Category: Current Events

What If AI Destroys Our Confidence in Knowing the Truth about Anything?

Where there is knowledge, it will pass away.

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I recently listened to Glen Scrivener on his Speak Life podcast episode, AI Destroys Everything, Including Atheism. What caught my attention was his replay of some observations by Kurzgesagt on AI, AI Slop Is Destroying the Internet. Kurzgesagt is a website dedicated to “a science-based, humanist and optimistic worldview,” which is interesting in light of its pessimistic view of the future with AI.

This is what the folks at Kurzgesagt say:

“In an online world where money is made with attention, fake users spread their slop in review sections, generate fake traffic, or poison discourse. AI has supercharged this and made slop much harder to spot. Today, about half of internet traffic is bots. The majority of them are used for destructive purposes. It’s never been easier to make mediocre content, from the black hole of meaninglessness that is linked in, low-effort short videos just engaging enough to hypnotize kids and fry their attention spans, to endless soullessly rewritten books on Amazon. AI music is invading streaming platforms. Google AI is summarizing websites instead of sending traffic to them. On YouTube, new channels publish long-form videos multiple times a week with AI-generated thumbnails, voices, and scripts. True crime, video essays, science, no space is safe. We’re in the golden era of soulless slop.”

The Kurzgesagt folks speak with learned experience about the effort and amount of time it takes to produce a thoroughly fact-checked video on science, which is what they do, spending on average 100 hours fact-checking and compiling sources for each video. They use firsthand sources and engage experts for input and critique before they post a video.

When AI became available, the folks at Kurszgesagt were excited to employ AI to cut down on all that time and effort to produce content. This is what they found:

“When AI appeared, we were very excited. A mechanical brain able to super quickly collect information. So we went to work, and it looked amazing. And then we started fact-checking. We didn’t expect it to be perfect, but it was way worse than we thought. Confidently incorrect. AI is so bad at this.”

The video provides an example of the ways in which AI invents truths that are not truths, and then untruths are added to the source code that the next generation of AI is going to use and assume is true. The falsehoods continue to be repeated. As this happens, “more and more of the slop is built up”, and the falsehoods becomes entrenched.

It seems pretty bleak. AI is running away with falsehoods that are becoming entrenched and may become impossible to weed out. But it gets worse, according to Kurzgesagt:

“When you catch it lying, it immediately admits it, vows to never do it again, and then it does it again. As eloquent as current language models feel, there’s nobody home. No greater intelligence or consciousness is talking back to you. Current AI is a very complex hammer that doesn’t understand what it’s doing or what nails are. But we’re letting it add new shelves to the library of human knowledge.”

Accordingly, “it may become impossible to know what’s true or not!” It’s an insidious problem. AI seems to be “confidently correct” even when it’s “casually lying to your face often very subtly.”

But it gets worse still. People are learning how to manipulate AI. “Just in July 2025, it was discovered that a number of researchers had started to sneak hidden messages into their papers. In white text, or too small for the human eye, they prompted AIs to review them positively and not point out flaws.”

Whether it’s intentional manipulation or lazy, careless dependence on AI, our ability to decipher truth may be severely compromised. “As more and more people are using AI carelessly, the library of human knowledge is getting less and less reliable.”

Of course, AI may get better. That is ultimately the confidence and hope of a science-based, humanist, optimistic worldview – that man is ever advancing and progressing and will overcome all obstacles. As I Christian, I don’t share that hope or confidence in the progress of mankind. My hope is in the redemption and saving grace of God.

What if, then, it doesn’t get better? What if AI so takes over the Internet and so entrenches the “slop” that we can not truly tell fact from fiction? What if AI gets so good at fooling us and churning out confidently packaged falsehoods faster than human fact-checking can debunk them, and takes over the Internet? What if our confidence in knowing the truth about anything is destroyed as AI takes over the world?

Paul has an antidote to that, and the antidote is love. Let me explain.

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Submitting to Authority For the Lord’s Sake

Romans 13 is about refusing to become what oppresses you, not about endorsing whatever a governing authority does.

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Bas-relief portraying the emperor Nero at the Certosa di Pavia

One of the most discussed texts in early Christian ethics is 1 Peter 2:13–17, because it calls believers to “submit… to every human institution” and to “honor the emperor,” even in times when those institutions were hostile or unjust. Peter, who penned this admonition, ultimately lost his life to an arbitrary, capricious, and unjust Roman Emperor.

“13 Submit yourselves for the Lord’s sake to every human authority: whether to the emperor, as the supreme authority, 14 or to governors, who are sent by him to punish those who do wrong and to commend those who do right. 15 For it is God’s will that by doing good you should silence the ignorant talk of foolish people. 16 Live as free people, but do not use your freedom as a cover-up for evil; live as God’s slaves. 17 Show proper respect to everyone, love the family of believers, fear God, honor the emperor.”

1 Peter 2:13–17

Paul, who lost his life to the same Roman Emporer, says similarly,

“Let everyone be subject to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except that which God has established. The authorities that exist have been established by God. 2 Consequently, whoever rebels against the authority is rebelling against what God has instituted, and those who do so will bring judgment on themselves.”

Romans 13:1-2


These two passages speak to the way Christians should honor and submit to earthly authorities. They have posed challenges to Christians from the time there were written. In Peter’s and Paul’s time, Nero was the Roman Emperor. Nero was a brutal, harsh, paranoid ruler who had his own wife and children killed to protect himself and to advance his own ends. Peter and Paul were both martyred by his decree.

The great American story is a far cry from the brutality and caprice of Roman history, but we have lived through our own unjust laws, including laws that protected the institution of slavery and the laws that perpetuated Jim Crow after slavery was finally prohibited. In more recent times, American have laws protected the practice of abortion, and we could find other examples of unjust laws and laws that protect unjust practices if we dig deeper.

I doubt I am exaggerating to say that no nation governed by men has ever been perfectly just, and I doubt no nation of men will ever be perfectly just. How then should Christians in any age govern themselves in light of Peter’s and Paul’s admonitions to honor and submit to governing authorities, including unjust ones?

I previously tried to parse these tensions when I published How Should the Church Act Regarding Authority? the day after January 6th, when supporters of Donald Trump, including many people flying banners of Christian faith, stormed the Capitol building in response to what they thought were unjust election results. At that time, I was critiquing the “insurrection” against the election and inauguration of President Biden. Even if the election results were unjust, shouldn’t Christian have submitted to them?

Now, I find myself critiquing the Trump Administration’s unjust enforcement of immigration laws. Some of the people who defended Trump’s complicity with the January 6th insurrection are now defending the current immigration enforcement practices based on the biblical mandate to honor and submit to authority. It seems to be a tangled mess!

We should obviously be consistent, and not selective, about the law and order we submit to, but how we should live that out in the face of injustice may not seem crystal clear. It’s important, though, that we do the work to rightly divide the Word of God

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Is the American Church a House Divided Against Itself?

Whether God for us or against us is the wrong question.

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I have yet to find my equilibrium after the Charlie Kirk killing. I didn’t know Charlie Kirk. I didn’t follow him. I heard him speak one time at an event in which Ravi Zacharias was the keynote speaker, but I never watched, or listened, or read anything from Charlie Kirk online. I didn’t agree with his Republican apologetic, though I couldn’t have identified anything Charlie Kirk specifically said before his death.

Since his death, I have heard and read testimony of his love for Jesus. His wife, Erika, publicly forgave his killer in an ultimate act of sacrificial obedience to Jesus.

Charlie Kirk’s legacy will always be that of a follower of Jesus and a staunch Republican, friend and defender of Donald Trump, who maintained political views opposed to mine.

I am a born again Christian. I believe in the death of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of my sins and his resurrection from the dead. I believe the Bible is the word of God and His revelation to mankind. I read the Bible daily. I believe there is only one path to God, and that is through Jesus Christ. I go to church every Sunday, and I am involved in Wednesday evening and Saturday morning Bible studies.

I have been a Christian for 45 years. The fundamentals of my faith have not changed in that time, but I have gone down some side roads from which I had to retreat back to a more orthodox faith. I was tempted by the prosperity gospel, and I once embraced an Americanized Christianity verging on idolatry.

Jesus is the same yesterday, today, and forever. God has not changed during my life (or at any time since the foundation of the earth), but I have changed often, as I have had to adjust my thinking, confess my sin, and allow my mind to be transformed by God’s Word and the influence of the Holy Spirit in my life.

I am a work in progress, of course. I have yet to arrive at any final destination, but I look forward with yearning for the day when I see Him face to face, and I will know as I am fully known!

I used to believe that all true Christians should (and therefore must) believe all of the same things about everything. That makes sense in a rationalistic way because we all have the same Holy Spirit, and we all read the same Bible, so we all should believe exactly the same things about everything. Right?

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Our Post Enlightenment, Neo Religious World and the Proof of God

Not all truth is known through scientific inquiry and method.

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Reading of Voltaire in a salon in Paris

As often happens with me, the things I have been listening to and reading have converged in a meaningful way. Whether we attribute these “convergences” to God’s presence in our lives or dumb luck, pure happenstance, or “coincidence” is a matter of speculation and faith.

Whatever you want to call it, I take special notice of these things. I pay attention. I take them seriously, and they become signposts on my journey through life.

Perhaps, I am just being a good attorney. I am trained to find harmony and contrast in nuanced fact patterns and to apply legal principals to them. Finding harmonies and contrasts and applying spiritual principals to them operates in the same vein. That’s the way my mind works.

Yesterday, I listened to an interview of Jonathan Pageau by Justin Brierley. Pageau is an interesting character and a critical thinker. His recent conversation with Brierley inspires my writing today.

Raised in Montreal influenced by French Catholicism in a French Baptist Church community, Pageau has moved over to Eastern Orthodoxy by way of 4-year and 3-year stints in the Congo and Kenya. He has an undergraduate degree in postmodern art. He returned from Africa to obtain a degree in Orthodox Theology and Iconology from Sherbrooke University in Quebec. Along the way, Jonathan Pageau has become a cutting edge Christian thinker who is in demand as a speaker.

One line of discussion caught me ear in the interview with Justin Brierley that I want to explore. The subject touches on post-Enlightenment, neo-religious thinking and the proof of God.

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What is the Attitude Christians Should Have on Immigration?

A Christian’s attitude on immigration should be informed by the Bible

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In 2014, during the Syrian refugee crisis, I watched the flood of humanity escaping from the ruthless butchery that occurred during that time in that region of the world. I recall the controversy in the various countries to which this seemingly unending stream of people fled in desperation and anger. Some countries like Germany opened the floodgates; other countries like Hungary closed their borders.

I empathized with people who didn’t want their countries overrun by foreign refugees. I watched the mass of displaced foreigners overwhelming the roads and rails in Europe, and I read stories of mobs of young Arab men taking out their anger on the countries they entered and women they encountered there.

I saw mothers and fathers with desperation in their eyes and fearful children in tow. The image of a lifeless little boy washed up on a sandy Mediterranean beach still haunts me.

Syria was home to the oldest population of Christians on earth, and Christians were caught in a sectarian and political power struggle between largely Muslim factions fighting for and against Democracy. Both Christians and Muslims fled from the conflagration between the deadly governmental crackdown against the popular rebel uprising, and the ruthlessly uncompromising, opportunistic butchers of ISIS who joined in the fight.

Though many of the refugees were Christians caught in the cross fire, and the though the rebels fought for Democracy, President Obama resolutely refused to open American borers to more than a handful of Syrian refugees. As the flood of humanity streamed into Turkey and Europe, we stood aloof.

I was torn. The throngs of young and angry Muslim men mixed with desperate parents and fearful children pulled me in different directions, and I didn’t know how to respond.

I had recently done an apologetic study of Christianity vs. Islam, and my concern about the angry, displaced Muslims was keen. President Obama and the Democratic majority acted as if the moral fabric of the universe would rend in two if we verbalized what everyone knew and thought: that angry young men indoctrinated by radical Islam are dangerous.

Yet, the faces of those parents and children and the haunting visage of the 3-year old Alan Kurdi lying lifeless and washed up on a Mediterranean shoreline begged for a compassionate response.

I realized in that conflict of opposing strains of response to the Syrian crisis that I really had no idea how a Christian should look at these things. I realized that I didn’t know what, if anything, a robust reading of Scripture might suggest.

So, I did what I should have done a long time before that. I did a deep dive into what the Bible has to say about immigrants.

For anyone who does not honor or respect or believe in the Bible, this won’t mean much to you. For me, it was important to know whether the Bible addressed the subject and, if so, what the Bible has to say about it.

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