Should I be guided only by AI?
Every day, we encounter articles warning of AI’s future dangers. But is machine learning really the threat? No. Many have spent more than a century embracing materialism: scientism ‘über alles’ (over everything).
When we reduce persons to mechanisms, it opens the door to dehumanization in all its forms. Formerly, Nazi Germany, materialist ideology reduced human beings to specimens in a racist biological theory, their humanity ignored.
Yet science operates legitimately on the material, measurable plane. But when it claims this is the only plane, it fails on its own terms.
Imagine assembling a research team to study Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. Physicists analyze the sound waves, intensities, and frequencies; psychologists investigate Beethoven’s childhood traumas and how he coped with deafness; neurologists use functional MRI to map which brain regions are stimulated when subjects hear the choral movement.
Yet no matter how much data our scientists compiled, they could not ‘explain’ a single bar of the musical experience we call the Ninth Symphony. The problem isn’t insufficient data. Aesthetic experience, meaning, and beauty exist on a plane that scientific measurement cannot access.
This isn’t a failure of science. Science cannot deal with all of reality. Love and hate, joy and mourning cannot be quantified. You can map every neuron, measure every hormone, track every electrical impulse – and still not explain why one loves a prodigal son.
The same limitation appears across every domain that matters most to human life. Science can map neurological processes during moral decision-making, but it cannot ground moral obligation itself. Why should we sacrifice for others if we’re merely collections of atoms following physical laws?
Fundamentally, science cannot answer “why” questions about the purpose and meaning of life. It excels at describing mechanisms – i.e., how things work. But it cannot address teleological questions – why things exist, what their purpose is.
These aren’t defects in the scientific method. They’re inherent limitations that reveal reality’s true nature: multiple planes of being, each requiring its own mode of knowing. The catastrophic error of scientism is claiming that only the material plane is real – that if science cannot measure it, it doesn’t exist.
The solution shouldn’t be to reject science but to take it as a partial understanding of reality. The Catholic intellectual tradition has always insisted on the “multiple planes of being.” Material reality operates according to physical laws that science can study. But persons exist simultaneously on several planes – body, soul, and spirit united in a person, a person made in God’s image.
Our conscience cannot be regulated through algorithms – not because our computers aren’t powerful enough, but because self-awareness belongs to a non-material plane of reality.
Materialism fails everywhere it’s applied to persons. You cannot reduce love to oxytocin, beauty to preference patterns, moral obligation to evolutionary advantage, or human dignity to biological function. Each person is a body and soul, created for communion with a personal God, bearing His image.
We should use AI where it excels – as a tool for analyzing data, automating routine tasks, and solving computational problems. However, we must resist letting it invade domains that belong to persons: education that forms character, counseling that heals souls, and relationships that constitute our humanity.
Nov 24 Mon