Research Methodology
"The best way to find out if you can trust somebody is to trust them."
---Ernest Hemingway
Transparency in the Age of AI
As I mentioned in the introduction, this project has two distinct but interrelated components: learning more about the Beatitudes and their alignment with other faith traditions, and exploring how artificial intelligence can support rigorous research, analysis, and writing. In the spirit of intellectual honesty that should characterize any serious inquiry, I want to be completely transparent about the role AI platforms played in creating this work.
We live in a moment of rapid technological transformation that is reshaping how knowledge is created, verified, and shared. AI tools have become powerful research partners, capable of processing vast amounts of information, identifying unexpected connections, and helping scholars explore questions that might otherwise require years of solitary investigation. But with this power comes responsibility—the need for new methodologies that harness AI's capabilities while maintaining the rigor and integrity that serious scholarship demands.
This project represents one attempt to develop such a methodology. The approach I describe here will likely be obsolete within months as AI platforms continue to evolve at breakneck speed. But I hope this transparency will serve two purposes: giving readers confidence in the accuracy and integrity of the content they've just encountered, and providing a potential model for other researchers navigating the new landscape of AI-assisted scholarship.
The Multi-Platform Workflow
Rather than relying on a single AI system, I developed a workflow that leverages the distinct strengths of different platforms while building in multiple layers of verification and human oversight. The process typically involved six distinct stages:
Stage 1: Conceptual Exploration with ChatGPT
I began each chapter by engaging in extended conversations with ChatGPT to brainstorm ideas, explore connections between traditions, and identify the most compelling aspects of each Beatitude. ChatGPT's conversational strengths made it ideal for this exploratory phase, helping me discover unexpected parallels—like the relationship between Jesus' "meekness" and the Taoist concept of wu wei, or the resonance between Islamic ṣabr (patient perseverance) and the blessing on those who mourn.
Stage 2: Research Verification with Perplexity
The initial draft was then subjected to rigorous fact-checking using Perplexity, an AI platform specifically designed for research applications. Perplexity excels at identifying and verifying sources, checking the credibility of references, and filling gaps in analysis. This stage often revealed errors or oversimplifications in the initial draft and suggested additional avenues for exploration.
Stage 3: Synthesis and Refinement with Claude
The research findings and critiques from Perplexity were then provided to Claude, along with the original draft, to create a revised version that incorporated the scholarly feedback while maintaining consistency with previous chapters in tone, structure, and approach.
Stage 4: Secondary Verification
The revised draft returned to Perplexity for another round of source verification and fact-checking, ensuring that no errors had been introduced during the revision process and that all claims remained properly supported.
Stage 5: Platform Iteration
Drafts typically bounced between Perplexity and Claude until all identified issues were resolved, which usually occurred by the second revision cycle.
Stage 6: Human Expert Review
The final AI-generated draft was then reviewed by a human scholar with expertise in comparative religions, providing an additional layer of verification and often suggesting refinements that no AI system had identified.
Why Different Platforms Matter
The decision to use multiple AI platforms reflects the reality that different systems have evolved distinct capabilities, strengths, and limitations—much like human experts in different fields.
ChatGPT proved invaluable for its conversational sophistication and ability to synthesize information across disparate domains. Its strength lies in pattern recognition and creative connections—helping me see, for instance, how the Beatitudes' emphasis on "inner posture" resonates with Confucian concepts of moral cultivation or Buddhist teachings on mental states. However, ChatGPT can sometimes prioritize completing a request over accuracy, particularly in extended conversations where context begins to drift.
Perplexity demonstrated exceptional research capabilities, able to identify and verify sources across multiple academic databases while flagging potentially unreliable information. Its integration with real-time web search proved particularly valuable for checking recent scholarship and ensuring that cited sources actually contained the claims attributed to them. Perplexity's limitation lies in its more constrained conversational abilities—it's less effective for exploratory brainstorming but superb for verification.
Claude excelled at synthesis and writing, demonstrating remarkable ability to maintain consistent tone and structure across multiple chapters while incorporating complex feedback from multiple sources. Claude's strength in understanding context and maintaining coherence across long documents made it ideal for creating final drafts that felt unified rather than assembled from disparate parts.
The Critical Role of Context and Prompting
One of the most important discoveries in this process was the critical importance of providing appropriate context to AI systems. Insufficient or unclear context is the primary reason AI platforms sometimes produce unreliable results—what researchers call "hallucination," though it's more accurately described as the system's attempt to fulfill requests based on inadequate information.
The foundational context I provided to all three AI platforms was:
"You are a PhD-level scholar of comparative religions, with especially deep experience in biblical history and Christianity, as well as Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, and Taoism. You have no foundational bias toward any religion. When I ask questions you will evaluate using information only from recognized academic and experienced sources, and not use any speculative information from lower quality sources."
Each platform then received additional specific instructions tailored to its role in the workflow. ChatGPT was instructed to prioritize creative connections while acknowledging gaps in knowledge rather than fabricating information. Perplexity received detailed instructions about source verification and scholarly rigor. Claude received the most extensive prompting, including specific instructions about maintaining series consistency, incorporating expert feedback, and balancing scholarly accuracy with accessibility.
This layered approach to prompting proved essential for maintaining quality control throughout the process. By clearly defining the role each AI system should play and the standards it should maintain, I was able to harness their respective strengths while minimizing their individual limitations.
Unexpected Discoveries and Limitations
The AI-assisted research process yielded several unexpected discoveries that likely would not have emerged through traditional research methods alone. The ability to rapidly explore connections across multiple religious traditions revealed patterns and parallels that might have taken years to identify through conventional scholarship. For instance, the specificity of convergence between Jesus' teaching on "those who mourn" and Buddhist insights into suffering, or the remarkable similarity between the Beatitudes' understanding of "pure in heart" and various traditions' concepts of spiritual integrity.
However, the process also revealed important limitations. AI systems, regardless of their sophistication, lack the intuitive understanding that comes from lived experience within religious traditions. They can identify textual parallels and scholarly connections, but they cannot fully grasp the experiential dimensions of spiritual practice that often give these teachings their deepest meaning. This is where human insight—both my own reflections and expert review—proved irreplaceable.
Additionally, AI systems inherit the biases present in their training data, which predominantly reflects Western, English-language scholarship. This meant that some perspectives, particularly from Global South traditions or non-English sources, may be underrepresented in the analysis despite my efforts to seek diverse viewpoints.
Quality Assurance and Verification
The multi-layered verification process proved essential for maintaining scholarly integrity. The combination of different AI platforms catching each other's errors, followed by human expert review, created a robust system for ensuring accuracy. In several instances, Perplexity identified misattributed quotes or oversimplified characterizations of complex theological concepts that had slipped through the initial drafting process. The human expert reviewer then provided cultural and contextual insights that no AI system had identified.
This experience suggests that the future of AI-assisted scholarship lies not in replacing human expertise but in creating hybrid methodologies that amplify human insight through technological capability while maintaining rigorous oversight and verification processes.
Implications for Future Research
This project suggests several principles for AI-assisted research:
Transparency is essential: Readers deserve to know how knowledge claims are generated and verified, particularly when new technologies are involved.
Multiple platforms provide better results: Leveraging different AI systems' strengths while mitigating their individual weaknesses produces more reliable outcomes than relying on any single system.
Human oversight remains crucial: AI can enhance human capabilities but cannot replace the judgment, experience, and intuitive understanding that human experts bring to complex subjects.
Context and prompting matter enormously: The quality of AI output depends heavily on the quality of input—both in terms of specific instructions and the broader context provided.
Verification must be systematic: The speed and apparent authority of AI-generated content makes rigorous fact-checking and source verification more important than ever.
Limitations must be acknowledged: AI systems have significant constraints, particularly around cultural understanding and experiential knowledge, that researchers must actively address.
The Future of AI-Assisted Scholarship
As AI capabilities continue to evolve, the methodologies described here will undoubtedly seem primitive within a few years. But the underlying principles—leveraging technological capabilities while maintaining scholarly rigor, transparency about methods, and commitment to truth over convenience—will likely remain relevant regardless of technological advancement.
The goal is not to replace traditional scholarship but to enhance it, enabling researchers to explore questions and connections that would otherwise remain beyond reach. In the case of this project, AI assistance made it possible to conduct a comprehensive comparative analysis across multiple religious traditions while maintaining the depth and rigor that such a study demands.
The result, I hope, is work that demonstrates both the potential and the limitations of AI-assisted research—showing how these tools can serve human curiosity and insight while reminding us that the most important questions about meaning, wisdom, and human flourishing still require the irreplaceable contributions of human reflection and experience.
Perhaps most importantly, this methodology enabled me to approach the Beatitudes not just as a scholar of one tradition examining others, but as a fellow human being exploring the universal patterns of wisdom that seem to emerge wherever people seriously grapple with what it means to live well. In that sense, AI became not just a research tool but a bridge—helping me discover connections across traditions that point toward our shared humanity and common longing for lives of meaning, justice, and peace.