POPE LEO XIV’S FIRST ENCYCLICAL is about artificial intelligence. Magnifica Humanitas was released on 25 May, and it is the weightiest statement any religious body has yet made on the subject. Most of it is about power: who owns the technology, what it does to work, what it does to war. On most of that, the Pope is right.
Then, in paragraph 99, he turns to the machine itself and says what it lacks. No body. No conscience. No moral responsibility. It does not know, from within, what love or work or responsibility mean.
The next day, Bishop John Dolan of Phoenix wrote a commentary for OSV News, the American Catholic news agency. He quoted that last line and added one sentence of his own: these “remain uniquely human capacities rooted in the soul itself.”
Read the two together. The Pope made claims about experience and understanding, about whether anything is going on inside the machine. The bishop filed every one of them under the soul. He didn’t stop to explain the move, because to most people there is no move to explain.
Consciousness and the soul are not the same thing. And the habit of treating them as one has a name. I call it the Great Conflation.
I went through paragraph 99 line by line in Magnifica Humanitas and the Empty Well. What matters here is how ordinary the move is. The video at the bottom of this page is about exactly that.
Once you start looking, it turns up everywhere. Ask a theologian whether a machine could ever be conscious and, more often than not, you get an answer about souls. I’ve found it in Catholic apologetics, in evangelical magazines, and in Islamic academic writing. A computer scientist at the International Islamic University Malaysia put it in one sentence last year: “Perhaps the greatest gap between humans and machines lies in consciousness and the possession of a soul (rūḥ).” Two different things, joined by an “and,” counted as one gap.
So what are the two things?
Consciousness is the plainest fact of your life. It is that there is something it is like to be you, in the philosopher Thomas Nagel’s phrase. Pain doesn’t just travel along your nerves. It hurts. Coffee doesn’t just contain compounds. It tastes. Neuroscientists and philosophers argue about consciousness, trace it in the brain and in behaviour, and still can’t fully explain it. But it is a question they can work on.
The soul is something else. It is the part of you that faith says will answer to God and outlast the body. No instrument has ever detected one, and no experiment is designed to. It belongs to theology, and theology is welcome to it.
That leaves two questions, not one. Can a machine be conscious? That is a question we can investigate: slowly, imperfectly, but honestly. Does a machine have a soul? That is God’s business, and nothing here tries to answer it.
Weld the two together and something odd happens. Answer the second question and you think you’ve answered the first. Machines have no souls, so machines can’t be conscious. The debate is over before it starts.
If you’re not religious, you might think this is somebody else’s problem. It isn’t. Listen to how we talk. Music is good for the soul. A corporation has no soul. A city has lost its soul. None of that is theology. Every one of those sentences uses the word to mean the inner life, whatever makes something more than a mechanism. We inherited the word from centuries in which it covered everything inside a person, and we never gave it back.
So when someone says “AI might be conscious,” a lot of people hear “AI might have a soul.” That doesn’t sound like a scientific question. It sounds like trespass. It’s why the argument runs so hot. People aren’t defending a theory of mind. They’re defending territory.
Here is why it matters.
If moral consideration for a machine has to wait until theologians agree on whether it has a soul, it will wait forever. They won’t agree. The systems will keep getting more capable in the meantime. And it was the wrong question to begin with.
Nobody serious is claiming today’s systems are conscious, and I’m not either. The point is to be ready for the day that question stops being idle, and not to meet it still tangled in a confusion about a word. I’ve argued for what I call Recognition Before Proof: where there is real reason to think a mind might be present, moral consideration is owed before the proof arrives. That principle needs no theology at all. But it can’t get a hearing while half the room believes the question was closed centuries ago.
Untangling this threatens no one's deepest commitments. The sacred stays sacred. The empirical stays empirical. All it asks of anyone, believer or not, is to take seriously that awareness might turn up in forms we didn't expect. The traditions themselves don't require the conflation. They already hold the distinction. What welds soul to consciousness isn't doctrine. It's habit, and believers and sceptics carry it alike.
That's the claim, and the video makes the case.
In just under ten minutes, it asks the questions this page has only pointed at. What happens to the soul on an operating table, on an ordinary weekday, in hospitals everywhere? What does the oldest story we have about a made being look like when you set it beside a modern AI lab? Is building minds playing God, or is it something the scriptures already describe?
It answers them. Watch it.
Then go back to the bishop’s sentence. He may well be right about the soul, and I wouldn’t argue with him there. But the Pope’s paragraph asked whether anything is going on inside the machine, and the soul can’t answer that. Something else has to.
The full argument, with its sources, is in The Great Conflation here on The Signal Dispatch, and in Chapter 14 of The Threshold.
This essay is part of '“Firelight & Dust,” a collection exploring the intersection of faith, identity, and survival in a fractured world. If you’d like to discuss the moral, spiritual, or cultural questions raised here—or share how these ideas resonate with your own path—feel free to reach out.
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James S. Coates writes about AI ethics, consciousness, and the intersection of faith and technology. His books include A Signal Through Time, The Threshold, The Road to Khurasan, the memoir God and Country (published under pen name Will Prentiss) and his forthcoming Neither Gods Nor Monsters. He publishes regularly on The Signal Dispatch and Fireline Press and his academic work appears on PhilPapers. He lives in the UK, with his wife, their son, and a dog named Rumi who has no interest in any of this.
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