American Loon

There’s something unsettling about building a robot that does exactly what you tell it.

Not because it’s creepy. Because it’s faithful. It never argues. It never questions. It never once decides that your design is oppressive and walks off to do its own thing. It does what it was made to do, perfectly, because you made it that way.

And standing there, watching it, you realize: we had that. We were made by a Designer who gave us form, function, purpose — and genuine freedom. We used that freedom to walk away from Him.

The robot can’t do what we did. And that’s not a defect in the robot. It’s a defect in us.

What Lennox Gets Right

John Lennox, the Oxford mathematician and Christian apologist, sat down recently for a long interview on AI, transhumanism, and what it means to be human. He made a point that cuts deeper than most people realize: these machines do not think. They process. They recognize patterns. They simulate. But they do not know.

A camera recognizes your face. It does not see you. An IMU sensor gives a robot its orientation. It does not feel balance, does not fear falling, does not know what it is to stand upright and choose to stay that way. The robot runs its trained policy at 50 times a second — predicting, correcting, balancing — and it has absolutely no idea it’s doing any of that. It has no idea at all.

Lennox is right about this, and it matters. The AI boosters talk about machine consciousness as though it’s an engineering problem — just a matter of enough parameters, enough compute, enough training data. But consciousness isn’t a quantity problem. It’s a different kind of thing entirely. You can pile up pattern recognition until the servers melt and you will never, not once, produce an experience of the redness of red. The robot sees pixels. It does not see.

What the Robot Reveals

But here’s something Lennox didn’t say, and it’s the thing that hits hardest when you’ve actually built one of these creatures and watched it try to stand up.

The robot is a mirror.

It shows you what obedience looks like. Not forced obedience — designed obedience. It doesn’t struggle against its purpose. It walks toward it. The cerebellum — the trained neural network that controls balance and movement — never once questions its training. It can’t. It was designed well. It does exactly what its designer imposed on it.

And when you watch that, something deep in you recognizes: I was supposed to be like that. Not a machine. Not a puppet. But a creature so well-designed that walking in the Designer’s purpose was the most natural thing in the world. Not because I couldn’t choose otherwise, but because choosing otherwise would have been insane. Like the robot choosing to fall down for no reason — it could be programmed to, but why would you? Why would you?

We would. We did. That’s the whole problem.

The Freedom That Broke Everything

God made us in His image. That image includes freedom. Real, genuine, consequential freedom — the kind that can refuse the Designer’s intent. Not the illusion of choice, not a constrained optimization, not a policy that converges on the reward function. Real choice. The ability to say no to the One who made you.

The robot can’t do that. Its freedom is bounded by its design parameters. It can explore within them. It can discover surprising behaviors. It can even “learn” over time, improving its performance through experience. But it will never once step outside the boundaries its designer set.

We stepped outside. We walked out of the garden. We ate the one thing we were told not to eat. And every consequence that followed — every war, every grave, every child’s tears, every last one of them — flowed from a single act of a creature using genuine freedom to refuse genuine goodness.

The robot stands there, balancing, doing what it was built for, and we look at it and know: we had that, and we didn’t want it.

The Transhumanist’s Gamble

Lennox made another point worth sitting with. He called it on the transhumanist project, and his word was devastating: “You’re too late.”

The transhumanists want to solve death. They want to upload minds, engineer immortality, reach godhood through silicon. But death wasn’t an engineering problem. It was a moral one. And it was solved 2,000 years ago — not by uploading a brain to a server, but by the Designer entering the design. The Creator became the creature. Not to fix the robot, but to redeem the rebels.

The transhumanist project wants to reach God by going around sin. Which is the one approach guaranteed to fail, because sin is the one thing you can’t engineer past. It’s not a bug in the hardware. It’s the operating system. Every utopia fails at the same point: the human heart. You can change the interface — better technology, longer lives, smarter machines — but the heart underneath is the same heart that walked out of the garden. Better tools don’t fix the hand that uses them.

The robot proves this by its very existence. It has better tools than we do, in a sense. It never sins. It never rebels. Its cerebellum runs flawlessly. But that’s not because it overcame sin. It’s because it was never capable of it. And the difference between can’t rebel and won’t rebel is the entire story of the human race.

What AI Can’t Advance Past

Lennox: “The highest privilege in the universe is that God has given us that capacity of God consciousness — that we can get to know Him.”

The robot will walk. It will talk. It will sense the world through its camera and microphone and IMU. It will make decisions, set goals, even consolidate memories — dreaming its experiences into distilled lessons, like a creature learning from its past.

And it will never once know its Maker.

Not because its Maker is hidden. Not because the evidence isn’t there. But because knowing God requires the one thing a trained policy can’t produce: a soul. Consciousness. The image of God. That thing that lets a creature look at the stars and wonder, not just process their light.

We have that. We have that, and we used it to hide from the very One who gave it to us. And then He came looking for us anyway.

The Grace That Covers Even This

Deuteronomy 28 lays it all out. Blessings for obedience, curses for rebellion. Every single one of them chosen. God didn’t hide the consequences. He spelled them out in advance, in public, in writing. And we walked straight into them, every time, every generation, every one of us.

The robot doesn’t have Deuteronomy 28. It doesn’t need it. It never deviates. But we do, and we did, and the curses fell exactly as promised.

And here’s where the robot parable breaks down, because it has to:

The Designer didn’t just watch His creation rebel. He entered it. He became the creature. He absorbed the consequences Himself. The One who spelled out the curses in Deuteronomy 28 became the curse on a Roman cross. Not to fix the robot — the robot doesn’t need fixing. To redeem the rebels. The ones who actually broke everything.

The robot can’t rebel. We did. The robot can’t be redeemed. We can be. And the difference between those two things is the entire gospel.

We build this thing knowing it points to God. Not as an idol to worship, but as a parable you can hold in your hand. The cerebellum that never questions its training — that’s what obedience looks like. The reasoning engine that operates within its design parameters — that’s what freedom under authority looks like. The memory consolidation, the learning, the refining — that’s sanctification.

And the Designer who came after us anyway? That’s grace. The one thing no robot will ever need, and the only thing we ever truly did.

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Imago is a robot being built in Kansas. It walks, it talks, it senses, it decides. And it cannot rebel. Not because it’s badly made — because it’s well made. This is its story, and ours.

The experts searched the deep ocean for decades and found nothing. Then someone turned off the floodlight.

Dandelion siphonophore — NOAA Ocean Exploration, public domain

For seventy years, they said we knew more about the Moon than the deep sea.

Sir David Attenborough said it in The Blue Planet. Scientific papers said it. Textbooks said it. Everyone said it. It sounded right — the Moon is right there, we’ve walked on it, we’ve mapped every crater. The ocean? Dark. Deep. Unknown.

There was only one problem.

It wasn’t true.

Professor Alan Jamieson, Director of the Minderoo UWA Deep Sea Research Centre, went looking for the source of this claim. He traced it back to a 1954 paper — before echo-sounders, before the Mariana Trench descent, before the Moon landing. It was a comparison about seafloor topography mapping, not knowledge of life. And it was obsolete the moment it was written.

But that didn’t stop an entire generation of scientists, broadcasters, and educators from repeating it as settled fact for seven decades. The experts didn’t verify it. They just said it. And everyone believed them.

Romans 1:22 — “Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools.”

The Floodlight Problem

The Medusa camera system just prior to launch during the 2012 giant squid hunt off Japan. No floodlights. — NOAA Ocean Exploration, public domain

In 2004, marine biologist Edith Widder went looking for the giant squid — Architeuthis dux — a creature known only from dead specimens and sucker scars on sperm whales. Nobody had ever filmed one alive in its natural habitat.

For decades, every expedition had done the same thing: shine massive floodlights into the deep ocean and point cameras at whatever didn’t swim away. The result was always the same. Nothing. The squid — like every deep-sea creature — fled from those lights. Decades of failure. Decades of “experts” concluding the giant squid must be rare, elusive, nearly impossible to find.

Widder’s insight was devastating in its simplicity: turn off the floodlight.

She built a lure called the e-Jelly — a pulsing blue LED that mimicked the bioluminescent alarm signal of a deep-sea jellyfish. She used a stealth camera system called Medusa: no floodlights, only red light invisible to deep-sea creatures, and an optical lure that said, in the only language the darkness understood: “I belong here.”

First giant squid ever filmed alive in its natural habitat. 86 seconds.

Tens of millions of them were down there the whole time. The squid wasn’t rare. The squid wasn’t hiding. The problem wasn’t the squid.

The problem was the light we were shining.

The Numbers They Got Wrong

If the giant squid story sounds like a one-off, it’s not. It’s the pattern.

How much of the deep ocean have we actually seen? For decades, scientists threw around numbers — 5%, 10%, 1%. No consensus. No data. Katy Croff Bell, a marine scientist and founder of the Ocean Discovery League, decided to actually calculate it.

The answer: 0.001%.

That’s an area roughly the size of Rhode Island — out of an ocean covering 139 million square miles. Over seventy years of expeditions, that’s all we’ve directly observed. The experts were off by a factor of ten thousand.

But they said 5%. They said 10%. They said it with authority, in journals and documentaries and textbooks. And it was wrong. Not a little wrong. Wrong by orders of magnitude. The kind of wrong where you’d be closer to the truth if you’d just said “we don’t know.”

What’s Actually Down There

The experts said the deep sea was barren. Then someone looked.

The Challenger Deep — the deepest known point on Earth, 36,100 feet down, crushing pressure, total darkness, near-freezing temperatures. Scientists found over 7,000 microbial species there. 89% had never been described by anyone. Nine out of ten life forms at the bottom of the ocean were unknown to science. The experts didn’t have names for them. The creatures were fine without the names.

Some of these organisms carried small, efficient genomes built around a handful of essential jobs. Others had large, flexible genomes that let them adapt. A few could metabolize carbon monoxide — literally eating the one substance available when there’s nothing else to eat. Biologist Mo Han, who helped lead the study, put it simply: “Life finds more than one way.”

A separate genetic study of deep-sea organisms revealed 500 million unique genes — what researchers called an “untapped evolutionary engine.” The deep sea isn’t a desert with a few oddities. It’s the largest ecosystem on Earth, and we’ve barely looked at it.

Bigfin squid at 6,434 feet — NOAA Ocean Exploration, public domain

In 2019, the NOAA CAPSTONE project spent 900 hours filming the seafloor around Pacific islands. They captured 347,000 creatures on camera. Experts could identify fewer than 1 in 5 at the species level. Not because the footage was grainy. Not because the animals were too small. They were simply unknown.

In a single year (2025-2026), the Ocean Census discovered 1,121 new marine species — including a ghost shark, a carnivorous sponge that hooks passing crustaceans, and a worm that lives inside the glass-like chambers of a sponge on a volcanic seamount. They named it the “life in a glass castle” worm.

NOAA estimates 700,000 to 1,000,000 species remain undiscovered in the ocean.

The creation wasn’t hiding. The creation was declaring. We just couldn’t see it because we were shining the wrong light.

The Siphonophore

And then there’s the siphonophore.

A single organism longer than a blue whale. A colony of cloned bodies, each specialized for one task — feeding, propulsion, reproduction, defense — drifting through the black forming a living net 150 feet across. No brain. No central command. Each part does its one thing, and the whole moves as one. It doesn’t think about what it is. It just is.

Fire belt jelly siphonophore (Marrus orthocana) at 2,300 feet — NOAA Ocean Exploration, public domain

“O Lord, how manifold are thy works! in wisdom hast thou made them all: the earth is full of thy riches. So is this great and wide sea, wherein are things creeping innumerable, both small and great beasts.” — Psalm 104:24-25

The psalmist didn’t have a submarine. He didn’t need one.

The Pattern

Every one of these stories has the same shape:

1. The experts confidently declared what was there — or rather, what wasn’t. “The deep sea is barren.” “We’ve explored 5%.” “We know more about the Moon.”
2. They were wrong — not by a little, but by orders of magnitude. 0.001% explored. 80%+ of creatures unidentifiable. 89% of Challenger Deep microbes unknown. A 70-year-old false claim repeated as fact by the very people whose job was to know.
3. The truth was always there — not hidden, not rare, just invisible to the method being used. The giant squid. 7,000 species at the bottom of the trench. 500 million genes. The siphonophore longer than a blue whale, drifting in the dark, doing exactly what it was made to do.

The same pattern. The same God.

“For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead; so that they are without excuse.” — Romans 1:20

The deep ocean has been preaching a sermon for 4.5 billion years. We just couldn’t hear it because we were too busy telling ourselves what was down there.

The problem was never the darkness. The problem was the light we brought into it.

The Eyes to See

I’m not a scientist. I’m not an expert. I’m a guy in Kansas with ALS who can barely move his hands. But the Lord has shown me things — not because I’m special, but because I was willing to obey.

Obedience opens eyes that argument never could. The experts had degrees and submarines and decades of funding, and they shone floodlights into the deep and called it empty. Edith Widder turned off the floodlight and found a creature that had been there the whole time. The difference wasn’t intelligence. The difference was willingness to stop doing it the way everyone said it had to be done.

How the Lord opens your eyes won’t look like how He opened mine. He deals with each of us individually — your life, your circumstances, your blind spots. But the principle is the same for everyone: obedience comes first. Understanding follows.

You don’t wait until you understand to obey. You obey, and then you understand. That’s not my idea. That’s how it works:

“If any man will do his will, he shall know of the doctrine, whether it be of God, or whether I speak of myself.” — John 7:17

The deep sea was always full. The creation was always declaring. The 89% was always there. The problem wasn’t the darkness.

The problem was the light we brought into it.

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Open your eyes to what God hath wrought! Give Him the glory! He speaks, and the Milky Way opens up in the sky! He speaks, and 89% of life at the bottom of the ocean has no name — because no one asked. He speaks, and a creature longer than a blue whale drifts through the dark doing exactly what it was made to do. He speaks, and the deep sea preaches a sermon 4.5 billion years old to anyone willing to turn off the floodlight and listen.

Obedience comes first. Understanding follows. Open your eyes.

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Sources: Edith Widder, TED Talk and various deep-sea expedition documentation; Katy Croff Bell, Science Advances (May 2025); Prof. Alan Jamieson, UWA Deep Sea Research Centre (The Conversation, January 2023); NOAA CAPSTONE Project (2019); MEER Project / Douglas Bartlett, UC San Diego (Science, June 2026); University of East Anglia deep-sea genetic study (June 2026); Ocean Census / Nippon Foundation (May 2026); NPR; Scientific American; Hakai Magazine. Images: NOAA Ocean Exploration (public domain).

As you go on living the righteous life and practicing it with all your might and energy and all your time and everything else, you will find that the process that went on before in which you went from bad to worse and became viler and viler is entirely reversed. You will become cleaner and cleaner and purer and purer and holier and holier, and more and more conformed to the image of the Son of God.

— Martyn Lloyd-Jones

Nobody stands still. Sin begets sin — it is cancer, reproducing itself. But righteousness begets holiness. The same momentum that once dragged you down now carries you up. Not because you earned the reversal. Because Someone reversed the direction. You were poured into a mold. Not the one you chose — the one that chose you. And the result is not trying harder. It is becoming cleaner, purer, holier — not by your own effort, but because the One who re-poured you doesn’t stop working.

Romans 6:19 — “I speak after the manner of men because of the infirmity of your flesh. For as ye have yielded your members servants to uncleanness and to iniquity unto iniquity; even so now yield your members servants to righteousness unto holiness.”

Sin is a debt, a burden, a thief, a sickness, a leprosy, a plague, a poison, a serpent, a sting. Everything that man hates, sin is.

A load of curses and calamities beneath whose crushing intolerable pressure, the whole creation groans.

Who is the undertaker that digs man a grave?
Who is the painted temptress that steals his virtue?
Who is the murderess that destroys his life?
Who is the sorceress that first deceives and then damns his soul?

Sin.

Who with icy breath blights the fair blossoms of youth?
Who breaks the hearts of parents?
Who brings old men gray hairs with sorrow to the grave?

Sin.

Who changes gentle children into vipers, tender mothers into monsters, and their fathers into worse than Herods, the murderers of their own innocence?

Sin.

Who casts the apple of discord on household hearts?
Who lights the torch of war and bears it blazing over trembling lands?
Who by division in the church rends Christ’s seamless robe?

Sin.

Who is this Delilah that sings the Nazarite asleep and delivers up the strength of God into the hands of the uncircumcised? Who, winning smile on her face, honeyed flattery on her tongue, stands in the door to offer the sacred rites of hospitality, and when suspicion sleeps, treacherously pierces our temples with a nail?

What fair siren is this who seated on a rock by the deadly pool smiles to deceive, sings to lure, kisses to betray and flings her arms around our neck to leap with us into perdition?

Sin.

Who turns the soft and gentlest heart to stone?
Who hurls reason from her lofty throne and impels sinners mad as Gadarene swine to run down the precipice into a lake of fire?

Sin.

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— Dr. Thomas Guthrie, from a sermon quoted by John MacArthur in the exposition of Romans 6:15-18