In "The God Question," a science fiction novella, a startling breakthrough in artificial intelligence is made at Stanford, producing the first superintelligent computer that surpasses human intelligence - far surpasses it.

News then emerges that the Stanford computer was allowed onto the Internet and promptly shut down hundreds of websites it found offensive. As a result, federal officials quickly shut down the computer, padlock the Stanford lab and ban any use of the program until it can be studied.

Stephen Kendrick, who runs a government supercomputer at Johns Hopkins University, previously taught with the lead Stanford researcher and was one of the key code writers for the Stanford project. And he has a backup copy of the Stanford Program.

Working in secret, Kendrick and another Johns Hopkins researcher decide to load the Stanford program onto Kendrick's supercomputer and ask it the ultimate question. Is there evidence for God, for a spiritual framework to life?

To their astonishment, the computer arrives at an answer.

Here is an excerpt:

It was not the quest for money that drove Kendrick. It was the persistent yet vague feeling since Berkeley that his work would lead to something of cultural value - although he didn't know what.

That feeling was given clarity just after he arrived at Johns Hopkins, when he read an article in The Journal of Machine Intelligence in which a Cornell University computer scientist, Jane Lui, predicted that within the next two decades computers would achieve language fluency, the ability to effortlessly understand writing and speech as well as the concepts in them. Soon after that, she said, they would likely surpass human intelligence and achieve the ability to think independently. And one of their strengths, given these talents, would be in recognizing previously undetected patterns, including social patterns, in vast amounts of written historical material. She then said "the God question" should be one of the first things such a computer is asked.

"Given access to every book, research paper, news article, letter, blog, and posting available on the Internet and elsewhere - essentially the amassed knowledge of humankind - could a superintelligent machine answer the single most vexing question for human beings: Is there evidence in any of it that God exists?

"Perhaps it can find subtle patterns in the way people's lives proceeded, in the way history proceeded, that might indicate a spiritual hand at work. Perhaps it can make a novel interpretation of history, of science - something no one has ever thought of - not by looking at life from a human's ant-high level, but by being able to take in nearly every particle of human history in one vast sweep and recognizing something that would say, 'Yes, only the existence of a guiding spiritual presence in life explains this.' It is our overriding responsibility to ask the question."

Kendrick never forgot the article. While most people, including most scientists, considered the prospect of a computer attempting to answer life's most basic philosophical question whimsical, he took it seriously. In fact, the more he thought about it, the less possible it became not to take it seriously.