The sleep we cannot outsource
Two questions I keep coming back to. They are easier to ask now that I work with AI every day.
The first: I’ll spend a third of my life unconscious. Eighty years on this planet, twenty-six of them with my eyes closed and my body shut down. Why did God build us this way? AI doesn’t sleep. GPUs don’t get tired. Why the deep, embodied, non-negotiable nightly shutdown for humans?
The second: Piper and N.T. Wright have argued for almost twenty years about what Paul meant by “justification” and “the righteousness of God.” Both are careful readers. Both love Scripture. They still cannot agree on what Paul, writing two thousand years ago, was getting at. I can ask an AI this afternoon to read every commentary ever written on Romans, in any language, within seconds. It will not tell me what Paul meant. The two human scholars have given their lives to that question and arrived at different answers. The text resists.
What both questions have in common is what makes them strange in the age of AI. They are about limits — bodily and intellectual — that AI does not have, that we do, and that we cannot engineer away. They are about what it means to be a creature rather than a tool.
Once you sit with that, a bigger question follows. The whole frame of being-a-creature assumes there is someone who made the creatures. Is there? Is God real?
I’ll take that in two ways. The historical case, which you could argue with a stranger about. And the personal case, which you can’t.
Sleep
You can stop at the neuroscience and call it engineering. A maintenance window for the wetware. Memory consolidation, glymphatic flush, growth hormone, immune recovery. The system needs to clear cache and re-index. That tells you what sleep does. It doesn’t tell you why God insisted on it.
Because he did insist. There is no path around it. You can stretch sleep for a few nights with caffeine and adrenaline, and you will pay the cost in attention and judgment and eventually in your body. Stretch it long enough and you die. Sleep is one of the few things in human life that money cannot buy your way out of and that discipline cannot defeat. The body shuts you down on the body’s schedule.
That’s the part I keep coming back to. We have invented our way around almost every other constraint. Hunger, distance, cold, heat, disease — civilization is largely the project of engineering away the limits that used to define us. But sleep stays. It is the daily reminder that you are a creature, not a tool.
The tech industry would love to fix it. Melatonin gummies, sleep tracking rings, polyphasic schedules, the whole wearables economy — all pitched on the same premise, that sleep is a constraint to be minimized. Christian theology turns that backward. Sleep is something to receive rather than optimize. It is closer in spirit to a meal at a table than to a build queue you are trying to drain.
The Psalms hear something in the rhythm. “He gives sleep to those he loves.” (Psalm 127:2) And later: “He who watches over Israel will neither slumber nor sleep.” (Psalm 121:4) The contrast is the point. Eight hours of being unconscious every twenty-four is God’s daily way of saying you are not the one keeping this thing running. Lay it down.
In Genesis 2, after he finishes creation, God rests. Not because he was tired — Isaiah is clear he doesn’t grow weary. He rested to set the pattern. Sabbath is the macro version of sleep, weekly rather than daily. If even God rested, who am I to think I should be the exception? The whole rhythm of the Christian week — six days of work, one of rest — and of every day — sixteen hours awake, eight asleep — is built around the same theological fact. You don’t run the world.
And then there is the older reading I keep finding harder to dismiss. Augustine called sleep a small death. Every night you lay down, lose consciousness, surrender control, and trust that you will wake up. Most people don’t consciously make that trust. We’re too tired by the end of the day to notice. But it is being made, every night. Sleep is, among other things, a rehearsal of the bigger laying-down at the end. The Christian who closes her eyes nightly in the trust that morning will come is being trained, slowly, to face the final closing with the same trust. The resurrection is the answer to both.
That’s the part that catches me when I think about AI. AI doesn’t sleep, but it also doesn’t experience anything. It doesn’t wake refreshed because it never grew tired in any way that has to do with being a person. Not sleeping isn’t strength. It is the absence of a kind of life God seems to have wanted us to have.
Piper and Wright
The argument gets technical fast. Imputed righteousness vs. covenant faithfulness. Whether “works of the law” means generic legalism or Jewish ethnic boundary markers. Whether justification is about being declared right with God or being included in his family.
I used to find this distressing. If two of the best readers of Paul alive can’t agree, what hope do I have?
I see it differently now. Paul wrote into specific situations in a thought-world we no longer inhabit, in a language we’re still translating. He left writings the church has been working over for two thousand years and we are still finding things in them. Two careful scholars arriving at different readings isn’t a bug. It’s evidence the material is deep.
Here is the interesting thing about AI in this. I have asked the models I use to lay out the Piper-Wright debate. They do it well. They list the positions, the citations, the lineage of the disagreement. What they cannot do is tell me which one is right. Not because the information is missing — they have access to every text. They cannot tell me because the question is not the kind of question a tool can answer. It requires reading Paul the way Paul wrote — as a person, embedded in a tradition, with something at stake. The Piper-Wright argument is not a data problem. It is a creaturely activity. Finite minds working hard at infinite material, in conversation with each other and with the dead, with their lives in the balance.
That’s the part AI does not do. It reads. It summarizes. It does not stake itself on what it finds. “Now we see in a mirror dimly,” even the best of us. AI does not see at all.
The question underneath
Stop here. Why am I worrying about how Paul should be read, or what sleep means theologically, if I’m not first sure God is there? Both questions assume the conclusion.
I’ve held this question loosely most of my adult life. I’ve watched enough good people lose their faith and enough thoughtful people find it to want to look at it honestly.
Is anyone home?
The historical case
If Christianity is true, it’s true because of a specific event. Jesus of Nazareth, executed by the Romans around AD 33, came back to life three days later. Paul says it plainly: “If Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless and so is your faith.” (1 Corinthians 15:14)
That’s an unusual kind of claim. Most religions ground themselves in inner experience or philosophical argument or scripture handed down. Christianity grounds itself in something that, if it happened, happened in space and time and had witnesses. That makes it testable in a way most religious claims aren’t.
Paul, writing around AD 55, quotes a creed listing Jesus’s death, burial, resurrection, and appearances to named witnesses. Scholars across the theological spectrum date the creed itself to within a few years of the crucifixion — sometimes within months. There’s no period of legendary development that makes the story plausible. It’s too early. The Christian movement begins in Jerusalem while eyewitnesses are still alive to contradict it.
The empty tomb is attested in all four gospels with details that point to authenticity. Women are the first witnesses. In the first century, women’s testimony wasn’t legally accepted in many contexts. If you were inventing a story to sell to a Greco-Roman audience, you wouldn’t put women at the center of your founding witness. The detail survived because it was true.
James, the brother of Jesus, was a skeptic during the ministry. He became leader of the Jerusalem church after seeing the risen Jesus and was eventually executed for that confession. Paul went from persecutor to apostle on the Damascus road and was executed too. These aren’t friendly witnesses being polite. They are people who turned their lives inside out and stayed turned.
And the church itself wants an explanation. A movement of Galilean fishermen centered on a crucified rabbi spread across the Roman world in three centuries against active persecution. The explanation the first Christians gave under torture is that they had seen Jesus alive after his death.
None of this proves God exists. A skeptic can offer alternatives. Hallucination. Stolen body. Legend. The strength of the case isn’t that no alternative is possible. It’s that no alternative accounts for the data as well. Wright’s The Resurrection of the Son of God lays it out at 700+ pages. The short version is that the resurrection, taken seriously as a historical claim, makes more sense of what we see than its alternatives do.
What is striking is that AI has not changed this case. The evidence available to a careful reader today is the same evidence the church has worked with for two thousand years. The data set is closed. The question is what you do with it. AI cannot do anything with it. It can list the arguments. It cannot weigh them and commit.
The resurrection is the hinge. If Jesus rose, the God he claimed to represent is real.
What the Bible says he is
The God Christianity points to is specific. He has a story.
He made the world and called it good. He chose Abraham’s family to be the channel of blessing for everyone else. He freed slaves from Egypt and gave them laws. He put up with centuries of his people’s failure to keep covenant, sending prophets to call them back. He came himself, eventually, as Jesus — fully God and fully man, a paradox the church has never tried to solve, only to confess.
He is holy, which in Hebrew means set apart, unlike anything else. And he is love, in the giving-yourself-away sense, not the sentimental one. The cross is the central image: God taking on his own creation’s evil and burying it.
He sees individuals. The Bible is full of names history would have lost track of and he didn’t. Hagar in the desert. Ruth the Moabite. Mary in Nazareth. “Even the hairs of your head are numbered.”
Compare what AI does. AI processes your data. It does not see you. The model has no users in the sense that matters. It does not love anything, because it does not love. The Christian claim is that there is, in fact, someone who sees and who knows. A real attention by a real person. The Bible’s most repeated phrase, in different forms, is some version of “I have called you by name.”
And he is coming back. Christianity isn’t a religion of moral self-improvement while waiting for death. It’s waiting for a king to return and put the world right. In the closing of 1 Corinthians, Paul slips in a single Aramaic word: Maranatha. Come, Lord.
That’s the God whose existence I’m asking about. Not a spiritual force. A specific person with a specific story.
The personal case
The historical case gets you, at most, to “probably.” It rules out cheap dismissal. It can make Christianity intellectually respectable. It can’t make God real to you.
For God to be real to me, something has to happen that I can’t fake.
This is the part of the post AI cannot help with at all. Everything I am about to describe is the kind of evidence only a person can have. AI can read about every category. It cannot have any of them. That is the point. The evidence for God in a person’s life is precisely the evidence AI lacks access to.
I’ll be honest about what I’ve seen.
Prayer. I prayed for years without believing much was happening. Most of the time it felt like talking to the ceiling. Then there were the other times. Times I sat in the quiet afterward and felt, for lack of a better word, known. Times I prayed for someone specific and watched something change in them and in me.
The Korean church I grew up around has a tradition of early-morning prayer. Saebyeok gido. People show up at the sanctuary at five in the morning to kneel in the dark before work. I used to roll my eyes at it. I don’t roll my eyes anymore. The pre-dawn hour does something no other hour does. You are emptied of your daytime defenses. You are alone with whoever is or isn’t there. The people who hear God aren’t the ones with extraordinary spiritual gifts. They’re the ones who showed up.
AI can simulate a prayer conversation, with whatever theological flavor you want. The model has no one to pray to. The whole shape of prayer — addressing someone — is what AI does not have access to and what we do.
Scripture. There have been days I opened to a passage I had read fifty times and it landed like a letter delivered to my door. Not because the words had changed. Because I had, and the text seemed to know it. This is what believers across centuries have meant by calling Scripture living. A verse you have skipped a hundred times stops you cold.
Other people. The clearest evidence of God in my life hasn’t come through dramatic moments. It has come through the cumulative kindness of his people. Pastors who took time with me when I had nothing to give back. An older couple in the church who modeled a long marriage I wanted to imitate. Friends who showed up when I was at my worst and stayed. I have met too many people who have been quietly changed in ways that resist any tidy naturalistic explanation I can construct.
AI can be helpful. It can be patient with you in a way an exhausted spouse cannot. What it cannot do is show up. It cannot bring soup. It cannot sit in silence with you in a hospital. The presence I am describing is not an information service. It is the embodied attention of one creature toward another, which is one of the things God seems to have built creatures to give to each other.
Conviction. There’s a particular weight I’ve felt hundreds of times, after I’ve done or said something I shouldn’t have. It isn’t fear of being caught. It’s the sense of having grieved someone who was paying attention. It usually comes with a specific way back. A purely material universe could produce shame. I’m less sure it could produce this. It feels like being corrected by a parent who loves me.
Marriage. My wife and I were married on January 29, 2000 — twenty-six years now. I’ve come to believe marriage is one of the places God shows up most, precisely because it is so hard. You can’t fake love across twenty-six years. You can’t fake patience with someone who has seen you at your worst. Either the resources come from somewhere larger than you or they run out. I’ve watched them not run out, in my marriage and in others. Some of that is the work of two people. Some of it is something else.
AI can give you marriage advice. It cannot be wrong with you for twenty-six years and stay. The thing that makes marriage hard, and the thing that makes it evidence, is the same thing — that you cannot opt out and stay honest.
Suffering. When something I cared about was falling apart. When someone I loved was sick. When I was awake at three in the morning afraid. Those have been the moments when I was, repeatedly, not alone. I can’t prove that to you. You can’t disprove it to me. These are experiences that count as evidence only to the person who had them. I dismissed mine for years. I don’t dismiss them anymore.
AI does not suffer. It cannot meet you in suffering, because it has never been there. The Christian God did go there — that’s the whole point of the incarnation. He met us in the place AI cannot reach.
If God is real, this is how he would meet a person. Not by overwhelming you with proof. By being available to anyone who actually looks.
What I haven’t answered
I haven’t done suffering at the level it deserves. Or hiddenness. Or other religions. Or the church’s failures, which are real and many. Or the long stretches when God has felt absent.
I don’t have tidy answers to those. What I can say is that every alternative framework I’ve tried has its own hard parts, and the Christian one has been the one that, for me, holds together the most of what I see. The moral weight I feel. The beauty I keep noticing. The love I’ve received. The suffering I can’t make sense of without believing it matters to someone.
Faith isn’t the absence of doubt. It’s walking forward with the doubt in hand.
But it all seems so random
Some days, none of this lands. I look at my life and the design feels arbitrary. Why sleep, why this much sleep, why this body, why these particular hard things in these particular years, why a marriage that has the shape mine has, why a career that has gone the way mine has. It doesn’t look like a plan. It looks like a random walk through the available options.
That is an honest feeling and I have it more often than I admit.
The only thing I can say to it is this. Inside time, looking forward, almost everything looks random. Looking back, the same events start to develop shape. The job that fell through that I needed at the time, that turned out to be the wrong job. The conversation I almost didn’t have. The friend who showed up because of a series of small accidents that didn’t feel like accidents when I was inside them. Small mercies that I missed in the moment and only noticed years later.
AI sees patterns instantly. It looks at a dataset and the structure pops out. We don’t get that view of our own lives. We are inside the data. The pattern, if there is one, only develops shape in retrospect, and even then partially. That is not a deficiency of human cognition. It is what being inside a story feels like.
The Christian claim isn’t that life looks ordered while you are living it. The claim is that there is an order, that the person holding it is good, and that one day what looked random will look made.
Paul wrote, “We see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face.” (1 Corinthians 13:12)
I am not asking anyone to believe that on my say-so. I am saying that, if it is true, the experience of randomness is not evidence against it. It is what creatureliness inside time feels like.
Where I land
So yes. As far as I can tell, he is real.
The historical case is stronger than it gets credit for in casual conversation. The Bible reads, over enough years, like a coherent story told across more than a millennium by people who didn’t coordinate it. The church, for all its failures, is somehow still here and somehow still making people more loving than they would otherwise be.
In my own life, the slow direction of things — patience I didn’t have, calm in places I used to panic, love for people I would once have written off — is going somewhere I didn’t aim it. The arc is wrong for self-improvement. I know what I can engineer in myself. This is more.
The two questions I started with — sleep, and Piper and Wright — turn out to be about the same thing as the question of God. Sleep is the body’s daily admission that we are not running the world. Theological argument is the mind’s admission that we are not the author of the text. Both are creaturely. AI lacks both, and AI also lacks what creatureliness opens onto. The model can summarize Paul. It cannot stake itself on what Paul says.
What AI is missing is what brings us close to God. Sleep, doubt, conviction, suffering, marriage, the slow shaping of a person — these are not the gaps in our design. They are how we know we are not alone.
I don’t have all of it figured out. Most days I show up, pray, fail at something, go to bed, sleep the eight hours I didn’t earn, and start over. That’s the evidence I can offer. It hasn’t gotten old.