ChatGPT helps Keith explore theological questions across centuries: clarifying Scholastic terms, finding Church documents, and tracing how Catholic tradition might bear on technologies that its earlier thinkers never encountered.
Keith did not grow up practicing a faith. He had been baptized Presbyterian, briefly attended a nondenominational church in high school, then lived what he describes as a secular, irreligious life. In New York City, he found that life to be interesting but increasingly empty: work, time with coworkers, a weekend, then the same cycle again. He kept returning to the thought that there had to be something more.
He wanted to find the roots of Christianity, its oldest institution, and that historical inquiry led him to the Catholic Church. In 2017, after one-on-one catechetical formation with a priest, Keith was received into full communion with the Church.
Conversion changed how he understood purpose and how he acted. His earlier worldview had been largely materialist; Catholic thought reintroduced what Aristotle called the “final cause”, the purpose for which something exists. It also expanded his idea of charity: helping a neighbor could mean money, time, answering a question, or another work of mercy. For Keith, service to another person became service to God.
Keith now reads papal encyclicals and theological works for pleasure, though he is careful not to call himself a theologian. ChatGPT gives him a way into that large and difficult literature. Recently, he used it to unpack “substance,” “essence,” and “form” in St. Thomas Aquinas and Aristotle, and explore how those concepts relate to being and to the human soul. He also asks ChatGPT to help him understand relevant Church texts and show how modern documents connect to earlier teaching.
Those texts raise questions their authors never faced: What can theory positing a “just war” say about AI-enabled autonomous weapons? How might Catholic tradition approach technologies unknown to earlier popes and philosophers? ChatGPT helps Keith map each new question to older concepts, turning a scattered archive into a conversation he can pursue.
Now residing in Texas, Keith uses ChatGPT to help find relevant documents and understand their arguments. Many of the older texts he wants to consult are in Latin, sometimes only available as barely legible scans. He prefers English translations to AI-generated ones because theological terms carry nuanced meanings that AI translation can miss. From there, he’ll explore a line of reasoning about, say, how Aquinas’s ideas might apply to modern questions.
Catholicism gave Keith a reasoned way to ask what life is for and how he should live it. ChatGPT helps him extend that inquiry into questions his tradition has not yet had centuries to answer.
