What some call Walker Percy’s weirdest book, Lost in the Cosmos (1983), suggests one reason we feel lost is that we don’t know who we are. The question of our identity is especially important in an ever-expanding cosmos. The Big Bang to which cosmologists trace the origin of the universe robustly reverberates in its effects.

In their speculative attempts to “sort out” the universe, philosophers and poets alike have often thought of it as a great chain of being. Many have also advanced a principle of plenitude that posits a maximally occupied cosmos. The philosopher-mathematician Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716) cites this principle in his Monadology (1714). He affirms that “There is nothing fallow, nothing sterile, nothing dead in the universe,” and elsewhere claims that “In every particle of the universe a world composed of an infinity of creatures is contained.” Here Leibniz refers to “monads,” the absolutely simple and ordered substances that, given the existence of composite things, must exist.

A century earlier another philosopher-mathematician, Blaise Pascal (1623-1662), confronted an equally powerful, albeit monad-free, universe. Nonetheless, he did so with a keen sense of who we are. In his Pensées, published after his death, he writes: “Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature; but he is a thinking reed.…But, if the universe were to crush him, man would still be more noble than that which killed him, because he knows that he dies and the advantage which the universe has over him; the universe knows nothing of this.”

And what follows from this contrast? Pascal tells us, “It is not from space that I must seek my dignity, but from the government of my thought. I shall have no more if I possess worlds. By space the universe encompasses and swallows me up like an atom; by thought I comprehend the world.” It is this same dignity, the gift of our Creator, that answers the Psalmist’s question:

When I see the heavens, the work of your hands,
The moon and the stars which you arranged,
what is man that you should keep him in mind,
mortal man that you care for him? (Psalm 8:2-7, 10)

It is not so surprising, then, that Pope Francis celebrated Pascal’s vision. On June 19, 2023, the fourth centenary of Pascal’s birth, Francis issued the apostolic exhortation Sublimitas et Miseria Hominis (The Grandeur and Misery of Man). Francis draws our attention to a pair of revealing passages from the Pensées. The first reflects the complexity of the human being: “What a fantastic creature is man, a novelty, a monstrosity, chaotic, contradictory, prodigious, judge of all things, feeble earthworm, bearer of truth, mire of uncertainty and error, glory and refuse of the universe! Who can undo this tangle?” The second identifies our saving transformation. “From all bodies put together, one could not succeed in producing a tiny thought….From all bodies and minds, one could not draw an impulse of true charity. That is impossible and of another, supernatural order.”

Pascal’s language calls to mind Thomas Aquinas’s pointed comparison of the human being and the material universe. “The good of the universe is greater than the particular good of one, if we consider both in the same genus. But the good of grace in one is greater than the good of nature in the whole universe” (ST I-II, q. 113, art. 9, ad 2). The cosmos reflects the glory of God, but the Creator becomes incarnate in the human being. It is man, not the universe that is capax Dei; it is man whose final end is to share in God’s own life.

Well might we wonder, gentle reader, what Blaise Pascal would say if he were present in our own technological “interesting times.” No doubt he’d smile to learn of Pascal, the computer language designed in 1970 that became the basis for many of our software development practices. But what would he make of artificial intelligence (AI) recently relabeled super intelligence (SI)?

A veteran software engineer (full disclosure, my oldest son!) makes three critical points that I’ll warrant the author of the Pensées would heartily endorse. The first is that AI, though a useful tool, neither thinks nor enjoys an “aha” moment. The second is that it seems smart because its interface is language based and driven by the patterns in existing data. The third is that AI is a conglomerate of mathematical predictors “trained” to align inputs with outputs that reflect relationships in the universe (!) of text data. And just here, we should add that AI, though it is no “one thing,” inhabits the same material universe about which we think but which itself never thinks about us. Nor, finally, does AI share in our vocation to see God face to face.