The Last Question We Cannot Answer

The sense people have that their lives have been flattened or narrowed, that something crucial has been lost… this is a sense that we are missing something, that we are living lives that are somehow less full, less meaningful, less rich in purpose.

—Charles Taylor, A Secular Age

For what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world and forfeits his soul?"

—Matthew 16:26

If you grew up Christian in the 90s and early 2000s, you remember the Left Behind book series, stories about the Rapture, where true Christians are abruptly swept from the earth into heaven by Jesus, which ushers in a dystopian era of satanic rule over the world. Those left behind, non-believers and Christians who weren’t Christian enough, have to endure the Tribulation: years of haunting and terrifying judgments of God unleashed on the planet, as revealed in the Book of Revelation at the end of the Bible.

I recall reading one of those books as a teenager, left in the desk drawer of the local Pioneer Gas station. I was a carwash jockey and had a lot of time to read since almost no one came by to have their car tidied up by any of us greasy teens working the stall.

I thought the book was fun enough to read at work, but it didn’t have the campy yet terrifying aesthetic of the 70s dispensationalist classic A Thief in the Night movie series. I’ve heard enough stories of kids who grew up Christian in that era being scared to death by those films: rushed prayers of repentance and promises to follow Jesus out of sheer fear of being left behind to endure the terrors of a one-world government and man-horse-scorpion stings that leave you in writhing pain for months.

But the real boogeyman in those Christian horror flicks wasn’t just the devil or the guillotine. It was the Computer. In the Book of Revelation, John writes about an Antichrist who will do evil in the name of Satan against God. And the writers of the Image of the Beast (the third film in the Theif in the Night quadrilogy) decide the Antichrist is a Computer: an Artificial Intelligence who will sit in the temple in Jerusalem speaking on behalf of Satan.

I’ve watched that movie since I was a kid, a Spanish dub back then, but now in English a few times. It’s campy but also weirdly horrifying. The acting is stale, but the music will haunt you. The computer bit always seemed silly to me. I grew up with computers, and by now they’re so normalized that it’s tough to think of life without them. And now we’re in the age of ChatGPT, Gemini, and a host of other AIs that are quickly integrating into our day-to-day lives, to what lasting effect we don’t yet know. But some are concerned, deeply, about the speed at which this technology is taking over our lives. And that fear is no longer just found in the corners of a niche breed of dispensationalist prophecy. It’s in the New York Times.

A recent interview featured columnist Ezra Klein and Ben Buchanan, the top adviser on AI in the Biden White House, talking about the next generation of Artificial Intelligence: AGI (if you don’t subscribe to the NYT, you can watch the conversation here).

The concern is that AGI, Artificial General Intelligence, is arriving as soon as 2026. Governments are racing to control it because AGI will be able to do anything a human can do, possibly better. It is being described as AI that would be at least at the level of a Nobel Prize winner in any scientific or mechanical field. AGI could be left alone for weeks and complete enormous amounts of work that would be impossible for humans, just in terms of sheer time. Take satellite images, for example. The government receives more than it can possibly analyze. Right now we have to be selective about what gets attention. But AGI could analyze every single image and return precise, actionable insight. That alone explains why countries like the United States and China are desperate to be the first to develop it.

It is an arms race. Who gets to this new nuke first. And while there are fears, there are also voices proclaiming the virtues and blessings this new technology will bring.

And yes, from a certain perspective, there are real blessings. Medical breakthroughs. Climate modeling. Hyper personalized education. Cures for diseases we can barely name. Longevity. Maybe even a solution to aging itself. There is talk of solving death, which is the kind of thing that sounds like the trailer for a Black Mirror episode. But the deeper you go, the more it starts to feel like something else. Like we are not just solving problems, we are rewriting the very goal of human life. Not upward toward God, but inward and forward. Into ourselves, into this moment, into the next innovation, the next upgrade.

Charles Taylor, a Canadian philosopher whose book A Secular Age I am slowly working through, calls this the shift from a transcendent order to an immanent frame. Once, human flourishing was understood as union with God, even if that meant hardship or carrying a cross. But in modernity, that vision was redefined. First, God was understood primarily as one who wanted our flourishing, so we remade Him as a cosmic therapist or distant creator who cheers from the sidelines. Then we decided we could have flourishing without God altogether, as long as we had health and wealth and peace. That is the cultural air we breathe now. A vision of the good life that is entirely material and entirely temporal. And it seems AGI might be the final tool to make that vision feel complete.

While I was reading the New York Times interview I kept thinking about this Isaac Asimov short story, The Last Question. It just would not leave me alone. Part of it was the image of the computers. In Asimov's imagined future they are not sleek little assistants in your phone or disembodied neural nets in some secret server farm. They are enormous. They span planets. They are basically divine in scope. And that kind of made me laugh because it feels so different from where we are now or where most science fiction imagines we are headed. Take something like the Netflix series The Three Body Problem, where the alien AI is basically hiding in the wiring of the universe itself, so small and efficient and invisible you would not even know it was there. In Asimov everything is cosmic and obvious and heavy. In modern sci fi it is all subtle and hidden and terrifying precisely because of how little it announces itself.

But even with the different shapes and scales of these imagined futures, the same idea keeps showing up. That we will master everything. That we will live forever. That we will solve all problems. And yet there is still this one question that will not go away. What is it all for. What does it mean. Can we reverse entropy. Can we undo the end. The story ends with a computer that has all knowledge and all power, sitting in the silence of a dead universe, waiting for someone to ask it again. And the question is still the same.

And that is why the gospel still interrupts all our technological dreaming. Not to drag us back into suffering, but to call us upward. To remind us that life is not just the absence of pain or the extension of days. That the healing we need is not primarily physical or even emotional. It is ontological. We are broken creatures in need of re creation. Not just better. New.

That is what Jesus offers. Not just another tool in the march of progress. Not even just a teacher. But the God Man who walked into death and broke it from the inside. Who turns death from an end into a beginning. A door to the life we destroyed and can no longer reach on our own. He saves us not only from the death we die, but from the death we live. The hollow ache beneath all our striving. The quiet despair behind our search for more time, more ease, more control. He comes not just to extend our lives, but to give us life. Real life. Eternal life. Life with God.

But if we refuse Him. If we insist that flourishing is only in the here and now. Only in the meeting of material needs. Then we may end up building the most comfortable prison in history. A world so efficient, so safe, so optimized, that we no longer feel the ache for the Infinite. A world that does not need God anymore, and so forgets that we were made for Him.

And maybe that is the last question AGI will never answer. Not because it cannot compute it. But because only one voice can answer it.

And that voice still speaks. Behold, I make all things new.

Almighty God, who alone can satisfy the longing of our hearts,
deliver us from the illusion that we can save ourselves
by the works of our hands or the power of our minds.
In an age of great knowledge and advancing strength,
teach us again that wisdom begins in fear of you,
and that true life is found not in progress,
but in the death and resurrection of your Son Jesus Christ.
Renew in us the hope of things eternal,
and make us ready to hear again the voice that speaks,
Behold, I make all things new.
Through Jesus Christ our Lord,
who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and forever. Amen.