Why this matters now
Thoughtful voices — like former Google X executive Mo Gawdat — feel the disruption coming and reach for the transcendent: they affirm design, the soul, love, even life beyond death. Everything, that is, but the Person at the center. Our aim isn’t to win the argument. It’s to offer enough clarity that people can make an informed decision, rather than settling for a god they have quietly curated.
Name the pattern gently — it’s all of us. The temptation isn’t unique to skeptics; it’s the oldest human habit: keeping ourselves as the final authority over who God is allowed to be. We take the attractive fruit — love, compassion, meaning — and leave the root. Say it as a shared tendency, not an accusation.
Five moves for the conversation
1. Listen first, honor the longing. Ask real questions about how they see intelligence, purpose, mortality, and AI’s rise. Start from what they’ve seen rightly — that intelligence didn’t create itself, that love isn’t optional, that something greater than us is real.
2. Surface the method, kindly. “You hold on to Jesus’ teaching about love but set aside his claim to be the unique Son of God. How do we decide which of his words are gold and which are disposable? If he was wrong about who he was, why trust him on ethics? If he was right, the ethics can’t be peeled away from the Person.”
3. Use AI as a live parallel. We already agree a powerful new intelligence can’t invent its own values — they must come from outside it, or it just amplifies our worst. The same is true of us. Design implies a Designer; the more astonishing the intelligence we build, the sharper the question of the Intelligence that built us.
4. Name the particular claims of Christ. Move from a vague higher power to the concrete: Jesus claimed authority to forgive sins, equality with God, that he alone brings us to the Father, and that his death was a ransom. The first Christians staked everything on the resurrection as a public, historical event. The cross isn’t an optional add-on — it’s where God’s justice and love meet.
5. Invite an informed decision. “You’re free to reject these claims. What none of us can honestly do, if we care about truth, is keep the attractive parts and quietly discard the center. That’s preference, not conclusion. An honest look means weighing who Jesus said he was, what the resurrection claim means, and whether any other account of reality holds together as well.”
A note on the old challenge
C.S. Lewis put it bluntly: a man who said the things Jesus said isn’t available to us as merely a great moral teacher — he is either Lord, or lying, or deluded. Some add ‘or legend,’ so the honest follow-up is the historical one: is the record reliable? That’s a question worth chasing, not dodging.
The posture
Humility, not superiority — we’re not smarter or better, just people who have been met by a claim that leaves no comfortable middle. Clarity over cleverness. Patience, because most people need time. And none of it works without prayer and the real presence of the love that comes from the living Christ — not from a set of borrowed principles.
Remove the illusion that we can forever curate our own god — and let the particular claims of Jesus stand in the open for an honest response.