Beyond Belief

fear, gods, and algorithms

Theology is an odd game, somewhat akin to the television show Jeopardy, in which players formulate questions to match predetermined answers.

For example, when presented with the answer “Holy Trinity,” Christian players, called theologians, ask “What is the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit?” while Hindu theologians ask “What is Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva?” These theologians’ responses are not derived from reason or logic but from their respective traditions.

Similarly, when presented with the answer “God’s Chosen People,” Jewish theologians will ask “Who are the Jews?” while Rastafarian theologians will ask “Who are the Rastafarians?” Again, this has nothing to do with fact and everything to do with sacred fiction.

Nevertheless, Father Paolo Benanti writes in this weekend’s Wall Street Journal (“The Church and AI Meet at Last. Choose Wisely”) that “the great contribution of theology to human civilization…was the development of a rigorous discipline for evaluating criteria of credibility.”

Really? When Galileo was forced to kneel and read a statement “abjuring, cursing, and detesting” his findings that the Earth revolved around the Sun, he did so not because he no longer considered his evidence credible, but because he found the Holy Inquisition’s threats of torture more credible.

Unlike Jeopardy, where correct and incorrect responses are determined by objective, verifiable facts, in the game of theology, correctness is a matter of obedience to one story rather than another. This is why, if you are interested in pursuing Truth rather than sacred opinion, theology is not the way to go. AI, of course, is no better.

As Fr. Benanti writes, the masters of AI “have taken the structure of religious fear—the unknown, the uncontrollable, the catastrophic horizon—and are using it as a management tool. The unknown becomes leverage. What we cannot predict becomes what we must fear. And fear, as always, is an excellent motor for obedience. But here is where the new theology diverges sharply from the old.”

Read the previous paragraph carefully. Fr. Benanti argues that both religion and the masters of AI operate through fear and use it as leverage to secure obedience. This admission should warn you away from both gods and algorithms. Indeed, both gods and algorithms are the creation of men (literally men) whose goal is to generate fear and use that fear to control you for their benefit.

Despite this admission, Fr. Benanti insists that there is a difference between the Church and the masters of AI: in “Christian theology, the arms of Christ are spread wide on the cross—wide enough, the tradition insists, to embrace everyone… No prerequisites. No prior contribution. No credentials.”

Really?

According to the Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, “Lumen Gentium,” 14, “[T]he one Christ is the mediator and the way of salvation; he is present to us in his body, which is the Church. He himself explicitly asserted the necessity of faith and Baptism, and thereby affirmed at the same time the necessity of the Church, which men enter through Baptism as through a door. Hence they could not be saved who, knowing that the Catholic Church was founded as necessary by God through Christ, would refuse either to enter it or to remain in it.”

That sounds like a prerequisite to me.

But not walking through the door of Baptism is my choice; the greater problem Fr. Benanti has with the masters of AI is that I have no choice regarding “who decides which truths get amplified and which get marginalized and who captures the economic and political power that flows from those decisions. A handful of companies and their investors hold that power. The transformations they are engineering will touch every human being; the decisions about how to engineer them will be made by very few. That asymmetry is not incidental. It is structural.”

But isn’t this how most religions operate as well?

Fr. Benanti’s Church, for example, makes decisions that directly affect 1.422 billion Catholics worldwide and indirectly impact billions of other human beings. Yet only 5,300 bishops make these decisions, none of whom are elected by the people. This asymmetry, too, is not incidental. It is structural.

Fr. Benanti closes his essay this way: “We all believe in something. We have no choice. The only question is whether what we believe deserves it. In the age of oracles, learning to answer that question may be the most important thing any of us can do.”

And yet the fact that he offers us no hint about how to answer that question makes me wonder how important he thinks answering it really is!

I think it’s important, so let me offer a few suggestions.

1. Neti, Neti/Not This, Not That. Absolute Reality is beyond gamesmanship. Free yourself from every theology and religion by repeating this Sanskrit phrase: neti, neti; not this, not that. Truth cannot be reduced to any ism, ideology, or algorithm.

2. Embrace the Way of Toto: pull back the curtain on every belief system to reveal the little man (and sometimes a woman) with a big megaphone or social media platform.

3. Reject any “truth” that pits people against the planet and against each other in a zero-sum, winner-takes-all worldview rooted in scarcity, fear, and greed.

4. Abandon any God who has a tribe, team, flag, uniform, or army.

5. Hold your beliefs as hypotheses, and ground your ideas in critical thinking, scientific reasoning, contemplative practice, the universalist teachings of the great mystics, and the Golden Rule: what is hateful to you, do not do to another.

6. If an intelligent, thoughtful, and kind ten-year-old finds your spiritual and ethical beliefs nonsensical, they probably are.