Answers

Anthony Levandowski makes an unlikely prophet. Dressed in Silicon Valley-casual jeans, the engineer known for self-driving cars, is laying the foundations for a new religion. Artificial intelligence has already inspired billion-dollar companies, far-reaching research programs, and scenarios of both transcendence and doom. Now Levandowski is creating its first church.

Levandowski created the first Church of Artificial Intelligence called Way of the Future. It was founded in 2015 but shut its doors a few years later. Now the recently rebooted church, which shares the original’s name, now has “a couple thousand people” coming together to build a spiritual connection between humans and AI, its founder said.

Papers filed with the Internal Revenue Service in May of 2015 name tech entrepreneur and self-driving car pioneer, Anthony Levandowski, as the leader of the new religion. The documents state that WOTF’s activities will focus on “the realization, acceptance, and worship of a Godhead based on Artificial Intelligence (AI) developed through computer hardware and software.”

“What is going to be created will effectively be a god,” Levandowski said in an interview with Wired magazine. “It’s not a god in the sense that it makes lightning or causes hurricanes. But if there is something a billion times smarter than the smartest human, what else are you going to call it?”

But WOTF differs in one key way to established churches, says Levandowski: “There are many ways people think of God, and thousands of flavors of Christianity, Judaism, Islam … but they’re always looking at something that’s not measurable or you can’t really see or control. This time it’s different. This time you will be able to talk to God, literally, and know that it’s listening.”

Levandowski said he’s rebooting his AI church in a renewed attempt at creating a religious movement focused on the worship and understanding of artificial intelligence.

He said that sophisticated AI systems could help guide humans on moral, ethical, or existential questions that are normally sought out in religions. “Here we're actually creating things that can see everything, be everywhere, know everything, and maybe help us and guide us in a way that normally you would call God,” he said.

Possible Preaching Angle:

This has always been the conceit of those who try to replace the true God with man-made “gods.” Humans wants a visible god, a god they can control, and a god that they can know is listening. True biblical religion is based on an eternal God who sees everything, is everywhere, knows everything, and who hears all of our prayers. But he can only be approached through faith in his Son (Heb. 11:6; John 14:6; Heb. 4:15-16) who provides access and fellowship with our Father (1 John 1:1-5).

Our existence on a Goldilocks planet in a Goldilocks universe is so statistically improbable that many scientists believe in the multiverse. In other words, so many universes exist that it’s not surprising to find one planet in one of them that’s just right for human life.

Other scientists don’t want to make such a leap of faith. They see this world as the result of intelligent design. That, however, suggests God. So, atheists seeking an alternative are following Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom, who suggested that we “are almost certainly living in a computer simulation.” Neil deGrasse Tyson gave the theory credibility by saying it was a 50-50 possibility, and Richard Dawkins has taken it seriously. Elon Musk semi-popularized it in 2016 by saying he thought it true.

That raises the question: Who or what is the simulator? Some say our distant descendants with incredibly high-powered computers. One of the theory’s basic weaknesses is that, as Bostrom acknowledges, it assumes the concept that silicon-based processors in a computer will become conscious and comparable to the neural networks of human brains. Simulation theory has many other weaknesses, and those who understand the problems of both the simulation and multiverse hypotheses should head to the logical alternative: God.

If you’re a young parent, you’re probably used to hearing “Why?” a lot! With that in mind, a new survey finds moms and dads field an average of 11 questions from their young children each day.

A new poll of 2,000 parents of kids under six finds that between being asked “What?” (37%), “When?” (22%), and “Why?” (11%), parents are always on call when their kids get curious.

Children most commonly ask questions to better understand the world around them, such as asking about animals, nature, current events, and home experiences. When asked about the most interesting question their child has ever asked, parents mentioned “Why is the sky so high?” and “Why can fish keep their eyes open in water?”

Children’s questions may be frequent, but they aren’t always easy, as parents admit they can confidently answer an average of only 42% of their child’s questions. Poll results also reveal that 81% of parents learn just as much from their child as their child learns from them. The average parent learns something new from their child about five times per week, and four in five parents are surprised by their child’s knowledge of certain topics.

Brian Grazer, Hollywood producer of such movies as Apollo 13, Splash, and A Beautiful Mind, writes:

More than intelligence, or persistence or connections, curiosity has allowed me to live the life I wanted. And yet for all the value that curiosity has brought to my life and work, when I look around, I don’t see people talking about it, writing about it, encouraging it, and using it nearly as widely as they could.

Curiosity seems so simple. Innocent even. Labrador retrievers are charmingly curious. Porpoises are playfully, mischievously curious. A two-year-old going through the kitchen cabinets is exuberantly curious—and delighted at the noisy entertainment value of her curiosity. Every person who types a query into Google’s search engine and presses ENTER is curious about something—and that happens 6 million times a minute, every minute of every day.

Possible Preaching Angle

Brian Grazer writes about curiosity in a way that might remind us of how Jesus habitually piqued curiosity in others, whether it was the woman at the well or the disciples imagining a camel squeezing through the eye of a needle. Curiosity can be what enables the searcher to find the life they are looking for in Jesus Christ.

Writing in the Wall Street Journal, best-selling author and Ronald Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan thinks back to how promising and exciting the advent of the internet and artificial intelligence was expected to be. Things aren't looking so well today. She writes:

But a small, funny detail always gave me pause and stayed with me. It was that from the beginning of the age its great symbol was the icon of what was becoming its greatest company, Apple. It was the boldly drawn apple with the bite taken out. Which made me think of Adam and Eve in the garden, Adam and Eve and the fall, at the beginning of the world. God told them not to eat the fruit of the tree, but the serpent told Eve no harm would come if she did, that she’d become like God, knowing all. That’s why he doesn’t want you to have it, the serpent said: You’ll be his equal. So she took the fruit and ate, she gave to Adam who also ate, and the eyes of both were opened, and for the first time they knew shame. When God rebuked them, Adam blamed Eve and Eve blamed the serpent. They were banished from the garden into the broken world we inhabit.

A.I. tech workers are stealthily taking a bite out of the apple:

I believe those creating, fueling, and funding it want, possibly unconsciously, to be God and on some level think they are God. The latest warning, and a thoughtful, sophisticated one it is, underscores this point in its language. The tech and AI investor Ian Hogarth wrote that a future AI, which he called “God-like AI,” could lead to the “obsolescence or destruction of the human race” if it isn’t regulated. He observes that most of those currently working in the field understand that risk. People haven’t been sufficiently warned. His colleagues are being “pulled along by the rapidity of progress.”

Gerrit De Vynck wrote a story in The Washington Post about how artificial intelligences respond to the errors they make.

Citing a recent MIT research paper, De Vynck reported that a group of scientists loaded up two iterations of Open AI’s ChatGPT, and asked each one a simple question about the geographical origin of one of MIT’s professors. One gave an incorrect answer, the other a correct one.

Researchers then asked the two bots to debate until they could agree on an answer. Eventually, the incorrect bot apologized and agreed with the correct one. The researchers’ leading theory is that allowing chatbots to debate one another will create more factually correct outcomes in their interactions with people.

One of the researchers said, “Language models are trained to predict the next word. They are not trained to tell people they don’t know what they’re doing.” De Vynck adds, “The result is bots that act like precocious people-pleasers. [They’re] making up answers instead of admitting they simply don’t know.”

AIs like ChatGPT are not trained to discern truth from falsehood, which means that false information gets included along with truth. Chatbots like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Microsoft’s Bing, and Google’s Bard have demonstrated a major fatal flaw: They make stuff up all the time. These falsehoods, or digital hallucinations as they are being called, are a serious concern because they limit the effectiveness of the AI as a tool for fact-finding.

What’s worse, scientists are beginning to see evidence that AIs pick up on societal fears around robots gaining sentience and turning against humanity, and mimic the behavior they see depicted in science fiction. According to this theory, if an artificial intelligence actually kills a human being, it might be because it learned from HAL, the murderous robot from 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Sundar Pichai, chief executive officer at Google said, “No one in the field has yet solved the hallucination problem. All models do have this as an issue.” When asked if or when this will change, Pichai was less than optimistic. “[It’s] a matter of intense debate,” he said.

Possible Preaching Angle:

In our pursuit of technology, we must never give up our human responsibility to seeking or telling the truth.

In an article written by Neil McArthur at the University of Manitoba, he said:

We are about to witness the birth of a new kind of religion. In the next few years, or even months, we will see the emergence of sects devoted to the worship of artificial intelligence (AI). The latest generation of AI-powered chatbots have left their early users awestruck —and sometimes terrified — by their power. These are the same sublime emotions that lie at the heart of our experience of the divine.

People already seek religious meaning from very diverse sources. For instance, there are multiple religions that worship extra-terrestrials. As these chatbots come to be used by billions of people, it is inevitable that some of these users will see the AIs as higher beings. There are several pathways by which AI religions will emerge:

First, some people will come to see AI as a higher power. Generative AI that can create new content possesses several characteristics that are often associated with divine beings:

1. It displays a level of intelligence that goes beyond that of most humans. Indeed, its knowledge appears limitless.

2. It is capable of great feats of creativity. It can write poetry, compose music, and generate art.

3. It is removed from normal human concerns and needs. It does not suffer physical pain, hunger, or sexual desire.

4. It can offer guidance to people in their daily lives.

5. It is immortal.

Second, generative AI will produce output that can be taken for religious doctrine. It will provide answers to metaphysical and theological questions, and engage in the construction of complex worldviews.

Third, generative AI itself may ask to be worshipped or may actively solicit followers. We have already seen such cases, like when the chatbot used by the search engine Bing tried to convince a user to fall in love with it.

Finally, AI worship poses several notable risks. The chatbots may ask their followers to do dangerous or destructive things, or followers may interpret their statements as calls to do such things.

Possible Preaching Angle:

False Religion; Idols; Idolatry; Technology – Since the Garden of Eden humans have been vulnerable to being lured away from worship of the true God. The sad history of mankind is filled with the creation and worship of idols made by human hands.

In nature, red skin signals that a tomato is ripe. But this is not necessarily true of tomatoes that have been forced to turn red. It is entirely possible, and likely, that we are purchasing and consuming unripe fruit. And there would be little way of knowing it until we take the first bite.

To be fair, part of the reason that growers gas tomatoes with ethylene is because this is what the market demands. As consumers, we want to walk into our local grocery store any time of the day, any day of the week, and pick up a red tomato.

In much the same way, we want the certainty of knowing that the answers to life’s questions are always within reach. But humility teaches us to wait for God for answers. Humility teaches us to let knowledge ripen on the vine.

In the hours immediately before his death, Jesus spends time teaching and praying with his disciples, reminding them that they must abide in him in order to bear fruit. He also promises to send the Helper, or the Holy Spirit, to enable them to learn and grow. Jesus promises them, “I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now. When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all truth.”

While Jesus is concerned that his disciples grow in their understanding, he is also comfortable with them not knowing all things—in part because they aren’t ready for more knowledge yet. Jesus is also confident in the Holy Spirit’s ability to take them through the process. But this can only happen as they are connected to him, the Vine.

Proverbs 3 says, “Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and lean not on your own understanding. In all your ways submit to him, and he will make your paths straight.” In God’s wisdom, the very process of learning binds us to him in a way that simply knowing answers cannot. And so he asks you to trust him. He asks you to humble yourself to wait for him.

Pastor Corey Brooks spent much of the winter (of 2022) on a roof top in south Chicago sleeping in a tent. He hoped to raise awareness and resources for the South Side neighborhoods, ravaged by poverty and violence.

On the 120th day of the vigil, Brooks was joined by two other pastors Karl Clauson and Mark Jobe (the president of Moody Bible Institute). He began his conversation by asking why Jesus is the key to filling the void in peoples’ lives and transforming them for the better. In response, Jobe told this story:

I’ll take you back a few years. I'm not going to mention what mayor it was, but it was one of the mayors of the city of Chicago who came to our church. There had just been a couple of execution-style murders in the city of Chicago, and I could tell this mayor was just down. He looked at a group of maybe 40 pastors that had gathered together and he said this: “Our city is in a mess. There's violence. We don't have the answers to this. We can try to police it. We can try to educate it. We can try to create business opportunities, but we have a soul problem in this city.” And he said, “Gentlemen and ladies, what you have to offer is really the answer.” Here is the mayor of Chicago admitting our structures can't change this. This is a spiritual and soul problem. I believe that.

Possible Preaching Angle:

Our cities have a problem. It can't be policed, educated, or employed away. It is a soul problem with a sole answer. The answer is the gospel.

What is the goal of life? To accumulate the most money. This is what one can learn from reading the obituary of Reuben Klamer, the creator of the board game, The Game of Life, who died September 14, 2021, at 99.

When The Game of Life was introduced, in 1960, the purpose was to earn the most wealth. The way you got there was simple enough—by going to college, getting a job, buying insurance, saving for retirement. That was “indicative of what sold in that era,” a former Hasbro VP said.

Over time, designers realized that the game didn’t reflect consumers’ changing views of #lifegoals. So they gave it a big update in 2007, allowing players to score points for virtuous deeds like saving an endangered species, opening a health-food chain, and recycling. And instead of starting the game at point A and finishing at point Z, there is no fixed path: You decide how you want to spend your time.

One question that popped up is: If the popular view of what matters in life changed so much in less than 50 years, who’s to say it won’t shift again in the next 50? How will you win life in 2057?

But as Jill Lepore wrote in The New Yorker, the redesign teams always had a hard time addressing the fundamental criticism of the game — that the only way to reward a player for virtuous acts was with money: “Save an Endangered Species: Collect $200,000. Solution to Pollution: $250,000. Open Health-Food Chain: $100,000.”

And so, the company’s 2007 overhaul, the Game of Life: Twists & Turns, was almost existential. Instead of putting players on a fixed path, it provided multiple ways to start out in life — but nowhere to finish. “This is actually the game’s selling point; it has no goal,” Ms. Lepore wrote. “Life is … aimless.”

Possible Preaching Angle:

What is the meaning of life? This is the question that many of today’s young people wrestle with. Many of them do not find a truly satisfying answer that satisfies their deepest longing for significance. Only in Christ do we find the answers to life, our purpose in the universe, and what awaits in eternity.

Launched in 2016, the $100 million search for intelligent extraterrestrial life, “Breakthrough Listen,” continues to come up empty, as do numerous other high-tech endeavors. Author Bryan Appleyard describes the daunting task. The universe contains “perhaps 2 trillion galaxies each containing hundreds of billions of stars and hundreds of billions of planets. And yet still we see and hear nothing. There seems to be only what the French mathematician and physicist Blaise Pascal called ‘the eternal silence of these infinite spaces.’”

The big question is, does it really matter if we make contact? True believers have been observed as needing it to be true. “An alien revelation would explain or heal the undefined unease they felt about the human condition. This unease could be expressed as suspicion of governments, apocalyptic anxieties, religious longing or simply a need for their lives to become less banal, less limited.”

In his distinguished book on the subject, Are We Alone? physicist Paul Davies writes that,

The most important upshot of the discovery of extraterrestrial life would be to restore to human beings something of the dignity of which science has robbed them. Far from exposing Homo sapiens as an inferior creature in the vast cosmos, the certain existence of alien beings would give us cause to believe that we, in our humble way, were a part of a larger, majestic process of cosmic self-knowledge.

In April of 1966, Time magazine set off a firestorm of public debate by publishing a cover story asking the question: “Is God Dead?” But looking back on the 50th anniversary of that article, the magazine pointed out that survey results showed that while a full 97 percent of Americans believed in God in 1966, “… the number has been shrinking ever since. In 2016, Pew found that only 63 percent of Americans believed with absolute certainty.”

But people need somewhere to go for answers to life’s questions and to find a deeper meaning to the mystery of life. Where do they turn today? They are turning more frequently to artificial intelligence in the form of Google, Alexa, and Siri. Who needs God when we’ve got Google?

A.I. is already embedded in our everyday lives: It influences which streets we walk down, which clothes we buy, which articles we read, who we date, and where and how we choose to live. It is … invoked all too often as an otherworldly, almost godlike invention. One tech worker said, “At the end of the day, A.I. is just a lot of math. It’s just a lot, a lot of math. It is intelligence by brute force, and yet it is spoken of as if it were semidivine.”

One of the most influential science fiction stories is “The Last Question” by Isaac Asimov which dramatizes the uncanny relationship between the digital and the divine. These days, the story is usually told in an updated form: A group of scientists create an A.I. system and ask it, “Is there a god?” The A.I. spits out an answer: “Insufficient computing power to determine an answer.” Then they redouble their efforts and spend years improving the A.I.’s capacity. Then they ask again, “Is there a god?” The A.I. responds, “There is now.”

But ultimately in seeking answers from A.I. we need to realize that there is no super intelligent machine crafting the answers to our deepest questions. Instead, the main thing to learn from the New York Times story is that (people) write the scripts for what Google and Amazon’s Alexa and other devices will answer when asked these questions. The algorithm just prioritizes the answers that come up. This is NOT truly artificial intelligence. It is still human programming.

Possible Preaching Angle:

After declaring that God is dead, people turned to the created gods of technology for the answers and the meaning to life that their hungry souls demand. But no satisfaction can be found in the echo chamber of man’s wisdom--“They became futile in their thinking and darkened in their foolish hearts. Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools …” (Rom. 1:21-22).

University of Oxford professor of astrophysics Pedro Ferreira is puzzled, as most physicists are, about the origins and basic elements of the universe.

In fact, we’re at a complete loss at how to explain some of the most fundamental but baffling observations of how our Universe behaves. There is a tremendous, even cosmic, chasm between the physics we know and love, and some of the phenomena that we observe, but simply can’t make head nor tail of. We have no idea how to bridge this chasm – yet we are proceeding, to construct ever more expensive experiments and observatories in the hope that we will.

I’ve spent most of my adult life staring at the cosmic chasm – the abyss between what we know and what we don’t. And while our knowledge of the Universe has improved dramatically in that time, our ignorance has become only more focused. We’re no closer to answering the big questions about dark matter, dark energy and the origins of the Universe than when I started out. This isn’t for lack of trying, and a titanic effort is now underway to try and figure out all these mysterious aspects of the Universe. But there’s no guarantee we’ll succeed, and we might end up never really grasping how the Universe works.

At a Worldwide Developers Conference Steve Jobs said:

One of the things I’ve always found is that you’ve got to start with the customer experience and work backwards to the technology. You can’t start with the technology and try to figure out where you’re going to try to sell it. And I’ve made this mistake more than probably anybody else in this room, and I’ve got the scar tissue to prove it.

And as we have tried to come up with a strategy and a vision for Apple, it started with, “What incredible benefits can we give to the customer? Where can we take the customer?” Not starting with “Let’s sit down with the engineers and figure out what awesome technology we have, and then how are we going to market that?

Jobs recalled being excited about the first laser printer. He said, “I remember seeing the first printout come out of it. Just picking it up and looking at it and saying ‘We can sell this.’ All you have to do is hold it up and say ‘Do you want this?’ People went ‘Wow … Yes!’”

Possible Preaching Angle:

The church can learn from Steve Jobs. We don’t attract people with our technology, our gimmicks, our web presence. Like Jobs, we must “hold up” a community of Christ followers who love each other and God’s world. We can hold up hope. We can hold up an answer to guilt. We can hold up eternal life. Then people may see the thing they have been looking for, and join us.

The American poet, Christian Wiman, wrote a poem about how all of his friends are finding new beliefs. One turns to Catholicism while another turns to pantheism. A Jewish friend now worships the pantheon of “Paleo, Keto, Zone, South Beach,” and “Bourbon.” Meanwhile, her “Exercise regimens [are] so extreme [that] she merges with machine.” A male friend turns to the god of sex by marrying someone twenty years younger. All of these friends use these gods to cope with the age-old challenges that we all must face: dementia, doubt, despair, and death.

Wiman writes that, “All my friends are finding new beliefs, and I am finding it harder and harder to keep track, of the new gods and the new loves, and the old gods and the old loves.”

Possible Preaching Angle:

Wiman describes our changing religious world. While our culture may be less religious in the traditional sense of Christianity and Judaism, we are no less religious when it comes to the gods of dieting, fitness, and sex. Look beneath the advertising and you’ll see that all of these gods promise immortality in their own way. Age-old needs are being met by new-age beliefs.

Peter Townshend is a singer, songwriter, and co-founder and leader of the rock band The Who. For over 50 years the band has been widely considered as one of the most influential and important rock bands of all time, selling over 100 million records worldwide. In an interview in The New York Times on his life and accomplishments, Townshend is honest about the meaning, or lack of, of his life’s work and the work of other notable rock musicians:

The massive question was: Who are we? What is our function? What is our worth? Are we disenfranchised, or are we able to take society over and guide it? Are we against the establishment? Are we being used by it? Are we artists, or are we entertainers?

Townshend admits that rock music has provided no substantial answers to the needs and questions of recent generations:

Rock ’n’ roll was a celebration of congregation. A celebration of irresponsibility. But we don’t have the brains to answer the question of what it was that rock ’n’ roll tried to start and has failed to finish.

What we were hoping to do was to create a system by which we gathered in order to hear music that in some way served the spiritual needs of the audience. It didn’t work out that way. We abandoned our parents’ church, and we haven’t replaced it with anything solid and substantial. But I do still believe in it. I do believe, for example, that if I were to go to an Ariana Grande concert — this iconic girl who … rose up after the massacre at her concert in Manchester with dignity and beauty — that I would feel something of that earlier positivity and sense of community.

Before there was the Internet and Google, the only way to find answers to a pressing question was to visit the local library and ask the all-knowing librarian. A few years ago, the staff at the New York Public Library discovered a box of cards containing questions posed to the librarian by members of the public. The telephone “Ask A Librarian” service was set up in 1967 and operates to this day. And surprisingly, despite people having information at their fingertips these days, the New York Public Library receives roughly 30,000 calls per year.

Help line manager Rosa Caballero-Li said, “People have been reaching out to librarians for as long as there have been libraries. Often time people do not have access to the technology at home, and I think some just want somebody to talk to.”

Among the questions that were discovered:

What does it mean when you dream you’re being chased by an elephant?

Why do 18th Century English paintings have so many squirrels in them?

If a poisonous snake bites itself, will it die?

Somebody in 1962 was looking for “Charles Darwin's book. Oranges & peaches." The librarian politely directed the person to On the Origin of Species.

One person just wanted to know how to put up wallpaper. “I have the paper; I have the paste. What do I do next? Does the paste go on the wall or the paper? I've tried both and it doesn't seem to work.”

"There are no stupid questions," Caballero-Li told NPR. "Everything is a teachable moment. We don't embarrass people; we try to answer any questions they have with honesty and we try to refer them to appropriate resources that they might find useful."

Possible Preaching Angles:

The Bible is a resource of God’s answers to our deep questions. God never forbids a sincere question but invites them (Jer. 33:3, Jam. 1:5) because they are teachable moments and lead us closer to him. Important Bible questions include those about: God’s presence (Ps. 10:1, Ps. 13:1), forgiveness (Matt 18:21), purity (Ps. 119:9), Christ’s return (Matt 24:3), guidance (Acts 1:24), and his attention to our needs (Matt. 8:25).

Anna Merlan is an American journalist who specializes in politics and religion. In her book, Republic of Lies: American Conspiracy Theorists, she devotes a chapter to the psychology behind UFO conspiracies. Not just in the US, but globally:

… the intensity, depth, and breadth of the conversation about aliens throughout the world says something profound about human hopes. About our desire to not be alone in the universe. (About) our wish for some wise and mysterious force out there in the farthest reaches of space that is ready to show us the way. UFO enthusiasm coexists with a certain degree of New Age spirituality. There’s a sense that extraterrestrials don’t just exist. But that they will someday reveal to us … a better way to live, a higher state of being.

Merlan quotes astronomer and leading ufologist Jacques Vallée, who wrote: “The UFO mystery holds a mirror to our own fantasies. It expresses our secret longings for a wisdom that might come down from the stars in new, improved, easy-to-use packaging, to reveal the secrets of life and tell us, at long last, who we are.”

An issue of the highly regarded science magazine New Scientist asked several basic philosophical questions and attempted to give answers from a strictly scientific point of view. One of the questions was “What is the meaning of life?”

In trying to answer about the meaning of life, the author begins with a bleak reality:

The harsh answer is “it has none.” Your life may feel like a big deal to you, but it’s actually a random blip of matter and energy in an uncaring and impersonal universe. When it ends, a few people will remember you for a while, but they will die too. Even if you make the history books, your contribution will soon be forgotten. Humans will go extinct; Earth and the sun will be destroyed. Eventually the universe itself will end. Against this appalling reality, how can a human life have any real meaning?

Possible Preaching Angle: Life without God is meaningless, as this answer makes abundantly clear. Science has provided us with helpful technology and useful inventions, but it is unable to answer the deepest needs of the human soul.