The fictional misanthrope Dr. House often joked that if one could reason with religious people, there would be no religious people. Of course, the scholar made these comments before Donald Trump became president, an event so devastating that it forced the world’s most openly religious man to act as a voice of reason.With the democratic powers of his home country electing the presidential version of Pope Alexander VI, a man whose foreign policy is based on nepotistic self-aggrandizement, the responsibility of providing moral guidance to his countrymen and much of the WENA world has fallen to the first American Pope. And now, like every manager in every corporate office, he too is talking about Artificial Intelligence. Thankfully, this is not the case with the enthusiasm of corporate heads who think AI can replace all kinds of redundant workers, so the only ones making money are CEOs and shareholders.In his first encyclical, titled Magnifica Humanitas, or Magnificent Humanity, the Pope warned about the dangers of Artificial Intelligence, comparing it to the Tower of Babel and saying: “Humanity, created by God in all its grandeur, faces today a critical choice: either build a new Tower of Babel or build the city in which God and humanity live together.”But what exactly is the Tower of Babel? What is an encyclopedia? Why is the Pope talking about Artificial Intelligence? And can he be a voice of reason against the largely atheist technocrats who can find Christ when it suits their narrative? And why are the sons of Abraham worried about deus ex machina? For those who live under a rock, or are more bothered by cockroaches or clubs, here’s a little primer.
The Tower of Babel Story
Most people who haven’t read the Bible from cover to cover may have first heard the term Tower of Babel in In one of the film’s more memorable scenes, Apocalypse hijacks the world’s nuclear arsenals and launches them into space before thundering: “You can shoot your arrows from the Tower of Babel, but you can never attack God!”The pulpy line takes an old religious myth and gives it a modern twist: the man points missiles skyward.
The Tower of Babel is a fictional Biblical allegory, what scholars call an etiological myth, in this case a story that explains why humanity speaks so many different languages. It appears in Genesis shortly after the story of Noah’s flood, when humanity is still imagined as a single people with one language. They settle in the land of Shinar and decide to build a city and a tower “whose top can reach the heavens” and which can ward off any floods. This is too much for an Abrahamic God who can’t stop his subjects from uniting against him, so he sends a gust of wind that makes the various workers unable to communicate with each other because, before Google Translate, when there is no common language, there is no way for people to work together.And then there’s the most famous name in that particular story: Nimrod, Noah’s great-grandson. Later Jewish, Christian, and Islamic traditions transformed Nimrod into a rebel-king who dared to challenge God and shot arrows into the sky to kill him. In some versions, the arrows return covered in blood, giving Nimrod the illusion that he has wounded the god.Read: Why did Trump TACOED against the Pope? But, as Peter T Chataway writes in Patheos, the action of Apocalypse twists the familiar legend. Nimrod aims his arrows at God, while Apocalypse aims them at Heaven because he is a “false god”. And today, it is Pope Leo who in his new encyclical is comparing AI to the new Tower of Babel, with humans playing the role of God.This is a myth found in all civilizations, including the Hindu Shatapatha Brahmana, which describes the asuras building a huge fire altar of bricks in order to reach heaven before being betrayed by Indra. This story also finds its place in children’s stories along with Jack and the Beanstalk.This idea is found in all civilizations, reflecting unbridled human ambition, such as John Milton’s Paradise Lost, where the confusion of human language causes laughter in heaven, or Franz Kafka’s short story Das Stadtwappen, where the builder of Babel is surrounded by bureaucracy. Even in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, a “Babel fish” is a device that can be implanted in one’s ear to translate any extraterrestrial speech.
Why did Pope Leo call AI the new ‘Tower of Babel’?
Now, before anyone asks, an encyclical is a papal policy document, which Rome still brings up when it wants to convince the world that the opinions of the Roman Catholic Church matter. This is an extremely long Substack post generally addressed to Catholics and “people of good will.” Pope Leo’s first encyclical is titled Magnifica Humanitas, or Magnificent Humanity, and is approximately 42,300 words long, which suggests that the Vatican has also discovered that AI discourse cannot be contained in a thread, and that the document was not written or edited by ChatGPT. The lack of “it wasn’t X, it was Y” statements suggests it probably wasn’t.The document was formally signed on 15 May, the 135th anniversary of Rerum Novarum, Leo XIII’s great intervention during the Industrial Revolution. Leo first wrote when machines were replacing labour. Leo XIV is writing when machines are changing the meaning of labor and perhaps the human condition.
Digital Papyrus was released with Christopher Olah, co-founder of Anthropic, a self-named “good” AI company, resigning before his system was used to bomb people. As The New York Times noted, Leo has been talking about AI since the beginning of his papacy, warning cardinals that the Church must address the risks posed by technology to “human dignity, justice and labor.”Leo outlines the conflict between building a new Tower of Babel and building a city in which God and humanity can live together. Presenting Tower of Babel as a beta product launch, he argued that it was “conceived without reference to God”, “eliminated diversity”, and chose “homogenization over communion”.Pope is not entirely anti-AI, saying that it can “heal, connect, educate and protect”, but warns that the technology is “never neutral” because it regresses to those who “devise, finance, regulate and use it”. This sounds similar to the dichotomy previously found in AI, when our choice was between MechaHitler, the Grok bot that threatened users with graphic harm, or Black George Washington, where Gemini couldn’t imagine a world where anyone was white or male.Babel syndrome, Leo warns, is “the idolatry of profit that sacrifices the weak” and resides in the arrogance that “a single language – even a digital language – can translate everything, including the mystery of the individual, into data and display”.In his own way, the Pope is reminding people that they are more than the culmination of stray patterns that can be replicated by a machine. That is why Leo writes that Babel highlights the danger of any grand project that “sacrifices human dignity for the sake of efficiency and aspires to reach heaven without God’s blessing”. The old builders used brick and bitumen. The newcomers talk about chips, clouds, capital and the kind of missionary language usually reserved for people handing out leaflets at traffic lights. The promise is the same: one language, one system, one tower, one future, a small priesthood that will decide what counts as progress.And if that sounds too dramatic, Leo makes the warning clear elsewhere: “If, however, power grows while hearts dry up and human bonds break, then we are facing a new form of Babel – a creation that is grand, yet fundamentally inhumane.”Which is probably the Vatican’s way of saying it most: When God is gone from your heart, there is no point searching for God in heaven or trying to create Him out of thin air.
Abrahamic God vs. Deus Ex Machina – Old God vs. New
The term deus ex machina is Latin for “God from the Machine”, commonly used as a plot device when a character comes out of nowhere to save the day, such as Salman Khan in Pathan. In The Matrix universe, this term meets its logical conclusion, where Neo offers an olive branch to the literal Deus Ex Machina, the god of machines.Ergo, it is not particularly difficult to understand why the idea of AGI, or a literal deus ex machina, is particularly troubling to the organized Abrahamic faiths, which all argue in their own way: You shall have no other gods before me.
“You shall have no other gods before me” is the basic operating system of all three major Abrahamic religions. This same sentiment is repeated in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, and there are different terms to describe its violations: idolatry, shirk, apostasy, and more. But perhaps the problem goes beyond God’s finding an Abrahamic alternative. It lies in creating a form of technology that makes us less human, no matter who we worship, or who we worship.Silicon Valley, our modern-day kingdom of kings, has always had the strangest relationship with theology, claiming to be secular, rational and data-driven while borrowing from the vocabulary of religious texts where the founders convince themselves that they are on a mission from God.As The New York Times notes, the Messiah series goes back decades. In an old joke, a programmer asks a computer, “Is there a God?” The computer replies: “Right now.”AI has simply upgraded that old sermon from a counterculture slogan to a trillion-dollar infrastructure where the keys to the kingdoms of heaven are such tormented creatures. Big Tech’s brothers keep human life close to the battery. They constantly devalue other human beings. They don’t think twice before firing thousands of people. They consider fellow humans as little more than guinea pigs. And many of them changed their ideology overnight to persuade, appease, and even worship the government of the day, as seen in the remarkable alacrity with which Big Tech abandoned vigilance as soon as Donald Trump won.Read: Does Sam Altman think of humans as batteries? What can we expect from such stricken people? The problem is not chatbots writing bad poems or models hallucinating quotes, but the Babel instinct, where the world is imagined as a dystopian John Lennon song: one language, one system, one aristocracy, one idea of progress, and the belief that humanity is nothing more than a series of data, performance, and predictions. The Vatican, for all its troubles, understands one thing that Silicon Valley has conveniently forgotten: False gods always demand sacrifices. And if the Singularity does come, that promised moment when man and machine merge, we wouldn’t want to see the kind of abomination we find on our hands.
There’s an interesting short story that shows what might have happened. In Arthur C Clarke’s The Nine Billion Names of God, monks painstakingly write down every name of God, which they believe number nine billion. It would take them 15,000 years to write down the names by hand, so they hire two computer experts who install a machine that can print out every name, and do so in 100 days. As soon as the last name was printed, they noticed that from above, without any fuss, the stars began to disappear, signaling the end of the universe. Hopefully, this will not be the fate of mankind when AGI is born.