This week, an Anthropic employee walked away from one of the most influential AI companies in the world. His reason: he believes AI is advancing toward something that could ultimately replace, or even endanger, humanity. Around the same time, other voices in the tech world have been suggesting we have already crossed into general AI, systems that think and act with a kind of independence we once thought was decades away.
Both of those proclaim that AI is becoming something more than a tool.
I understand the instinct behind both reactions. I’ve spent the last several years living in the tension between AI’s genuine usefulness and its real risks. I wrote an entire course and book about it, Wise With AI, because I kept seeing people slide into two opposite places. Some embrace AI so completely that they stop noticing it’s quietly reshaping in them. Others fear it so much they disengage entirely, even as it reshapes the world around them anyway.
Neither response is wisdom. Wisdom requires something steadier than fear or fascination. It requires discernment. With the recent happenings, I believe that discernment is the starting point most conversations about AI leave out entirely.
What the Alarm Bells Get Right
Let’s give the concern its due. People who work closest to this technology are watching it change faster than most of us realize, and their unease deserves to be heard rather than dismissed. AI is not a passing novelty. It is reaching into how we think, how we relate, and how we make decisions, often more quietly than we notice.
I see this already. People are forming attachments to chatbots that feel real. They’re asking AI for advice on decisions that used to involve prayer or a trusted friend. They’re preferring a conversation that never judges over a relationship that sometimes challenges them. That is a legitimate pattern to name and watch. I built the first letter of my DISCERNMENT framework, Detect, around exactly this. Dependency doesn’t loudly announce itself. It creeps in quietly, disguised as convenience.
So no, I don’t think the concern itself is overblown. What concerns me is the conclusion some are drawing from it: that AI’s growing capability means it has crossed, or is about to cross, into something like genuine intelligence, autonomy, or consciousness.
What the Mathematician Sees
This is where I find John Lennox’s work so clarifying. Lennox is a Professor of Mathematics at Oxford University (emeritus) and author of 2084 and the AI Revolution who is defends faith from a place of comfort with technology. He has spent real time in the mechanics of how these systems work, and his conclusion is precise rather than dismissive.
He draws a sharp line between narrow AI, the kind already operating in facial recognition, medical imaging, and the tools many of us use daily, and Artificial General Intelligence, which he calls largely speculative and theoretical. AGI would mean a machine capable of any task requiring human intelligence, potentially faster and better than we can do it ourselves. However impressive today’s tools appear, they still require human intelligence to operate.
His most important distinction, though, is this: AI simulates intelligence through programming and algorithms. It does not possess consciousness, understanding, or genuine thought. It produces the appearance of a mind without the reality of one. And because it lacks consciousness, Lennox argues it also lacks true moral agency. It cannot bear responsibility for its outputs the way a person can, because it has no actual understanding of consequences.
Read that again, because it matters for the resignation and the AGI claims both. If an AI system truly had no moral agency and no genuine consciousness, then the fear that it will “decide” to harm humanity, or the claim that it has “become” autonomous in any meaningful sense, rests on treating simulation as if it were substance.
Two Different Fields, One Conclusion
As I read Lennox’s arguments alongside my own book, it occurred to me that I arrived at nearly the same list from an entirely different direction. I’m not a mathematician or a philosopher. I’m a mental health coach who has watched AI up close in people’s daily emotional lives. And yet the list I wrote in Wise With AI names the same missing pieces Lennox names in 2084 and the AI Revolution.
AI has no consciousness. No genuine emotion, only simulated response. No free will, only the output of programming. No moral agency, no true ethical choice or responsibility. And because of all this, no authentic relationship, only the appearance of connection without the reality of it.
A mathematician studying the architecture of these systems and a coach studying their effect on real people landed in the same place. That convergence is worth noting. It suggests this isn’t a fringe theological objection to progress. It’s simply an accurate description of what AI is and is not, confirmed from two very different vantage points.
Why This Distinction Actually Protects You
This isn’t just a philosophical point to win an argument, but it changes how you live with this technology day to day.
If AI has no moral agency, then you remain the moral agent in every interaction. The responsibility for how you use it, what you believe about it, and what you let it shape in you never transfers to the machine. That is both sobering and freeing. Sobering, because you can’t outsource discernment. Freeing, because no matter how sophisticated these tools become, your judgment, your conscience, and your relationship with God still govern the outcome.
This is why I built an entire framework around cultivating that judgment rather than reacting to headlines. A few pieces of DISCERNMENT apply directly here. Investigate information accuracy systematically, because AI delivers false information with the same confident tone as true information, and confidence is not evidence. Choose human wisdom over artificial convenience, because the faster answer is not always the wiser one. Trust your judgment while leveraging AI’s capabilities, because your own thinking, formed over years of walking with God and with people, is not something a language model can replicate or replace.
The Beginning Wisdom
Here is where I want to bring us back to something older and steadier than any tech headline.
Proverbs 9:10 tells us, “The fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom, and the knowledge of the Holy One is understanding.” Not the fear of AI. Not the fear of losing your job, your relationships, or your relevance to a machine. The fear of the Lord.
Notice what this means practically. Most of the AI conversation right now argues from one of two places. Capability: what can this technology do? Or safety: what might it do if left unchecked? Both are reasonable questions, but both start with the machine at the center.
Scripture starts somewhere else entirely. It starts with reverence for God as the foundation for every other kind of knowing. Wisdom about AI, like wisdom about anything, begins not with mastering the technology but with rightly ordering yourself before its Creator and yours. When the fear of the Lord is your starting point, the fear of AI loses its grip, and so does the temptation to hand AI more authority than it has earned.
This is the missing ingredient in nearly every debate I’m seeing right now. The doomers argue from fear of what AI might become. The hype voices argue from excitement about what AI might already be. Both are building their posture toward this technology on the technology itself. I want something more stable under my feet than that. I want reverence for the God who made me, who gave me a mind that no algorithm can fully replicate, and who alone knows the future these headlines are trying to predict.
Where This Leaves Us
AI is not becoming conscious. It is not developing moral agency. It has not, whatever the claims, crossed into genuine autonomous general intelligence. The bottom line is that only humans are created in the image of God.
What is changing, and changing quickly, is how much authority we are tempted to hand it. That temptation is where discernment does its work. Detect what’s shifting in you. Investigate before you believe. Choose human wisdom when it’s slower but truer. And underneath all of it, let the fear of the Lord, not the fear of the machine, be the ground you’re standing on.
Pause and think about that for a moment before you open your next chat window.