Babbage saw digital computers as instruments by which to catalog otherwise inaccessible details of natural religion — the mind of God as revealed by computing the results of his work. He believed that faster, more powerful computers would banish doubt, restore faith, and allow human beings to calculate fragments of incalculable truth.

“A time may arrive when, by the progress of knowledge, internal evidence of the truth of revelation may start into existence with all the force that can be derived from the testimony of the senses,”

Of course George Dyson gives Charles Babbage his flowers.

With us entering the AI age, it’s fascinating how faster, more powerful computers don’t banish doubt or restore faith. They instead create more questions. Even with U.S.S. Enterprise levels of compute, some truth will remain incalculable.

Dyson, George. Darwin Among the Machines: The Evolution of Global Intelligence. United States: Basic Books, 2012. pg42