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.