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.

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.