After the Pope’s AI Screed, It’s Time to Break Free from Dependency on Religious Morality

Religion has too long maintained a cartel on morality; we need to find a new scientific ethics

Most people would never go to a medieval bloodletter to treat a fever, or listen to a quack offering a cure for cancer taken from medieval scrolls. The life-saving benefits of modern medical science are too obvious for anyone sane to fully ignore.

Why then do so many listen enthusiastically to clerics of Bronze Age religion for advice about our most important life choices — i.e., morality?

Notably, not only “conservative” commentators but numerous “progressives” have fallen all over each other to praise the recent Catholic encyclical Magnifica Humanitas by Robert Prevost (“Pope Leo XIV”). They exhibit a widespread cultural dependency on religious morality, an irrational, toxic habit we should have kicked long ago.

Among religious “conservatives,” Prevost’s tome was met not only with deference but adulatory relief. The editors of the National Review reveled in the fact that AI companies like Anthropic and eventually “all eyes” looked to the church as a moral authority.^¹ They’re reassured that so many would take the church’s moral advice seriously despite its decades of enabling child sexual abuse, like alcoholics reassured by a crowded bar.

The aura of religion’s moral authority blinds even nominally secular commentators into seeing its obvious vices as though they were virtues. The secular “progressive” Atlantic featured a columnist whose favorite passage from Prevost’s tract condemned any attempt to “eliminate suffering,” because it recognized the importance of exalting our “limitations” and “woundedness.”² He echoes the addict’s delusional rationalization that purity is pathological, because life needs a little poison.

Religion’s aura may dazzle because we do need light. There are real questions worth answering about the proper development and use of AI. And AI itself cannot answer our deepest moral questions — about AI or anything else. There’s no substitute for human intelligence. But then we should work to answer these ethical questions in the same way that tech researchers used to develop AI: intelligently. We should make rigorous, critical, ambitious use of the scientific method, rather than religious faith.

So it’s revealing that Prevost’s tract contains no new data about the consequences of using AI, no proposed experiments for evaluating the effects of regulating it — no new thinking at all. Many of his anecdotes are not even about AI per se, but about decades-old problems with the digital economy, e.g., the plight of workers involved in reviewing content for “disturbing material.”³ A rational thinker would consider that AI image recognition technology could save people from reviewing this content and look for ways to encourage the development of such technology. But Prevost is no such thinker.

His missive is only a repackaging of conventional anxieties about AI, candy-coated with superficial facts about tech and fancy theological terminology to make Catholic values easier to swallow. The values are thoroughly faith-based and mystical. We’re told we must protect “dignity” by forcing taxpayers to fund jobs that create no value for private employers. They supposedly possess this dignity “by virtue of existing, of having been willed, created and loved by God.”⁴ We’re told the state must protect the “common good” through regulations on AI innovation. This “common good” is “not the sum total of individual benefits” but a transcendent “greater good” that “we could not explain.”⁵ We’re told to take this all on faith, without rational explanation.

Religious faith has long operated like a cartel in the morality business. Its customers think they can’t get it anywhere else, supposing that morality inevitably appeals to someone’s feelings. They assume it cannot be scientific or fact-based. So religious faith, itself a kind of feeling, seems the only source of morality.

But just as we can’t leave the guidance of our most sophisticated and powerful technology to mindless machines, we also can’t leave it to mindless faith and other unscrutinized emotions. It’s time to think rationally about how to kick the religious morality habit and formulate a scientific code of ethics.

Our best scientists serve as role models. Consider Geoffrey Hinton, the “godfather of AI.”⁶ For decades he toiled in obscurity, convinced that if neurons help brains think, electronic “neural nets” could emulate them. His peers thought this was hopeless: AI needed to emulate logicians’ formal algorithms, and replicating the more organic cognition of living things would take too much computing power. Indeed, many of his hypotheses failed. But colleagues suggested hybridizing neural nets with other algorithms. He listened, and did more experiments. When the necessary computing power was available, he and his colleagues developed some of the first reliable image recognition technology, selling it to Google for a fortune. The rest is history.

Hinton’s achievement might not have been just a result of impressive intelligence, but also of a commitment to certain values. Scientists seek the truth, come what may, regardless of peer skepticism. They willingly abandon pet hypotheses in favor of proven rivals. They courageously, ambitiously push forward to know more and more truth, building practical applications that test their theories further, improving human life in the process. Scientific objectivity is not “value-free.” Objectivity — the methodical pursuit of the truth — is itself a value.

What if, to understand scientific objectivity, we need to see it as requiring moral character virtues of honesty, integrity, and pride in one’s work?

Whether they know it or not, the best scientists could already be offering us an implicit alternative moral code — and the factual basis of value claims. Biologists can’t offer evolutionary explanations without showing that traits or behavior are naturally selected when they promote the good of the organism. And doctors regularly identify facts about what is healthy for our bodies and thus good for our lives.

Don’t we also need to assess the “health” of our personal character to live a happy life? What if this is the job of a scientific ethics?: To discover the virtues practiced by scientists — and engineers, and businessmen — by which we characteristically discover the truths by which we explain, predict, and control the world, and thus successfully live.

Yet our culture discourages even the possibility of a scientific ethics, because of its continuing dependence on a toxic religious morality that promotes fear of the truth, hatred for those who pursue it and of their success in life. Religion has sold this fear and hatred for centuries and even secular ethicists have absorbed it. It’s why they tolerate the values that Prevost proclaims on blind faith. It’s why they resonate with the central image in his screed, the Bronze Age myth of the Tower of Babel, about how God punished ambitious builders, fearing they would gain confidence in their own minds. And it’s why they even empathize with his perverse lamentation of using technology to eliminate suffering, fearing that it will somehow “dehumanize” us.

The scientific pursuit of truth is the most glorious distinction of our humanity, and AI technology is its latest expression. To be proper custodians of this technology — not to mention of our economies, our governments, and our nuclear weapons — we must learn to extend the virtues of science to every domain of life — especially to morality. Elsewhere I have outlined the case that’s already been made for such an ethics but so far ignored by our culture. We need to find a scientific ethics if we are to break free from addiction to a morality that is the toxic brew of atavistic witch doctors.

1. The Editors, “AI and the Pope,” National Review, May 27, 2026.

2. Gal Beckerman, “The Pope Doubles Down on the Beautiful Struggle,” The Atlantic, May 26, 2026.

3. Pope Leo XIV, Magnifica Humanitas, §173, Vatican.va, May 15, 2026.

4. Ibid., §52.

5. Ibid., §60, 61.

6. See Joshua Rothman, “Why the Godfather of A.I. Fears What He’s Built,” New Yorker, November 13, 2023; Cade Metz, Genius Makers: The Mavericks Who Brought A.I. to Google, Facebook, and the World (New York: Penguin, 2022).

Image credits: Anton Petrus / Moment / via Getty Images