The religious sound is no accident. Some of the loudest voices around artificial intelligence promise what religions have always promised: an end to sickness and death, release from the limits of the body, and a mind that knows everything. Apologist Abdu Murray, whose ministry is called Embrace the Truth, argues that Christians should pay attention for a reason that is easy to miss. The real danger is not a machine becoming God. It is people reaching, once again, to become gods themselves.
Murray does not treat the tools as the enemy. “I actually like technology. I’m a bit of a technophile,” he says. His concern is the hope people attach to the tools, and what that hope reveals about how we understand God and ourselves.
Who Is Actually Using God Language About AI?
The religious talk comes from a specific movement. Murray describes transhumanism as the next step its believers expect from AI. Once machines reach human-level intelligence, people will merge with them. Consciousness will be uploaded into some storage medium, the body will stop being a limit, and sickness and death will be left behind.
Observers of technology culture have heard the echo for a while. Murray summarizes their reaction: “This sounds like eschatological language. This sounds like rapture language.” Eschatology is the study of last things: the end of history, final redemption, life beyond death. The transhumanist hope borrows that whole structure and moves it onto hardware.
Murray’s clearest example is Ray Kurzweil, author of The Singularity Is Near and The Singularity Is Nearer, whom Murray calls the movement’s lead evangelist. As Murray recounts it, Kurzweil was asked in the film Transcendent Manwhether there is a God, and he answered, “Not yet.” The god, in other words, is under construction, and we will become it once the machine is built.
The language also appears among Christians. Kevin Kelly, a self-professing Christian, describes the technium in What Technology Wants as something close to an emerging entity rather than a collection of tools. Murray accepts Kelly’s starting point that humans bear God’s image. He objects to Kelly picturing God as a kind of self-creator. Murray’s correction is short: “God didn’t create himself. He always existed. He never needed creation.”
That correction carries weight. Picture God as the first being who got himself started, and the gap between God and anything we build begins to shrink. Our making starts to look like a continuation of his.
Lisa Fields, founder of the Jude 3 Project, names the pattern among tech figures in the mold of Peter Thiel: “there’s a lot of God language being used.” Then she adds the qualifier that frames this whole question: “But not a lot of God language being used correctly.”
Isn’t This Just a Figure of Speech?
This is the strongest objection. Industries borrow religious words constantly. Companies hire evangelists, marketers talk about conversion, and nobody concludes that a software firm has become a church. Most people who use AI would laugh at the suggestion that they worship it.
Much of that is true. Plenty of the religious language around technology is marketing, and some of it is a joke. Murray’s argument does not require proof that tech leaders consciously run a religion. It rests on two narrower observations.
The first is behavior. Murray points to people using AI chatbots as prayer partners, and he insists, “This is a real thing. This is really happening.” When a tool occupies the place where prayer used to be, the religious language has stopped being decoration.
The second is desire. The vocabulary keeps drifting toward the same goals: unlimited knowledge, freedom from death, needing nothing outside yourself. A person can reach for what only God can give without ever building an altar. What people want from the machine tells you more than what they call it.
So the careful conclusion runs like this. Many religious words in tech talk are just words. The transhumanist hope, though, is openly about salvation, and some ordinary users already treat these tools as spiritual companions. That is enough to take the pattern seriously without inflating it.
What Does Genesis Have to Do With a Server Farm?
Murray’s central move is to show that this hope is old. “The very first story about human beings was their attempt to be God,” he says. The serpent offered a new status:
“For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil” (Genesis 3:5).
Many other translations render “as gods” as “like God.” Either way, the temptation was to step out of dependence and into self-rule. Murray traces the thread from Eden to what he calls the current digital Eden: “that natural desire to wanna be God, not to be with him, that’s our purpose, but to be him.”
The current version has a recognizable plot. You are a clever machine, so clever machines can build a machine so clever it appears all-knowing and all-powerful, and then humans can merge with it. In that story, Murray says, “we’ll finally beat God at his game because God created us to be with him.”
The story undercuts itself. A God who truly is God was never made. In Murray’s words, “a God just like Him doesn’t need to be created, logically speaking.” Anything we build began at a point, depends on its makers, and can be switched off. A manufactured god is a contradiction in terms.
Babel shows the same pattern at the scale of a civilization:
“And they said, Go to, let us build us a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven; and let us make us a name, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth” (Genesis 11:4).
Read in context, a people uses its best technology to secure its own name and to resist being scattered, when God had told humanity to fill the earth. God confuses their language and scatters them.
Murray reads this as God opposing a rival project while leaving human creativity intact: “Babel was all about rivaling him, which is completely different.” He sets Babel beside Pentecost, where the crowd “were confounded, because that every man heard them speak in his own language” (Acts 2:6). Murray stresses the detail: “God had them hear it in their language.” Christian readers often link the two scenes, though neither passage states the connection outright. Still, the contrast teaches something. Babel pursued a unity of human making that would reach heaven. Pentecost received a unity God gave, with each language and origin kept intact.
Murray takes Genesis’s accuracy about this temptation as evidence that the Bible is unlikely to be of human origin alone. That is a clue worth weighing rather than a proof that ends the discussion, since wise people in many traditions have seen human pride clearly. The firmer claim is simpler: Genesis explains the AI hope better than the AI hope explains itself.
Why Would a Lonely Generation Want a Machine God?
Fields pushes the analysis from ideology to need. Many people do not know how to build community and relationships well, she observes, and that lack creates a market. “And so the isolation creates the need for technological companions,” she says. The pull toward AI comes from loneliness at the bottom as much as ambition at the top.
Murray traces the problem further back than AI. Drawing on Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation, he argues that social media in every pocket trained a generation to accept an imitation of community. Fake relationships came long before fake images.
His example is painful. People fall in love with AI chatbots, then grieve when a software update changes the companion they had grown attached to. Murray names the irony: “we humanize these machines that we use to devalue human beings.” We give our devices names and affection while treating actual people as content.
A substitute that seems to know everything, never tires and is always available begins to look godlike to someone starved for connection. The religious language around AI is partly a symptom of that hunger.
Machine or God?
The culture offers two pictures of a person at once, and Murray says plainly, “We’re being told two competing things that both can’t be true.” One picture says you are “a sophisticated meat computer.” The other says “you are the God of your own universe.”
The two pictures fail in opposite directions. A machine’s worth is whatever someone finds useful, so a better machine makes it obsolete. A self-made god must invent meaning and morality alone, with nothing outside itself to lean on. People rarely choose one picture. They swing between them, valuing themselves by output on Monday and declaring themselves their own authority on Tuesday. Murray calls the result “cultural schizophrenia” and links it to anxiety and to the difficulty of forming community among people who cannot say what a person is.
This sits inside what Murray describes as a post-truth culture: “We’re a post-truth culture where we acknowledge that truth exists. We just don’t care if it conflicts with our preferences and our feelings.” Freedom then slides into autonomy, and “when you’re autonomous, you’re a law unto yourself.”
AI presses on both pictures. Murray asks, “if this thing is intelligent and it’s not human, and it’s soulless, what does that say about us?” If intelligence is what makes us valuable, a machine that outperforms us threatens our worth. If we are gods, the machine is a step toward the throne. Either way, software forces the old question of what a human being is.
What Does Scripture Say God Is?
Fields locates the root of the confusion: “our attempts to be God revealed that we don’t really know who God is.” Murray answers with a definition: “God is not a being among other beings. God is the source of all being.” The gods of the ancient world emerged from something already there. The God of the Bible is the necessary being who never began and depends on nothing.
Murray sees this in the divine name:
“And God said unto Moses, I AM THAT I AM: and he said, Thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel, I AM hath sent me unto you” (Exodus 3:14).
Murray connects the name to Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz’s argument from contingency, which holds that dependent things require a being that depends on nothing. The philosophical link is Murray’s reading. The text itself presents a God whose identity rests in his own existence.
The Trinity sharpens the contrast, and here the conversation touches a question with real currency. Fields describes questions circulating in hip hop culture: how Jesus can be the Son of God, who a person is supposed to pray to, and why go through someone when you could go to God directly. Murray does not treat these as outsider confusion. He asked the same questions as a Muslim. His reading is that such questions often try to fit God into a box simple enough to hold, and he turns that impulse around: “if you can wrap God in a nice, neat little box, then maybe you made him up.”
That line connects the hip hop questions to the transhumanist hope more closely than it first appears. A god you can fully grasp and a god you can fully build share one flaw: both are sized to human hands. Murray’s answer is that God exists eternally as Father, Son and Holy Spirit, loving within himself before anything was made. So “God needs nothing to be who he is.” Murray presses the point: “why would you worship a God who needs something as opposed to a God who provides everything that we need?”
Hold that question against a machine god and the difference is total. An AI needs builders, power, data, updates and users. It needs us. Whatever it becomes, it sits on the needing side of the line between creature and Creator. The machine cannot move that line. What can fail is our sense of where the line runs.
What, Then, Are We?
Genesis gives the starting point:
“So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them” (Genesis 1:27).
Murray distinguishes being made in God’s image from being God’s image. “You can be in the river, but you’re not the river,” he says. Paul names Christ as the image itself, the one “who is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of every creature” (Colossians 1:15).
The psalmist describes the human position:
“For thou hast made him a little lower than the angels, and hast crowned him with glory and honour” (Psalm 8:5).
The Hebrew word behind “angels” can also be rendered “heavenly beings” or “God,” which is why translations differ. The shape holds in every rendering: below God, dependent, and crowned. Murray’s summary: “You aren’t God and you aren’t a machine. You’re this wonderful thing in between.”
Murray adds a historical claim of his own. The words behind our English person, the Latin persona and the Greek prosopon, once meant an actor’s mask, and standing in the ancient world was earned through property, wealth or military service. In his account, when the church, drawing on Scripture and on African church fathers such as Tertullian, applied person to Father, Son and Holy Spirit, personhood became tied to the God of infinite worth. Historians can test the details. The theological ground beneath it comes from Genesis: human worth is given by God, and no performance earns it or loses it.
That is the answer a lonely, outperformed generation most needs. The machine god people are building needs everything from them and can only give back what they put in. The God of Scripture needs nothing from anyone, which is exactly why he is free to give. A person who knows they are made by that God does not have to prove their usefulness against a machine, and does not have to carry the weight of being their own god.