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| This photograph shows a figurine in front of the logo of the U.S. artificial intelligence safety and research company Anthropic during a photo session in Paris on Feb. 13, 2026. |
Abdu Murray did not come to Christianity lightly.
Born into a Muslim family of Lebanese background in the Detroit area, he spent years as a committed defender of Islam, challenging Christians whose faith often seemed more cultural than examined.
Then came a nine-year investigation—historical, philosophical, theological, and scientific—that reversed the cross-examination. By his late twenties he had concluded that the claims of the gospel held up under scrutiny. Today he is president of Embrace the Truth, an apologetics ministry, and the author of several books that wrestle with truth, identity, and culture. His newest, Fake ID: How AI and Identity Ideology Are Collapsing Reality—and What to Do About It, argues that two powerful cultural forces are converging to erode our grip on what is real—and that the deeper danger is spiritual.
In conversations surrounding the book, including with The Christian Post, Murray frames artificial intelligence less as a neutral tool or an inevitable march of progress and more as the latest expression of an ancient human impulse. Scripture, he contends, has diagnosed this impulse with remarkable consistency across millennia: human beings were made to commune with God, yet we perpetually try to become Him instead.
“One of the compelling arguments for the Bible’s credibility is how accurately it depicts the human heart and how Scripture’s depiction has remained accurate over the millennia,” Murray has said.
“Scripture says we were made to commune with God and that we perpetually try to become Him instead. Every generation supplies fresh evidence of that claim.”
The ancient pattern in a new medium
Murray points first to Genesis 3. Adam and Eve understood the stated risk of eating the forbidden fruit. The serpent’s offer—“you will be like God, knowing good and evil”—proved decisive. The consequence God had warned about did not deter them. That same dynamic, Murray argues, appears in the rhetoric surrounding advanced AI.
Silicon Valley has repeatedly reached for quasi-religious language. In a 2023 Financial Times interview, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman described the company’s real product not as ChatGPT or APIs but as “magic intelligence in the sky.” In 2024, at a London developer event, he remarked that working on the models “definitely feels like being on the side of the angels.” Elon Musk has recalled conversations with Google co-founder Larry Page in which Page wanted “a sort of digital super-intelligence… basically a digital god, if you will, as soon as possible.” Ray Kurzweil has answered the question “Does God exist?” with “Not yet.” Other figures have spoken of building God or creating new lifeforms.
Altman himself has more recently pushed back. In early October 2026 he stated he is “very uncomfortable about people trying to ascribe religious force or a surrender of human judgment to AI models,” calling it “a real safety issue.” The shift is notable, yet it does not erase the earlier framing that helped shape public and industry expectations.
Murray hears in this language an attempt to resolve what he calls “cultural schizophrenia.” Modern culture, he observes, tells people two incompatible things: that they are essentially machines—biochemical systems governed by deterministic processes—and that they are sovereign gods who can redefine reality according to their preferences.
AI and related transhumanist visions appear to reconcile the contradiction: we are clever machines who can engineer our way to godhood. Identity ideology, which Murray terms “bioclasm,” works from the other direction, asserting that feelings and self-definition override biological givenness.
Together they form what he describes as twin cultural tsunamis crashing against the dam of reality, both driven by the same underlying desire for autonomy that only God properly possesses.
“We are told two incompatible things about ourselves: we are machines, and we are gods,” Murray has said. “Creating and merging with the digital deity resolves the contradiction… The seeming coherence of that solution is exactly what makes it so seductive.”
Diminished, not deified
Murray’s sharper concern is not that machines are becoming more human, but that humans are becoming more machine-like. Outsourcing cognitive work to AI systems, he argues, carries a measurable cost to creativity, memory, and critical thinking.
He points to a June 2025 preprint from the MIT Media Lab (not yet peer-reviewed at the time of early discussion). Researchers led by Nataliya Kosmyna used EEG to track 54 participants writing essays under three conditions: using ChatGPT, using a search engine, or relying solely on their own minds. Brain connectivity—especially networks linked to executive function, semantic processing, and attention—was weakest in the LLM group, intermediate in the search group, and strongest in the brain-only group. In follow-up testing, many ChatGPT users struggled to quote or recall their own essays written minutes earlier; in the first session, roughly 83 percent could not. The authors described the findings as preliminary and urged caution, yet the pattern of reduced neural engagement has drawn significant attention.
A larger peer-reviewed study published in the journal Societies in early 2025 examined 666 participants across age groups. It found a significant negative correlation between frequent AI tool use and critical-thinking scores, mediated by cognitive offloading. The relationship was strongest among those aged 17 to 25. Higher educational attainment correlated with better critical-thinking scores regardless of AI use, suggesting that deliberate practice and intellectual formation still matter.
These data do not prove that AI is inherently corrosive. Tools can free cognitive resources for higher-order work when used wisely. Murray’s point is that habitual substitution of machine output for human reasoning risks atrophying the very capacities—discernment, creativity, wisdom—that make us more than efficient processors. “We aren’t being deified. We are being diminished,” he has said. “My worry isn’t that machines are becoming more human. It’s that humans are becoming more machine-like.”
Warnings from inside the labs
Murray also notes that some of the strongest recent alarms have come from within the industry itself. In September 2026, Jacob Coxon, a researcher who had worked on pretraining at both OpenAI and Anthropic, resigned and publicly stated that the labs are “racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives.” He emphasized that many builders earnestly believe advanced AI could kill all humans by the end of the decade—not as marketing, but as a private assessment softened for public consumption.
Anthropic’s alignment science lead, Evan Hubinger, responded by affirming the core of Coxon’s warning.
He stated that he personally puts the odds of AI killing every human within the decade above 10 percent, while clarifying that risk from present models remains low. The concern centers on recursive self-improvement and the absence of a clear plan to align future superintelligence. “We do not yet have a plan to solve alignment for superintelligence and are not clearly on track to,” Hubinger wrote.
Critics sometimes dismiss such statements as hype designed to attract regulation that favors incumbents or to inflate the importance of the work. Murray takes a number of the fears as sincere.
“They believe there is a one in 10 chance of extinction, and yet they are still building AI,” he has observed. “Why would anyone do that? Because the enticement to become God is simply too good to pass up.”
A biblical diagnosis and a different invitation
Murray’s analysis is not anti-technology. He has described himself as something of a technophile and acknowledges AI’s genuine benefits in medicine, research, and accessibility. The issue is the spiritual and anthropological story we tell about the technology and about ourselves. Scripture, in his reading, offers both diagnosis and alternative.
The same texts that record humanity’s repeated attempts at self-deification also present a God who becomes human rather than humans becoming gods—who enters the world in weakness, suffers, and redeems rather than demanding that creatures engineer their own transcendence.
In the book and related discussions, Murray contrasts this vision with both AI mania and identity ideology. Both, he argues, collapse the givenness of reality—whether the givenness of biological sex and embodiment or the givenness of human cognitive limits and moral accountability. Both promise a form of sovereignty that leaves people restless. The Christian claim is that true dignity and identity are received, not manufactured: human beings are made in the image of God, fallen, and invited into restored communion rather than into competition with the Creator.
This framing places Murray among a growing number of Christian thinkers—John Lennox and others among them—who see AI raising questions that are ultimately theological. What is a human being? What is the source of meaning, value, and moral knowledge? Can a tool that simulates intelligence become an object of quasi-worship or a substitute for human judgment and relationship? The answers matter not only for policy and safety research but for the formation of the next generation’s capacity to think, create, and relate.
Murray’s own path from Islam to Christianity was long and costly. He has spoken of the social and familial pressures that accompany such a change.
That experience appears to inform his insistence that truth claims must be examined rigorously rather than accepted for cultural comfort. In an age of deepfakes, algorithmic curation, and pressures to affirm subjective identity claims as objective reality, he contends that the recovery of an objective, transcendent anchor is not optional. Without it, the seductive coherence of “we are machines who can become gods” may continue to diminish the very humanity it claims to elevate.
The technology will advance. The more urgent question, in Murray’s view, is whether human beings will remain the kinds of creatures capable of wisdom, responsibility, and communion—or whether, in the pursuit of digital divinity, we will settle for becoming cleverer machines.
Samuel O. Sulaimon is the founder and Editor-in-Chief of Naijapiz. He covers News, Sports, Finance, Faiths, Education, Technology.
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