If it weren’t such a well-known fact, it might be puzzling that thoughtful people who genuinely strive to get to the root of things so often don’t end up becoming my fellow Catholics — or even Christians at all. In my experience, not only does the evidence seem weighty enough to substantiate the hypothesis that the Lord Jesus is the Son of God, but believing the opposite makes life a fairly irrational endeavor to continue at all. If the Lord Jesus were a product to sell, He should be the easiest thing to promote, since everyone is hardwired to long for Him. He should be every marketer’s dream!

The more I think about it, the more plausible it seems that it is we the believers who do such an effective job of concealing the truth of the Gospel, which hides in plain sight. By the same token, there is also hope that this situation won’t last forever, and that a return to normal may come relatively soon. To explore the phenomenon more closely, let me analyze what may be the most effective of the fallacies on offer.

I would call it the fallacy of a theological system that can stand on its own.

I encounter variants of such construction all the time. It is so popular that it is not only served to those who ask questions, but often expected by them as well. The only problem is that, having received the desired answer, they cannot believe it, internalize it, and live as if it were true — and thus be faithful to it. And there is no faith without being faithful.

The outline of these explanations is always the same. A set of logical statements is presented that, taken together and cleverly analyzed, can prove that God is who we Catholics claim Him to be. The argument usually rests on a few axioms that are hard to dispute and quite reasonable to believe, which are then logically combined to generate new conclusions. In the end, these yield a novel and unexpected truth about God — one that seems equally hard to deny.

A short example of such a construction is the well-known Kalam cosmological argument, which goes like this:

1. Whatever begins to exist has a cause.

2. The universe began to exist.

3. Therefore, the universe has a cause.

The conclusion drawn here is obviously that the universe must have had a creator who chose to bring it into being.

I deliberately chose a short example, yet there are whole books full of such eloquence and rhetorical craftsmanship. It’s hard to argue against these statements. They follow logic flawlessly, the assumptions are ones no reasonable person would oppose, and the individual terms clearly describe objects and processes in the real world.

I’m an engineer. That means I’m one of the many people whose vocation is to use real-world objects to achieve customers’ goals. From years of practical experience, I have to say that I’ve unfortunately encountered far too many cases where such perfect logical constructions failed terribly on first contact with reality. I’m sorry I have to say this, but reality tends to evade our attempts to bring it under control. It constantly invents new dimensions, edge cases, side effects, and double meanings. Over the years, I’ve come to a strange realization:

The more elegant and logical the explanation sounds, the greater the failure when you let it face reality.

“Why, then, do you engineers use logic at all, if it’s so useless?” you may ask. To which I have to say that it isn’t useless at all. There are many perfectly logical explanations that work reliably; you just never know in advance which of them will survive contact with reality.

A standalone theological system has one obvious advantage: it needs no external validation, since it can stand on its own. Yet that doesn’t make it better in the eyes of people like me. It makes it worse — to us, it’s unacceptable. Some would even say it feels detached, or cowardly. Many of these critics invoke science and, for lack of a better word, say these systems feel unscientific to them. In turn, they are usually attacked by my fellow apologists for their alleged scientism. It’s all one big misunderstanding.

What these people in fact demand is to be able to test the explanation in reality. Not just once, in a subjective, personal way, but repeatedly. Many apologists say this is impossible, but it is actually quite possible. It is what the Lord Jesus does in the Gospel; it is why I was already half convinced after reading it for the first time. He is no philosopher and constructs no standalone mental models; He shows examples and challenges you to test the claim for yourself, to find out whether it’s true.

Christianity can never be lived alone; it’s a religion that can only exist in a real community. Creating a community is even one of the visible effects of the Eucharist, which is absolutely central to all Catholics. And the community exists, among other things, so that everyone who shares life with others can see — not only in their own life, but in the lives of those around them — that what the Lord Jesus says in the Gospel really does stand the test of reality. It gives evidence that we all experience God in remarkably similar ways, too striking to be accidental. This is the kind of scientific proof — a repeatable reality check — that the community provides. Only upon such experience can anyone live a faith one can lean on.

So please, if we can, let’s stop using standalone theological systems for evangelization. I’m not suggesting that we throw Thomism and similar systems out the window; many of them are good analytical tools for those who already believe. But since theology is often described as a mere commentary on the Gospel, I’d suggest we all do our best to respect the fundamentally scientific method laid out there by an engineer (then called a carpenter), the Lord Jesus, our God.

And for those who can’t bring themselves to believe, who keep searching for the ultimate elegant explanation that will finally switch on the light bulb in their head — let’s help them reset their expectations. Let’s explain that they will have to step out of their private comfort zone and draw physically closer to their parish, or another such community. At least if they want a science-grade level of confidence to build their faith on.

Christianity is no ideology, no set of axioms, not even a set of values. Let’s stop misrepresenting the Church as such and focus on explaining the absolutely essential part — the community. In fact, Christianity is an objective, scientific endeavor, in the widest sense of the word. It’s just that you don’t test your hypotheses behind the doors of a lab — you test them by sharing your life with people you love.

A note from the author: I've applied this same engineering lens to Catholic doctrine as a whole in about 150 pages. If you keep searching for an explanation that survives contact with reality, check out my book Design Patterns of Catholic God.

There have been numerous discussions about how far it is acceptable for the Church to meddle in worldly matters. Now, I’m not talking about the Church as the communion of local communities of the faithful, since each of us meddles to some extent simply by existing somewhere — where we work, live, raise our kids, and try to change things for the better. Nor do I mean pronouncements from the Vatican — whether weighty magisterial documents or everyday political stances against some atrocity or worrying social trend. I’m talking about something in between. A church school, say, or a church hospital. These are joint undertakings of many believers, lay and ordained alike, and they touch individual lives far more concretely than any public exhortation could.

These days, in the wealthy parts of the world, it can be harder than ever to justify why such institutions should exist at all. Many Catholic schools, for instance, are Catholic in name only, barely distinguishable from any secular counterpart and neither more affordable nor better. The same goes for the hospitals. When there are public and private options already, surely there should be a better reason for keeping such a complex thing going than just soothing ourselves with the hope that a kid or a patient might, by accident, bump into a chaplain — and that once in a while, that could turn a life around.

I’m not saying it doesn’t happen — it did for my own wife. But in the past these institutions contributed far more widely to the salvation of souls, to bringing people into a right relationship with God. Once, remember, the poor and uneducated often fell into pagan superstition and were routinely ensnared in practices too graphic to describe here. The same was true of families in which a mother or father fell ill and might have died without medical help. A lack of resources used to push people into desperate survival strategies that left them open to terrible exploitation. Even today, in many parts of the world, people and whole societies resort to terrible things when they are kept uneducated and without medical care — and it was once like that in your own country too, wherever you live. This is where church schools and hospitals have truly served the salvation of multitudes.

I’m not saying all this to invoke a dead past or to dwell on trivialities. I want to show that the salvation of souls has always been at the center of such endeavors — because I can see that today, too, people and whole societies resort to terrible things wherever entering into relationship with God is made difficult by systematic evil. Some of these new situations are worth naming — and we may even find ourselves imagining new church institutions, not yet established, that could serve our societies as deeply as hospitals and schools did two hundred years ago.

Let’s start with something we still face everywhere, even in wealthy, clean countries: serious problems with sanitation. We drown in informational slop. It is so thick that it’s hard to reach the cornerstone of truth buried beneath it. For years there has been no clear way to find curated material on a matter of importance — material that meets some baseline standards of quality and truthfulness, basic Catholic requirements. And it isn’t only those hungry for truth who are stuck. Even more stuck are the would-be creators of such material: the ones who would gladly contribute to the common good if it weren’t all but certain they’d end up broadcasting into a wall.

The root cause is how today’s big-tech infrastructure is built. As an author, you must please the algorithm first; God comes second at best, and there is no way around it. It’s like a city whose water pipes are made of plastic bottles, delivering water that is free but muddy, thick with viruses and bacteria — because for the corporation, delivering water is only a sideline, and its true business is selling medicine. Forgive the harsh words, but I believe they reflect reality accurately.

The fact is that we, the people, did not build this, and the common good did not guide its design. Facebook, to take just one example, was built so that well-off students could rate each other’s looks online — and yet this is now where most institutions reach people and share what matters. With Google, you can never be sure which of the indexed pages will actually surface for a given query; there is no way to dig deep for serious research. It has grown so useless that people hailed the arrival of large language models as the glorified search engine we’d always wanted — and yet these tools work only for content well represented in their training data, and they are inherently unpredictable.

Years ago I sat in front of an ancient computer in a library, trying to find good material on a subject. It was frustrating, but satisfying too. With the language processing technology we have today, we could build tools for precise search that would push that experience to a level that once felt like science fiction. We could explore the whole of human heritage in a rigorous, scholarly way — and make it available to anyone, as public infrastructure — if only enhancing human skill were valued more than shedding it to cut costs.

Attempting this is well within the means of the Catholic Church. If it has its own observatory, why can’t we at least try what apparently no one else is interested in doing? There is no public infrastructure for looking up resources designed with the common good at its heart, because in this climate of relativistic confusion no public institution has shown the courage to back such an endeavor. We don’t need the world’s top talent to start, or to show the way — only the will to stop being mere commentators on what is crumbling.

Wikipedia proves this kind of thing is achievable without wealth: its founder had neither billions nor big-tech money behind him. At first he was ridiculed. Linux is another such example, on an even larger scale — and it did real, lasting good for humanity, the kind AI has yet to match. It is no accident that one of its most popular distributions, Ubuntu, takes its name from the very concept Léocadie Lushombo spoke of at the presentation of Magnifica Humanitas: that a person becomes fully human through relationships with others.

Yet if we leave the courageous few who fight for projects like Wikipedia and Linux to fend for themselves — or worse, let LLMs drain the work that multitudes poured into these projects, exploiting it the way they already exploit copyrighted material without permission — we will sink, as a society, to a place where people of intellect can no longer find room to breathe. There must be a better way than to wish good luck to those willing to start over and build proper channels for information.

But if the Catholic Church could become the driving force behind such an infrastructure, that would still be only the first step. The ability to discover information accurately does not capture the most important dimension of information: its quality — its veracity, sincerity, and faithfulness. These criteria may strike a modern reader as too subjective, yet they are in fact far more objective than they appear. As we grow increasingly capable of processing language automatically, we can now build an index constructed and maintained by humans, with algorithms doing the heavy lifting. I am not calling for another Index Librorum Prohibitorum, the old list of forbidden books; I am calling instead for a carefully curated index of recommended resources, one in which each contributor’s work is judged on its merits — quality, beauty, and truthfulness — not on the author’s identity or wealth. Inclusion would be free; no one could buy their way in. The Church was once in this business, and its return to the field may help save many souls — perhaps as many as were once ensnared in pagan superstition.

Third, and most fundamentally: by ensuring that humans moderate one another’s contributions to public infrastructure, we may restore some measure of denied dignity. Today, human beings increasingly face automated systems that deal with them coldly and without mercy, in ways incompatible with our humanity. It may soon become impossible to be heard at all — as is already the case when dealing with today’s big-tech “free infrastructure” providers. Lately, even reaching a real person is no guarantee: the one who reads and responds may turn out to be a form of automation. This steadily builds walls between people, their representatives, and the institutions meant to serve them. Ensuring that people can meet one another in virtual space would keep them from growing accustomed to a world that treats them with the consideration owed to animals rather than the dignity owed to human beings. It goes without saying how hard it is for someone living in such conditions to develop a healthy relationship with God.

Out of 1.3 billion Catholics, only a tiny fraction would be needed to change a great deal. Perhaps, in the process, another kind of public infrastructure would emerge — one that would finally let people across the planet meet those they ought to know. That was another unfulfilled promise of social networking.

The world has many extremely wealthy people willing to feed the hungry, provide sanitation and medical care, or teach a sustainable way of living. These philanthropists understand well enough what it means to be ill, to go hungry, to live in discomfort when basic needs go unmet. They are rarely faithful Catholics, or Christians at all, and they may have little sense of what a life of purpose looks like. But perhaps now is the time to let them build the schools and the hospitals, while the Church provides what money cannot buy: the public infrastructure of truth.

So, dear Holy Father, perhaps the task does not belong to somebody else — some international body, a group of politicians, or a brave and talented individual. Perhaps we should be the ones to show the way.

Because the Truth is our core business.

It looks like the kind of question that should have a simple answer, and for most of history it did. These days it isn’t so simple, and the difficulty has everything to do with a relatively new habit: judging everything from the outside, as if we lived our lives from outside our own heads rather than inside them.

Take, for instance, the question many Catholics now ask: why can’t women be ordained? From the outside, the answer seems obvious. There is nothing a man does at the altar that a woman couldn’t do — and that is perfectly true, so long as the only legitimate vantage point is the one occupied by the scientist of religion, who studies believers the way an entomologist studies ants. From there, the case is closed.

But that vantage is impoverished. Treating human beings as biological machines or clever animals — describable entirely from the outside — fails to honor their dignity, and it isn’t even the sharpest tool we have for understanding ourselves. A better approach is to step inside: to empathize, to analyze souls by putting ourselves in another’s shoes, and to use the external view only as a complement. That is what I’ll try to do here.

When the Lord Jesus walked this earth, he kept the constant company of His apostles. They were never detached scientists analyzing God incarnate; on the contrary, the Gospels show them being trained to see people from within — from the heart — rather than from the surface, as the Pharisees did. Much of the tension between Jesus and the Jewish authorities turned on precisely this difference.

The man the apostles were chosen to know most intimately was, of course, God himself. This is where the first Catholic priests were born: a chosen few who came to know the Lord Jesus from the inside, who saw first-hand — long before they fully shared it — His consuming passion for the salvation of souls. He gave His life for that passion without hesitation. God himself chose to be tortured to death to show how much it matters to Him to win us as His friends. From this the succession of priesthood began, and it continues today.

It is no small thing to give your life for someone who loves you. It is truly extraordinary to give it for those who hate you — who hate you, above all, because your very existence shines as evidence that there is a way out of their self-deception, a way out of their death in sin (see John 3:19–20; Romans 5:7–8). To be a priest is to be this. If you are a Catholic priest, the light of self-sacrifice that extinguishes the darkness of a life lived in the lie of sin now shines through you, with Christ as its source. That is what makes you a source of sacramental reunion — and it is also what makes you the same target of hatred Christ was, for your existence alone. This is what you must be ready for.

One may object that not every priest today is like this — that not every priest even knows he is supposed to be like this. I agree — it is a tragedy. The less people understand what a priest is, the fewer vocations to the priesthood are realized. But this is not because the bar is set too high; it is because many aim at the wrong place.

The ministerial priesthood was never meant to be the calling of every Christian, nor does it stand above the other vocations. It is one of several necessary organs in the Body of the Church. Catholic teaching distinguishes two participations in Christ’s one priesthood (CCC 1546–1547): the common priesthood, which all the baptized share, and the ministerial priesthood, which is one calling among many. It is in the common priesthood that anyone — ministerial priests included — can strive to excel: in a life of faith, hope, and charity, a life lived according to the Spirit. There, every believer is called to become an instrument of God, putting the gifts received from Him fully at His disposal.

The baptismal priesthood is the universal call to sanctity, and it falls on the priest no less than on the layperson. It is tempting to imagine the opposite — that ordination is a kind of sacramental vow to take holiness seriously, leaving the rest of us excused from any such ambition. Many people quietly think this way; some priests do too. A great deal of clericalism, and much of the serious abuse that has scarred the Church, has grown out of this misconception. But in this respect — the call to sanctity, the share in Christ’s priesthood through baptism — we are all created equal, men and women alike.

But men and women are not equal in every respect. Woman, for instance, is not simply an improved version of man, equipped with the organs that facilitate the gestation of a fetus. That may sound like a caricature, but I use the harsh language deliberately, to highlight how easily our culture slides into the cold, external view of the human person. Phrases like this are now common when motherhood is discussed.

As a man, I cannot fully empathize with what it is to be a woman — to be, by her very nature, a potential mother. It is something I can admire and love, but never quite enter. And I am convinced that the potential for motherhood permeates the whole of what it means to be a woman. Equally, I believe a woman cannot fully empathize with what it is to be a man. If she could, then to be a man would amount to nothing a woman is not already — and one could imagine, without much regret, a future in which technology made men obsolete.

I could never make peace with that, but I cannot be entirely certain either. This is the point where the world without God offers a cold, emotionless answer, while the world with God — warm, loving — leaves you to faith and empathy, but not to certainty.

God became man, and the priest makes Christ’s real presence available at the altar. Do we understand the difference between man and woman well enough, today, to say it makes no difference who stands in that place? Or is the question itself a symptom — a sign that we have grown used to seeing the world in the flattened, external way I described at the beginning of this piece?

Christ chose twelve men. Not one woman. And He was not a teacher trying to keep His audience: when He established the Eucharist, He asked His Jewish disciples — for whom the dietary laws were sacred — to eat His flesh and drink His blood, and most of His followers walked away at that moment (John 6:66). A man willing to lose almost everyone over a hard teaching was not a man trimming His choices to fit the expectations of His culture. The all-male Twelve was a choice.

I don’t believe our society can afford to view motherhood — including pregnancy — the way it now does. And I don’t believe it is right to have women — every one of them a potential mother — to bear the particular hatred that, as I said earlier, falls on the priest for His existence alone.

I am not certain about the ordination of women. Perhaps no certainty is available, by God’s design. But I am fairly certain that now is not the time to change it. We are asking the question from a low place, not a high one.

I offer this as a kind of scientific observation — in the older and truer sense of the word, where science meant the patient description of something open to repeated observation by anyone willing to look. Falsify it if you can, from within your own conscience.

This article applies the method described in my book.

In Latin there is a saying some ascribe to Tertullian: Diabolus simia Dei — literally, “the Devil is the ape of God.” The idea is that the Devil mimics God, promoting a kind of “good lite” that turns out, unsurprisingly, to be evil itself.

It can be illuminating to ask what various trends in society or the Church are trying to mimic. Social networks, for example, were supposed to draw people into a more perfect communion — but they have produced instead a multitude of isolated echo chambers. These are communions of a sort, but rather than fostering empathy, they amplify hate. But this much we already know. Let us now analyze the newest invention — Large Language Models — from the same perspective.

LLMs could likely never have raised enough investment money were they not marketed on the promise of layoffs in expensive white-collar creative jobs. There could have been a positive promise to humanity instead, which remains largely untold: controlling things effectively through natural language, building better user interfaces or code generators, aiding writing, improving search. But let’s skip that for now since, as with social networks, it is telling what LLMs have already ended up causing.

One could argue it is too early to tell in many areas, but I want to focus on an outcome that already seems almost certain: humanity is to be relieved of the fear that we might soon have to understand, even slightly, how these technologies work inside. Many find it unpleasant enough to acquire that kind of literacy in math, physics, or biology; for the ubiquitous computer science, apparently, we can be excused.

I can already hear the cheering that the dreaded science of the IT nerd will stay out of the curriculum — even though, only a year ago, it seemed certain that every future student would have to learn the basics of coding, computational complexity, and how information systems communicate. Now, with many predicting that software engineers will become about as rare as the designers of passenger airliners, we can rest assured: we will not need to understand information technology from the inside — not even to the extent we understand what happens under the hood of our cars. Which, generally, is not much.

Outsourcing understanding is never a good thing, but in many areas it is inevitable — and has been since the division of labor. Yet we should ask whether dealing with information is separable from our humanity at all, and especially: to what extent can our relationship with God happen outside it? Many Christians inhabit two worlds. There is the private space of life and worship, and there is the technosphere — which they enter only minimally, certainly less than their worldlier neighbors. The minimal engagement is taken to justify illiteracy in the field. Physics and biology are different, of course: noble disciplines, fit for the admiration of God’s creation. The only small flaw is that it is not quite possible to live with others — to love them in any meaningful way — without their having influence on you; and if you do not understand a significant part of the world you all live in, you may end up ensnared by the technosphere without even using it.

Another saying goes: if you do not care about politics, politics will care about you. I am afraid with technology it is exactly the same. Through the influence of social networks, I have seen many people living inside an echo chamber and carrying more hatred than before — even when they themselves do not use social networks and abstain from technology as much as they can. But with LLMs, things are about to get much more serious.

Before LLMs, the amount of information we were supposed to responsibly process was already overwhelming, and there was no infrastructure to help us make the right decisions in a responsible way. With LLMs, we can seemingly just delegate everything to a well-trained statistical machine. We can ask it to study our work contract, mortgage, insurance, or any other terms and conditions, opinions, news, political decisions, healthcare decisions, parenting decisions. We can ask it to summarize the emails others have sent us — or have it generate the responses for us, or better still, train it on our past output and let it impersonate us. We can rightfully argue that we cannot afford to spend the whole day reading hundreds of pages of natural-language content just to stay on top of things. Frankly, consuming all the necessary information with the attention it deserves and cross-checking it is the only way we could stay responsible — and it is not physically possible. And there are no longer journalists or other trustworthy authorities to help us; those gatekeepers were swept away by an earlier technological wave. So delegating to a machine seems inevitable, since we have not built any real infrastructure to help us organize information collaboratively — or build trustworthy blocks of it together.

So we have decided to delegate our understanding and our orientation to a global statistical machine — one supposed to be reliable, at least for the mediocre and average, which is most of us. We may hope our lives will not be disturbed. The technosphere will live the information-heavy part of life for us, while we ourselves are not required to be mentally present. And now, having already lost some of the trustworthy middlemen who once helped us handle the complexity, we are removing the rest by automation: lawyers, clerks, marketing specialists, software engineers, and who knows whom else. The hope is that the deluge of information will somehow handle itself, without our ever looking into it or understanding it.

Are you still able to believe this? Does it not seem obvious that the probability of this not crashing global society — and crashing it hard — is now very low?

I find this genuinely sad. I had thought we would follow a different path — but that path would have required basic technological literacy at a level comparable to our grasp of physics, mathematics, or biology. My expectation was based on an observation from my own field, software engineering, where we already build infrastructure for managing the incredible complexity of information across many domains of expertise. We do it every day, and, I must say, rather successfully. And here I do not mean applications for sharing selfies and statuses. I mean something more fundamental: the building of software itself.

Building a codebase is, in essence, an act of collective agreement about how some real-world challenge will be handled, from the highest level down to the smallest detail. If we tried to write that agreement out as a continuous block of natural language — a book, or a bill of law — it would be impossible to manage. The result would be as overwhelming as the ocean of information we are already drowning in.

A code repository solves this differently. Natural language is used only to name things: components, processes, pieces of data. The structure itself is hierarchical, not linear, and held together by links rather than repetition. What has already been described is not described again millions of times over.

The fundamentals of this approach are not terribly complex — arguably simpler than basic math, physics, or biology. If we were even a little literate in them as a society, we could collaborate on a common understanding of the very things mentioned earlier: work contracts, mortgages, insurance terms, news, our political and healthcare and parenting decisions. This is how software developers already work: unlike an article or a book, a codebase can be built by many people at once, each contributing to a shared understanding of the same domain. The repetition is reduced as much as possible, and there is a working industry-standard review process in place, as well as automated quality testing.

There is no reason we could not do the same elsewhere — building a source of trust, and an understanding as detailed as it needs to be. In my book I go even further: this can be compared to the idea of logos, with direct implications for how Catholic teaching might be passed between generations, accurately and effectively.

LLMs are unusually good at processing and generating code precisely because code can always be rendered into plain language — though when so unfolded, it becomes too long for any human to read. LLMs are comfortable with that unfolded form: they summarize it, reformulate it, translate it between programming languages and human languages.

Yes, statistical machines are better than humans at handling natural language. But that does not mean we should delegate understanding to them. It means we should use them as a tool while finding a better infrastructure for managing information complexity than natural language, one that keeps understanding in our hands.

And this is where the dividing line actually runs. Between the God-like and the ape-like.

That sentence may sound strange, but I mean it quite literally.

Consider how expensive it is to build a new cathedral. Now imagine giving that same sum to a team of dedicated people tasked with creating a new, effective representation of the catechism — perhaps not a book, but something more effective — capable of capturing more detail without requiring more pages or compressing meaning behind terms that are hard to grasp. I mean something that doesn’t alter the doctrine in the slightest; on the contrary, it presents everything in a detailed, accurate, and understandable way, using the terms, language, and modes of expression natural to this century. Something that would bring people to an understanding they wouldn’t merely deem plausible, but one they could genuinely accept, internalize, make peace with, and align their lives around. Something they could discuss publicly without embarrassment and pass on to others — who would, in turn, also find it plausible. Some of those people might accept it; others might forcefully reject the Lord Jesus, recognizing how uncomfortable and dangerous His path would be for their ambitions, wealth, and social standing — recognizing Him as “a stone that causes people to stumble” (1 Peter 2:8).

You may find it strange to speak this way about spreading Christianity. It may even seem wholly impossible, since today most people reject the faith for entirely different reasons. They reject it because, once you look beneath the surface message that we should all be kind to one another, the deeper explanation begins to sound like strange syllogisms — a curious play with language and logic, detached from the hands-on approach we’ve come to expect from the sciences, and therefore, on the whole, illegitimate.

Yet there were times when Christianity spread in precisely the manner I described above. Which means it is possible — or at least that it once was.

From here, the discussion tends to branch. One side argues that the old way of teaching is no longer possible, given what we now know and how far humanity has progressed. The other replies that there is no problem with the effectiveness of syllogisms if one tries hard enough to comprehend them — that anyone willing to study Aristotle and Aquinas can recover the mode of thought that was once ubiquitous. A third position cuts the knot differently: it makes no sense, this view holds, to dig any deeper than the message of interpersonal kindness, which can stand on its own. If doctrine contradicts that message, doctrine should be rewired to suit the times.

I don’t side with any of these branches. Yet I’m almost certain that all parties to this discussion, after careful investigation, would unite around one objective truth: we simply haven’t tried hard enough to reformat the way the teaching is taught. That effort could prove immensely difficult and expensive — yet still feasible, compared to rewiring the doctrine itself (especially if the doctrine proves as unyielding as the laws of physics). And we cannot simply sweep aside the testimony of those experts in syllogisms, who warn us that rewiring the doctrine would force us to accept a life lived in a lie. That is something we cannot accept — not in science, not in religion, not in any other field of human endeavor.

As someone who has already invested significant effort into finding new ways the doctrine can be expressed in a plausible and acceptable form, I can testify that it seems quite feasible — or at least, far from a lost cause.

The real reason we haven’t tried, I suspect, lies in the bricks. Imagine the moral hazard of paying a cathedral’s worth of money to people for an intellectual effort like this — one that many doubt can even succeed. What if they failed? Who would be held accountable when a cathedral’s worth of money is gone, with nothing left to show for it — not even a single brick? We are taught how important it is to be practical, to focus on everyday things; and somehow an intellectual effort to anchor the fundamentals for this age seems suspicious, while investing substantial resources in it could even spark outrage. This stands in stark contrast with the Middle Ages, when people concentrated primarily on how to attain salvation — for which technical progress may have suffered during that period.

In the current age, we have the opposite problem. We have refrigerators, yet we have lost the meaning of life. It is largely for this reason, I think, that some say today that Christ in the Eucharist can dwell in a modest space without being surrounded by expensive works of art. A single cathedral’s worth of money, they argue, could instead be converted into one modest but lofty church and three community centers — with plenty left over to feed the poor. But the lofty church will always stand half empty, the community centers will be rented out for yoga lessons, and the poor will learn that we do not take the Real Presence of God quite seriously — a posture they themselves will tend to adopt, since we have modeled it as normal.

Now take a step back and imagine what would happen if that great intellectual effort were more acceptable than piling bricks. Imagine if that group of people, to whom you gave a cathedral’s worth of money to build a new form of the catechism, actually succeeded.

Mightn’t that help feed the poor on an entirely different scale? Wouldn’t it make possible many lofty cathedrals where Christ in the Eucharist could dwell, surrounded by works of art more awe-inspiring than any seen before — each cathedral with ten community centers within commuting distance?

I know many Christians may hate to hear this suspected triumphalism, at a time when we are being encouraged to accept that there will be fewer and fewer of us, and to cherish that very diminishment. But what if the diminishment is simply because we have never really tried? It seems to be an objective fact that for the past two centuries we have not invested significant resources into investigating how the teaching might be taught effectively — with a measurable impact on whether its recipients were able to either accept or reject the Lord Jesus in an informed way.

You may have heard that more Christians face persecution today than ever before — but it is not because the evil regimes of the world have correctly ascertained the power of the Gospel. What these regimes are truly against is human rights, and religious freedom in particular. If those same Christians were instead adamant about practicing a particular form of yoga in a suspiciously spiritual way, they would be persecuted, tortured, and killed just the same.

Persecution is not evidence that the Gospel is being heard. It is evidence that freedom is being denied. The work of being heard still lies ahead of us, and we have barely begun it.

If you work with wood, for whom would you create your finest chair or cabinet? If you work with stone, for whom would you build the most beautiful staircase? If you are an artist, for whom would you make your greatest sculpture or painting, your most profound music, your most exquisite architecture?

Would it be some local strongman — the one with the priciest car and plenty of respect? Some oligarch, the owner of a golden toilet? A politician, assuming he doesn’t already belong to either of the previous categories? Some celebrated guru? A high-ranking clergyman?

Isn’t that a disgusting set of choices?

And if it is — is it even worth showing the best of your craft? If not, will you simply accept that you will never build anything extraordinary, because there is no one worthy to build it for? Or do you just care about getting paid? Are you rational enough to produce work as mediocre as possible, calibrated to maximize your earnings? Is it all just work for you, no passion? Do you only care about living comfortably, having given up all ambition?

For me, these questions are very real, and they would have entirely different answers if I were not Catholic. But I believe they matter to many others as well — I can even see the coping mechanisms people have developed to arrive at partially satisfying answers.

When I look at much of modern art, I often feel I am hearing the response: “I hate that giving my best makes no sense within my worldview — but at least I can fight for someone whose voice isn’t heard, who is abused or marginalized.” On its face, this is a noble motivation. But it is not the same as producing your best.

There are even less satisfying answers, like: “I’m going to shock you and stir up your emotions by exposing my take on the truth.” This is a worse motivation — and yet it still earns more respect in my eyes than being able to say that a man with a golden toilet bought your painting, which now hangs above it. It would be only slightly better if it were an Archbishop of a major metropolis who bought it and hung it in his office. I don’t think this is only my bias: it is the artists who shake us by exposing uncomfortable truths who end up in modern galleries, while those who pleased the most prominent buyers are always faintly suspected of having produced kitsch.

But earning the highest respect among critics by exposing your take on the truth is still not the same kind of activity as struggling to produce your very best. And if the world is designed in a way that fully realizing your potential makes no sense, it would be a depressing world to live in. Still, I would rather live in such a depressing world than live in self-deception — and so I understand why some people choose the depression over the illusion. I believe living in truth is the highest value, even when it brings suffering. You may find this a fundamentally Christian attitude, yet there may in fact be more people among non-believers than among believers who have chosen suffering over lies, and I have deep empathy for that. I also feel a profound sadness that the Church has so neglected the task of conveying truth in ways that are legitimate and defensible from a rational, scientific perspective, that many people today would sooner choose to suffer than believe in God.

Yet being a believer in God still doesn’t change the situation much — I think the turning point lies somewhere else entirely. Many believers would likely disagree, since once you believe in God, He may seem like the ideal recipient of your best work, as worthy a recipient as one could find. But while any believer accepts this theoretically, the real question is how to implement it practically in daily life. For a Christian, it seems simple. You can serve the poor and help the disadvantaged, the oppressed, the ill, those who are alone. You can even do all of this in secret, in which case you don’t face any disgusting choice. You can do it all for Him, since it is the relationship with Him that matters. And you can see this is what the Church has done well in many cases — whether you take her as an institution or as a community of believers who together love God. But in a sense, this answer too is only partially satisfactory. It is in fact somewhat similar to where artists turn their attention when it no longer makes sense for them to do their best. And no wonder — this is where our whole society has plateaued for the last two centuries.

I know many Christians will hate to hear it, but caring for the poor, the ill, and the marginalized is not enough for a proper relationship with God. It is a necessary part of any such relationship, but it doesn’t quite solve the puzzle. And our God is the God of incredibly intricate puzzles — many of them presented to us in the Gospels, but also in physics, and everywhere else we care to look.

First, if you are poor, ill, or marginalized, you are about as likely to be a sinner as if you were rich, healthy, and privileged. Helping others is noble on its face, but when you relieve them of material suffering only to leave them accepting that striving to live up to their full potential makes no real sense, you have merely replaced material suffering with intellectual and spiritual suffering — the kind that questions the design of the world itself and will eventually erode their relationship with God, if they had one.

Second, do you think it’s also possible to create paintings, sculpt, compose music, or work with wood and stone alone, in secret? Because in such a case there would truly be no disgusting choices involved. It would be just you and God. You could earn money by producing work as mediocre as possible, calibrated to maximize your earnings, only to build the best chairs, cabinets, sculptures, buildings — and yes, even books — in private, hidden from the rest of the world. I really mean it when I say it would be better to build a cathedral in the desert. Better that than risk the Archbishop of a major metropolis boasting about what a marvelously rich and important figure he must be to have made such a thing happen.

Fortunately, this is not how the world was designed. But it would be, were it not for a cornerstone that hasn’t been mentioned yet. That cornerstone is the Eucharist: the real presence of God, the Lord Jesus, at a particular place and time — really, truly, and substantially present under the appearances of bread and wine, whom we can eat and drink. It is the most difficult thing to believe. I know — I came to it from software engineering, from a worldview where claims like this are filed away under superstition without a second thought. Yet once we find a way to make peace with it, the puzzle is suddenly solved. Now there is a place for a cathedral, where our best chairs, cabinets, sculptures, paintings, and architecture fit as appropriately as anything ever could. Now there is a sacred place where we can come to visit Him, who is infinitely larger and more worthy of adoration than the Archbishop of a major metropolis — a place genuinely sacred, where we can genuflect in fascination, worth performing our best music in, worth writing the best books about, also worth writing books that will help others do their best in their own art and craft. It makes possible something worth living for, something higher even than the elimination of suffering — something that will never let us plateau the way we have plateaued until now.

For an artist or craftsman, there can be no better discovery than the Eucharist. Suddenly there is no ceiling on what is appropriate to achieve, no effort that is insanely high, no level of pomp that would be too much. It is suddenly fine to strive for things that are truly extraordinary. At the same time, it explains why some of us feel drawn to churches, and why we find it entirely appropriate to genuflect, pray, and give thanks there — that the cornerstone of the world’s design exists to free us from the chains of a desperate, plateaued life where everything is so mediocre it will be automated before long. Without the Eucharist, all the piety and adoration would have to feel deeply suspicious — as they do for many people today, perhaps more of them now than ever.

In essence, the Eucharist is the crown of the Church’s teaching. But the real question is: how can one make peace with such a strange belief — perhaps the strangest puzzle one has ever encountered? The answer is that in this matter, you can only reconcile your reason in the context of the whole Catholic teaching.

Nobody should expect such a strange puzzle to be explained in one paragraph. But it is my mission to explain it in detail, in terms plausible to this century. As a software engineer — a craftsman of a sort — coming from a non-humanities background, deeply immersed in science and technology, I have written a book that explains the whole picture from scratch. If you are interested, check out Design Patterns of Catholic God.

How deeply do we have to delve into AI before we begin encountering questions about good and evil? In my view, not very far - just as in many other areas of human endeavor.

Consider a simple thought experiment. Imagine you meet a person who can, at any moment, complete a complex fill-in-the-blanks exam in your field of expertise with near-perfect accuracy - enough to earn the highest certification - and who can do so without relying on multiple-choice hints. Would you assume that this person has a strong understanding of the field?

Perhaps. But it’s also possible that they simply memorized the correct answers and don’t truly understand the subject at all.

In practice, however, most fields are far too complex for someone to memorize the answers to every possible fill-in-the-blank question. It’s far more efficient to actually learn the material - through study, experience, and by developing an internal understanding of how things work. That, after all, is the reason such tests exist: they are meant to probe whether someone has genuinely grasped the underlying knowledge, not merely memorized isolated responses.

Technology operates under different constraints than humans. A system could store a database containing millions of questions and answers and query it through a simple mobile app to achieve excellent scores on such tests. But that would not amount to software-assisted understanding of the field.

If you were an airline pilot, you certainly wouldn’t want your co-pilot to possess that kind of “knowledge” of flying.

That is why it has long been sensible to regularly change the wording of important fill-in-the-blank exam corpora - to make simple answer-lookup cheating impossible.

Then large language models (LLMs) introduced a different approach, in which changes in wording are no longer an obstacle. If every word in a language is assigned a numerical ID, a model can learn a very large mathematical formula that predicts the most likely missing word given the surrounding text. No matter how the sentence is phrased, the model can attempt to infer the missing word that best fits.

An LLM is, in essence, a large formula compiled from a huge spreadsheet of sentences, with missing words in one column and the correct words in another. This is called the training data. It’s not a perfect transformation - only an approximate one. But in this new representation of knowledge, the exact wording no longer matters.

Internally, an LLM has nothing to do with a chat: it’s not about questions and answers, but rather about filling in missing words. When you ask an AI chatbot a question, it reformulates it internally as a sentence with missing words and then fills them in based on the formula.

Just to give you a visual impression of what such a formula might look like, imagine the sentence “Winter is cold,” which the software sees as a sequence of words: X = Winter, Y = is, Z = cold. If we know the numerical IDs of “Winter” and “is,” we could use the formula to calculate a likely ID for the word in Z.

The spreadsheet with training data is trillions upon trillions of rows long, but if it were short, the formula might visually look something like sin(4X + 2Y + 10Z + 5) = 0. Many of us solved such equations in high school and can imagine how to calculate the missing value if we know the other two.

In reality, the formula would use a slightly different function than a sine function, but most importantly it would be much longer and more deeply nested, since it needs to work not just for “Winter is cold,” but also for most of the other rows in the training spreadsheet. Conceptually, however, it’s not rocket science - this is what I’m trying to illustrate here.

This kind of “artificial understanding” is a lot like a strategy many of us use when we can’t remember a particular test answer: “If the sentence starts with ‘Camel,’ the correct answer is ‘sand.’” The mathematical model can capture much more complex “hacks.”

In this analogy, numbers such as 4, 2, 10, and 5 would be called parameters, and the number of consecutive words the model focuses on (X, Y, Z) is known as the context window. Modern frontier LLMs contain more than a trillion parameters. Even calculating the next word can therefore be computationally demanding, but the real expense lies in finding the right parameter values through computational brute force rather than through any intelligent search.

That process requires immense computing power and energy; sometimes it even requires its own power plant. Suddenly, our training spreadsheet has been converted into a large and immensely computationally expensive formula that can handle different phrasings of the facts contained in the training data.

The training data can now be discarded - or, better yet, kept for calculating the next version of the formula. Researchers constantly come up with improvements to the underlying model architecture, and the training data itself becomes outdated fairly quickly. In practice, the ideal setup might involve one power plant for training, another for serving customers, and yet another for research and innovation. Good.

There is one neat trick, however, that people often use to begin their explanations of LLMs - and which I have deliberately postponed until now. The formula is so well constructed that if you always let it fill in the next word based on, say, the 10 preceding words, you can generate a sequence of words as long as you wish.

With large enough context windows, it can produce clever sentences about your field of expertise that sound almost as if they reflect a PhD-level understanding. That is what gives the technology its “wow” effect - especially if you tweak it to appear like a chat, where part of the conversation is provided by the user and part is generated by the formula.

Some individuals can even fall in love with such a formula, under the illusion that it has human consciousness.

But let us return to our earlier question about understanding. Imagine again that you are the airline pilot who discovers that your co-pilot carries a device in his pocket that gives him a computer-aided “understanding” of flying. Does it really change the situation if the gadget can now deal with different wording? I don’t think so.

Yet I am a software engineer, and in my field many companies now mandate that my peers use such tools whenever possible. In the past, when developers searched for solutions in various internet discussions, managers would raise their eyebrows and start talking about proper skill sets. It didn’t stop us then, and it wouldn’t stop us now if they tried to prohibit the use of these tools. Nor would it stop us from using our own brains when they are more effective than LLMs - because objective results matter in the end, no matter what the guidance is.

That said, it is also true that even a person with a PhD-level understanding will appreciate a gadget they can ask questions and receive meaningful answers from, especially when their colleagues fail to provide them. These days the tools can also handle many routine tasks quite well.

But it is also true that everyone fears the specter of a software engineer (or a co-pilot) whose understanding comes only from having a gadget in their pocket capable of answering fill-in-the-blank tests at an expert level, independent of wording.

This is about the point in this article where greed and inhumane motivations enter the picture at many different levels. Let us try to explore them one by one.

First, if automated AI tools handle most routine tasks, a senior software engineer may be left only with the most cognitively demanding work - problems AI cannot solve. Yet humans are not designed to sustain such intensity for eight hours a day. It is like telling a sprinter that everything in his life will be taken care of except the one thing he excels at - sprinting. The result is exhaustion and burnout, since the human body cannot easily be upgraded the way hardware can. Observations like this will likely apply to many - perhaps most - white-collar professions in the future. For now, however, few people seem concerned. If we fail to address the issue, we may soon find ourselves in a situation not unlike that of factory workers a hundred years ago. But God did not create men as mere human resources; He created us in His own image.

At the other end of the spectrum, junior engineers face a different risk. They may not be given enough time to reflect on the deeper relationships and consequences within their craft - the kind of understanding that grows when one struggles with problems and learns to figure things out independently. If short-term productivity gains are constantly prioritized, they may never have the chance to grow into senior engineers and may remain merely operators of automated tools. That would squander talent and could eventually lead to an intellectual and creative plateau from which it would be difficult to recover.

This concern does not apply only to software engineering; it is simply the first field in which these risks have become clearly visible. And to be honest, we cannot really say that we live in an age of intellectual and creative mountain ranges. At best, we are already living among rolling plains - though few of us realize it.

The training data behind LLMs were built upon the work of people with a deep understanding of their fields. We should not risk squandering this creative richness and turning our civilization into a landscape of shallow, leveled plains - living only on the legacy of its great ancestors, who may one day appear like demigods of intellect and dignity beside our diminished contemporaries.

As a human being and a practicing Catholic, my primary motivation at work is to serve my neighbors. In this context, that means helping customers and colleagues live even a tiny bit more purposeful lives in accordance with what I recognize as God’s will. I do not experience God’s will as a set of traditional values, general wisdom, or ideology. Rather, it often comes to me as small, concrete hints and gifts from Him, for He is a living God.

The most innovative and creative ideas that have ever occurred to me do not come from my own initiative or from any particular way of life. They simply happen to me - almost like strange coincidences - undeserved gifts. I can only receive and understand them because, in limited ways, I am able to empathize with other human beings, since these small inspirations are always meant as gifts for others. Recognizing this fills my life with purpose.

In some sense, it works this way for every human being. You may call it randomness, and you may choose not to empathize and receive, but what Catholic doctrine describes is about as real as what physics textbooks describe.

We are not robots; we are God’s agents. That is our specialty in the labor market - our added value. You might also call this teamwork or a customer-centric attitude. But this is simply what we do as human beings. We do not merely shovel data from one heap to another in an attempt to maximize selected metrics.

By saving us time on routine work, LLMs might free our hands to be more creative and inventive in that uniquely human space. But that will only happen if the time we save is reclaimed for that purpose. If it is, it might bring us closer, in more direct ways, to our customers and colleagues - making us less narrowly technical, less isolated behind technical concerns, and more broadly engaged. This is what some of the designers of these tools really intended.

Unfortunately, this is not what is currently happening. There is substantial evidence that big tech is not pursuing a vision of an economy in which we serve one another in ever more perfect ways, but rather one in which we compete to accumulate power. This is no surprise, since the struggle for power lies at the heart of Marxism - the only rational path to follow if one assumes that there is no God - and this new “elite” is full of cultural analphabets.

What I describe below is not a transition to another stage of market capitalism. The destination is not a prosperous society, but a poor one in which a small group of the miserable imposes totalitarian rule over a population that is poorer and even more miserable, yet fully dependent on it to receive just enough to barely cover its basic needs. We have seen this dynamic many times before - one that appears almost as robust as a natural law.

To make things clearer, let me describe an alternative future - one that may yet turn out to be the real future, only somewhat delayed. There is still hope.

One of the most attractive aspects of studying information technology is the ability to manage enormous complexity through layers of abstraction. For example, I can buy a couple of chips and build a small device to monitor temperature and humidity at home. To do that, I need documentation for the chips, and I also need a conceptual understanding of how they are built internally - but not in extreme detail. Their manufacturer has agreed to follow certain common conventions; we can call them contracts.

I trust the manufacturer, and because I conceptually understand how the chips work, I can also make reasonable guesses about the conditions under which they might fail. That is an example of a layer of abstraction.

Similarly, when I buy a computer, I can install the same software that runs on many other computers, even though they may contain wildly different processors and components. Thanks to another layer of abstraction, it does not matter what specific processor or components are inside. There is another “contract” - another abstraction layer - that allows me to control the computer in essentially the same way. Layers of abstraction allow us to accomplish almost effortlessly tasks that would otherwise be unbearably complex - something approaching rocket science.

It is quite tempting for any engineer to build something on top of LLM models, yet the proper abstraction layer is not really there yet. For instance, we know that LLMs power modern automatic translators and are capable of capturing many of the nuances of language remarkably well. A specialized, well-trained model could help me build practical tools for writers - tools that would help them understand meaning, etymology, and connotation, all presented in an informative graphical way.

Such an LLM could be relatively small and not terribly intelligent or versatile. I could run it on my own laptop; there would be no need to build a new power plant to operate it in a data center. It would only need to be stable and reliable.

Yet somehow nobody seems to produce such a model. I could rely on one of the large LLM providers, but their systems are too slow, too general, too constrained, and too unstable for this purpose. They boast that what works today may work quite differently tomorrow. Most of what I would need to know about the training data, internal architecture, and other crucial aspects is kept secret.

For instance, I have no idea what kind of licensing fees I might face in the future. These companies are still burning through billions of dollars in investment, and nobody really knows what the true operating costs are for a use case like mine. They are building something enormous all at once, fueled by vast amounts of capital, and there seems to be little room to help someone like me build a business incrementally - step by step, guided by customer feedback.

Similarly, LLMs could help address the frustration users face when navigating many contemporary applications, with their endless buttons, text fields, and controls. The result is often a usability mess - and beneath the surface, the technology can be even messier. This seems like a perfect opportunity for a small, well-crafted LLM designed to let users control applications through natural language, while clearly confirming whether their intentions have been understood correctly.

Once again, I find myself stuck filling my applications with endless buttons and text fields, while the major LLM providers appear to be racing to build dozens of new power plants to support their vast, newly built data centers. Why?

I could go on and on with dozens of use cases, but let me mention one last example. For this one, I would gladly rely on the large LLM providers, with their vast data centers and massive models. It is somewhat of a journalistic use case: automatically sifting through streams of new data to find whatever topics my users have said they care about.

But here is another complication. Keep in mind that these enormous models are trained to handle trillions upon trillions of question–answer pairs. Adding new information requires careful testing to ensure that the model has not “broken” what it previously learned. Recomputing such a massive body of data again and again might indeed require the output of a nuclear power plant - or ten, or twenty of them.

So how fresh can the data inside these models really be? Can such periodic recalculation ever become profitable? That remains something of a mystery. We hear that there has been a lot of promising research progress - and that more investment is needed.

Why are they doing this? Isn’t it somewhat irrational? The answer is simple: only by building an enormous formula that encompasses all fields of human endeavor can they hope to replace white-collar workers altogether, with their weak bodies and inconvenient conscience. Senior or junior, human workers simply don’t scale.

Obviously, this could only work if humans are not God’s agents and if Catholic doctrine is merely a fairy tale. It should also be said that there have recently been numerous reports that many actors in the markets are speculating against the success of the major LLM providers. But could big tech succeed at least halfway? If it did, the consequences would likely be severe: a huge wave of unemployment, a sharp rise in energy prices, and a steep plunge in consumer demand, as unemployed white-collar workers would have little money to spend.

The report that recently shook Wall Street - The 2028 Global Intelligence Crisis (often referred to as the Citrini Report or the “AI Doomsday Report”), published by Citrini Research in February 2026 - went viral for outlining a “heads-I-win, tails-you-lose” dilemma in which both the success and the failure of AI could lead to severe economic downturns.

We will likely all be poorer soon. The question is whether our children will end up with their intellects permanently leveled. That question is now just dozens of gigawatts of power output away. Will they live with the dignity of well-cared-for cattle, owing everything they have to a new and powerful elite?

It is not yet clear whether this is science fiction or not. But what is certain is that these CEOs from Silicon Valley truly mean what they say. And they can only mean it because Catholic engineers are no longer in charge.