I have a friend who once told me he was praying for his mother’s health. In the next breath, he described, with great anxiety, the specific qualifications of the surgeon who would be performing her heart bypass.
It’s a pattern I see everywhere once I start looking. People who profess that their fate is in God’s hands will still look both ways before crossing the street. People who believe in a grand, predestined plan will still work tirelessly to get their startup funded.
To my mind, this seems like a bug. A glaring contradiction. If I truly believed an omnipotent being was in control, my actions would be, at best, redundant. At worst, they’d imply a lack of faith. I would be simultaneously holding two models of the world that are mutually exclusive. It’s like trying to believe the sky is both blue and not-blue at the same time.
But I’ve come to realize that treating this as a simple contradiction is to misunderstand what’s really going on. It’s not that people are actively holding two contradictory beliefs. It’s that they’re running two different operating systems on the same hardware, and they switch between them unconsciously.
Let’s call them the Physics Kernel and the Metaphysics Kernel.
The Physics Kernel is the OS we use for navigating the tangible world. It’s ruthlessly empirical. Its rules are consistent: fire is hot, gravity is real, infected wounds require antibiotics. When I’m working through a logical problem, I’m running the Physics Kernel. If I don’t, I won’t get to a valid conclusion. Success in this realm is defined by measurable, repeatable outcomes.
The Metaphysics Kernel is the OS people use for navigating meaning. It handles questions the Physics Kernel has no answer for: Why are we here? What is a good life? Why do we suffer? What happens when we die? This kernel isn’t built on verifiable proofs, but on stories, traditions, and subjective feelings of transcendence. Its purpose isn’t to be factually correct, but to be emotionally and existentially functional. It’s designed to manage the profound terror of being a conscious being in a silent universe.
I see most people live their whole lives switching between these two kernels without noticing. When their car breaks down, they boot the Physics Kernel and call a mechanic. When they contemplate their own mortality, they boot the Metaphysics Kernel and find comfort in prayer or purpose. For them, there’s no conflict, because the two kernels are designed for different tasks.
The problem, and the reason this bothers me, is that my mind runs a constant logic linter in the background.
As a systems-thinker, I’m driven to find a consistent model for how everything works. My mind is trained to spot inconsistencies as bugs that need to be fixed. When my linter sees someone running both kernels, it throws a fatal error: Incompatible Systems. I see spaghetti code where others see a working application.
What feels like a delusion to me is, for them, an unexamined default. Most people are not the developers of their own belief systems; they are users. They inherit a system that, for the most part, works. It helps them build communities, raise families, and endure tragedy. They have no reason to inspect the source code, so they never see the messy parts I do.
And I can see there’s a reason for that. To uninstall the Metaphysics Kernel is a terrifying prospect. It means facing the biggest questions of life with an answer of “I don’t know.” It means accepting that the universe is not designed for your comfort. It’s clean, from my logical standpoint, but emotionally it’s like stepping out of a warm house into a blizzard with no coat.
So when I see this duality, I’m seeing an unexamined solution to the two hardest problems of life: how to survive, and how to endure survival. The frustration I feel is the frustration of a systems architect looking at a product that was designed not by an architect, but by its users.