AIdolatry and Worship in the Singularity

Remarks at the 2026 Council of the CREC

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Introduction

The singularity is the moment when man and machine together enter into a runaway feedback loop of autonomous self-improvement, such that technological change takes off like a rocketing pheasant, and where out on the plains of Shinar, we have an army of programed robots, which are industriously applying bitumen to all the bricks for the zigguraut.

Yes, I said bitchumen, looks like bye-two-men, and we all learn something new every day. But then Grok pulled me back from the brink by telling me Americans say it the way it looks.

The frothing and surging field of AI is of great interest to Christians because it is of great interest to everybody—but we, of all people, ought to make sure that our interest in the subject is biblical, grounded, sustained, and intelligent.

So what I want to do here comes in two parts. First I want to review certain aspects of the AI challenge that I have addressed before in other places. But then, in the second place, I want to conclude with a set of exhortations that build on these observations and are fitting for a gathering of pastors and elders.

Considerations: Staying Suspicious and Being Pragmatic

While I do want Christians to keep all their suspicions on high alert, I believe that any attempt at a blanket ban of AI will be counterproductive in the short run, and practically impossible in the long run. There will be benefits, undeniable benefits, and if we try to fight this by denying the undeniable, the end result will be that nobody will heed our warnings about any of it, including the things that really are screaming horrors. I believe we must grant the good, not because the bad is not so bad (it is bad), but because you can’t fight bad things by means of intellectual dishonesty.

As for the practical impossibility of steering clear of it, imagine sitting down twenty years from now for a quiet game of Scrabble with your wife, and the board buzzes at you angrily because you put down some tiles that were not a word. You have the option of appealing it, but the judge is a community fact checker in Singapore.

Another example. You go to toast your English muffin in the morning, and the toaster says, “Are you really sure you want that setting? You didn’t like the results yesterday.”

When Nancy and I were first married, we had an old Rambler that at times needed engine work. When that happened, I could pop the hood, climb in, and work on the engine while standing on the pavement. Today what you see when you pop the hood is wall-to-wall electronic features that nobody asked for. That is where all the AI gremlins are going to be housed in the future.

We are now in the market for a washer and dryer, as our old Speed Queen needed to have its jersey retired. And for the life of us, Nancy cannot find a dumb washer or a dumb dryer. We would like to have a washer that does not have any back doors that could be accessed by the CIA, or by Google, or by the Rothschilds.

But Keep Your Old Suspicions Also

In recent months, there has been more than a little stoking of the AI fears. I am not talking about reasonable and judicious concerns, but rather about the Doomsayers. Not a zombie apocalypse, but something almost as good—a robot apocalypse. We have just x number of decades before, you guessed it, “the extinction of the human race!”

Now I have just two things to say at this point. I have read my Bible multiple times, including the parts about the future of our planet, and there is nothing in there that resembles this kind of cataclysm. We are not going to go down before an army of pitiless Roombas. That’s one thing.

The second thing is this. The panicky note that is being sounded about AI reminds me an awful lot of something that happened to all of us not all that long ago. I am referring of course to the COVID hysteria. And it turned out in that situation that there was indeed a threat, but the threat was not from the little virus, but rather from the CDC. In other words, it was just the kind of danger that the government would like to step in and offer to save us from. Be on the lookout for the same kind of thing here.

As Mencken says somewhere, the expressed desire to save the human race is a thinly disguised desire to rule it.  Friedrich Hayek said something in a similar vein: “‘Emergencies’ have always been the pretext on which the safeguards of individual liberty have been eroded—and once they are suspended it is not difficult for anyone who has assumed such emergency powers to see to it that the emergency will persist.”

And now . . . now we are being told that AI is going to kill all the . . . [checks notes] kill all the polar bears. No, wait. My index cards got mixed up. Kill all the people, that’s it. The revolt of the smart tools is coming, and we need to prepare, people!

AI is a grave threat. We need government controls! Regulators! We need a cabinet level position that will protect us from the Reckless Proliferation of Memes. Now I cheerfully grant that AI could become a very bad thing. But our current form of government is, right this very minute, a very bad thing. Whatever happens, let us not put them in charge of saving us, whatever we do.

Please take note of the fact that the people who were saving the polar bears, and the people locking you away from the virus, and the people demanding you take an experimental vaccine, and the people decrying the imminent AI-geddon . . . are all the same people. They are the people who think you can cool down the planet through paying higher taxes.

You may not have noticed it, but I most certainly have. Those who have this libido dominandi have decided to come down to our little corn field in order to switch out the scarecrows. The climate change scarecrow was their old reliable, spanning decades. They did have to change the name of it midway—from global warming to climate change—but that was only a fluke made necessary by the fact that every time Al Gore went somewhere to speak about global warming, it snowed on him. Then there was the very effective but short-lived scarecrow that went by the name of COVID. Remember that one?

Now for the Quick Review

I divide AI into three broad categories. These are not proportioned categories, meaning that these categories are not exactly even and not to scale, but I do think that there are three of them in the main.

First there is AI as useful tool. Second, there is AI as overheated hype. And last, we have AI as “that hideous strength”—with LLM standing for Large Legion Model. So let us first conduct a quick review of examples from each of these three categories, and then move on to the ultimate issue, which is always going to be worship and the fear of God.

Lawful tool: AI serves as—a sophisticated search engine, provided there are footnotes, and they are checked; writing code for web sites, which will either function right away or not; maintenance code that will keep the initial code from going moldy; first draft translation work; searching for something you already half know the answer to; taking minutes for an online meeting; summarizing an article to help you know whether or not you should read it; and so on.

Uses of applications like the one just mentioned are a double-edged sword. The summary of an article could really help you decide whether to waste your time on the article. But the summary might also help you to pretend that you had in fact read the article. So lawful tool might be unlawful when held in the left hand, but really helpful if you held it honestly in your right.  

Overheated hype: Because we are being promised a world like the Jetsons had, there will be a bunch of businessmen who will swallow it all—hype, line, and sinker—and they will rush to be early adapters. I am already getting email business pitches to help me market some book I wrote, and the pitch was manifestly written by a bot, and they will manifestly try to market my book by sending out ad copy that was written by a Chinese bot, one that was still struggling with how the subjunctive works in English.

I don’t know what it is exactly, but when I see one of those ads that say “Idaho drivers save on insurance” accompanied by a picture of an attractive middle-aged blonde, I know instantly that the thing is AI, and I am not sure how I know. I also know how much I don’t like it. And while it might be making your ad campaigns get out there faster, it is certainly not helping it get out there better. How many of you have called some big corporation to cancel a credit card or something, but then bailed on the conversation because you were just going to be bounced around between bots for an hour?

Demonic: if it is possible for a man to stand before a stone idol that he himself carved, and to bow down to it, how much more will it be possible for unregenerate man to worship the work of his hands in this new realm? Remember that the point of all worship is to somehow get back to the tree of life. The guardian cherub blocked the way back to Eden for a reason, and that was because God intended to provide us a way back to the tree of life through the gospel, and only through the gospel (Rev. 22:2). But unregenerate man is a thief and a robber. He wants the life all right, but he intends to climb over the wall.

Here’s an idea! Clone your own body, and then have robot surgeons transplant your head onto a younger version of your own body. You can live forever! What could go wrong? Quite apart from a scriptural worldview, these people have never watched a science fiction thriller in their lives, and it shows. Of course they should heed the warnings of Isaiah, Solomon, and Ezekiel, but we can set the bar even lower than that. I would be content if they would just heed the warnings of Ray Bradbury.  

Just Watch for a Minute

“The modern age has not abolished idolatry; it has merely sanded the faces off the statues and given them better lighting. Idolatry is still what it always was—the attempt to park a created thing in the throne-room that belongs to the living God alone—and our particular gods are the self, the state, the screen, and the swelling wallet. We do not bow before carved Baals in the living room, but we do expect financial security, reputation, sexual identity, and the next algorithmic oracle to do for us what only the Maker of heaven and earth can do. The danger is not that these things exist (money must still be handled, governments still restrain evil, and a phone is not itself a golden calf), but that we refuse to demote them from the god-shelf of the heart. And because we become like what we worship, a people who trust speaking devices and mute bureaucracies will themselves grow deaf to the Word, blind to the image of God in their neighbor, and increasingly unable to walk in any direction that has not been pre-approved by the spirit of the age.”

Now, appearances notwithstanding, that previous paragraph was not me. The prompt for that paragraph was this: “In the style of Douglas Wilson, please write me a short paragraph on the dangers of idolatry in the modern age.”

As I read it over, I didn’t actively disagree with anything, and a small handful of expressions seemed stilted to me, just half a bubble off, but I don’t know that any of you would have noticed it. Maybe there is a fourth category. Let’s just call it creepy.

I know some Christians who are enthusiastic and early adapters. They nod at the cautions, but they are enthusiastic about the prospects of AI. I know other Christians who take what might be called a dim view or, spelled a little differently, they take a doom view. They echo the sentiments of Mr. Beaver in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.

Subject to Fear

   

So what is the exhortation for pastors and elders? The driver of all the negative aspects of this AI revolution is fear. Fear of death, fear of aging, fear of omnicompetent tyrannies, fear of being dragged into a matrix, and so on. Fear can drag us in any direction—toward AI as an idolatrous savior, or away from AI as a monster that devours. But the actual enemy is the fear.

Jesus instructs us that we are not supposed to fear in this way.

In short, we are told not to fear what man can do. And is AI something that man can do? Yes, it is, and consequently the one enthroned in Heaven laughs, and the saints on earth are encouraged to echo that laughter. God laughs. You laugh. Then Alexa laughs. But follow me closely here. Then you laugh again.

The great Puritan John Flavel distinguished three kinds of fear. One is natural fear, a creational thing. This happens on a hike when you round a bend on the trail to encounter a grizzly. It is not sinful, but certainly exhilarating. The second kind of fear is sinful fear—fearing when God has told you not to. Do not fear what man can do. So . . . can man cook up a Wuhan virus? Can man impose draconian lockdowns on that basis? Can man insist on injecting you with a vaccine? Can man threaten your job if you refuse? How easily was the global population molded into crazy and ridiculous behaviors, and all on the basis of fear.

The third kind of fear is the fear of God, and it is the only antidote to the second kind. Fear is a powerful mechanism. When the people of God fear God and trust Him alone, a hundred will put ten thousand to flight (Lev. 26:8). When we do not fear God, the opposite happens.

When people don’t know God, they are held in bondage throughout the course of their lives, and the chain that holds them is the fear of death.

So are there any effective countermeasures to AI? Or to the negative effects of AI? Yes. And the central one is your worship service. The only antidote to the fear of man is the fear of God, and the right worship of God, offered to Him in accordance with His Word, is the prime shaper of the fear of God.

The jubilant and joyful worship of God, with unmasked congregation assembled, was profoundly attractive to those who realized with dismay that they had been members of Shaking Leaf Worship Center. Do you not remember how it was?

My point is a simple one. When it comes to the foundational issues, absolutely nothing has changed. Assemble the people of God. Sing psalms to Him. Open the Word to them. Break the bread and pour the wine. What can man do to us? Nothing that he couldn’t always do. What can God do for us? Nothing that He hasn’t always promised to do.