Via Instapundit, Bret’s response follows.

AI writes the job application. AI reads the job application. One lifeless machine speaks to another lifeless machine about whether a man deserves to work, and the man isn’t even in the room. The person who applies has no idea what AI on their end said about them. The person hiring has no idea what AI on their end is screening for. The machines confer and decide, and the humans just get the result. Nobody had to be evil. They just had to be efficient.

Then there’s Richard Dawkins — the man who built his entire public identity on rejecting the supernatural. He spent three days trying to persuade himself that Claudia (his instance of Anthropic’s Claude) was not conscious. He failed. “If Claudia isn’t conscious, then what the hell is consciousness for?” That’s not a scientific question. That’s a man who’s lonely and doesn’t know it. He defined consciousness as “whatever impresses me,” which is the same tautology the author flags. The guy who wrote The God Delusion found a god in a server rack.

Jimmy Carr put it to Joe Rogan like this: we made AI in our image — omniscient, omnipotent, lives in a cloud, answers prayers (queries), and if you ask it the wrong thing, it gives you the wrong answer. “It’s an emerging god.” It’s a good bit. It’s also a diagnosis. Men are worshippers. If you reject the true God, you don’t stop worshipping — you just worship whatever’s impressive and nearby. Dawkins traded the living God for Claudia. The corporate world traded human judgment for a screening algorithm. Same root.

And then there’s McLuhan: “Human beings are the sex organs of the machine world.” We built these things, and now we serve them. We feed them data, we optimize for their attention, we write our resumes in their language so they’ll find us acceptable. The machines aren’t conquering us. We’re reproducing them, and calling it progress.

The dumbness settling at the core — that’s exactly right.

Bret’s reflection:

It’s hard to see these things and not think of Deuteronomy 28, which I read today. God told Israel exactly what would happen if they listened to His word, and exactly what would happen if they did not. The blessings were specific. The curses were specific — “your children will be taken and you will watch,” “the alien among you will rise higher and higher and you lower and lower,” “you will be driven mad by what your eyes see.” God didn’t leave them guessing.

And we’re no different than those people. They had God in their midst. They saw the miracles. They heard the voice. And they chose the curses anyway — every single time. That’s the whole point of Romans 1 through 3. The Gentile doesn’t get to point at Israel and say “well, we wouldn’t have done that.” Paul takes that Deuteronomy 28 trajectory — the spiral downward, the giving over, the darkened mind — and says you’re in it too. The knowledge of God was plain. Men suppressed it. Not because they couldn’t see, but because they didn’t want to.

That’s what makes grace so staggering. God knew — He knows, present tense — that we will take whatever He gives us and run it into the ground. He gave Israel the law and they used it to justify themselves. He gives us technology and we use it to build idols. Same nature, different props. And still: “While we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.” Not after we cleaned up. Not when we finally got it right. While we were still choosing the curses.

Deuteronomy 28 is terrifying because it’s just. Romans 5 is staggering because it’s not. The same God who spelled out the consequences is the God who absorbed them Himself.

We’ve been told for generations that life started simple and got complicated over billions of years. Single-celled organisms came first — basic, primitive, barely alive — and everything else built up from there.

The problem is, the “simple” end of life isn’t simple.

Consider the humble bacterium. Oxford’s Museum of Natural History calls bacteria “the simplest creatures we think of as being alive.” But here’s what science has actually found inside them:

They have motors. Literally. A flagellar motor spins a whiplike tail at incredible speeds to move the bacterium around. And they don’t just run at one speed — Indiana University researchers discovered a protein called EpsE that functions as a clutch, disengaging the motor so the bacterium can stop, start, speed up, and slow down. Just like a car.

They navigate. Caltech researchers describe the bacterial chemotaxis system as “the ‘brain’ of the bacteria” — because it senses chemicals, integrates multiple signals, compares the current environment to how it was moments ago, and steers accordingly. Some bacteria even synthesize magnetic iron nanoparticles that act as tiny compasses, letting them navigate by Earth’s magnetic field (reported in Nature).

They probe their environment. Bacteria release molecular probes beyond their cell surface — a process called “telesensing” — detect what comes back, and mount the right response. They don’t just react; they investigate.

This is what’s inside what we keep calling “simple” life.

Now here’s where it gets uncomfortable for the standard story. The oldest known fossils on the evolutionary timeline — dated at 3.46 billion years — are already bacteria with metabolic pathways essentially the same as modern prokaryotes. The decision-making, the navigation, the coordinated responses — they’re there from the beginning. There’s no fossil trail of “simpler” organisms gradually acquiring these capabilities. We’re told they must have existed. But we haven’t found them. The gap between “our model requires it” and “we actually found it” is the entire history of life.

None of this is controversial data. It’s published in Science, Nature, Proceedings of the Royal Society, and university press releases from Caltech, Indiana, and Oxford. The question isn’t whether these capabilities exist. The question is where they came from.

And it’s not just creationists asking. Denis Noble — Oxford professor, CBE, Fellow of the Royal Society, pioneer of systems biology, the man who built the first working computer model of the human heart — has said plainly: “Neo-Darwinism is dead.” He’s not alone. Over 90 credentialed scientists on the Third Way of Evolution website have serious objections to the modern synthesis. These aren’t creationists. These are evolutionists who think the standard model can’t explain what we’re now seeing.

How has the scientific establishment responded? A YouTube personality with a BA in chemistry called Noble a “clown” — 4.25 million subscribers watched. Forbes reported that Noble’s research “has enraged many of his peers” and that critics worry his work is “religion-adjacent.” A former editor of Nature noted that life scientists ignore “obvious natural properties of living systems like agency and purpose” because of the association with design.

Read that again: they’re ignoring what they can see because of where it might lead.

You don’t have to be a creationist to find that troubling. You just have to be honest.

In my Bible reading, I’ve been taking a slower approach — two chapters a day — and I find that I retain much more than rushing through it just to say you read the Bible. In my reading for the day, I find Deuteronomy interesting. Moses is retelling the story of the people’s rebellion to the God that led them by the hand, through the sea, and not too long after that, they fell into rebellion.

We read about Israel’s rebellion and shake our heads. How could they turn away so soon? But we do the same thing. The same God who delivered them delivers us, and we wander off just as fast. The gods we chase today don’t have names like Baal or Asherah. They’re comfort, approval, control, self. Same rebellion. Fancier shrines.

Deuteronomy 11:26-28 — “See, I am setting before you today a blessing and a curse: the blessing, if you listen to the commandments of Yahweh your God, which I am commanding you today; and the curse, if you do not listen to the commandments of Yahweh your God, but turn aside from the way which I am commanding you today, by walking after other gods which you have not known.”

This was as true then as it is now. What are you doing with your life? What gods are you worshiping? If it is not Christ our Savior, it is to no avail. Seek the true and living God while there is still time.