Explaining Everything and Nothing (Part V)

Send us Fan Mail The fifth and final part of the "Metaphysics Scandal" series asks what happened after Scholasticism broke. The answer is two roads — empiricism and rationalism — that look like opposites but in the extreme arrive at the same destination: a world scrubbed of God and person, leaving only function. What drove both roads is older than either. It is the Promethean spirit — the will to possess knowledge by force rather than receive it as gift. Today, an endpoint of that arc is artificial intelligence: the moment when function threatens to become total, when the machine that cannot be a face is offered as a substitute for one. Pope Leo XIV's new encyclical calls it an anthropological crisis, not a technological one. This episode is an attempt to explain how we got here. Read my latest book, Science and the Person.