AI and the Subjective Crisis of Knowledge
Paul Scherz and Luis Vera
Journal of Religious Ethics, June 2025
Religious ethicists have observed how the threat of AI-generated texts, images, andvideos accentuates the problems of a “post-truth” world already linked to algorithmsthat foster misinformation and echo chambers. There is also a less discussed problemoccurring in science as it becomes increasingly dependent on AI’s analytic techniques,shifting toward statistical knowledge and probabilistic prediction, which is creating areproducibility crisis. Neither experts nor laypeople can fully trust the seeming factsthey confront, driving a deeper, subjective crisis of knowledge. This epistemologicalinstability creates ethical problems, since a person’s relationship to knowledge isan essential component to the constitution of subjectivity. Many philosophers andtheologians have historically embraced practices of the self that can aid in the properformation of the subject’s relationship to knowledge. By turning to the practices ofthe self that philosophers and theologians have used to respond to prior crises of the subject, this essay suggests practices by which people might be able to restore their judgment.