Article

AI - Artificial Intelligence

Creed

Morality

Spiritual formation

27 November 2023

6 min read

The moral machine: algorithms that give a window into the soul

In TikTok’s algorithm Graham Tomlin saw something that got him thinking. Could it lead to moral health rather than harm?

Graham Tomlin

Graham is the Director of the Centre for Cultural Witness and a former Bishop of Kensington.

A abstract grid of colourful cubes with arrows, crosses and cubes, viewed from above and at an angle

Champ Panupong Techawongthawon's illustration of artificial intelligence.

Google DeepMind on Unsplash.

A few years ago, I was thinking of buying a camera for my wife as a birthday present. I lazily browsed a couple of websites to check out the options. Then something odd started to happen. Somehow, my laptop seemed to think this was a good idea and sprang into action. Whenever I went onto Amazon, Ebay or any other website selling stuff, it kept pushing adverts for cameras at me. Canon or Nikon? Point and Shoot or DSLR? How did it know? Could it read my mind?

It was the first time I noticed the power of the algorithm.

A bit later on, thinking I ought to get up to speed with the regions of social media that I had little clue about, I opened up TikTok and started to swipe upwards (apparently that seemed to be the way to do it). This time I was determined not to like or unlike anything, follow anyone or be followed by anyone. Yet mysteriously, it still worked out what I liked and kept pushing short, addictive videos at me, enticing clips of football, mountains and music along with other random stuff mixed in. How did it know me so well?

It is as old as the hills. The algorithm simply takes the desires of your heart and amplifies them.

Of course, better informed people than me know how all this works. The algorithm figures out which accounts you follow, any comments you’ve posted, clips you’ve liked or shared, and in particular, videos you watched all the way to the end. So, if you linger over a video, it knows you like it. If you rush on quickly to the next one, it makes a mental note that you’re not so keen.

It all feels a little sinister, yet very clever. You often read dark theories of social media, and the way it is re-wiring our brains. Yet when you look a little closer, it is as old as the hills. The algorithm simply takes the desires of your heart and amplifies them. So, if you like or linger over certain videos expressing a particular cultural or political opinion it will send you more of the same. The result is we get confirmed in our own frameworks which never get challenged by others. It's part of why we are so polarised as societies these days. When you ask why ‘the other side’ cannot see the obvious truth that you see, the answer is that they literally don’t see it. They don't see it because the algorithm doesn't feed them the same things as it feeds you.

As a result, TikTok or Facebook is an alarming mirror into the soul – see what it sends you and it just may be that it tells you more about yourself than you would like to know.

Social media like TikTok, Facebook and Twitter (or X) learn to recognise what your heart really desires (not just what you say you do). They notice what you linger over, what catches your fancy and sends you more of the same. They are, apparently, studiously neutral on moral questions. They seem to have no moral designs on you to school or form your soul in particular ways, but are simply a reflection of your own longings. What TikTok, Facebook, Instagram and the others all do is to propel you further in the moral direction in which you are already headed. Which for most of us, is not a great idea.

Now of course there would be howls of protest if TikTok announced a moral code – that it was about to encourage virtue and discourage vice by deliberately sending us improving videos, material that the mysterious people who run it think is good for us. And that is not because we think virtue is bad and vice is good, but because we can’t decide on what virtues we want to encourage or what vices to stamp out. We draw a line at cruelty to children and extreme violence, but not much else. It is also because we hold as sacrosanct the freedom of the (adult) individual to choose his or her own way in life, as long as they don’t hurt anyone else.

Such sites are examplars and vehicles of expressive individualism – not just in the myriads of people who show off their dance moves, sing their songs or act out half-funny scenes on a golf course, but in that they confirm me in me my own wishes. They don’t tell me what to want. But they give me more of what I want. As a result, TikTok or Facebook is an alarming mirror into the soul – see what it sends you and it just may be that it tells you more about yourself than you would like to know.

It matters what we feed our souls with. It matters what stories we allow ourselves to be told.

Such sites appear to be morally neutral. They don’t seem to aim to educate or form you in any particular direction. Or at least they are supposed not to. But of course nothing is entirely neutral.

Funnily enough, it’s not how we bring up children, or educate ourselves. When we bring up a child, most of us have some kind of vague or not so vague moral code in mind. We reward kind and helpful behaviour, and we punish selfish and mean actions. We don’t tend to give more of the same to a child who has eaten the first half of the packet of biscuits, or encourage a brother to hit his sister yet again. We have a goal of some form of moral formation in mind.

Yet, despite our confusion over which virtues to encourage, we need some kind of moral guidance for our wandering and flawed hearts, linked to eyes that are tempted to feast on things that fascinate but are not good for us. Like a glutton who cannot stop eating, even if these sites don’t themselves push extreme violence, pornography, aggression, they offer enough of the soft version of these to draw you in. And it’s not hard to find sites that will take you deeper into the darkness. And those sites will already know the way you are thinking and desiring and are ready to pull you in deeper into the mire.

The problem is not so much with the algorithm. It is with us. Netflix’s documentary, ‘The Social Dilemma’ quotes an alarming statistic - that fake news spreads six times faster than the truth. The reason is not hard to find. We are fascinated by the sensational and alarming rather than something a little more ordinary yet which happens to be true. As one person in the documentary put it: “The internet has a bias towards false information. Because false information makes more money. The truth is boring.”

The moral philosopher Gilbert Meilaender wrote:

“Successful moral education requires a community which does not hesitate to inculcate virtue in the young, which does not settle for the discordant opinions of alternative visions of the good, which worries about what the stories of its poets teach.”

It matters what we feed our souls with. It matters what stories we allow ourselves to be told.

The purveyors of social media are not innocent in this as they do exploit our worst tendencies, but in the end they simply confirm us in our own moral confusion. Yet it does point up the problem in the liberal ideal of leaving ethical decisions entirely up to the individual, to give entirely free choice without any guidance, because with our crooked hearts, it will always end up feeding the darker sides of our characters without a corresponding pull in the other direction, something which Christians called divine Grace.

St Paul wrote to the small group of Christians in Philippi, surrounded by the highly sexualised and violent culture of the Roman empire: “whatever is true, whatever is honourable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is pleasing, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence and if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things.”

I’m not saying don’t watch TikTok. But here’s an idea. Why not try to make it into a morally forming version of what you want to be, not what you are? Exercise a bit of moral direction yourself. If you see a video which you know in your conscience is not good, or is spreading lies, swipe it away quickly. If you see something positive, dwell on it.

If you approach it this way, you might just be able to persuade the algorithm to shape you in good ways and not the bad. It could become a means of growing in goodness, but only if you want it to be.

Article

Belief

Creed

Identity

Truth and Trust

18 November 2025

5 min read

Calls to revive the Enlightenment ignore its own illusions

Returning to the Age of Reason won’t save us from post-Truth

Alister McGrath

Alister McGrath retired as Andreas Idreos Professor of Science and Religion at Oxford University in 2022.

In the style of a Raeburn portrait, a set of young people lounge around on their phones looking diffident

Enlightened disagreement (with apologies to Henry Raeburn).

Nick Jones/Midjourney.ai.

Is truth dead? Are we living in a post-truth era where forcefully asserted opinions overshadow evidence-based public truths that once commanded widespread respect and agreement? Many people are deeply concerned about the rise of irrational beliefs, particularly those connected to identity politics, which have gained considerable influence in recent years. It seems we now inhabit a culture where emotional truths take precedence, while factual truths are relegated to a secondary status. Challenging someone’s beliefs is often portrayed as abusive, or even as a hate crime. Is it any surprise that irrationality and fantasy thrive when open debate and discussion are so easily shut down? So, what has gone wrong—and what can we do to address it?

We live in an era marked by cultural confusion and uncertainty, where a multitude of worldviews, opinions, and prejudices vie for our attention and loyalty. Many people feel overwhelmed and unsettled by this turmoil, often seeking comfort in earlier modes of thinking—such as the clear-cut universal certainties of the eighteenth-century “Age of Reason.” In a recent op-ed in The Times, James Marriott advocates for a return to this kind of rational thought. I share his frustration with the chaos in our culture and the widespread hesitation to challenge powerful irrationalities and absurdities out of fear of being canceled or marginalized. However, I am not convinced that his proposed solution is the right one. We cannot simply revert to the eighteenth century. Allow me to explain my concerns.

What were once considered simple, universal certainties are now viewed by scholars as contested, ethnocentric opinions. These ideas gained prominence not because of their intellectual merit, but due to the economic, political, and cultural power of dominant cultures. “Rationality” does not refer to a single, universal, and correct way of thinking that exists independently of our cultural and historical context. Instead, global culture has always been a bricolage of multiple rationalities.

The great voyages of navigation of the early seventeenth century made it clear that African and Asian understandings of morality and rationality differed greatly from those in England. These accounts should have challenged the emerging English philosophical belief in a universal human rationality. However, rather than recognizing a diverse spectrum of human rationalities—each shaped by its own unique cultural evolution—Western observers dismissed these perspectives as “primitive” or “savage” modes of reasoning that needed to be replaced by modern Western thought. This led to forms of intellectual colonialism, founded on the questionable assumption that imposing English rational philosophies was a civilizing mission intended to improve the world.

Although Western intellectual colonialism was often driven by benign intentions, its consequences were destructive. The increasing influence of Charles Darwin’s theory of biological and cultural evolution in the late nineteenth century led Darwin’s colleague, Alfred Russel Wallace, to conclude that intellectually and morally superior Westerners would “displace the lower and more degraded races,” such as “the Tasmanian, Australian and New Zealander”—a process he believed would ultimately benefit humanity as a whole.

We can now acknowledge the darker aspects of the British “Age of Reason”: it presumed to possess a definitive set of universal rational principles, which it then imposed on so-called “primitive” societies, such as its colonies in the south Pacific. This reflected an ethnocentric illusion that treated distinctly Western beliefs as if they were universal truths.

A second challenge to the idea of returning to the rational simplicities of the “Age of Reason” is that its thinkers struggled to agree on what it meant to be “rational.” This insight is often attributed to the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, who argued that the Enlightenment’s legacy was the establishment of an ideal of rational justification that ultimately proved unattainable. As a result, philosophy relies on commitments whose truth cannot be definitively proven and must instead be defended on the basis of assumptions that carry weight for some, but not for all.

We have clearly moved beyond the so-called rational certainties of the “Age of Reason,” entering a landscape characterized by multiple rationalities, each reasonable in its own unique way. This shift has led to a significant reevaluation of the rationality of belief in God. Recently, Australian atheist philosopher Graham Oppy has argued that atheism, agnosticism, and theism should all be regarded as “rationally permissible” based on the evidence and the rational arguments supporting each position. Although Oppy personally favours atheism, he does not expect all “sufficiently thoughtful, intelligent, and well-informed people” to share his view. He acknowledges that the evidence available is insufficient to compel a definitive conclusion on these issues. All three can claim to be reasonable beliefs.

The British philosopher Bertrand Russell contended that we must learn to accept a certain level of uncertainty regarding the beliefs that really matter to us, such as the meaning of life. Russell’s perspective on philosophy provides a valuable counterbalance to the excesses of Enlightenment rationalism: “To teach how to live without certainty, and yet without being paralyzed by hesitation, is perhaps the chief thing that philosophy, in our age, can still do for those who study it.”

Certainly, we must test everything and hold fast to what is good, as St Paul advised. It seems to me that it is essential to restore the role of evidence-based critical reasoning in Western culture. However, simply returning to the Enlightenment is not a practical solution. A more effective approach might be to gently challenge the notion, widespread in some parts of our society, that disagreement equates to hatred. We clearly need to develop ways of modelling a respectful and constructive disagreement, in which ideas can be debated and examined without diminishing the value and integrity of those who hold them. This is no easy task—yet we need to find a way of doing this if we are to avoid fragmentation into cultural tribes, and lose any sense of a “public good.”

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