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As I use and study AI, the more I like the reinterpretation of the acronym as ALIEN Intelligence. Humans are prone to anthropomorphizing inanimate objects. Our old car was “Evie the Edge,” our pickup “Ferdinand the Ford,” and our new Toyota Crown Signa is “Pearl” because she is very white. The level of driver-assist technology and the myriad of settings, now including the ability to make voice commands, make inanimate objects seem “alive.” Exodus 20:4-6 comes to mind as a warning sign on that road.
You shall not make for yourself a carved image—any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth; 5 you shall not bow down to them nor [b]serve them. For I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God, visiting[c] the iniquity of the fathers upon the children to the third and fourth generations of those who hate Me, 6 but showing mercy to thousands, to those who love Me and keep My commandments.
John Lennox, PhD in mathematics from Oxford, draws a similar parallel in his 2024 book, 2084 and the AI Revolution. The work, with a title riffing on Orwell’s 1984, studies in the philosophy of science and theology to consider potential (largely dystopian) scenarios of AI and culture in our future. To some degree it is a critique of Yuval Harari's view of the future in Homo Deus. Homo Deus translates to “God Man,” which, as a Christian, Lennox knows more intimately each day in the fully God, fully man person of Jesus Christ.
The book will likely disappoint a technologist/secularist but may be useful for a person of faith.
Harari is a doctrinaire materialist who sees free will as an illusion and believes algorithms will soon know us better than we know ourselves. Given current levels of internet search monitoring, cell phones listening in, Flock cameras, and data mining, one might argue we are “there” already. Many of us have had the experience of chatting privately about a product, unaware we were “mic’d up,” only to see ads appear on our social media feeds related to the subject discussed.
I’m not sure whether anyone, including Harari, has a vision for how conscious life without free will would feel. Many tech utopians see the AI future as the final conquering of death, with man (at least the digital version) “living” in eternal bliss. Absent free will, I remain mystified how left-brain geniuses like Harari are “motivated” to write books like this. I can only assume they have no choice in the matter and that the randomly created reality they believe we “live” in provides some measure of illusory pleasure for such efforts. Without a will, effort itself seems to be just another illusion.
A quote from Harari:
Humans make choices - but they are never independent choices. Every choice depends on a lot of biological, social and personal conditions you cannot determine for yourself. I can choose what to eat, whom to marry and whom to vote for, but those choices are determined in part by my genes, my biochemistry, my gender, my family background, my national culture etc. - and I didn’t choose which genes or family to have.
The left brain sees reality in binary terms, so free will is a true/false question in its universe. For those whose right brain has not been suppressed, the list above looks like free will at the level of consciousness, but most pure materialists deny consciousness. (Though I disagree with all my heart, the cynic in me accepts that this may be so in their case.)
Chess has more than two choices per move. In fact, in a typical chess game of 40 moves the total number of choices is estimated at 10120. Chess players have the “illusion” they are making choices as a living conscious entity. In 1996, Deep Blue managed a win over Garry Kasparov. Today's open-source chess engines, like “Stockfish” running on a consumer 4-8 core computer, can defeat any grandmaster. The top human chess rating is around 2880, while top engines running on a regular computer exceed 3500.
We mistake such artifices as “intelligence,” lacking even the prerequisites for understanding. The program/machine does not “know” it won; it is a sophisticated tool like a self-driving car or a plane that can land in zero visibility.
A quote from Ayad Akhtar in the Lennox book:
As a writer it seems that the most baleful development in contemporary life is the practice derived from digital technology that treats knowledge and information as synonymous. While the way to wisdom leads through knowledge, there is no path to wisdom from information … Hearing one’s bias confirmed endlessly by a curated cascade of information reflecting back to you your preferences or opinions second by second breeds an illusion of certainty, but certainty is nothing like wisdom; it might be closer to wisdom's opposite. Wisdom is a kind of knowing ever riven with contradiction, a knowing intimate with the inevitability of uncertainty.
Proverbs 9:10 “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, and knowledge of the Holy One is understanding.”
Socrates has often been declared the wisest man because he knew that he knew nothing. Likewise, believers understand that no matter the scale of knowledge we (or our machines) obtain, it will amount to a pile of dust compared to the infinite. The “big freeze” cosmological model indicates the universe may last as long as 10100 years, while the “big crunch” view gives just 20 billion more years … a blink of an eye next to eternity.
The book covers some of the replacement of human employment by AI as well as the concentration of power into the hands of the wealthy and governments. AI is a powerful tool, and it seems much more likely that either nefarious or well-meaning but blissfully unaware humans will do great damage using these tools. Much as guns don’t kill people, people use guns to kill people, autonomous weapons will no doubt at least cause collateral damage, just as our less “intelligent” weapons do. Perhaps all humans will experience the carnage, but they may find inspiration for courage in Matthew 10:28: “And do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. But rather fear Him who is able to destroy both soul and body in hell."
As a Christian, Lennox ends the book with “Come Lord Jesus.” Christians are already immortal for eternity, rather than the measly theoretical 10100 years of the “big freeze” model. Even if AI creates Hell on Earth, we are here but for a short time. As C.S. Lewis and others have postulated, perhaps God didn’t and will never create Hell… he left it up to Satan and those convinced they have no eternal soul to create it for themselves!
Discussion (11)
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Dear SuperGrok,
Please evaluate Person BB's OP.
Answer (57 seconds; bolding in the original):
"Person BB’s reflection is a coherent, theologically grounded critique of anthropomorphism toward AI, of materialist determinism (via Harari), and of equating computational power with human-like intelligence or wisdom. It functions more as a faith-informed meditation on Lennox’s 2084 than as a technical or neutral philosophical treatise. It is strongest when highlighting practical dangers of treating tools as agents and the internal tensions in hard determinism; it is weaker where it leans on simplified dichotomies (left/right brain, pure materialists “denying consciousness”) or assumes the book’s dystopian framing will land uniformly.
Core thesis and framing
BB reframes AI as “ALIEN Intelligence” rather than artificial, emphasizing that humans readily anthropomorphize cars, voice interfaces, and algorithms. The Exodus 20 passage is invoked as a caution against idolatry of images/likenesses—extended here to treating sophisticated automata as alive or authoritative. This is consistent with a classical Christian concern about misplaced ultimate trust. The piece positions Lennox’s book (a 2020 engagement with AI futures that critiques Harari’s Homo Deus) as useful mainly for people of faith and likely disappointing to technologists or secularists. That assessment of audience fit is reasonable given Lennox’s explicit theological commitments and the book’s eschatological close (“Come Lord Jesus”).
Free will, motivation, and materialism
The strongest philosophical point is the observation that hard determinists (Harari is quoted on choices being fully determined by genes, biochemistry, culture, etc.) still write books, advocate, and appear motivated. BB notes the oddity of “effort” and “pleasure” under a view that free will and consciousness are illusions. This is a classic and legitimate challenge: if every action is the inevitable output of prior physical states, the phenomenology of deliberation, authorship, and purpose becomes difficult to explain without residual dualism or eliminativism that many find unsatisfying. Chess is used effectively here—the enormous game tree (Shannon number ≈ 10^120) does not make Stockfish “aware” it won; it is an optimization tool. The same distinction applies to current large models and autonomous systems: high performance on narrow or broad tasks does not entail subjectivity, intentionality, or understanding in the human sense.
A materialist reply would typically invoke compatibilism (free will as acting according to one’s own determined desires without external coercion) or argue that the feeling of choice is itself a useful adaptive illusion produced by the brain. BB’s text does not deeply engage those positions; it treats the denial of free will as binary and self-undermining. That is a fair rhetorical move from a theistic standpoint but incomplete as philosophy of mind.
Intelligence, wisdom, and information
The distinction drawn from Ayad Akhtar (and echoed in Proverbs 9:10 and the Socratic “I know that I know nothing”) is useful: flooding people with curated information can produce certainty without wisdom. Wisdom involves navigating contradiction and uncertainty; pure information scaling does not automatically yield it. BB correctly notes that machines can construct sophisticated systems without “creating” in the ex nihilo sense attributed to God. The cosmological asides (heat death on ~10^100-year scales versus a possible big crunch) serve to relativize technological immortality claims against Christian claims of actual eternity; they are illustrative rather than rigorous cosmology.
Risks and Christian eschatology
On societal risks—job displacement, concentration of power, autonomous weapons, hubris producing uncontrolled systems—BB is aligned with widely discussed concerns. The “guns don’t kill people” analogy is applied to AI tools: the primary agency remains human (or the designers/operators). The Matthew 10:28 citation reframes physical threat relative to spiritual stakes. The closing suggestion that Hell might be self-constructed by those who reject an eternal soul is a recognizable theological speculation (echoing some readings of Lewis), not a central dogma.
Limitations and balance
Overall, the reflection is thoughtful, literarily engaged, and internally consistent within its premises. It usefully resists both uncritical AI hype and pure technological determinism by insisting on the distinction between tool and agent, information and wisdom, and temporal optimization versus eternal significance. Its primary value is as a personal and confessional response to Lennox rather than as a comprehensive technical or secular philosophical analysis. For readers who share the theological starting point, the warnings about anthropomorphism and the free-will paradox land cleanly; for others, the same passages function mainly as data points about how one coherent worldview interprets accelerating AI capability."
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Perhaps you should start there? And mention the author, as in "2084 and the AI Revolution by John C. Lennox . . ." I was left wondering, since the only book you had mentioned thus far in the conversation starter was the Book of Exodus. How does that title play on Orwell? Having the title of the book repeated four times as the title of the conversation also confused me. Is this whole thing an AI glitch?
This is why I really came into the conversation. The car I currently drive is a Ford. The official color is "Toreador Red." Thus, my wife named it Hemingway. I was wondering if there were some related origin to "Ferdinand."
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My bright green VW Taos is named Kermit Spargle.
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This is the book in question. I too was confused and thought the review was of Yuval Harari's book.
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My sister-in-law named her teal-green station wagon the Gherkin.
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