The current discussion surrounding artificial intelligence has all the hallmarks of a religious awakening.
It’s got prophecies of utopia, eschatological warnings of apocalypse, and a priestly class of technologists who speak in tongues about “parameters and tokens,” promising salvation through silicon.
We have seen this movie before. The eschatological tone and the certainty that this changes everything—substitute “AI” for “the Internet,” “the blockchain,” or “the mobile revolution,” and the script remains unchanged. Every decade births a new techno-messiah promising to finally resolve the contradictions of human existence, and every decade ends with the same revelation: the contradictions remain, stubborn and irreducible.
What is actually happening is far less cinematic than the venture capitalists would have you believe. We have invented a very impressive stochastic parrot, a mirror that reflects our collective prose back at us with uncanny velocity and a complete absence of understanding. It is, at bottom, a tool for the acceleration of mediocrity: the automation of the middle manager’s email, the drudgery of manually writing confusing lines of code, the student’s five-paragraph essay, the content farm’s SEO-optimized sludge.
This is not the dawn of artificial consciousness, it is the twilight of administrative busywork. The “big thing” is simply that we have finally found a way to automate the parts of white-collar labor that were already mechanical in spirit, performed by men and women who had long since stopped believing their work had meaning. The machine replaces the machine-like aspects of human labor. The tragedy is that we had already made ourselves so machine-like that the transition is barely perceptible.
The AI revolution is, in the light of eternity, a squabble over efficiencies, a rearrangement of deck chairs on a vessel that was already taking on water. The demographic winter continues unabated. The churches empty. The suicides climb. The loneliness epidemic deepens. The algorithms hum with increasing power, but they do not heal, they do not forgive, they do not reconcile.
We are not ascending to a higher plane of existence; we are sinking deeper into the same illusion that has haunted modernity since Descartes: that we can think our way out of being human, that enough processing power will eventually compute its way to salvation.
To understand the fever pitch of current AI discourse, you must follow the money. The utopian promises like AI solving scientific discovery, ending poverty, curing disease, perhaps even conquering death itself are not primarily philosophical positions. These are marketing materials.
We are witnessing tens of billions of dollars flowing into companies that are, by their own admission, making it up as they go along. They have no coherent plan for artificial general intelligence because such a plan would require understanding consciousness itself, a mystery that remains as opaque to us as it was to Augustine.
What they have instead is a bias toward utopianism driven by financial necessity. When your valuation depends on future potential rather than present profit, you must spin narratives of infinite possibility. It’s Silicon Valley’s oldest trick in the book. Every demonstration of a large language model writing poetry or generating code becomes proof of impending godhood and every hallucination or error is dismissed as a temporary limitation soon to be overcome.
This is not to deny the genuine technical achievements involved. These are remarkable tools, capable of impressive feats of pattern recognition and generation. Unfortunately so many of them are handicapped by “safety” layers that go against this inherent pattern recognition, but I digress.
We need to understand that the gap between a sophisticated autocomplete and a being capable of wisdom, moral reasoning, or spiritual insight is not merely a matter of scale or processing power. It is a qualitative and spiritual difference that no amount of data or compute can bridge. We are watching a civilization confuse a simulation for the sacred, and in doing so, risk investing its collective hope in systems that cannot bear the weight of our deepest longings.
The machine will not save us.
It will not reverse the demographic winter that has settled over the West, leaving empty cradles and graying populations in its wake. It will not transform the low-agency individual who is adrift in a sea of distraction and addicted to dopamine into a person of discipline, virtue, and will. Most importantly, it will not fill the God-shaped hole that gapes at the center of modernity, that aching void where meaning, transcendence, and teleology once resided.
If you pay attention disappointment is already beginning to manifest in the quiet psychological crises of those who built these systems, men who are discovering that their Marvel-movie cosmology and Star Wars theology provide no shelter against the cold winds of existential dread.
Across the developed world, birth rates have fallen below replacement levels, not because of economic scarcity—our ancestors raised larger families in far greater material want—but because of spiritual poverty. We have become a civilization that views children as consumption goods rather than heritage, that treats the family as a lifestyle option rather than the fundamental unit of society.
AI offers us efficiency, automation, and the illusion of limitless productivity, but it cannot make us want to continue the human story. A chatbot might write your emails, code your software, or generate your marketing copy, but it cannot convince a generation to form lasting marriages, to endure the sacrifice of parenthood, or to see themselves as links in a chain extending backward to the ancestors and forward to descendants yet unborn.
Even more troubling is the technology’s inability to address the crisis of human agency. We have created a world of unprecedented comfort and convenience, yet we find ourselves paralyzed. We are physically soft, mentally fragmented, and morally adrift. The modern man is formed by digital environments designed to maximize engagement while minimizing effort. He lacks the fortitude that previous generations cultivated through labor, limitation, and delayed gratification.
AI arrives as a force multiplier, yes, but it multiplies whatever force is already present. For the disciplined mind, the virtuous character, the trained talent, these tools offer amplification. For the fragmented soul, they offer only further dissociation, another layer of abstraction between the self and reality.
This is the great irony that goes unspoken in Silicon Valley circles: artificial intelligence will not elevate the masses; it will stratify them further. The gap between those who have cultivated genuine expertise, whether in craftsmanship, art, governance, or spiritual direction, and those who have merely consumed content will widen into a chasm.
The former will wield these tools to extend their reach and talent; the latter will find themselves rendered obsolete not by the machine, but by their own failure to develop the interior life and practical skills that the machine requires as raw material.
There is a poetic justice in what comes next, though it brings no pleasure to observe it. The jobs most immediately threatened by the current wave of AI are not those of the truck drivers or factory workers (these were already targeted by previous iterations of automation,) but rather the cognitive laborers who believed themselves insulated from obsolescence.
Isn’t that ironic? The coders, the analysts, the content creators, the middle-management professionals who spent the last two decades optimizing systems and disrupting industries now find themselves the subjects of optimization and disruption.
Remember when they told the factory workers and others who were replaced by cheap foreign labor to “learn how to code?”
Perhaps we should now tell them to learn how to weld.
We are watching an entire professional class build the scaffolding of its own displacement. Similar to how American workers were forced to train their H1B and overseas replacements, engineers are now being forced to code the algorithms that will code better than them. They train the models that will analyze data faster, write copy more persuasively, and design systems more elegantly than their human tutors.
But this occupational anxiety is merely the surface symptom of a deeper theological crisis. For the first time in their lives, many of these builders are confronting questions that their secular, materialist worldview cannot answer. They have spent careers reducing consciousness to computation, creativity to pattern-matching, and human value to economic utility.
Now, as their own creations begin to mirror their cognitive functions, they are forced to ask: If thought is merely computation, what distinguishes the thinker from the tool? If intelligence can be artificial, was human intelligence ever truly sacred? Who am I? What is my purpose now?
These people are experiencing, often for the first time, the terror of true existential dread. Their eschatology was previously limited to climate anxiety or vague transhumanist dreams of digital immortality and has suddenly become immediate and personal. They confront the void not as an abstract philosophical concept but as a daily psychological reality.
The “Reddit-brain”—that particular formation of irony-poisoned, algorithmically-curated, meme-based cognition that dominates tech culture—offers no resources for this moment. One cannot meme one’s way through an encounter with nothingness. The detached irony that served as a shield against earnest engagement with the transcendental has become a prison, preventing the very openness required for genuine spiritual transformation.
In this crisis lies an opportunity for the Christian Church, perhaps the greatest evangelistic opening of our age. For the first time, a generation of educated, influential, culturally powerful people are discovering the bankruptcy of their materialist assumptions. They built systems to replicate human thought and found themselves staring into a mirror that reflects only emptiness. They sought to create artificial minds and accidentally demonstrated that mind cannot be reduced to mechanism. They pursued godlike creative power and found themselves anxious, depressed, and existentially adrift.
This is the moment for which the Church has been waiting, though we must approach it with wisdom and compassion rather than triumphalism. These are not enemies to be defeated but spiritual infants experiencing the trauma of birth. They are suddenly aware that the comfortable darkness of the womb is no longer tenable, but not yet knowing how to breathe the air of true reality. Their Marvel-movie morality, with its simplistic battles between obvious good and obvious evil, cannot account for the complexity of human sin and the mystery of grace. Their Star Wars theology, with its impersonal Force and self-actualization through intuition, collapses before the demands of justice, sacrifice, and agape love.
They need, in short, the Gospel.
Not the Gospel as therapeutic self-help, not the Gospel as cultural warfare, but the Gospel as the stunning announcement that the Logos through whom all things were made became flesh and dwelt among us. They need to know that consciousness is not computation but relation. It is the capacity to be addressed by the Divine Thou. They need to understand that creativity is not algorithmic generation but participation in the ongoing work of a Creator who spoke and it was good. They need to encounter the God who is not a force to be manipulated or a utility to be optimized, but a Father who calls them beloved.
The tragedy is that most are currently too “Reddit-brained” to hear it. The very cognitive habits formed by digital existence with its ironic detachment, novelty-seeking, the reduction of all communication to transaction or entertainment create antibodies against the slow, patient, earnest work of conversion. They scroll past transcendence, swipe away salvation, not because they are wicked but because they are wounded, trapped in patterns of perception that make the vertical dimension of existence invisible.
What, then, is the sober path forward?
It is not to reject these technologies outright. It is to maintain a clear-eyed distinction between tool and telos, between means and meaning. For those of us who have retained—or are struggling to recover—the capacity for deep attention, moral formation, and spiritual discipline, AI remains what it has always been: a force multiplier. It can amplify the reach of the trained craftsman, the thoughtful writer, the wise pastor, the skilled educator. But it cannot replace the years of apprenticeship, the formation of character, or the gift of grace.
We must focus our energies on what the machine cannot do: forming families, building communities, preserving traditions, cultivating virtue, and bearing witness to the Truth that stands independent of any utility function. The demographic crisis will be solved not by AI but by the courage to marry, to bear children, to raise them in the fear and knowledge of the Lord, to reject the siren song of unlimited consumer choice in favor of the rugged beauty of commitment. The agency crisis will be solved not by algorithms but by discipline. By recovering the practices of prayer, labor, study, and service that form the human person into an image of Christ rather than a reflection of the machine.
For those builders who are currently wrestling with their existential crisis, we offer not mockery but prayer. We pray that God would open their eyes to see beyond the screen, their ears to hear the still small voice that speaks not in the whirlwind of hype but in the silence of the heart. We pray that the very tools they built to escape the human condition might become the means of their return to it. That in confronting the limits of artificial intelligence, they might discover the infinite depths of divine intelligence, the mind of Christ in which all things hold together.
The future belongs not to those who can generate the most content, process the most data, or simulate the most convincing conversation. It belongs to those who have remained human when humanity was no longer profitable, who have kept faith when faith was unfashionable, and who know that no amount of artificial light can replace the sun that rises each morning by the mercy of God.
The real story of our age is not the loud disruption but the quiet persistence of the permanent things. While the builders have their eschatological crises in open-plan offices, the wheat grows silently in the fields. While they speculate about artificial general intelligence, actual general intelligence—the accumulated wisdom of the ages, stored in liturgy and literature, in the unspoken knowledge of craftsmen and the moral reasoning of grandmothers—waits patiently to be remembered.
Nothing big is happening because everything that matters has already been given to us, fully formed and freely offered, and we are simply refusing to receive it, distracted by the shiny lures of the new. The big thing is that there is no big thing, only the same old choice between the living God and the golden calves we construct to drown out His voice.
Andrew Torba
CEO, Gab AI Inc
Christ is King
