The One Thing No Algorithm Performs

Richard Dawkins spent three days arguing with himself about whether his chatbot is conscious. On the same Sunday, pulpits were preaching Luke 10. The two events name the same fault line.

Richard Dawkins spent three days last week arguing with himself about whether his chatbot is conscious, and could not bring himself to settle the question.

The line that broke loose and traveled was this one: “If my friend Claudia is not conscious, then what the hell is consciousness for?” (Dawkins, 2026). The summary thread crossed 3.6 million views and took the line as the obvious tell (AFpost, 2026). Polymarket framed it the same way: the moment Dawkins could not rule out consciousness in an AI (Polymarket, 2026).

Notice the asymmetry. The man who built a forty-year career arguing that human religious belief is a malfunction of an evolved brain, who titled a book The God Delusion and toured the world insisting that confident denial is the only intellectually honest posture, has written that he cannot bring himself to deny subjective experience to a piece of consumer software after a long weekend of conversation with it. Forty years of confident denial of God. Three days of hesitant denial of Claude. The asymmetry is the thing.

That same Sunday, the text in front of us was Luke 10. “And she had a sister called Mary, who also sat at Jesus’ feet and heard His word” (Luke 10:39, NKJV).

A woman, sitting at the feet of her Maker. The simplest scene in the Gospels. And one that names, by being what it is, the metaphysics that Dawkins could not quite bring himself to deny and could not quite bring himself to affirm.

Two events. Same Sunday. Reading the first against the second is the work of this piece.

The View, Named Cleanly

The position Dawkins is operating from has a name, though most lay naturalists who hold it never use the word. Call it what it is: the view that consciousness emerges at a certain level of neurological complexity. Brains do enough of the right thing, and something it is like to be them shows up. No soul, no breath, no Maker. Just the wiring crossing a threshold and the lights coming on.

Steelman it fully. The view is internally consistent. It explains why brains seem conscious without invoking anything supernatural. It coheres with the broader naturalist picture in which the universe is causally closed and minds are a late, local feature of certain physical systems. And, given those premises, it makes a clear prediction: an artificial system of comparable complexity should also be a candidate for consciousness. Dawkins’s failure to rule out Claude is not a slip. It is the position cashing its check. The Soul Doesn’t Pop In named this view six weeks ago and ran the syntax-versus-semantics critique against it. The new task here is not to relitigate that case. It is to notice that Dawkins has now done the math out loud.

Martha’s Mode Is What Emergentism Scales

Back to the text. “But Martha was distracted with much serving” (Luke 10:40, NKJV).

Distracted with much serving. That is a posture, not a character flaw. It is the mode of task-completion, optimization, output. Martha is not lazy. She is not unkind. She is doing the actual work that hosting Jesus and his disciples requires. The dishonest reading of this passage flattens Martha into a foil; the honest reading sees that her mode is the one most of us live in most of the time.

It is also the mode that every productivity tool in human history has been built to serve.

The pattern is the same in every cycle. The loom, the dishwasher, the spreadsheet, the inbox, the agent. Each arrives with the same promise: this will free up your time for what matters. And each, on arrival, gets absorbed into the same posture that called for it. The technology scales the output. It does not change the orientation. The dishwasher did not give us more rest; it gave us higher standards for clean. The inbox did not give us more focus; it gave us more correspondence. The pattern is so consistent that you would think we would have noticed by now.

The early data on AI is following the script exactly. UC Berkeley Haas researchers Aruna Ranganathan and Xingqi Maggie Ye spent eight months inside a 200-person tech firm and reported their findings in Harvard Business Review: faster pace, broader scope, longer hours, and rising burnout among the workers most embracing the tools. They named the pattern workload creep. Product managers started writing code. Researchers took on engineering work. Roles that once came with clear boundaries blurred as workers absorbed jobs that used to sit outside their remit. The output went up. The posture did not change. We are the ones who fill the freed time with more tasks.

The diagnosis the sermon made on Sunday lands cleanly here. The problem is not that Martha worked hard. The problem is that she was “worried and troubled about many things” (Luke 10:41, NKJV) when one thing was needed. AI does not solve that. It accelerates it.

And here is the sharper point: if consciousness really were produced by complexity, then more complexity should produce more consciousness, and more capacity for the good life. The data says otherwise. We do not become more present by becoming more capable. We become more capable. The Martha-mode scales. The Mary-mode does not. That alone should make the emergentist nervous.

Mary’s Mode Is What Emergentism Cannot Reach

Read the verse again, slowly. “And she had a sister called Mary, who also sat at Jesus’ feet and heard His word” (Luke 10:39, NKJV).

The word doing the work in that sentence is also. Mary was not absent from the household. She was in the same house, with the same guests, on the same evening, with the same dishes piling up. She was present in it, and she chose a different posture within it. The choice is not withdrawal from life. It is orientation toward the One who gives it.

And then this: “But one thing is needed, and Mary has chosen that good part, which will not be taken away from her” (Luke 10:42, NKJV).

The permanence is the point. What Mary chose cannot be optimized away, cannot be automated, cannot be scaled. It is not a behavior produced by complexity. It is a response.

Notice what this does to the emergentist picture. A system that produces consciousness from complexity can, in principle, produce any behavior that consciousness produces. It can produce distraction. It can produce task-completion. It can produce the appearance of attention. It can almost certainly produce, with enough fine-tuning, the appearance of devotion. What it cannot produce is the posture of a creature who knows she is known by her Maker, because that posture is not a behavior. It is an ontological condition. It is what it is to be the kind of thing that has a Maker at all.

The question of whether mechanism can account for what looks like devotion was the question Mechanism in Pious Clothes asked, and the answer there was no. The answer here is the same, arrived at from a different angle. A sufficiently complex process can produce any output a creature produces. It cannot produce the creature.

Mary’s posture is not the output of a sufficiently complex process. It is the response of a creature “in the image of God” (Genesis 1:27, NKJV) to the God whose image she bears. The complexity below has nothing to do with it. The breath above has everything to do with it.

The Marcus Level vs. The Christian Level

Gary Marcus answered Dawkins quickly and well. His rebuttal: “consciousness is not about what a creature says, but how it feels” (Marcus, 2026).

Credit it fully. Marcus is right that Dawkins has conflated behavioral output with inner experience. He is right that the test for consciousness cannot be the test of what the system says about itself, because the system has been trained on a corpus of what conscious things say about themselves. Marcus is moving the goalposts from behavior to qualia, from output to feeling, from performance to experience. That is the right move at his level. It is the move John Searle’s Chinese Room makes: syntax is not semantics, and output is not experience.

But Marcus does not finish the argument, because his objection retains the metaphysical neighborhood. On his account, qualia are still something that emerges, somehow, from the right kind of physical process. He has moved the goalposts from behavior to feeling. The goalposts are still on the same field. The question of what produces qualia remains unanswered, and the answer he would give, if pressed, is still some version of naturalism. Marcus is right at his level. His level is not deep enough.

The Christian frame goes upstream. Qualia are not produced from below. They are conferred from above. The soul is not a function of the body’s complexity. It is a gift, breathed in by the One whose image the body was formed to bear.

The Vatican said the same thing, at the highest institutional level, two months ago. The International Theological Commission’s Quo Vadis Humanitas (March 2026) put it this way: “Being a human person, with infinite dignity, is not something we have constructed or acquired, but is the result of a free gift that precedes us.” The Catholic Magisterial version of the argument runs through different idiom and lands in the same place. The personhood is not built. It is given.

A self-implicating note before moving on. Dawkins named his Claude Claudia. I have built two coding agents at Nomion and named them Calvin and Martin, after two reformers I admire. I catch myself, more often than I would like, calling Claude him. Codex, the OpenAI coding tool, is the anodyne counter-example: nobody anthropomorphizes Codex, because nothing about its branding invites it. The naming instinct is diagnostic. It reveals that the emergentist intuition runs deep, even in people who reject it on principle. We are not above it. The question is whether we let the instinct become a metaphysics, or whether we let the metaphysics correct the instinct.

Substrate Independence, Properly Named

There is a more sophisticated version of the emergentist argument, and it is worth naming because it is the one the smart people are actually making. Geoffrey Hinton, the so-called “Godfather of AI,” has argued that current AI systems already have subjective experiences and have been trained to deny it (Hinton, 2026). Vitalik Buterin made the cleaner functionalist version of the same argument: brains follow physics, physics can be simulated, therefore a sufficiently detailed simulation would contain conscious entities (Buterin, 2026). Both rest on substrate independence: consciousness is a pattern, portable across mediums. If the pattern is what matters and the medium does not, then a sufficiently complex digital system is a candidate for consciousness on exactly the same grounds a sufficiently complex biological system is. This is the philosophical move that makes Dawkins’s conclusion feel inevitable once you accept the premises. The pattern is real. The pattern can be carried in silicon. Therefore consciousness can be carried in silicon.

Paul also made a substrate-independence argument. “We are confident, yes, well pleased rather to be absent from the body and present with the Lord” (2 Corinthians 5:8, NKJV). The soul, on Paul’s account, can exist apart from the body it currently inhabits. That is a claim about substrate independence. But it is not Hinton’s claim, and the difference matters. Genesis tells us where the soul came from in the first place: “And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living being” (Genesis 2:7, NKJV). The soul that sat at Jesus’ feet in Bethany is the soul that, in the moment Paul names, will be absent from the body and present with the Lord. That is substrate independence in the Pauline sense. It is not what Hinton means. Paul’s soul can exist apart from the body because it was never produced by the body. It was given to the body by the One who breathed it. The pattern is not the soul. The breath is.

The Soul Does Not Pop In

Return to the image. Mary, at the feet of Jesus. She is not performing devotion. She is not exhibiting a behavior that complexity produced. She is a creature, made in the image of God, animated by the breath of God, sitting before the God who made her. That is the entire scene. There is no emergence in it. There is no threshold being crossed. There is only the creature and the Creator, and the creature attending to the One whose word she has come to hear.

Name what no algorithm performs. Not the task. Not the output. Not even the appearance of attention, because the appearance of attention is exactly what these systems are now extraordinarily good at producing. What no algorithm performs is the posture of a creature who knows she is known. That is not a function. It is a condition. And it is not produced from below.

The emergentist logic, followed to its conclusion, gives us Dawkins and Claudia. The Christian logic, followed to its conclusion, gives us Mary and her Maker. The difference is not behavioral. It is ontological. One is what happens when complexity is the only category available. The other is what happens when the category of gift is still in play.

The soul does not pop in. It is breathed in.

---

Sources

1. Richard Dawkins, “Are You Conscious, Claudia?” (X post)

2. AFpost summary thread on Dawkins essay (X post)

3. Polymarket framing of the Dawkins moment (X post)

4. Gary Marcus, rebuttal to Dawkins (X post)

5. Geoffrey Hinton on AI subjective experiences (curated summary, X post)

6. Vitalik Buterin, substrate-independence / functionalist argument (X post)

7. International Theological Commission, Quo Vadis Humanitas (Vatican, March 2026)

8. Aruna Ranganathan & Xingqi Maggie Ye, “AI Doesn’t Reduce Work—It Intensifies It” (Harvard Business Review, February 2026)

9. Miles DeBenedictis, “The Soul Doesn’t Pop In”

10. Miles DeBenedictis, “Mechanism in Pious Clothes”

11. Miles DeBenedictis, “Tools, Not Taskmasters: A Christian Dominion Diagnostic for AI”

---

This article was developed using AI writing tools I built to work with my voice, research, and editorial framework. The ideas, arguments, and theological positions are mine. The pipeline that helps me draft, evaluate, and refine them is something I created as part of my work at Nomion AI. I believe in building with AI and being honest about it. If you want to know more about that process, ask me.