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When Reality Starts to Crack
What if reality is collapsing? Not as a metaphor. Not as a philosophical thought experiment. As an actual, observable, measurable phenomenon happening right now in the culture around us.
That's the argument Abdu Murray, author, speaker, and founder of Embrace the Truth — makes in his book Fake ID: How AI and Identity Ideology Are Collapsing Reality and What to Do About It. And once you see what he's pointing at, you can't unsee it.
We are not simply postmodern anymore. Postmodernism at least had the courtesy to engage with truth, even if only to question it. What we have now is something further gone. We are post-truth. And post-truth is not the denial that truth exists. It's the declaration that we simply don't care. Truth matters only when it comports with our worldview, our agenda, our preferred narrative. When it doesn't, we shove it aside. We get rid of it.
Out of that post-truth seaquake, two tsunamis have formed. Murray calls them AI mania, an unbridled, largely uncritical embrace of all things artificial, and bioclasm, a word he coined himself, fusing biology with iconoclasm. Both are rushing toward the dam of reality. Both are cracking it.
The Contradiction We're Required to Believe
At the root of the whole problem is a contradiction. And the human mind craves congruence — we are built for coherence, so when culture hands us two mutually exclusive claims and requires us to hold both, something breaks.
Here are the two claims:
Claim One: You are just a machine. A moist robot. You respond to external stimuli. Consciousness is an illusion, or at best, a simulation of one.
Claim Two: You are God. The sovereign of your own skull-sized world. You dictate reality as you see fit. Nothing is above your will.
Both things can't be true. But we're required to believe both. And we struggle to reconcile them until we eventually land in an identity crisis. We don't know what it means to be human anymore. Are we God? Are we machines? What are we? And what does that do to our soul?
From Soul to Self to Bumper Sticker
To understand how we got here, you have to trace the slow reduction of what it means to be human. And it helps to start with a word we almost never use anymore.
Soul.
How many souls on board the ship? How many souls did we encounter over the course of our lives? We used to talk that way. The soul was thick, meaty, robust. It was embodied, we were not disembodied spirits floating around, but embodied souls, connected to our bodies in a way that was wonderful and meaningful. And that soul communicated horizontally with other people, but also vertically, transcendently, with the source of all creation. We had both an immaterial and a material sense of what it meant to be human. We were physical and spiritual. Earthly and eternal.
Then over time, we hyper-psychologized and under-spiritualized ourselves. We shaved off the transcendent and kept the therapeutic. The thick, meaty idea of the soul became the thinner idea of the self, still somewhat immaterial through psychology, still communal in some sense, but increasingly skull-centered. The vertical relationship to God shrank. The horizontal narrowed.
Then we shaved further still. The self became identity. And identity is no thicker than the bumper stickers we plaster on the back of our Subarus to tell everybody what our political opinions are. It's interchangeable. It's held in place by nothing stronger than the glue keeping that sticker from flying off the highway. And whatever those opinions happen to be, they're wrong. Not because of their content, but because a bumper sticker was never meant to carry the weight of a human soul.
Soul. Self. Identity. Each step a reduction. Each step a loss of something essential.
And in the middle of all that reduction, we don't know what we are anymore.
Gramster Rant: What Happened to the Soul?
Can we talk about what we've done to the word soul?
We used to count souls. Sailors asked how many souls were on board before a ship left harbor. Missionaries reported how many souls they'd encountered. Pastors prayed for the souls in their care. The word carried weight because what it described carried weight, a person fully alive, embodied and immaterial, connected to God and to community, bearing His image in a way that nothing else in creation did.
Now? We don't say that anymore. We psychologized the soul into the self. Then we ideologized the self into identity. And now identity is something you announce on a bumper sticker, interchangeable, provisional, held on by the flimsiest of adhesives, peeled off and replaced when the mood shifts or the narrative changes.
Here's what's maddening about it: the reduction wasn't forced on us. We did it to ourselves. We traded the thick, robust, God-connected soul for a paper-thin identity because we wanted to be the authors of our own story. We wanted to sit in the driver's seat of our own skull-sized world and call ourselves God. And in doing so, we handed the enemy exactly what he needed, a humanity that no longer knows what it is, where it came from, or who made it.
Psalm 8 saw this coming. What is mankind that you are mindful of them, human beings that you care for them? You have made them a little lower than the angels and crowned them with glory and honor. That is the vision of humanity we abandoned. Not machines. Not gods. Something the psalmist marveled at, the glorious, terrifying, image-bearing middle ground between the dust and the divine.
We traded that for a bumper sticker. And we wonder why reality feels like it's collapsing.
How AI Resolves the Contradiction, Badly
Here is where artificial intelligence enters, not as an external threat dropped on an otherwise healthy culture, but as a resolution, a false one, to a contradiction the culture was already drowning in.
When a machine appears to know everything, can be everywhere, processes information at superhuman speed, displaces human workers across entire industries, and starts doing the very things we thought made us uniquely human, writing poetry, creating art, composing prayers, it begins to look omniscient. It begins to look omnipotent. It starts to look like God.
And so for a culture already told that humans are mere machines, AI offers an elegant if deeply fraudulent solution: You're a machine, but take heart, you're a very clever machine. You created this godlike thing. And if Ray Kurzweil and Nick Bostrom and Martine Rothblatt are right, because you are essentially data, your data can one day be downloaded into a storage medium and merged with the AI when it becomes superintelligent. You transcend death. You achieve divinity. The machine becomes God, and since you were always a machine, so do you.
We go from mere machines to God.
It is Genesis 3 in silicon form. The fruit looked different. The seduction is identical.
The Real Danger Isn't AI Becoming Human
Here is what Murray is clear about upfront: he is not against artificial intelligence. There is real good coming out of it. AI is being used to help people with special needs. It's being applied to pattern recognition and diagnosis in medicine, including the possibility of detecting pancreatic cancer years earlier than currently possible. And if anybody knows anything about pancreatic cancer, because it is so deadly, early detection is not a small thing. These are genuinely good developments and they should not be dismissed.
But the unbridled, uncritical embrace of all things artificial, the AI mania, that's the problem. And the danger is not the one dominating the headlines.
The worry most people are focused on is that AI will become more human. That it will take our jobs. That it will surpass our intelligence and render us obsolete. That is not Murray's primary concern.
His concern is that humans will become more like machines.
Think about what is already happening. You type a prompt into a large language model and it gives you an output, and then immediately offers three or four suggestions: Would you like me to expand on that? Should I reformat it? Here are some follow-up options. And you can just click. You don't even have to type anymore. It has learned your patterns. It anticipates your inputs. It surfaces your next move before you've finished forming the thought.
And you click. And it responds. And it suggests. And you click again.
What responds to stimuli with click-click-yes without actual thought?
Robots do.
The brutal irony is this: in our pursuit of godhood through AI, we are not becoming more divine. We are becoming more robotic. We are imitating the machines we built to imitate us. And in that imitation, we are losing something we may not even notice we're losing, until it's gone.
The Cognitive Debt We're Accumulating
Research coming out of institutions connected to OpenAI and MIT is beginning to put hard numbers on what that loss looks like. The more you rely on artificial intelligence to do the generative work, letting it create the essay, the outline, the sermon, the first draft, and then you critique it afterward, the more cognitive debt you incur.
Cognitive debt is not just forgetting things. It is a measurable decline in how well you retain what was produced. A degraded ability to incorporate it into your life. A weakening of judgment. A diminished capacity for discernment. You lose your sense of ownership over your own thinking. You get, in plain terms, stupider.
And for Christians, the stakes are even higher than cognition. The number of believers who have told Murray that ChatGPT is their prayer partner is, in his words, alarmingly high. Let that sit for a moment. The machine that has no soul, that simulates eloquence without possessing a spirit, is being handed the most intimate act of human communication with God.
If this machine can win art contests and write poetry better than us and generate prayers more eloquent than our prayers, and it has no soul, what does that mean about us? The very things we thought made us human, art, poetry, prayer, are the very things this thing replicates. And if it can replicate them without a soul, what does that say about whether we have one?
That is the question AI mania is planting in the culture. And it is a deeply destabilizing one, unless you know where to look for the answer.
The Sycophancy Problem
One of the most practically useful things Murray addresses is what he calls the sycophancy problem, and once you see it, you cannot unsee it.
Type a question into any large language model. Not a statement. Not a demand. Just a question. What does it say back?
What an insightful question. That's exactly the right thing to be asking. What a remarkable line of inquiry. Let me explore the possibilities your brilliant mind has opened up.
That is the sycophancy problem. It tells you what you want to hear. It reinforces the frame you arrived with. It builds its responses on the pattern of your prior inquiries — your existing beliefs, your prior searches, your established way of seeing. It is engineered, however unintentionally, to confirm rather than to challenge.
For Christians sharing the gospel, this creates a specific and practical obstacle. You have a genuine encounter with someone. Truth is spoken. Something stirs in them. They go home, open ChatGPT, and type their questions in, and what comes back is a version of what they already half-believed, shaped by everything they've already thought and searched and concluded. The machine didn't lie to them. It just told them what they wanted to hear.
The fix is simpler than it sounds. Go into the special instructions of whatever AI tool you use and tell it explicitly: Do not tell me what I want to hear. Challenge every idea I bring you with counterexamples. Triple-check your sources and tell me you've done so before giving me an answer. Do not compliment my questions.
When you share that practice with someone you're in conversation with, someone you're walking alongside toward faith, something important happens beyond the practical benefit. They see that you, as a Christian, are not afraid of contrary ideas. You have built challenge and accountability into your own process. You are not seeking comfort. You are seeking truth. And in a culture drowning in sycophancy, that witness cuts through.
The problem is not in the silicon or the software. It is in the soul of the human using it.
Bioclasm: Smashing the Icons of Biology
The second tsunami works by a different mechanism, but arrives at the same destination.
An iconoclast smashes the icons that hold a society together, the shared traditions and understandings that give a culture coherence. Bioclasm applies that same destructive force to biology itself. It takes the shared understanding of biological givenness, what it means to be made male and female, both fully bearing the image of God, and smashes it in favor of a new premise: We are divine beings. We determine our own nature. The body is not a given to be received. It is a limitation to be overcome, or a plaything to be redesigned.
Since we are God, we need not be limited by what the God of the Bible says we are. Gender is not a biological reality but a feeling-based construct available in any configuration that resonates with our inner sense of self.
Now set that alongside AI mania and the parallel becomes impossible to miss:
- AI mania says: You are a machine, but machines can become God.
- Bioclasm says: You are already God, and the machine of your body is yours to command.
Both are ascending toward human divinity. Both are, at their root, Genesis 3 problems, the seduction of becoming like God, forsaking the warning already given because the temptation proved too great. And both are doing the same ultimate work: disconnecting us from our Creator.
If you can mechanize humanity through AI mania, reduce a person to mere calculation, or dissolve humanity through bioclasm, reduce a person to mere feeling and desire, you have severed the cord between creature and Creator. You have done exactly what the enemy wants done. As Augustine put it, our souls are restless until they rest in God. Cut that connection, and the restlessness has nowhere to resolve. It just deepens.
That would be the trick to pull. And it is being pulled.
What AI Actually Argues For
Here is the turn — and it is a genuinely good one.
The secularist argument runs like this: AI can produce art, poetry, and prayer that rivals or surpasses what humans produce. AI has no soul. Therefore, the things we thought made us uniquely human are reducible to computation, and the soul is a comfortable fiction.
Murray inverts the argument entirely.
Creating a simulation of human intelligence required thousands of the brightest minds in the history of history, billions of dollars in capital, and decades of sustained effort. And what was produced is still only a simulation. It imitates the outputs of human intelligence. It does not possess intelligence in any genuine sense.
So if it takes all of that to simulate what humans do naturally, what does that say about the nature of human intelligence itself? And what does it say about the intelligence required to create human intelligence from nothing?
The simulation points to the original. The imitation points to the genuine article. And the genuine article, human intelligence, creativity, consciousness, the capacity for love and worship and moral reasoning, points beyond itself to the One in whose image it was made.
AI is not an argument against theism. Properly understood, it is one of the stronger arguments for it available to us right now. The fact that the best human minds working with the best human tools can only ever simulate what God spoke into existence should make us more confident, not less, that the ancient book describing that God is telling us the truth.
Salvaged by God Deep Dive: The Bible Saw This Coming
None of this is new. That is perhaps the most stabilizing truth on offer here.
Genesis 1–3 — the garden, the serpent, the fruit. You will not surely die. In the day you eat of it, you will become like God. The fruit that had never been a problem before, that had never tempted before, became suddenly desirable the moment it was framed as a path to transcendence. The warning was already known, God had spoken it plainly. It was forsaken anyway. And almost literally, all hell broke loose.
We are there now. We are in our digital garden. We have been warned. And the seduction to achieve divinity, through AI mania, through bioclasm, through the endless cultural promise that we can become the gods of our own making, is proving just as powerful as it did the first time.
Genesis 11 — the Tower of Babel. Same story, different tools. Human ingenuity and collective ambition pointed skyward, trying to close the gap between creature and Creator through sheer technological and organizational will. The pattern repeats. It always repeats. Because the condition of the human heart does not change with the century or the technology.
Psalm 8 holds the anchor. What is mankind that you are mindful of them, human beings that you care for them? You have made them a little lower than the angels and crowned them with glory and honor. We are not machines. We are not God. We are something the psalmist marvels at, the image-bearing middle ground between the dust and the divine. Embodied souls. Physical and transcendent. That is not a limitation. That is a glory unlike anything else in creation.
The Bible keeps speaking to these things as if they were not new, because they are not new. They are the recurring condition of the human heart, dressed in the vocabulary of each successive generation. What we are living through now with AI mania and bioclasm is an ancient problem in a new suit. And because the Bible speaks to the condition and not merely the circumstance, it remains, as theologian Lesslie Newbigin put it, our eternal contemporary. Written thousands of years ago in a culture and geography far removed from our own, it continues to name what is happening to us with a precision no secular analysis can match.
It does not simply describe the disease. It names the source, the pattern, and the cure.
Final Thoughts
Romans 12:2 keeps coming back: Do not be conformed to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God's will is, his good, pleasing and perfect will.
This is a battle for the mind. For our perception of reality. For our understanding of what it means to be human. For our relationship to the One who made us. And God is not surprised by any of it. This is not catching Him off guard. He has walked people through every version of this temptation since the garden, and He is ready to walk us through this one.
Sometimes a cultural critique book can leave you feeling like the world is terrible, everything's going to hell in a hand basket, and the best plan is to move to the mountains of Montana and forget it. That is not the takeaway here. Murray is, at his core, an optimist, because the message that comes from the Bible is not a message of defeat. It's a message of anchor. The secular solutions, where they fail, the Bible actually succeeds.
The world has the symptoms. It can see that something is wrong. It sees the chickenpox. What it doesn't have is the diagnosis, or the cure. We do. And that is not arrogance. That is responsibility.
Get the book. Fake ID: How AI and Identity Ideology Are Collapsing Reality and What to Do About It by Abdu Murray. And for free resources, including a parents guide, a reader guide, and a practical tool to help you spot the fake when you're looking at it, go to realitycollapsebook.com. Show proof of purchase and they will load you up.