Christians have started handing out their p(doom), the odds that artificial intelligence ends the species, and I hear it from people who professed that same morning that Christ will come again to judge the living and the dead.
The fear underneath it is worth taking seriously, and it was popularized by men with equity in what they warn us about. Anthropic’s Dario Amodei told Axios last September that there is a 25 percent chance things go really badly and a 75 percent chance they go really well, while raising capital on both. Hold what you are handed at arm’s length, whoever hands it to you.
A believer can hold that number without contradiction if it means artificial intelligence is plausibly the instrument of the final trial, after which God ends history and judges it. I am arguing against the other version, where the species deletes itself inside history and nothing follows.
What we were actually promised
Scripture is not shy about catastrophe, and past the wars and rumors of wars it goes further than most people quoting it realize, because unless those days were cut short no one would be saved, and they are cut short for the sake of the elect (Mt 24:6-8, 22). Our capacity to destroy ourselves is conceded there, with the limit sitting in God’s act rather than our restraint.
The Catechism describes a final trial that will shake the faith of many believers (CCC 675) and says the kingdom arrives only by God’s victory over the final unleashing of evil (CCC 677). My argument rests on 769, where the Church progresses on her pilgrimage amidst this world’s persecutions and God’s consolations and receives her perfection only at Christ’s glorious return. A pilgrim Church is made of living people, and she walks the whole distance.
That is an inference rather than a defined doctrine, and someone can reasonably answer that God could raise an extinct humanity and judge it, because the Catechism places the resurrection of all the dead before the Last Judgment (CCC 1038). What I conclude is mine and not the Church’s ruling: the ending we were promised has somebody left in it to receive it, and a species erasing itself offstage with no judgment and no return is fantasy wearing prophecy’s vocabulary.
One error wearing two faces
Catholics have been quick to notice that the men promising an end to scarcity and death are running a religion, citing the Catechism against a messianic hope claimed within history when it can only be realized beyond it (CCC 676). Its references point at millenarianism and at Communism, at counterfeit salvations rather than forecasts of catastrophe, so anyone telling you that text condemns doomers is laundering an inference into magisterial teaching.
The paragraph before it names the supreme religious deception as that of the Antichrist, a pseudo-messianism by which man glorifies himself in place of God and of his Messiah come in the flesh (CCC 675), and what I borrow on my own authority is the structure of that self-glorification rather than the identification. A story in which a small circle of technologists and regulators is all that stands between us and the void still makes men the authors of history, the utopian’s error with the sign flipped. Both versions hand the last act of history to us.
Whose fear this is becoming
Nothing here is Church teaching, and my faith gives me no standing you lack.
The contrast on sale this autumn is fearless China against frightened America. The Ipsos AI Monitor put China first of the thirty-two countries it surveyed this year, with more than four in five Chinese respondents calling artificial intelligence more benefit than drawback, against fewer than half of Americans, though saying otherwise in China carries a cost it carries nowhere here.
Gallup found this spring that roughly seven in ten of us oppose an AI data center going up nearby, and the opposition crosses party lines rather than belonging to either side. A number that size is worth real money before an election, and the ads for November are already being written around it, with some candidates promising statewide moratoriums while others who were enthusiasts a year ago have gone notably quiet. The worry has changed hands on a schedule too, since Republicans were the more concerned party back in 2023 and Democrats are the more concerned party now, with every point of that Democratic move landing after a president made this technology his own. Nobody writing those ads is trying to teach you anything about artificial intelligence. It’s not about what it’s about.
Two different fears are being sold to you as one. Asked why, the people who want none of it nearby name the water and the electricity bill, and those bills are real enough that nobody owes an apology for minding them. The second fear, the one where the species deletes itself and nothing comes after, is what somebody else added to your answer. A Christian of all people has no business being moved by that one in November, because his creed answered it long before any of this was built.
What is actually being amplified
What I would be afraid of is nearer and duller than extinction, because artificial intelligence is a multiplier and what it multiplies fastest is appetite. It makes whatever corrupts us cheaper and more private than ever, pornography that adapts to you and a companion that never once disagrees, while everything that builds a culture of love still costs presence, patience, and years. Prayer costs silence, and silence is the one commodity the machine cannot manufacture and has every reason to spend.
Leo XIV put the choice to believers directly, setting Babel, where collective effort follows a plan that dominates and ultimately dehumanizes, against the ruins of Jerusalem rebuilt under Nehemiah as a project of shared responsibility, then asking what we are building (Magnifica Humanitas 90). He says plainly that this is a choice we must make and can make.
A probability is not an answer to that question, because a number is something you report rather than something you answer for. The world’s ending was never our department, and what we are becoming while we wait for it is the only part of this that was ever assigned to us.
If this gave words to something you have been carrying, share it with someone who needs it.
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I think that having a p(doom) isn't just lacking sufficient trust in ultimate eschatological hope. It's a mis-read of the moment, and the data.