they are not capable of more. Then they look at me. Pride, they remind me, is the greatest sin — and attempting anything greater than the very tiniest of things smells of pride to them.

Having analyzed all of this and considered things meticulously, I dare to conclude with a couple of recommendations.

The first would be to statisticians and sociologists. To them I’d suggest a new metric, something to measure and keep an eye on over the years to come: the percentage of documents and similar resources a person encounters, over a given period, for which they can correctly ascertain why the thing was written — the motivation behind it. The metric would cleverly pack two things into one number: functional understanding and empathy. It would tell us whether people are still able to carry out their duties more than mechanically, and whether they can still grasp what moves other people. I hope it would become a reliable source of good news, since from its current value, I believe, it can only go up.

And to all my neighbors living the active life, I would dare to suggest: please, consider at least entertaining the possibility of freeing, say, 20% of your calendar, and spend the time with boredom. Lose that time with God. He will forgive it, in my opinion, and may even use the space for something unexpected. Maybe someone will manage to reach you — not a beggar or a homeless person to whom you throw a dime, but perhaps someone you might join in some purposeful effort, something that would make sense to you both and please God, even if it is not the very tiniest of things.

St. Thérèse of Lisieux, I know how you meant it when you wrote in your diary about God, the beggar of love. Please, pray for us.