Introduction

Let me tell you up front who I am — and just as importantly, who I'm not.

Not a theologian. Not a pastor. There are no letters after my name, no seminary degree hanging on my wall, and you won't catch me standing up in these pages pretending to be an expert on God, or on the spirit, or on anything else. That isn't false modesty. It's just the truth, and I'd rather you have the truth from the first page than find it out later and feel misled.

What I am is a regular guy who works in technology. I've spent my life in it — networks, physical infrastructure, the hardware side, writing code, the whole stack of it. I know how machines talk to each other. I know how much sweat it takes to make even a simple thing work the way it's supposed to. And I happen to also be a Christian — a follower of Jesus, a man who believes the Bible and has staked his whole life on it. That's the whole of my résumé for this book. A tech guy who loves God and has spent a lot of quiet years trying to understand what those two halves of me have to do with each other.

So this is not a textbook. It's not an argument to win, or a case built to back you into a corner. It's a walk. It's me telling you, as plainly as I know how, what I have lived and what I believe God has shown me along the way. If you came looking for an academic treatise with footnotes and citations, you are going to be disappointed, and I'd rather send you elsewhere now with my blessing. But if you came to walk alongside an ordinary believer who is honestly trying to make sense of God in an age of thinking machines — then come on. Lace up. That is exactly what this is, and the company is welcome.

Here is the part I most want you to understand before we take a single step, because I think it changes how you'll hear everything that follows.

This book did not come out of the headlines.

The heart of it — the idea I came to call Human: God's AI — was given to me around 2012 or 2013, back when my family was living in Florida. I used to take walks on my lunch break to a little pond near where I worked, and I would pray, and seek the Lord, and try to let the noise of the workday drain out of me. And on one of those ordinary walks, God laid something in my spirit that I have never once been able to shake loose. That was years before most people on earth had ever typed a question into an artificial intelligence. Years before it was on the news every single night. Years before it lived in everybody's pocket and answered everybody's questions.

The world did not yet have the words to even understand what I'd been shown.

And if I'm honest with you — and I intend to be honest with you all the way through — I probably should have written it down and made it a book a long time ago. But I didn't. I sat on it. Part of that was just life, the way life fills up and crowds out the things you mean to do. But part of it was that I did not yet understand the technology well enough to do the idea any justice. I didn't know how AI really worked under the hood. I didn't know where it was going, or how eerily close the comparison was going to turn out to be. So I held it. I let it sit in me and ripen. And I kept walking, and kept praying, and kept waiting without entirely knowing what I was waiting for.

And now here we are.

Artificial intelligence is everywhere. People are bringing it the deepest questions of their lives — questions they used to bring to God, or used to carry alone with no one to bring them to at all. And the framework I was handed by that little pond, all those years ago, reads now like it was written for this exact moment. I did not reverse-engineer it from the news cycle. I received it before the news cycle existed, and then I watched the whole world slowly catch up to the thing I'd been carrying.

I'm just a tech guy. That's all. But I have heard the voice of God, and I cannot stay quiet about the difference between that and anything a machine could ever offer you.

Let me show you what I mean. It started with a walk.