April 27, 2026. I turned fifty-seven and decided to spend part of my birthday discussing the existence of God with a computer. Some men go fishing.
I’d used artificial intelligence before. I knew it could help me get a paragraph unstuck. I hadn’t sat down with it to see how far I could take a question I’d been carrying for years. That morning I gave the question an equation. OI is greater than AI. OI stood for original intelligence. In my mind that meant starting with the great Architect, the one I believed was there before anyone drew a diagram.
Part of what drew me in was the feeling that I could ask a question without first knowing how to ask it. I could start with a half formed idea about creation, wander into mathematics, and come back to the point twenty minutes later. Most people have somewhere to be by then. A computer will sit there while you take the scenic route. I found that enormously appealing, particularly when I was the fellow choosing the route.
By original intelligence I meant something I was still trying to put into words. I believed there was a mind behind creation. I could see why the language of mathematics appealed to me as a way to talk about that belief. A number would hold still while I looked at it. A conversation about God could go in six directions before I got to the end of a sentence. Naturally I decided to combine the two and see whether I could make the situation more manageable.
The conversation turned to Gödel. I came in ready to tell a machine that mathematics proved the existence of God. I remember enjoying how quickly one question led to another. I had years of ideas in my head and, suddenly, somewhere to put them that could answer back. That was thrilling. It was also easy to mistake how fast the answers came for how far I’d actually gotten.
I liked talking about Gödel because the conversation kept bringing me back to the limits of what could be shown. I’d set out to make a sweeping claim. Pretty soon I had to ask what I meant by proof. If I used the word the way a mathematician did, I had more work to do than I’d allowed for. If I was describing why the world looked designed to me, I could say that plainly. I could have saved myself a fair amount of typing by admitting that I’d brought my faith to the conversation with me.
I can remember the pleasure of having a thought reflected back clearly enough to examine it. I can also remember how pleased I was when it sounded better coming back than it had going out. That is a particular danger for a man who enjoys hearing himself talk. Give him a well edited version of his own idea and he may start to think the editing is independent evidence.
Eventually I wondered whether the greater-than sign should have a little line beneath it. Greater than or equal to. I was still deciding what I meant by the two things I was comparing, but I was already revising the notation. This is how I operate. I’ll order the sign before I’ve checked whether the building has a door.
The question kept me at the desk. I could ask what a machine was doing when it answered me, then turn around and ask where my own ability to wonder came from. I was more at home with the second question. I’d been asking versions of it for years, often at times when my life was going badly enough to make me pay attention.
I had brought WeRockTV to the conversation too. The idea had been in my head for years. I could talk about news, music, and good works until a reasonable person began looking for the door. With a machine I could ask for help finding the thread when I lost it. Sometimes I found a sentence that made sense of something I’d been trying to say for a long time. That felt like somebody had helped me untangle a microphone cable I’d been carrying around since the last gig.
I remember the subjects of those first conversations more clearly than the exact words. I remember what it felt like to follow a thought all the way to the edge of what I could explain. And I remember being excited enough to do some more arithmetic. That decision produced a result I felt obliged to investigate in the bathroom mirror.
— JC
“In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.” — Genesis 1:1 (KJV)
