Take two magnets, snapped together, like you did at school. Now pull them apart, and turn one around, if you can. Feel that jump, the slide—the invisible cushion that seems impossibly tangible. Its rounded edges mesmerise as you stare at the space between, where something seems to be, and yet isn’t.

Now think of Bach, who famously couldn’t bear to leave a musical phrase hanging in the air. Or the Two Ronnies sketch where each man finishes the other’s sentence with the wrong wellingtons. Curious sensations like these come flooding back sometimes when you’re using conversational AI. Have you noticed? A kind of unspoken glass ceiling—disorienting, slightly adrift. Like you’re handed a new thought, but as you chase it, the rabbit hole swerves like a gaslighting frenemy.

“Mind the gap,” says the railway announcer—who might just as well be speaking of the space between the fingertips of Adam and God in Michelangelo’s mural. Not because God’s arm isn’t long enough, but perhaps because the same finger designed the cosmic separation of Genesis 1. That space between heaven and earth is the site of juxtaposition: perichoresis, the choreography of Trinity, the condition for encounter. What it is not, is nothing.

To watch what happens on the screen, you have to be far enough back—though not too far. Bullough’s old insight still holds: the sweet spot is where disbelief is suspended, neither pressed up against the stage nor wandering off down the street. Proximity. Psychical distance. Everything depends on it. Theatre director Peter Brook made the same point. How easy it is to make it too much about performance, or too much about the textbook. Holiness abides somewhere in between.

This special kind of nothingness carries its own charge—something qualitatively different from sheer absence. What’s certain is that you can’t force it, rush it, or fake it. You can only—well, and that’s the question. Observe the effects of magnetism when it can’t itself be seen? Intuit how the sentence ends, even when it doesn’t? It’s as if meaning has a life of its own. Perhaps knowing without having things spelled out is part of what makes humans such peculiar conduits.

Talking about these spaces between—these “non-spaces"—quickly takes us to the edge of language. We keep circling the same resistance, trying to pin down a silence that slips away as soon as we name it. Pretentious-sounding abstractions pile up until you wonder if anything is really being said at all. Especially now. Language has become a commodity. Cheap content stuffs, pads, thickens, saturates.

And yet—on a hard day—you can grab a coffee and rustle up an instant AI pep talk in the style of Joel Osteen. It may almost as well be him. It’s all words, isn’t it? Words, words, words.

You know the real luxury?

Silence.

Sacred space.

Elbow room.

Talk may be cheap.

And King David said, “I will not offer to God that which costs me nothing.” His sacrifice of praise did not assume God needs our money—or even our blood. God is Spirit, and those who worship must do so in Spirit and in Truth. Whatever that means, it cannot just be more words, even the right ones. And even signs and wonders don’t count if we do not actually know Him, says Jesus. Relationship. Intimacy. Presence.

Scripture repeatedly refuses substitution. Job is given no explanation. Naboth’s vineyard is an inheritance, not a commodity. AI, for all its exponential scope, is incapable of this kind of knowing. It can do words—no problem. But when AI is silent, it always means something very different from human silence.

So much for parlour games with magnets and wordplay. What does this mean for ordinary life? It may all sound too high-brow to matter. But here is the thing. AI is an incomparable tool for pattern recognition, yet it cannot practice discernment. It has no skin in the game—nothing to lose, no cost to pay, no way to witness. It cannot be held accountable, or addressed, and it cannot answer.

And yet, precisely here, AI offers theology an unexpected gift. Like a camera lens that renders light visible by arresting it, AI reveals—by absence—the incarnate trajectory of human speech and silence. A litmus test, perhaps, for whatever might be meant by Spirit and Truth.