The Unmeasured Soul: What Orthodoxy’s AI Debate Reveals About the Limits of Certainty

When Hamlet tells Horatio that “there are more things in heaven and earth… than are dreamt of in your philosophy,” he speaks to a world where the undreamt-of arrives daily. So too with artificial intelligence, which rouses both wonder and a strange overconfidence — not only among technologists, but among theologians.

Writing in Public Orthodoxy, Dr. Dylan Pahman draws on the Orthodox concept of sobornost — conciliar wholeness — to enrich Pope Leo’s AI encyclical Magnifica humanitas. Yet the author identifies a shared overstep: both Pahman and the Holy Father assert that AI “can never make true moral judgments, nor possess goodness and virtue in its heart.” The encyclical insists these systems “do not have a moral conscience, since they do not judge good and evil.”

Perhaps. But the encyclical itself concedes that “current AI systems are more ‘cultivated’ than ‘built'” — developers create a framework “within which the intelligence ‘grows.'” If we cannot fully explain what emerges, humility becomes the truer Orthodox posture. The spiritual question is not whether machines have souls, but whether our certainty about anything unseen has quietly become idolatry.