Some aphoristic mathematician, John von Neumann or someone, is supposed to have said “In mathematics you don’t understand things, you just get used to them”, and as much as that’s a joke, it’s what it means to work with necessary truths. A theologian might say it about divinity.

Aaronson and O’Donnell both called Huang’s paper the “book” proof of the sensitivity conjecture, referring to Paul Erdős’ notion of a celestial book in which God writes the perfect proof of every theorem. “I find it hard to imagine that even God knows how to prove the Sensitivity Conjecture in any simpler way than this,” Aaronson wrote.

Cartesian logic and geometry offer a pragmatic usefulness that shows no signs of diminishing, more than three hundred years after their inception, and in spite of immense cultural and technological changes to the society they serve. But, while Cartesian thought and method succeeded in freeing science, and therefore technology, from the grip of religion per se, it maintained the adversarial Biblical relationship between the domain of the human and the realm of ‘Divine’ nature.

There’s a robust school of theologians who conceived of a God with attenuated powers. They understood that a truly humanistic faith demands a deity with such limits. This doctrine requires that humans relinquish their need for certainty—and for an intelligence who can provide definitive answers—and instead accept life as an irreducible mystery. If science persists in its quest for superintelligence, it might learn much from this tradition.