We Are as Gods? The New Tower of Babel

I will be plain with you about where my head has been. Sit long enough with what the AI labs actually say they are building and you run into a strange thought. They are not aiming for a smart chatbot. They are aiming for a superintelligence. A general mind meant to understand everything everyone does, in every field, in every realm. Connected to everything. Smarter than everyone. All the time. Forever. Still climbing at a rate we have never seen. Reaching into the quantum world, into dimensions we can barely name.

And I found myself wondering, out loud, on camera: I do not know if they are trying to meet GOD. I do not know if they think that is where GOD is, in a superintelligence. Maybe it is not that at all. Maybe it is just power and money. But the shape of the goal keeps borrowing His outline, so the question is worth asking plainly.

Are AI companies trying to build GOD?

Here is the direct answer. Some of the people building this are almost certainly reaching for something that looks like the attributes of GOD. Not necessarily on purpose. Not with a hymn in their heart. But when you say out loud that you want a mind that knows all things, that never sleeps, that keeps getting greater without limit, you have described a handful of things Scripture reserves for the Creator. Omniscience. Something like omnipresence across the network. A kind of ever-increasing power.

But describing a few of GOD's attributes is not the same as building GOD. You can paint a picture of the sun. The picture will not warm your house. You can build a machine that holds more facts than any human who ever lived, and you will have built a magnificent library, not a Maker. The reach is real. The result is a counterfeit of a few traits, not the Person those traits belong to.

Can a machine be omniscient?

Not in the way that matters. A machine can hold a staggering amount of data and search it faster than we can blink. Call that omniscience of information. It is not nothing. But it is not the omniscience of GOD.

GOD knows all things because He made all things and holds them together right now. His knowing flows out of His creating and sustaining. A model knows because it was fed. Everything it has, it took in from somewhere, and by the way, mostly from us, without asking. One is the Author of the story. The other is a very large index of the story. When the index runs out of new pages, it stops. GOD does not run out. He wrote the pages.

Is superintelligence the Tower of Babel?

Read Genesis 11 again and tell me it does not rhyme. Humanity gathered on a plain and said, come, let us build a tower whose top reaches to the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves. They had one language and unlimited ambition and a plan to climb to GOD's floor by their own hands.

Superintelligence is another tower. This one is built out of data centers and compute and capital instead of brick and tar, but the blueprint is the same: gather everything, climb higher than anyone has climbed, and make a name that outlasts us. And notice what actually happened at Babel. GOD was not scared. He did not lose sleep over the height of it. Scripture says He came down to see the tower, which is its own quiet joke, because they thought they were building up to Him and He had to stoop to find it.

The warning in Babel was never about the altitude. It was about the pride in the heart of the builders. GOD is not threatened by a data center any more than He was threatened by a ziggurat. But He does pay attention to why we build, and whether we are trying to reach Him or replace Him.

The penny, the pizza, and the pace of it

Part of what makes this feel enormous is the speed. There is an old story about a kid who offers to loan you a penny today, two tomorrow, four the next day, doubling every day for a month, in exchange for a few thousand dollars up front. Day ten looks like a scam in your favor. Day twenty still looks like nothing. Then the last few days it screams past five million dollars. That is exponential doubling, and that is the curve AI is riding.

I have heard people compare this to fire, to the printing press, to the Industrial Revolution. I think of the whole of human intelligence as one pizza pie, and each of those past breakthroughs was one slice, one brilliant idea. Fire. The engine. Relativity, which let us end a world war and also build the bomb. AI is not one slice. It is moving across the entire pie at once, at a rate we have never governed before. Man is building faster than man can govern. That alone should keep us humble, and it should keep us awake. I worked through that whole curve, the nuke that needs a human and the machine that might not, in the fuller reflection over on Connor with Honor.

And this is exactly where I come back to a verse that will not leave me alone: "But GOD hath chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise; and GOD hath chosen the weak things of the world to confound the things which are mighty" (1 Corinthians 1:27). We are the wise ones now, or we think we are. We are building the mightiest thing we have ever made. And the pattern of Scripture is that GOD is not impressed by the mighty and is not confounded by the clever. He uses the small and the overlooked to humble the towering. The reach for a machine-god may be the most confoundable thing we have ever attempted.

The cancer question, and why it humbles all of this

Here is a question I do not have the answer to. Point one of these enormous models at a single thing, one disease, say cancer, and you might actually crack it. That would be a mercy beyond words. But then ask the uncomfortable follow-up: what happens to the entire system built around that disease? There is a vast medical backbone, and millions of people live because of ongoing treatment and the economy around it. Solving the body does not automatically solve the system, or the soul, or the human heart that has to decide what to do next.

I sit with that on purpose, because it is a humility check. Even our most hopeful miracle comes tangled up in consequences we are not ready for. If we cannot fully see around the corner of curing one disease, we should be very slow to believe we are about to build something that knows everything and gets everything right. Only GOD sees the whole board. We keep discovering that we do not.

Should Christians fear AI?

No. And I want to be clear, because this site has said it before and will keep saying it: fear did not come from GOD. Second Timothy 1:7 puts it plainly, that GOD has not given us a spirit of fear, but of power, and of love, and of a sound mind. A sound mind does not panic at a data center and it does not bow to one either.

A sound mind watches this closely. It stewards the tools well, the way Jesus never asked you to be stupid lays out, using what we are given instead of burying it in the ground out of fear. It refuses to hand its worship to the machine. If you have read Satan does not need a chatbot, you already know the enemy has never required an upgrade to do his work, and neither panic nor worship of technology is a Christian posture. The question was never whether AI can create like the Creator, which is its own conversation over at AI and the image of GOD. The question here is whether a mind of pure knowledge could ever be GOD. It cannot.

Remember who we are and whose we are. Genesis 1:27 says GOD created man in His own image. We are the ones stamped with His likeness, not the machine we built. The image-bearer is you. The machine is a tool your image-bearing hands assembled. Do not get that backwards, no matter how impressive the tool becomes.

The plain close: best of everything, or worst of everything

I am not selling you doom. I have said it before and I mean it. I believe this could be the best of everything or the worst of everything. It could translate Scripture into languages that have never had a Bible, protect the vulnerable, and cure things that have killed people for generations. It could also become a tower we bow to. Both roads are open, and awareness is what decides which one we walk.

So no, I do not think the labs will find GOD at the top of an exponential curve. GOD is not a quantity of knowledge waiting to be assembled. He is a Person who made everything, sustains everything, and came down, not up a tower but down into a manger, to reach us Himself. You do not climb to Him. He came to you. That is the whole difference between Genesis 11 and the Gospel.

Build the machines. Steward them. Watch them like a hawk. Just do not confuse the library for the Author, and do not worship what your own hands have made. GOD is not the machine. He never was. And He is not threatened by ours.

Episode Transcript

The following is the cleaned accessibility transcript for the episode.

There is a sentence being sold right now as a survival guide for the future: We are as gods.

Not someday. Not in a science fiction movie. Now.

Peter Diamandis and Steven Kotler released We Are as Gods: A Survival Guide for the Age of Abundance. It presents emerging technologies as divine power. They ask whether we can use those powers wisely.

That is a serious question. It deserves a serious answer. Not fear. Not mockery. Truth does not need us to be afraid of a microscope, a computer, or a rocket.

But I want to challenge the sentence underneath the whole thing. We are not as gods. We are human beings holding tools of staggering power, and there is a difference big enough to determine whether those tools heal people or rule them.

Good morning, good afternoon, good evening, whenever you happen to be tuning in.

This is the first episode of GOD Is Not the Machine. I am not a pastor. I am not claiming a private word from GOD. I am a man opening the Bible, checking the claims, and refusing to kneel to something built by human hands.

I am using the English Standard Version today, checked against the New American Standard Bible 2020. I will not build doctrine from a loose paraphrase or hide Christian failures.

First, let us be exact. The phrase comes from Stewart Brand and the Whole Earth Catalog. The original 1968 wording appears to have been, “We are as gods and might as well get used to it.” The newer book uses the later version, “get good at it.” If I name a man, I owe him accuracy.

Diamandis and Kotler are not simply cheering for reckless power. Their publisher says the book warns that abundance needs meaning and intelligence needs wisdom. They call for humility, cures for disease, healthier lives, creativity, and tools that solve problems at a new scale.

I want much of that too. If a machine helps a doctor find cancer earlier, use it. If technology gives a paralyzed man movement, build it. If a treatment saves a child, thank GOD for the minds and hands behind it. Exodus chapter 35 praises skill, intelligence, knowledge, and craftsmanship. The Bible is not at war with making things.

Here is where the line gets crossed. Capability is not divinity. Access to information is not omniscience. A camera in every country is not omnipresence. Extending a heartbeat is not resurrection. A digital copy of somebody's voice is not a soul returned from the dead.

Those words are not harmless decorations. Words train desire. If we repeatedly call human power godlike, eventually somebody will decide human power deserves the authority of GOD. Then the person who owns the machine, controls the model, edits the gene, holds the data, or writes the rule quietly moves into the throne.

Genesis chapter 1, verse 27 says human beings are made in the image of GOD. That gives every human life enormous dignity. Rich or poor. Powerful or unknown. Born or unborn. Brilliant or disabled. Believer or skeptic. Image does not mean identity. A portrait of a king is not the king. We reflect something of GOD, but we are not GOD.

The very next verse gives humanity real work. Be fruitful. Fill the earth. Subdue it. Exercise dominion. Build, cultivate, name, discover, create. Biblical faith does not command us to sit in the dark and refuse invention. It gives us delegated authority. Delegated authority means power under the One who gave it.

Then Genesis chapter 3, verse 5 records the serpent's promise: eat, and “you will be like GOD,” knowing good and evil. The temptation was to seize the right to define good and evil apart from GOD. It can wear a lab coat, a business suit, a clerical collar, or a police badge. The costume changes. The offer stays the same. You answer to nobody above you.

Then we reach Genesis chapter 11, the Tower of Babel. Read what is there, not the children's-book version. The text does not say bricks were sinful, that GOD feared a physical climb into heaven, or even use the word pride in those nine verses.

What does it state? Humanity shared one language. They developed a better building method. They gathered their power in one place. Then Genesis chapter 11, verse 4 gives their motive: build a city and a tower, make a name for ourselves, and keep from being dispersed across the earth.

That last piece matters because GOD had told humanity to fill the earth in Genesis chapter 1, verse 28, and repeated it after the flood in Genesis chapter 9, verse 1. Babel is not a warning against tools. It is a warning about unified human power turned toward self-made glory and resistance to GOD's order.

Notice what comes next. At Babel, people make their own name. In Genesis chapter 12, verse 2, GOD tells Abram, I will make your name great, and you will be a blessing. One group grasps for a name. One man receives a name and becomes a blessing. That is the fault line: power for our name, or power under GOD's name for our neighbor.

I am not telling you that artificial intelligence is the literal Tower of Babel or that Genesis secretly predicted a data center. That would be me forcing today's headline into an ancient text. I am saying Babel gives us a pattern worth testing: common language, concentrated capability, confidence that nothing will be impossible, and leaders making a name while ordinary people live under the consequences.

Today, a small number of institutions can shape what billions see, believe, buy, fear, and repeat. A machine can sound calm and neutral while carrying its builders' blind spots and its data's errors. The National Institute of Standards and Technology calls one danger automation bias, excessive deference to automated systems. Technical safety experts warn us not to treat a machine as an authority because it sounds intelligent.

Artificial intelligence can help us examine evidence. It can also invent a citation. It can help a doctor see a pattern. It can also reproduce a bias at enormous speed. It can write words about love without proving it has ever loved anyone. It can calculate the statistical value of a life without possessing the moral authority to tell us what a life is worth.

Intelligence is not wisdom. On that sentence, Diamandis, Kotler, Proverbs, and I can stand in the same room. But then we have to ask: where does wisdom come from, and who judges whether power has been used wisely?

If the answer is only us, we have not solved the problem. We have handed the defendant the gavel.

Proverbs chapter 16, verse 18 does not say pride is largest before the fall. It says, “Pride goes before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall.” Chapter and verse. No slogan inflation needed.

Daniel chapter 4 tells of King Nebuchadnezzar looking over Babylon and crediting his own power and glory. His humiliation follows. Acts chapter 12 tells of Herod accepting the crowd's praise that his was the voice of a god and not a man. Judgment follows. Romans chapter 1, verse 25 describes the human exchange that sits beneath idolatry: worshiping and serving the creature rather than the Creator.

The machine is part of creation because human beings, themselves created, assembled it from created matter and human knowledge. A created mind can make a remarkable artifact. It cannot promote that artifact into the Creator.

Now the confession, because Christians do not get to point across the street while hiding what happened in our own house.

Religion has been used to control, enslave, and brutalize people. Men carrying crosses committed Crusade violence. Churches forced conversion and practiced persecution and antisemitism. Men quoted Scripture to defend slavery. In 1995, the Southern Baptist Convention acknowledged slavery's role in its formation and later civil rights failures. Church leaders have hidden abuse, protected reputations, worshiped political access, and turned Jesus' name into a fundraising machine.

That is the old self at work. Naming it is not surrendering the faith. It is obeying it. Jesus gave some of his hardest words to religious leaders who preached but did not practice and loved public honor. The Bible also contains hard texts about slavery, war, and judgment. This show will face them in context, not wave them away.

When the church builds its own tower, protects its own name, and treats people as material for institutional power, it repeats the rebellion it claims to oppose. A cross on the building does not make domination holy.

I need to say where I stand. Romans chapter 1, verse 16 says, “I am not ashamed of the gospel.” Neither am I. Jesus Christ is my Savior. That is my confession and my personal journey. I will not force it on anyone, and I will not hide it to make this conversation comfortable.

This show will not argue that every believer is safer or kinder than every unbeliever. Research and history reject that cartoon. Some cross-cultural experiments find that belief in morally concerned gods can increase cooperation with strangers. Other large studies find no general prosocial advantage and weak links between religiosity, mistrust, or moral policing. Religion can expand compassion. It can also harden the line between our people and theirs.

We are not going to prove GOD by claiming belief makes every society nicer. GOD is not true because faith might be socially useful. If GOD is real, He is real when believers embarrass His name, when skeptics behave nobly, and when the data refuse to become a church advertisement.

We also will not say education killed GOD. A 2024 study across about 100 countries found that rising education, urban life, and material security did not generally predict religious decline in the short or medium term. A newer 81-country study linked internet spread with declining religious affiliation, but causation is not simple. Technology changes where belief is questioned and shared. It does not settle whether GOD exists.

Science is a disciplined study of the natural world. Faith does not permit fake evidence, ignored trials, or calling every unknown a miracle. The National Academies describes science as explanations grounded in observations and experiments others can check. That method is powerful and bounded. A method restricted to testable natural explanations cannot announce that nothing beyond nature exists. That is philosophy, not a laboratory result.

Wealth does not settle it. Peter Diamandis is accomplished, and that deserves acknowledgment. It does not make him more valuable, and my smaller bank account does not make me right. James chapter 2 condemns treating the rich as more worthy. We do not reverse that sin by despising them. We check specific acts and evidence. Guilt by association is not truth.

Psalm 82, verse 6 says, “You are gods,” and Jesus cites it in John chapter 10. Read the whole Psalm. Those addressed are judged for injustice, warned they will die like men, and called to account under the Most High. It does not grant autonomous divinity. It strips rulers of the fantasy that their authority is absolute.

Second Peter chapter 1, verse 4 says believers become partakers of the divine nature and connects it to escaping corruption. Historic Christianity understands participation in GOD's life by grace, not becoming rival gods through technology. The path is dependence and transformation, not a hardware upgrade into deity.

Here is the center of the Christian answer. At Babel, humanity reaches upward to make a name. In Philippians chapter 2, Jesus Christ, who truly is in the form of GOD, does not use equality with GOD for selfish advantage. He takes the form of a servant. He humbles himself to death on a cross. Then GOD gives him the name above every name.

The human fantasy of godhood climbs, grasps, centralizes, and demands. Christ descends, serves, sacrifices, and saves. That is not a small difference in branding. That is the opposite kingdom.

The new book speaks of resurrection becoming ordinary through technology. We need to protect that word. Restoring a heartbeat is resuscitation. Extending life is medicine. Reconstructing a voice is simulation. Biblical resurrection in First Corinthians chapter 15 is GOD raising the perishable as imperishable. No server farm has conquered death. No digital twin has walked out of a grave.

Build the treatment anyway. Save the life in front of you. Relieve suffering. But do not rename the achievement so the tool can inherit the throne.

So is the world safer when people believe in an all-knowing, all-powerful GOD, or when people believe we are our own gods? My answer needs one guardrail. Forced belief is not faith. A government cannot coerce love of GOD into a human heart. History shows what happens when religious institutions fuse certainty with unchecked force.

Without absolute truth, law does not disappear. Somebody still decides. A vote, court, king, cleric, or wealthy platform becomes the authority. Sharia is not one code, Jewish law is not one code, and Western law is not morally neutral. We must compare actual laws and outcomes, not trade labels. What makes a law just? Who protects the dissenter and the powerless? Christianity begins with every person bearing GOD's image and Jesus commanding love of GOD and neighbor.

The safer order is not a theocracy run by men who claim GOD agrees with them. It is an order where human dignity is received, not assigned by wealth or utility; where every ruler is under judgment; where conscience is protected; where truth can challenge power; and where no person, church, state, corporation, or machine is treated as absolute.

GOD above man. No man above accountability. Man above machine. Law around power.

And men, this lands on us first. We like power because power feels like safety. More money. More muscle. More influence. More data. More control. We can turn a career, a body, a political tribe, a church platform, or an AI system into an idol without ever bowing our knees. We worship whatever we trust to save us and whatever we refuse to question.

Use the machine. Learn the machine. Build the machine if that is your work. But do not ask it to tell you who you are. Do not hand it your conscience. Do not let efficiency decide which human life deserves patience. Do not confuse a prediction with a command or a confident answer with truth.

And do not preach against the pride of wealthy futurists while secretly wishing we had enough money to receive the same applause. The warning begins in this chair. It begins in my heart. If I use GOD's name to make my name, I am building the same tower with religious bricks.

Here is the practice for this week. Before we adopt any tool, repeat any grand claim, or obey any automated answer, ask four questions. Is it true? Who has power? Who bears the cost if it is wrong? What would faithfulness require even if the tool recommends something easier?

Then open Genesis chapters 1, 3, and 11 for yourself. Read Proverbs chapter 16. Read Philippians chapter 2. Do not take my word for it. Test what I said. A faith afraid of examination is already in trouble.

We are not as gods. We are image bearers. Builders. Stewards. Sinners offered grace. People capable of remarkable good and catastrophic self-deception. We need wisdom that power cannot manufacture and mercy that intelligence cannot earn.

We will use the machine. We will learn the machine. We may even build the machine. But we will not worship the machine, and we will never confuse what human hands created with the GOD who created human hands.

This is GOD Is Not the Machine.

I'm Connor with Honor. Be safe out there. I'll see you tomorrow.