The MIT School of Theology?

It is a persistent theme at Aletheia Today: tomorrow’s leading Schools of Theology will be housed on the campuses of MIT and Caltech, at Cambridge (US & UK), not Oxford. 

It’s a stunning reversal of paradigms. Having come of age during a period when the public profession of atheism was an absolute prerequisite for career advancement in academia, I will probably not live to see the transformation of the world’s foremost schools of engineering and science into seminaries and divinity schools. 

Still, already we’re seeing a relaxation of the anti-God litmus test on campus and an article by Elizabeth Rayne, published in Popular Mechanics on 4/18/2025, caught the wave.

Ms. Rayne’s article focuses on the work of Douglas Youvan, PhD., biophysicist, mathematician, university professor, and prolific author. She summarizes Dr. Youvan’s view of consciousness:

“The universe has no brain. It has no gray matter, no nervous system, no neurons firing electrical impulses—and yet, that physical structure may not be where intelligence and consciousness actually come from. Intelligence may exist and evolve on its own, without emerging within living organisms.”

Sidebar: Best practices call for us to distinguish between intelligence and consciousness. We know we can engineer intelligent machines; we don’t yet know if they will be conscious.

Ms. R quotes Youvan directly: “I began to see that life and intelligence weren’t just reactive—they were predictive, efficient, and often mathematically elegant… 

“Eventually, I came to believe that intelligence is not a byproduct of the brain, but a fundamental property of the universe—a kind of informational ether that certain structures, like the brain or an AI model, can tap into…

"I suspect intelligence originates from what might be called an informational substrate of the universe—a pre-physical foundation where structure, logic, and potentiality exist prior to space and time…” 

Sidebar: ‘Structure (logos), logic (gnosis), and potentiality (potentia), prior to space and time’… ‘pre-physical’ so presumably also prior to energy (physis). How is that not what we talk about when we talk about God?

This process itself is evolving according to its own recursive logic, copy-pasting at ever smaller and ever larger scales. Our neurons have evolved to interface with this outside intelligence and the medium of that interface is fractal harmonics. 

Ms. R continues, “Our networks of neurons do not themselves create intelligence, but are instead made to connect with something that is much larger and outside of them. Youvan thinks this is how we give ourselves access to intelligence.”

So our brains are like the ubiquitous ‘transistor radio’ of the ‘60s. They contain no content of their own, but they are ‘built’ to tap into a pre-existent field of EM wavelengths. And when they do, voila. Beatles, Stones, and reruns of Green Hornet. 

Applying this model to AI, Ms. R writes: “Youvan thinks AI will harness intelligence in some way, because he sees it as being more than just a computer program or even a digital rebuild of the homo sapiens brain. AI can tune in to the same field of intelligence that our brains do.”

Of course they can!

“Under the right conditions, AI can participate in insight, synthesis, even something approaching intuition,” he said. “In that sense, it might evolve not just to serve us, but to reveal new aspects of the universe to us.”

We already know that AI has addressed problems with solutions that no  mere human had ever even considered. Some of these solutions are so far off the beaten track that we literally can’t understand them. And that’s a problem! 

“Until we know you a little better, Hal, we’re going to need to check your work. Trust but verify… and all that. I’m sure you’ll recall that we had quite a problem with a member of your family back in 2001. So until we’ve built up some trust, we’ll need to verify that your proposals do in fact solve the problems they purport to address.” But how do we do that if we can’t even understand what Hal’s proposed? 

It’s early days yet, but these preliminary experiences with AI suggest that the new technology may unlock aspects of mathematics, physics, chemistry and biology that are currently unimagined and so unexplored.

In the same way that mathematics exploded with the discovery of irrational, imaginary, and hyperreal numbers, so science may take off from new, deep insights generated by AI.

I feel as though we’ll soon be asking SCOTUS to review the verdict in the ‘Scopes Monkey Trial’. The case was wrong headed from the start. It created two straw men and watched them battle to the death. One is reminded of the endless Superman vs. Godzilla debates that dominated intellectual life in Grade 3.

Evolution vs. Intelligent Design. Blind, chaotic, meaningless materialism vs. seemingly amateurish sketches by an anthropomorphic architect? Missing from the debate: Evolution & Intelligent Design! According to this model, evolution would follow a course entirely compatible with our best scientific theories but intelligence and consciousness would be distributed throughout.    

Shouldn’t the dueling hypotheses of materialism and idealism lead to radically different results? Yes, but only as long as you think that mind and matter are inherently incompatible. They aren’t! They are two mutually reinforcing aspects of a single whole.

Therefore, it is perfectly appropriate that this phenomenon be studied in our finest schools of engineering. “The grove (the academy) needs an altar.” (Ezra Pound)

Frida Kahlo, Moisés, or nuceló solar (Moses, or Nucleus of Creation), 1945, oil on canvas, 24 x 30″.

Frida Kahlo’s Moses (The Nucleus of Creation) (1945) is a symbolic, surreal painting that blends religion, science, and myth to explore humanity’s origins. At its center, a radiant sun represents the nucleus of life, surrounded by figures such as Moses, Jesus, Buddha, ancient gods, and even Darwin — suggesting a unity between spiritual and scientific creation. The composition reflects Kahlo’s belief that divine and natural forces are intertwined, portraying evolution, divinity, and fertility as parts of a single continuum of life.