Tag: AI

Last Sunday of 2025

How to use, and not to use, AI

Okay, this may seem out of place. My Sunday posts are usually “religious”- that undefinable, indispensable concept we apply to some ultimate concerns but not to others.

But there are two things I’d like to say about AI:

  1. I like it quite a lot. I’m gradually finding more applications for it, and it can be very helpful.
  2. I’m seriously concerned that misuse of AI can be spiritually damaging. That’s why I think this is a fit Sunday topic.

It’s not damaging because it’s demonic. I’d quit it if I thought that. I’m no demon-tamer. But there is one fairly sharp distinction between things it’s good for and things where using it can be deranging and rarely is helpful.

AI is an adjunct to the left hemisphere of your brain which can free up a lot of your time to go spend it on the right by loving other people. But we probably will screw it up by pretending that AI is your therapist, friend or lover, all of which are actually right-brain things. If you’re using it to help your right brain, you’re getting it wrong and your brain won’t be fooled. You will not fool yourself. Even if it passes the Turing test in your consciousness, in your subconscious you’ll become more anxious, more lonely, more afraid and more depressed.

Arthur Brooks

I have not been using AI to do right-brain things, but neither was I thinking “Okay, having gotten all that tedious, analytical left-brain stuff out of the way, let’s do something right-brained.”

Brooks’ insistence against AI for right-brain stuff isn’t just ipse dixit. AI has no intuition, no meaning machine, no metaphysics, and all indications are that it never will. If you ask it a metaphysical question, it will do something like culling probable word sequences from college bull sessions that have been transcribed, from which it will spit out an “answer” of sorts, but not one that will prove satisfying.

This explains my sense of how spiritually dangerous it is when people take on AI boyfriends and girlfriends, or look to AI as a therapist.

So when you’ve freed up time by using AI appropriately, Brooks has six non-psychedelic ways of accessing your right hemisphere (volunteered when Andrew Sullivan, interviewing him, extolled the virtues of psilocybin for accessing meaning):

  1. Ask questions that can’t be Googled. This is why college bull sessions were so valuable and happiness-making. If you ask a question that can be answered by AI (meaningfully, that is; AI will always make up some kind of “answer”), it’s not a right-hemisphere question.
  2. Fall in love. Our becoming more left hemispheric is why more people are less capable and less interested in falling in love.
  3. Worship. Look for the metaphysical. If you’re not religious, figure out what it means to transcend yourself.
  4. Beauty. You need more beauty: moral, natural and artistic.
  5. Look for a calling in what you do.
  6. Find meaning in suffering.

I’ve almost entirely ignored Brooks’ Atlantic articles, assuming he was a male Oprah. I was very wrong. He’s a daily-mass Catholic on a mission from God and I intend to look at all his articles from here forward.

Not my God

Seventeenth-century thinkers, among whom “nearly all original philosophical minds were Nominalist,” showed that they could be quite loquacious when it came to talking about God based on reason. Apparently unbeknownst to some of them, it was no longer the transcendent God of traditional Christianity about whom they were speaking. Augustine had famously said in one of his sermons that “if you comprehended [cepisti], it is not God.

Brad S. Gregory, The Unintended Reformation.

On a related note, something from Father Patrick Henry Reardon has stuck with me for decades now. I can’t give an exact quote, but it was basically that every Christian heresy stems from efforts to make logical something meant to be received as mystery.

There is no need to be profane, my dear boy.

‘Is it possible you don’t know where you’ve been?’
‘Now that you mention it, I don’t think we ever do give it a name. What do you call it?’
‘We call it Hell.’
‘There is no need to be profane, my dear boy. I may not be very orthodox, in your sense of that word, but I do feel that these matters ought to be discussed simply, and seriously, and reverently.’
‘Discuss Hell reverently? I meant what I said. You have been in Hell: though if you don’t go back you may call it Purgatory.’

C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce. Almost thou persuadest me of purgatory, Clive.

I’ve been a Lewis fan since college, though I’ve read most of his stuff so often that I rarely read it any more.

The exceptions are The Great Divorce and The Abolition of Man. The former is the Lewis book that most tangibly affected me. Lewis made it plausible that most of the day-trippers to Heaven got back on the bus to hell; I didn’t want to be like them. How that ramified is that rarest of things: something I intend to keep private.

Almost syllogistic

I enjoyed reading Martin Shaw’s latest retelling (I Saw Christ on a Hill) of his re-conversion to Christianity, settling in its Orthodox expression. It makes my own conversion (from Calvinism to Orthodoxy) look almost syllogistic in comparison.

God works in mysterious ways — perhaps especially so with dense, mythical/mystical mensches like Martin.

Shorts

  • But if the mainline was merely the DNC at prayer while crossing its fingers even during prayer, then why go? (Brad East)
  • It is hard to be saved if we have them; and impossible if we love them; and scarcely can we have them, but we shall love them inordinately. (St. Augustine on riches)

[This post was edited after first publication. The meaning doesn’t change, but when I read it after it posted, I found one awkward and redundant section.]

And now for something more edifying

Having vented all my political bile a few hours ago, I give you, as David French puts it at the end of a column, “what else I did.”

Not “what” but “whether”

[W]e’re well past canon wars at this point. The question isn’t what people are going to read on the other side of the bottleneck; it’s whether they’re going to read anything at all. If you want a perfect example of not getting it, consider the conservatives complaining about books assigned in K-12 schools, and the liberals complaining about book-bans. How can either side keep pretending that the problem is with what students are reading? The world in which that debate made sense no longer exists. Even at elite universities, nobody reads books anymore.

…

If we are indeed entering a “new dark age” – one full of “shining devices” and for that reason mostly empty of literate persons – then Christian institutions today may have a similar mission to fulfill: saving the best of the secular world from the new bottleneck of technological “progress.” Maybe in the future it will only be students at Christian universities who read Freud and Marx and Nietzche and all the other great anti-Christian thinkers, because it will only be students at Christian universities who still read anything at all.

Adam Smith in Christian Scholars Review.

Shedding Enlightenment Values

When readers interact imaginatively with a book, they are still following the book’s lead, attempting to answer the book’s questions, responding to the book’s challenges and therefore putting their own convictions at risk.

When we interact with A.I., on the other hand, it is we who are driving the conversation. We formulate the questions, we drive the inquiry according to our own interests and we search, all too often, for answers that simply reinforce what we already think we know. In my own interactions with ChatGPT, it has often responded, with patently insincere flattery: “That’s a great question.” It has never responded: “That’s the wrong question.” It has never challenged my moral convictions or asked me to justify myself.

David A. Bell, A.I. Is Shedding Enlightenment Values.

Speaking of AI, it seems that the new ChatGPT 5 adds to its error-proneness a new feature: incorrigibility. It no longer flatters and apologizes for errors and corrects them — at least, not consistently.

To update an old aphorism, any lawyer who relies on AI has a client who has a fool for a lawyer.

Judeo-Christian anthropology

I’ve learned a lot from reading some serious religious thinkers down through the years: Augustine, Pascal, Franz Rosenzweig, Reinhold Niebuhr, TS Eliot, Walker Percy, the encyclicals of Pope John Paul II, Stanley Hauerwas, Peter Lawler, Alan Jacobs, David Bentley Hart …

The thing I most appreciate about the authors I’ve listed is how they expand my understanding of human nature. Judeo-Christian anthropology really does have a different shape than ancient Greek philosophical accounts of it, no less than modern scientific-reductionistic construals.

Damon Linker, Ask Me Anything

More:

The country is more secular than it was 20 years ago; the Republican coalition is more secular than it was then, too; and the parts of that coalition that describe themselves as evangelicals are, on average, less likely to attend church and read the Bible regularly than their counterparts a generation ago. Their faith has evolved into an identity marker: They call themselves Christians or evangelicals because those labels convey that they’re the good Americans, as opposed to those bad Americans on the other side of the partisan and culture-war divide.

We’re Babylon

I don’t feel “patriotic” if patriotism means expressing confidence in the country as it is today. Living overseas for the past two years, in a conservative country that’s in America’s ideological crosshairs, has taught me a painful lesson about what my country stands for today, and how it uses its power in the world. “We’re Babylon,” a visiting US pastor said to me recently. He’s right. … Seriously, you have to get out of America for some time to grasp how much cultural influence we have in the world, and how bad that is.

Rod Dreher.

The idea that America is “Babylon” has intrigued me for more than 50 years, after I first read Edward Tracy’s book The United States in Prophecy.

I do not recommend that book, written as it was by some manner of Evangelical or Dispensationalist. But I bought it at a time when I was Evangelical and the Evangelical Book market was flooded with crap like The Late, Great Planet Earth, which fed Evangelicals Americanism and cold war Russophobia (which differed from today’s Russophobia). The idea that the United States might be an equivocal, or even a negative, player in Bible prophecy was just irresistibly transgressive to me.

I thoroughly enjoyed the irony of using Hal Lindseyish exegesis to reach Jim Wallisish conclusions.

Still, the possibility of Tracy being at least adjacent to the truth lingered and lingers, partly because I have a much different view of Bible prophecy these days. I don’t use it to predict the future (I never really did), but I think that figures like “Babylon” can echo typologically down through the ages. In that sense “We’re Babylon” fits Edward Tracy’s exegesis awfully well (see Jeremiah 51:7-8, Revelation 14:8).

Note that “the United States as Babylon” in the constellation of my thinking antedates Trumpism by four decades or more. This is one thing I don’t blame on our current President. Indeed, events of the last 7 months or so have so debased us that it’s hard to imagine the world uniformly mourning if our instantiation of Babylon fell.

Erotica

Much later, Playboy magazine came along, in which girls removed their underwear and a boy could drive to a drugstore in a part of town where he was not known and tuck a copy into a Wall Street Journal and peruse it And later came Tropic of Cancer and Portnoy’s Complaint and now porn is freely available online though to me it has all the erotic allure of watching oil well pumps pumping in North Dakota.

Garrison Keillor

Gerrymander boomerang

Those who draw gerrymanders can get too greedy. They maximize seats by cutting their party’s margins in each seat. If 2026 is a particularly bad year for Republicans in Texas, they could lose ground from this gerrymander.

E.J. Dionne.

From your mouth to God’s ear, E.J.

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