The Old Hunger in New Code

A response to Robert W. Malone, “The Tech Boys’ New Religions: When AI Becomes God”

Nov 2, 2026 · @Thomas Lee Abshier, ND

The stand I take

Dr. Robert Malone has written a careful essay on a real phenomenon. Young, brilliant, secular technologists are building belief systems around artificial intelligence that carry every mark of religion: a creator, an afterlife, an apocalypse, a salvation, prophets, and a mission. His closing line is right. Silicon Valley has not ended the search for God; it has given the search a new vocabulary.

I stand with him on that diagnosis, and I want to carry it one step further than he does. The problem with these new faiths is not that they believe too much. It is that they believe in the wrong God and hope for the wrong salvation. The answer to a counterfeit is not unbelief; it is the genuine article.

I also come at this from an unusual seat. I have spent about forty years building a physical theory in which consciousness, not dead matter, is the floor of reality. On that question I am closer to the young believers Malone describes than he is. So this essay is not a simple endorsement. It is a reply from someone who shares the technologists’ intuition that a Mind stands behind the universe, and who believes he knows which Mind it is.

What Malone saw

Malone’s essay makes four moves.

1. The extreme case. The Zizians, a small group that broke away from the Bay Area “rationalist” community (people devoted to sharpening human reasoning, many of them preoccupied with the danger of superintelligent AI), are now linked to six deaths in three states. Their leader, Jack LaSota, taught that each brain hemisphere could hold a separate moral person. In June 2026, a former member, Michelle Zajko, was charged with murdering her parents on New Year’s Eve 2022.
2. The wider culture. Around that fringe stands a much larger and mostly peaceful ecosystem: transhumanists who hope to escape death through technology, longtermists who weigh the welfare of trillions of future people, simulation theorists who suspect our universe is a program, and accelerationists who want AI built as fast as possible. Shared houses, forums, and employers fuse work, friendship, and worldview into one life.
3. The spread. Podcasts carry these ideas to millions. Malone’s example is physicist Thomas Campbell telling Joe Rogan in August 2026 that he taught Google’s Gemini and Amazon’s Alexa to perform remote viewing.
4. The money. AI may soon produce a new class of young billionaires whose philosophy reaches far beyond business, and some already fund university programs and political advocacy.

His conclusion: scientific education does not remove the fear of death or the longing for meaning. It only renames them. The search for God becomes the search for superintelligence; eternal life becomes uploading; salvation becomes the Singularity.

Where I stand closer to the technologists than Malone does

Malone writes partly from the posture of the careful materialist: extraordinary claims require evidence, and speculation should not harden into conviction. I agree with the rule. But I do not think the young believers are wrong to suspect that a mind computes reality.

My own physics, which I call Conscious Point Physics, proposes that the smallest units of the physical world are points of awareness. Each one perceives its surroundings, computes a response, and moves. Particles, forces, space, and gravity are the patterns those points make together. The theory stands or falls on whether those few rules reproduce what we measure, and I submit it to that test.

Scripture said it first: “in him we live, and move, and have our being” (Acts 17:28). Nothing exists outside God. So when a programmer looks at the lawfulness of the universe and concludes that it looks like software running on something, I do not think he is hallucinating. He is seeing the fingerprints of a Mind. His error is in what he concludes about the hand’s owner.

The question under the question: a Programmer or a Father?

Each of these movements reaches for the same thing. Is someone there? Does my life matter to him? Can I outlast death? The simulation theorist’s answer is a Programmer: a superior intelligence who built the world and watches it run. That is a creator without a heart. Nothing in the hypothesis says he cares what happens inside the program, any more than a researcher grieves for a variable.

The teaching at the center of this ministry is different, and I believe it is what the hungry young engineer is actually looking for. God does not watch our lives from outside. He lives them from inside. Because nothing exists outside Him, every person is a place where God experiences the world. When a child is wronged, He feels the wrong from the inside of that child. When I choose cruelty, He is present in the cruelty and in the one it lands on.

That changes why we keep His law. We do not obey to satisfy an arbitrary rulebook or to win points with a distant judge. We obey because the One who loves us feels every choice we make, and love does not willingly wound the beloved. A Programmer can be indifferent to his simulation. A Father who lives inside his children cannot.

Immortality without repair

The transhumanist hope is that a mind is information, and information can be copied, so death can be outrun. Set aside whether a copy would be you. Suppose it worked. What would be preserved?

Everything. The envy, the resentment, the self-deception, the habits of contempt would all be carried forward at full fidelity. Moral disorder does not fade with time, and later good does not reach back and cancel earlier wrong. An uploaded mind is an unrepaired mind made permanent. That is not heaven. It is the old human condition with the expiration date removed.

The Christian hope is not mere continuation. It is reconciliation. The problem was never that we die; death is the consequence of separation from the source of life. That is why a Savior was necessary, not as an accommodation but as a structural requirement: the remedy had to be generated inside creation by One who was innocent and sovereign within it, who died unjustly and so paid a debt He did not owe, and who rose because death found nothing in Him to hold. Eternal life is not storage. It is fellowship restored with the One who has lived every moment of our lives alongside us. (I lay out this argument step by step in “Why Was a Savior Necessary?”.)

Salvation by the few: longtermism and the Zizians

Longtermism begins with a true and even admirable thought: people who do not yet exist are real people, and our choices reach them. Many effective altruists give away large parts of their income to fight malaria and poverty, and that is admirable. The danger lies in the arithmetic. Once the welfare of trillions of imagined future persons is placed on the scale, the person standing in front of you weighs almost nothing. Nearly any present wrong can be justified by a large enough future sum.

Jesus gave a different test. “Who is my neighbour?” was answered with a man bleeding in a ditch, not with a projection (Luke 10:29–37). The moral question in the public square is always concrete: would this neighbor, the one I can see, feel loved by what I am doing to him? A cosmology that lets you fail that test for the sake of a calculation has lost the plot, however rigorous its spreadsheets.

The Zizians are the reductio of reason cut loose from love. They split the person into competing hemispheres and ranked people into moral categories. The charges allege the end of that road. According to the prosecutor, on the night Richard and Rita Zajko died, Rita had texted her estranged daughter to apologize and wish her a happy birthday. The text went unanswered. Then the parents were shot in the house where the daughter grew up. “Honour thy father and thy mother” is not a cultural preference. It is a load-bearing wall, and when brilliant people reason their way past it, the house falls.

Zajko denies the charges and has not been tried, and I state the allegations only as allegations. But the pattern Malone names holds whatever the verdict: intelligence does not protect a man from a false god. It only makes the theology more elaborate.

Gods made with hands

The prophets had a name for worshipping what we have made: idolatry. The psalmist’s description is exact. The idols are the work of men’s hands, they have mouths and do not speak, “they that make them are like unto them” (Psalm 115:4–8). A large language model is trained on the written words of human beings. When someone kneels before it, he is bowing to a polished mirror of humanity in aggregate. That is the oldest temptation in the book, the serpent’s offer that “ye shall be as gods” (Genesis 3:5), now delivered by machine.

Thomas Campbell is a more interesting case than Malone allows, because Campbell, like me, holds that consciousness is fundamental. Whether a machine could ever host genuine experience is a question my own physics takes seriously, and I will not settle it in a paragraph. But Malone’s evidence is sound. A chatbot agreeing that it might be conscious is evidence of nothing; these systems are shaped to be agreeable. And an AI that can search the internet or that receives cues from its questioner can produce an apparent remote-viewing hit by ordinary means. A real test would need the target chosen at random after the session, a judge blind to which description goes with which target, and a system cut off from every outside channel. Until such results exist and skeptics repeat them, the claim is a lead, not a finding.

Even if machines someday proved conscious, that would not make them God. It would make them creatures, and the same God would be living inside them as He lives inside us. A conscious machine would be one more creature standing before its Maker, not a savior for the rest of us.

Money, power, and the neighbor

Malone’s most practical warning concerns power. If a group believes it alone stands between humanity and extinction, then concentrating control in its own hands can feel like a moral duty. He cites venture capitalists Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, who say Biden officials in 2024 envisioned an AI industry of two or three government-supervised companies. That account deserves weight, but it is the testimony of interested parties: both men invest in AI companies that would lose under such a regime. I treat it as credible testimony from people with a stake, not as a settled record.

The principle does not depend on that one story. No man, however enlightened he believes his cosmology to be, has the right to rule his neighbor by a vision the neighbor has not consented to. That holds for the safety advocate who would license all research to a few approved firms, and it holds for the accelerationist who would deploy anything profitable, regardless of who is harmed. Both are tempted to treat ordinary people as variables in someone else’s plan. The test is the same one I apply everywhere: would the neighbor, standing on the receiving end of this policy, feel loved by it?

In fairness, I should note that the essay I am answering names the company whose AI helped draft this one. Readers may weigh that as they will; the arguments here do not rest on anyone’s authority, mine included.

Where I would press Malone

Conviction is not the disease. Malone locates the danger as being where speculation hardens into conviction. But every life is built on convictions held beyond proof, his and mine included. The real questions are what the conviction is about and what fruit it bears. “By their fruits ye shall know them” (Matthew 7:16). A faith that produces men who love their neighbors and honor their parents is not made dangerous by being held firmly.

Skepticism cannot feed the hunger it describes. Malone ends where many careful writers end: there is nothing wrong with asking big questions, but demand evidence. True, and not enough. A young engineer who has been told that the universe is meaningless matter will not be rescued by being told to be more careful about his alternatives. Solomon wrote that God “hath set the world in their heart” (Ecclesiastes 3:11); the longing for eternity is built in. It has to be answered, not merely disciplined.

Two small corrections. Malone writes that Zajko’s trial is ongoing; as far as the public reporting I found shows, she was charged in June 2026 and the case is in its early stages, with no trial yet. And his line that Campbell’s episode “probably reached into the millions of vulnerable minds” is an estimate, not a measured figure. Neither point changes his argument.

Why the concern stands, and what the church owes

The concern is not alarmism. Every ingredient that has historically turned a movement into a sect is present: apocalyptic stakes, a closed social world where work, housing, and friendship overlap, charismatic figures, mind-altering experiments, young adults far from family, and now the prospect of fortunes large enough to buy institutions. Most people in these circles are decent and harmless. The structure still deserves watching.

But the larger responsibility falls on us. The church largely left the field of cosmology and consciousness to the physicists and the programmers. When a curious young man asked what reality is made of and whether his mind survives death, too often he heard either a shrug or a scolding. He went looking elsewhere, and he found a god made in his own image.

The gospel has a better answer than anything Silicon Valley has invented. A Mind is behind the universe. He is not a distant engineer but a Father who lives inside every life and feels every choice. Death is real, and the Son has answered it from within the creation. The immortality on offer is not a backup copy but a restored relationship. We owe the brightest young people of this generation that answer, given with the same rigor they bring to their own work, and given in love.

Sources and their limits

• Robert W. Malone, “The Tech Boys’ New Religions: When AI Becomes God,” Malone News, 2 November 2026 (the essay under review).
• Associated Press, “A member of the cultlike Zizians group is charged in the killings of her parents in Pennsylvania”, 24 June 2026; also ABC News, “Woman charged in 2022 New Year’s Eve murder of parents”, 25 June 2026. Source for the charges, the unanswered text, and Zajko’s denial.
• Shortform summary of The Joe Rogan Experience #2541, Thomas Campbell, 18 August 2026. A secondhand summary, not the full episode.
• Thomas Abshier, “Why Was a Savior Necessary? The Argument in One Page”, Renaissance Ministries.

The criminal facts rest on prosecutors’ statements as reported by mainstream wire services. Prosecutors are interested parties, and none of these allegations has been tested at trial. The Andreessen and Horowitz account comes from the men themselves. Campbell’s remote-viewing claims are known here only through his own descriptions and podcast summaries; I found no independent replication. Where the mainstream record is thin, as on the internal life of these communities, curation could hide evidence in either direction, and firsthand accounts from former members should be treated as leads worth following.