Explaining Everything and Nothing (Part V)

Send us Fan MailThe fifth and final part of the "Metaphysics Scandal" series asks what happened after Scholasticism broke. The answer is two roads — empiricism and rationalism — that look like opposites but in the extreme arrive at the same destination: a world scrubbed of God and person, leaving only function.What drove both roads is older than either. It is the Promethean spirit — the will to possess knowledge by force rather than receive it as gift. Today, an endpoint of that arc is artificial intelligence: the moment when function threatens to become total, when the machine that cannot be a face is offered as a substitute for one. Pope Leo XIV's new encyclical calls it an anthropological crisis, not a technological one. This episode is an attempt to explain how we got here.