What’s the Point of Thinking?

Of all the mathematical breakthroughs by AI models this year, OpenAI may have just blown them out of the water. This week they released 722 manuscripts on long-standing mathematics problems. These included some of the biggest unsolved problems, including the Riemann hypothesis, which helps explain how prime numbers—the building blocks of all other numbers—are distributed.

[BRIEF]

The massive data dump means we don’t yet know what to make of it all: Is this genuine progress, complete nonsense, or AI stealing the ideas of mathematicians? It will take weeks for experts to dig through and understand all the results.

Even ahead of those results, mathematicians were starting to wonder if their field was over. Kevin Buzzard, professor of pure mathematics at Imperial College, London, said:

A Ph.D. student I know told me that they were stuck … in their research, and Chatgpt one-shotted it, and it made them wonder what the point of it all was.

We live in an age when it is increasingly easy to avoid intellectual effort. Can we outsource all that hard work to AI?

Meanwhile, also published this week was The New Dark Ages: The Death of Reading and the Dawn of the Post-Literate Society, a book by James Mariott. He argues that we were avoiding intellectual effort long before AI came out:

• Movies spell out the plot, signposting each important moment, because audiences are too distracted to pick up on nuance.
• The vocabulary in pop songs is shrinking, the lyrics are more repetitive, and the melodies are simpler.
• In books, the number of words in a sentence has shrunk by a third since 1930. Romance and fantasy novels still sell, as do self-help books. But sales of nonfiction and literary fiction have steeply declined.

“If culture loses its capacity to sustain complexity, readers, moviegoers and music enthusiasts may find themselves with increasingly inadequate understandings of the world,” writes Mariott in the Washington Post’s summary of his book.

• Together, the two publications show how, increasingly, we don’t want to think, and we don’t need to.

This is a spiritual crisis. In the Western world, the push for mass education and universal literacy was propelled by the belief that each individual needed to be able to read and understand the Bible to have a personal relationship with his Creator.

• Understanding the Bible required intellectual effort. The purpose of universal education was to equip all men with the means to make that effort.

But thinking is hard, and many don’t want to do it. For most today, religious imperative is gone, and AI can take away the need for deep thought to complete school or work tasks.

God created man’s mind. He intended us to think, ponder and grasp new and difficult concepts. We need that to come to understand Him. Consider the following quotes from our free booklet Education with Vision:

• “True education is nothing if not the persistent and determined training of the mind to think, act and reason like the mind of God.”
• “Jesus Christ was the greatest thinker who ever lived.”
• “When asked how he discovered the law of gravitation, Isaac Newton responded, ‘By thinking about it all the time.’ Just think about how the course of history was altered when a great thinker like Abraham Lincoln or Winston Churchill came along.”

Thinking alone is not spiritual education. Thinking like God requires the addition of God’s Spirit, which so many of the great thinkers of this world have lacked and so have been wildly off course. But thinking is an essential requirement of conversion—learning to think like God. No wonder it is under attack.

‘Middle East NATO’ Gets Activated

On Monday, Turkey and Pakistan activated their mutual defense clause with Saudi Arabia to protect the Saudis from Houthi terrorists. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has sent air defense systems, while Pakistan has sent thousands of troops, Turkish media report.

• The Houthis, a Yemen-based Iranian proxy, have been targeting Saudi shipping in the Red Sea for months. This is in retaliation for Saudi Arabia’s alleged support of the United States’ campaign against Iran.
• Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Turkey signed the Mecca Agreement on August 7—essentially a “Middle Eastern nato,” where an attack on one was an attack on all. While no country specified any particular enemies, the circumstances suggested the alliance’s purpose is to counter Iran.

Are the Houthis finished? Saudi Arabia borders Yemen and has yet to dramatically intervene against the Houthis. It is unlikely Pakistan and Turkey are planning for full-scale warfare anytime soon.

• Geopolitical Futures’ analysis was that Turkey is trying “to bolster its military power but also avoid the riskiest part of this conflict by not engaging directly in the fighting in Yemen.”

The alliance’s activation shows the three Sunni Muslim powers are serious about each other’s security. Two of the three have nuclear weapons, and Saudi Arabia is actively developing a nuclear program.

The Trumpet wrote on August 12: “The alliance’s existence suggests all three countries see Iran as a potential threat—serious enough to literally threaten the nuclear option.”

Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Turkey just activated the alliance against the Houthis. It may not take much more provocation to trigger it against Iran itself.

China’s New Overseas Military Base

The People’s Liberation Army quietly opened a new military facility in the nation of Laos last week, expanding China’s military presence in Southeast Asia and catching the United States off guard.

• China says the new Joint Flight Training and Support Center at Ban Keun Airport, 28 miles northwest of Vientiane, Laos’s capital city, will train Laotian military pilots and deepen cooperation between the two nations’ forces.
• Analysts expect the facility to function as far more than just a training center. Its nearly 1.2-mile runway can accommodate fighter aircraft and could be extended to handle bombers, transport planes and aerial-refueling tankers.

Encroaching on the U.S.: The base lies ominously close to Thailand, a U.S. treaty ally where American forces regularly train and operate military ships and aircraft.

• The development appears to have caught the U.S. off guard, as Laos was not among the nations the Pentagon listed in its December 2025 assessment as potential sites for future Chinese military centers.

Rising dragon: China already operates a military base in Djibouti in Africa and is expanding its military presence at Cambodia’s Ream Naval Base. The new facility in Laos gives Beijing another strategic foothold in Asia and another avenue for projecting military power beyond its borders—developments that take on added significance in light of the Bible’s prophecies about China’s future military role.

IN OTHER NEWS

In effort to be feared, France tests new submarine missile: On Tuesday, France test-launched its new M51.3 intercontinental missile from its nuclear submarine Le Vigilant. According to French President Emmanuel Macron, the test demonstrated “the credibility” of France’s deterrence. He added that “to be free, you have to be feared. And to be feared, you have to be powerful.”

UK prime minister visits Germany for new security partnership: British Prime Minister Andy Burnham visited Berlin today for his first face-to-face meeting with German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, where the two will launch a UK-Germany joint security partnership. The pact is meant to counter sabotage, cyberattacks and other hybrid threats through closer information-sharing and coordinated monitoring, deterrence and disruption. Biblical prophecy warns against trusting Germany.

Schröder visits Moscow on Putin’s birthday: Former German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder visited a Globus supermarket in Moscow yesterday. Schröder joined the supervisory board of Hyperglobus, the Russian spin-off of Germany’s Globus Holdings, on September 30. Media reports speculate he was there to meet Putin. While Germany and Russia appear to be at odds on the surface, extensive collaboration is taking place behind the scenes—and there is an alarming reason for it.

Using magic to find a partner: Nearly 2 in 3 Gen Z daters have turned to psychics, tarot, manifestation or paid love spells in the search for romance, according to a national survey commissioned by DatingNews. Cherry Data Signals surveyed 1,013 U.S. adults online in August. Sixty-four percent of Gen Z respondents said they had tried at least one spiritual or psychic practice to improve their love life. Nineteen percent had paid for a spell or ritual on platforms such as Etsy or TikTok. Gen Z led in manifestation or scripting (29 percent), seeing a psychic (25 percent) and visiting a tarot reader (17 percent). Millennials, at 51 percent overall, were most likely to use astrology charts.