Caritas in Algorismis
"There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy." -Hamlet
I have this memory of trying to explain the Monty Hall Problem to a few friends. We were on religious retreat, of all things, so I have no idea why it came up. I was probably just excited about some related math thing that all my friends would yawn over, so I tried to make it interesting.
The Monty Hall Problem goes like this: Suppose you're on a game show, and you're given the choice of three doors: Behind one door is a car; behind the others, goats. You pick a door, say Number 1, and the host, who knows what's behind the doors, opens another door, say Number 3, which has a goat. He then says to you, "Do you want to pick door Number 2?" Is it to your advantage to switch your choice?
The answer is yes you should switch. When you selected a door originally, you had only a 1 in 3 chance at guessing correctly. But after the host shows you the goat, you now have a 2 in 3 chance at being correct. This is wildly unintuitive as was first made famous by Marilyn vos Savant.
I explained it out (for the math-y version, see Bayes’ Theorem) and one in the group simply refused to believe it. I explained it all and she resolutely refused to see that it was 2 in 3. She believed you had a 1 in 2 chance. Why, I asked. Because, that makes sense, she answered. No amount of persuading would change her mind.
I was so incensed by this that after the retreat I went home and wrote a simple Monte Carlo simulation (in Ruby) to randomly switch or stay over a million different trials. A couple weeks later I presented to her the results, clear as day. "Oh I still don't believe that. Who knows what your program does. It's 1 in 2."
Not only did this woman fail to grasp a truth about the world, she failed in her willingness to even try, and then she failed in accepting the idea that hypotheses can be tested, and methods (or code) can be evaluated for errors.
Of course that's overstating it. More likely than not, she just wanted to be rid of this weird nerd who kept trying to talk about arcane math. But this silly event from the middle of my twenties created what has remained a defining axiom of my life and has resurfaced over and over.
People live in different worlds, based on the models and abstractions they can accept.
"It is the characteristic of our minds to be ever engaged in passing judgment on the things which come before us. No sooner do we apprehend than we judge: we allow nothing to stand by itself: we compare, contrast, abstract, generalize, connect, adjust, classify: and we view all our knowledge in the associations with which these processes have invested it." -John Henry Newman
This past weekend, Pope Leo XIV knelt at Pope Francis' tomb to pray, placing a white rose there.
The white rose matters. It's a deliberate nod to St. Therese of Lisieux, the Little Flower, who promised to send roses as signs from heaven after her death. Pope Francis held a particular devotion to her. It connects not just to his predecessor, but to the simple and direct faith of a 24 year old nun who talked about the Little Way, the capacity of love in the smallest acts.
The Papal name Leo says something else entirely. He deliberately invokes Leo XIII and his encyclical Rerum Novarum that defined the Church’s first response to the modern world. Leo didn't retreat into mysticism or tradition; he waded into the messy reality of labor conditions, economic systems, and human dignity in an age of machines.
Our new Leo faces a similar challenge, and in his first addresses he is showing that he knows it. AI and algorithmic systems are reshaping our world with the same revolutionary force that industrialization did in the 19th century. This may seem like a minor biographical detail, but I’m thrilled by it: Leo XIV has an undergrad degree in math. In the humanities-rich Church it is less common to have training in both spiritual and mathematical thinking.
The last couple of days I’ve been thinking about Georges Lemaître, the Catholic priest who proposed what we now call the Big Bang theory. He combined worlds that most consider separate. In an interview, Lemaître said: "I was interested in truth from the point of view of salvation just as much as in truth from the point of view of scientific certainty. It appeared to me that there were two paths to truth, and I decided to follow both of them."
Both of them.
When Pope Pius XII tried to use the Big Bang as “proof” of Catholic doctrine, Lemaître pushed back hard. One of the most profound facts about the world is that it exists in an epistemic middle. That even as our knowledge of the world expands so far, there is still room for faith. God does not perpetually retreat. He exists beyond and behind all natural explanations, not as proof and not in competition but as their ultimate source and ground. The transcendent isn't diminished by the explicable. But neither is the world so simple that it is always understandable.
I go to Mass. I pray. I believe in scientifically inexplicable events. Even more, I believe in the transcendent. But I also believe in the explanatory power of science. The inductive power of math. We are capable now of building systems that are so complicated we can’t understand them, that use math to generate intelligence, that defy the only understanding of intelligence we’ve ever had.
How do our theological first principles inform how we use math? What does it mean to build systems that affect millions of people at a time? St. Therese of Lisieux taught us to find love and joy in the small sufferings and everyday encounters right in front of us. What is the scaled complement to that? Can we find the love of Christ in algorithms and intelligence that is no longer afforded only to humans?
I think about the millions of decisions encoded in every technological system. Each parameter, each decision boundary, each objective function hides moral judgments about what matters, who matters, how we should value different outcomes.
A hundred years ago we mechanized human labor and now AI is trying to automate human intelligence. It may obviate human judgement in the process. We're taking our values (or lack thereof) and transplanting them into systems that make millions of decisions and interact with billions of people.
The modern perception is that religion requires an intellectual shoulder shrug, a willing embrace of simplistic explanations. It's the "everything happens for a reason" crowd, who attribute political outcomes, natural disasters, and even sporting events to divine intervention. The woman from my retreat lived in a world that was simpler than reality. We can do better.
Here's what excites me: when the Church has engaged deeply with technological revolutions rather than retreating from them, it contributes profoundly. Leo XIII didn't entirely condemn capitalism or socialism; he articulated principles for human dignity in the industrial age.
What might our new Leo articulate for the algorithmic age? How does human dignity persist when more intelligence lies elsewhere? What values do we imbue in algorithms without thinking? What does it mean to love our neighbor through automated systems?
The Church needs this evangelism. One that retains the eternal principles of faith and adds mathematical and scientific literacy. We need figures who can navigate both the personal dimension of religious experience and the abstract reasoning required to understand complex systems.
When I see our new Pope place a white rose on Francis' tomb and calling on the legacy of Leo XIII, I see someone preparing for this tension: simple love and technological complexity.
I am worried that this framing sounds far too Manichean. Complexity and simplicity aren’t the only dimensions. Truth can’t always be captured in equations. We need stories and symbols as much as simulations. And in a world increasingly governed by algorithms, this is of paramount importance.
I am eager to learn from Leo XIV. I am excited to follow him into mystery and for the Church to engage with our intelligence age.
White roses and equations. We need both.
