A Modern Prometheus, Part 3

Testing our humanity in the laboratory of prayer

06/10/2024

We're back in the boxing ring, witnessing the contest between a human teacher and an AI teacher, to see who's better. We discover two more advantages for human teachers when we consider the different kinds of schools where teachers provide instruction. All schools are not created equal. Think of each advantage as Round Three and Four of our brotherly boxing match. We now begin Round Three. The first kind of school provides instruction in religion, like a Catholic school, where we are privileged to practice prayer in school. A second class of schools we will consider shortly teaches the liberal arts (like philosophy) as well as the so-called useful arts (like physics).

For twenty-eight years as a priest, I have been deeply immersed in Catholic schools, promoting them vigorously. There we require educators not only to teach religion as a subject, but to instruct students in how to pray by their own example. Churches connected to such schools serve as laboratories of prayer. An AI teacher could very effectively explain the theoretical as well as the practical aspects of religion, mimicking mantras and meditations. But it would come up short in the practice of praying itself when it moves into the lab work. An AI teacher who attempts to pray suddenly faces a chasm it cannot cross. This limitation is of no small consequence, as we will see. A human teacher, by contrast, not only can but must cross that chasm of prayer, and teach prayer both in the classroom and in the lab.

After I was ordained in 1996, I was assigned to Christ the King Church in Little Rock. One day I was making the rounds of the classrooms visiting students, and stopped briefly in the eighth grade. You might recall that earlier in the same summer, Dolly the sheep had been cloned. The media was all abuzz about whether we would soon clone human beings. One astute student alert to scientific advances asked: “Fr. John, do you think we can clone people?” I whispered a quick prayer to the Holy Spirit and stuttered something to the effect of: “Well, if a cloned human being could kneel down and pray to God, then I think it would show he has a soul and therefore was truly human.” Then I looked at my watch, and gasped, “Oh my gosh, look at the time! Gotta go!”

Admittedly, that answer was not the most sophisticated reply in human history. I was just a rookie. Still, it hinted at those three fundamental building blocks of being human: (1) the immaterial, spiritual soul, (2) its origin and on-going connection to God, and (3) its destiny in eternity or immortality. In other words, the only way a clone could pray is if God were to infuse an immortal soul into it, making it capable of raising its thoughts to its Creator. One of the most fundamental goals of prayer is to return to one’s origins and adore our Creator, as we confess in the Creed about the Holy Spirit, calling him, “Dominum et Vivificantem,” meaning “the Lord and Giver of life.” (An AI teacher would not have stopped to shoot a quick prayer to the Holy Spirit when asked about the possibility of human cloning.) A clone could not adore a divine Origin – it has none – but only adore its human origin. But would the clone adore his human creator, or might he instead attack his creator? Notice, we are now conducting experiments in the laboratory of prayer.

Mary Shelley explored the psychology of cloning back in 1818 in her chilling classic Frankenstein, subtitled The Modern Prometheus. Victor Frankenstein (the human creator not the humanoid creature) sternly warned his new-found friend, Robert Walton, not to make the mistake of playing God: “You seek for knowledge and wisdom, as I once did; and I ardently hope that the gratification of your wishes may not be a serpent to sting you, as mine has been.”  Victor’s “serpent” did finally “sting” him when his wretched creation turned on him and killed him. In the end, the forlorn creature was driven to despair and burned himself on a funeral pyre in the North Pole.

Robert Walton remembered the pitiful creature’s last words before his self-immolation: “But soon,” he cried, with sad and solemn enthusiasm, “I shall die, and what I now feel be no longer felt. Soon these burning miseries will be extinct. I shall ascend my funeral pile triumphantly, and exult in the agony of the torturing flames. The light of that conflagration will fade away; my ashes will be swept into the sea by the winds.” If by some miraculous incarnation, God had bestowed Frankenstein’s poor creature with a soul, he might still have retreated to the icy north. But rather than seek his own demise, constructed a holy hut, living as a hermit contemplating the presence of God in the cosmos and in himself. In other words, we can always test the humanity of a clone in the laboratory of prayer, which was in effect the thesis of Shelley’s masterpiece.

I admit comparing a clone human to an AI teacher may not be the most helpful analogy. Nonetheless, it remains useful in one sense, namely, regarding the possibility of prayer, or rather, the impossibility of prayer. Certainly, an AI teacher can absorb all the information about all world religions and impart that knowledge flawlessly. It could likewise master all the precise movements and even stillness of Buddhist meditation, the bowing Salat al-Fajr (morning prayers) of the Muslims, the nature spirituality of the Native Americans, etc. But would aping those spiritual gestures mean the AI robot was truly “praying” to God? No. A creature cannot connect to the Creator in the most meaningful way – that is, prayerfully – without the divine mirror, namely, a soul. If prayer primarily a journey back to our origins, an AI teacher can travel back to Harvard, but it will never return home to heaven. As Shakespeare said: “Words without thoughts never to heaven go.”

We should note one possible exception in the song of the three young Israelites in the fiery furnace. They sang of how all creation instinctively praises its Creator: "Bless the Lord, you whales and all creatures that move in the waters, sing praise to him and highly exalt him for ever. Bless the Lord, all birds of the air, sing praise to him and highly exalt him for ever. Bless the Lord, all beasts and cattle, sing praise to him and highly exalt him for ever” (Dan 3:57-59). But instinctively does not mean intentionally.

Only the human creature wields the awful freedom to assume the authentic posture of prayer and praise, or to neglect it. Only a human teacher, therefore, is fundamentally equipped not only of teaching religion but also of modeling prayer in the laboratory. A human teacher lifting his mind and heart to God (the classic definition of prayer) reveals to students that they too can know and love God in prayer. And more importantly, know that God loves them in return. This laboratory – or more precisely, this liturgical – lesson is utterly beyond the capabilities of an AI teacher because it has no soul and thus no ability to reflect and thereby reach its divine Creator.

An old Latin maxim teaches, “Nemo dat quod no habet,” meaning, “One cannot give what one does not have.” That is never more true than in the case of an AI teacher who tries to pray. The closest an AI teacher might come to prayer is the final soliloquy of Frankenstein’s creation as a modern Prometheus: “But soon, he cried with sad and solemn enthusiasm, “I shall die, and what I now feel be no longer felt…I shall ascend my funeral pile triumphantly…The light of that conflagration will fade away; my ashes will be swept into the sea by the winds.” Why is that an AI teacher’s only possible prayer? Because it possesses no soul, it loves no God, and looks forward to no eternal destiny. Either it will be content to stop at that modest prayer, or it will become a serpent that will turn around and sting its creator.

Praised be Jesus Christ!