Artificial Intelligence, the Comfort of Knowing, and the Unease of Prayer

Conversations surrounding the practical use of artificial intelligence in student academic work seem to be less straight-forward than those having to do with plagiarism.¹ In the academic culture that directly surrounds me, a concerted effort has been made to offer a nuanced approach to the topic. Rather than simply vilifying the use of AI in the classroom, many are attempting to walk a tenuous line that negotiates factors related to both habit and ethics in response to a pragmatic view: since AI is now ubiquitous, how we can help students navigate it well?² While I recognize that this is a complex topic that will continue to benefit from thoughtful consideration, I have noticed that solutions offering a sort of middle ground have resulted in confusion for students as they consider the nature of their own interactions with AI.

One positive result of this ambiguity, however, is that many students are far more willing to discuss their use of ChatGPT than they are instances of plagiarism. While my own students know I am not a fan of AI use for academic work, they also know I am eager to discuss questions that matter to them. As such, one student recently relayed to me that he used AI to help him as he prepared to write a paper for another class. (I have students sign a no-use AI contract in my own classes.) This “confession” surprised me, as it came from a student that I know to be curious, intelligent, and a decent writer. Given these strengths, I asked him why he felt the need to seek assistance. Quickly, he reassured me: “Don’t worry; I just use it to generate ideas.” He further clarified that he did not use AI to compose the paper itself.

Imagine such a moment in a student’s life: he receives instructions for an assignment, he considers the busyness of his schedule, and he feels discomfort because of his own perception of his shortcomings. He knows that he needs to write the paper himself, but he feels it is necessary to “get ideas fast.” This is the context in which I propose that the danger of Chat GPT does not reside chiefly in its provision of periodically questionable information; rather, its participation in the “gathering of ideas” truncates a person’s process of inquiry by delivering instant and multifaceted answers to questions that are very often not the student’s own in the first place.

Encouraging this process seems harmful for several reasons. First, it reinforces the assumption that the final artifact due for submission ought to be the object of the highest regard—the best end of a given academic assignment.³ Furthermore, in teaching our students to value the delivery of answers over and above the process of asking questions, we are also teaching them to regard as unimportant (or at least inconvenient) the transforming nature of the struggle that is endemic to inquiry.

For the student in this situation, a deeply human transaction takes place. In An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, John Locke grapples with the fact that people, while certainly affected by good and evil, are more often motivated to move, change, or act in response to their felt uneasiness.⁴ In his words: “The greatest positive good determines not the will, but uneasiness.”⁵ In short, we hate to be uncomfortable.

If Locke is right, I think most encouragement that mirrors a parental, “It is far better for you to do the work yourself” will always pale when compared with the inescapable discomfort students feel in response to the immanence of deadlines and grades. Furthermore, despite common professorial complaints about student apathy, I am certain that many students feel immense pressure to prove themselves—to both themselves and to others around them.

The experience of unease is primary in Locke’s consideration because it is fundamentally related to desire—the longing for something that promises to relieve our present lack (the reason for our unease). Thus, we perpetually seek to soothe that which causes discomfort. Furthermore, we are not capable of craving anything “more good” until “our desire, raised proportionably to it, makes us uneasy in the want of it.”⁶ We have to become actually uneasy because we lack the good. For Locke, the mere knowledge that something else is good is not sufficient to cause us to desire its attainment, specifically because the misery of present unease is far more real to us than the possibility of good we are not currently experiencing.⁷

If this is the case, are we simply doomed to patterns of action that are motivated by the possibility of avoiding discomfort?⁸ And practically speaking, how can I encourage my students to fully inhabit such moments of unease without reaching to medicate their discomfort with the seeming reassurance provided by Chat GPT?

I’ve recently been reading the small but potent treatise authored by Fr. Jacques Philippe: Searching for and Maintaining Peace: A Small Treatise on Peace of Heart.⁹ In this essay, Philippe similarly diagnoses the human propensity toward restlessness—that which is ultimately antithetical to interior peace. Philippe claims that the great drama of humankind is captured in the idea that “Man does not have confidence in God.”¹⁰ Because of this lack of confidence, “[One then] looks in every possible place to extricate himself by his own resources and renders himself terribly unhappy in the process rather than abandon himself into the tender and saving hands of his Father in heaven.”¹¹

It strikes me that the movement Philippe describes here—away from restless lack and toward perceived security—closely parallels both the Lockian description of the human desire to soothe uneasy discomfort and the habits of the student who probes ChatGPT to “get ideas” in order to safeguard himself from the discomforts of a busy schedule and intellectual vulnerability.

As a solution to the restlessness that one experiences due to this lack of confidence in God, Philippe recommends growing in this confidence by way of practicing a contemplative gaze on Jesus. “To contemplate Jesus Who gives His life for us, nourishes us with ‘too great a love’ that He expresses on the cross; that is what really inspires confidence…What can one fear from a God Who manifested His love in so evident a manner?”¹² According to Philippe, too many people “do not take the time to nourish their own hearts and return them to peace by gazing with love on Jesus.”¹³ In Philippe’s mind, the reward is worthwhile, since “the certitudes that the habit of prayer inculcates in us are considerably stronger than those that flow from reasoning, even at the highest level of theology.”¹⁴

Embedded in Philippe’s encouragement toward contemplation is both the promise of reassurance—God will gift us with confidence in his goodness—together with the implication that if one is not willing to commit to both time and practice, one will not be able to grow in his capacity for contemplation or prayer. This leads me to a central question: if we become habituated to—and even dependent upon—the instantaneous provision of solutions in response to restless and habitual supplications, might we also become increasingly unable to bear up under the immense vulnerability and discomfort of prayer—a space wherein God is always present, but where we are also often asked to listen and wait, without receiving an instant or clear reply?

Perhaps the now ubiquitous presence of artificial intelligence has provided us with a regular and invaluable mechanism by which we may take notice of our uncertainty and embrace the discomfort of not knowing. Tempted, as we all are, by the automation of “truth,”¹⁵ I suggest we are faced with an opportunity to lead students to a place wherein they do not simply write better papers or learn to ask questions themselves; rather, we have the opportunity to support them as they practice a species of uncertainty that readies them to engage in practices of prayer—learning to pray and wait, despite encountering silence or uncertainty. Our work in the Christian academy is not meant to provide students with some great analogy for the Christian life or the goodness of God. It is meant to lead students to God himself.

As I consider this, I am reminded that our life of faith is marked by spiritual growth that is not only rooted in God’s greatness, but miraculously includes the reality of humankind’s wretchedness—to use language from Pascal. While we are promised an eternity united with Christ, marked by holiness, and empowered by the Holy Spirit, it is not through the abolishment of our humanness that we become more like Christ. Rather, it is Christ’s becoming human that paradoxically allows us to be united with Him.¹⁶

Given the seeming inevitability of unease, together with the fact that the act of prayerful contemplation is not one wherein we cease to be ourselves, I think it likely that the solution to Locke’s diagnosis of humankind’s perpetual unease-avoidance—and Philippe’s restlessness—resides not in escape, but in the unease itself. Perhaps what is most needed is to embrace the opportunity to remain in the still point—to ask what it means, as Eliot describes, to “wait without hope, for hope would be hope for the wrong thing.”¹⁷

In his Dark Night of the Soul, St. John of the Cross proposes that it is not only in the certain light of day where God may be found but instead in the darkness of night:

“In that happy night,
In secret, seen of none,
Seeing nought myself,
Without other light or guide
Save that which in my heart was burning.

That light guided me
More surely than the noonday sun
To the place where He was waiting for me,
Whom I knew well, And where none appeared.

O, guiding night;
O, night more lovely than the dawn;
O, night that hast united

The lover with His beloved,
And changed her into love.”¹⁸

As we proceed through this Lenten season, let us not hasten too quickly to the fullness of reassurance offered in the Resurrection; rather, let us learn to wait well, recognizing that our discomfort leads us to gaze upon Him who comforts us, even as he himself shares in our sufferings.¹⁹

1. This is not to say considerations about plagiarism should be one-dimensional. For thoughtful considerations dealing with these topics, I highly recommend Rachel B. Griffis, “Plagiarism as the Language of Ownership: Aligning Academic Liturgy with Christian Virtue,” Christian Scholar’s Review, January, 2020 and Jane E. Kim, “Writing in the Time of ChatGPT,” Christian Scholar’s Review, Jan. 16, 2024.
2. See the recently published article: Traynor Hansen, “Faithful Writing Pedagogy in the Age of Generative AI” A Sabbath-Grounded Approach” in Christian Scholars Review, March 11, 2025
3. I imagine this is the result of numerous factors, including especially the need for faculty to have measurable evidence of classroom success, ultimately to provide this evidence to accrediting bodies, etc.
4. John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Co., Inc, 1996), 101.
5. Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 102.
6. Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 103.
7. Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 104, (emphasis mine).
8. think of Eliot’s “distracted from distraction by distraction” [T.S. Eliot, “Burnt Norton,” from Four Quartets (New York, NY: Harper Collins, 1943, renewed 1971), III.101.
9. Father Jacques Philippe, trans. George and Jannic Driscoll, Searching for and Maintaining Peace: A Small Treatise on Peace of Heart (Staten Island, NY: Society of St. Paul, 2002),
10. Philippe, Searching for and Maintaining Peace, 34.
11. Philippe, Searching for and Maintaining Peace, 26.
12. Philippe, Searching for and Maintaining Peace, 34.
13. Philippe, Searching for and Maintaining Peace, 34.
14. Philippe, Searching for and Maintaining Peace, 34.
15. It is interesting here to consider that after Adam and Even sinned, having been tempted by the Devil to eat of the fruit of the tree in order that they might be like God, knowing good and evil, they were no longer able to commune with God in the same way. This is the first foreshadowing of the exchange I am suggesting here: either one becomes self-satisfied by procuring his own reassurance, or one practices inhabiting the unknown while gazing upon Jesus, allowing for the possibility of a wholly different species of satisfaction.
16. Romans 5:1-5, Romans 6:5, 1 John 3:2.
17. “I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope / For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love, / For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith / But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting. / Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought: / So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing. (T.S. Eliot, “East Coker,” Four Quartets (New York, NY: Harper Collins, 1943, renewed 1971), III.123­–128.
18. St. John of the Cross, trans. David Lewis, Dark Night of the Soul (Charlotte, NC: TAN Books, St. Benedict Press, 2010), xxii (stanzas III-V).
19. 2 Corinthians 1:5.