By Robert Maginnis

Years ago, I sat in Jerusalem with a group of American evangelical Christians as Israeli intelligence officials briefed us on the threats surrounding their country. The exchange taught me something that went beyond the intelligence assessment: beliefs about the future can become instruments of power in the present.

Many American evangelicals view Israel through biblical prophecy — a conviction documented by the Pew Research Center and examined at length in Cambridge University Press’s political-science literature. Israeli leaders have long recognized that evangelical convictions can translate into political influence, financial support, tourism, volunteer service, and sustained advocacy for the Jewish state, a pattern the Associated Press has chronicled among Israeli officials themselves. The relationship is not necessarily cynical. Shared beliefs and strategic interests often reinforce each other. But its geopolitical effect is unmistakable. Eschatology does not remain inside churches or seminaries. It can shape alliances, public policy, and national survival.

That experience comes to mind as another eschatology gathers influence — this one emerging from the laboratories, boardrooms, and manifestos of artificial intelligence.

Google DeepMind chief Demis Hassabis says humanity stands in the “foothills of the singularity,” with artificial general intelligence perhaps only a few years away. OpenAI’s Sam Altman is more dramatic: “We are past the event horizon; the takeoff has started.”

These are not merely forecasts about better software. They are declarations about where history is going.

Philosophy asks what man is. Eschatology asks where man and history are headed. But every eschatology also produces a strategy. Once people become convinced that a particular future is coming, they invest, legislate, organize, and surrender authority in preparation for it.

That is what makes the emerging AI eschatology consequential.

The accelerationists offer one version. Venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, a newly appointed Pentagon advisor, calls AI “our alchemy, our Philosopher’s Stone,” and describes it as a universal problem-solver. His manifesto goes further: slowing artificial intelligence, he argues, will cost lives. Technological acceleration therefore becomes not merely profitable but morally obligatory.

Anthropic chief Dario Amodei offers a more humane vision. He predicts that powerful AI could compress 50 to 100 years of biological progress into five to 10 years, producing what he calls a “compressed 21st century.” OpenAI’s policy researchers, meanwhile, contend that movement toward superintelligence will require more than minor regulatory adjustments. They propose a public wealth fund, accelerated energy construction, and other measures intended to distribute AI’s anticipated gains.

The national-security community presents a third version. RAND now treats the transition toward AGI as a strategic problem comparable in seriousness, though not identical, to the destabilizing early nuclear competition. Its analysts warn that a winner-take-all race could intensify U.S.-China rivalry, encourage aggression, and narrow the window available for human judgment.

These camps disagree over speed, safety, and control. Yet they share a premise: advanced artificial intelligence is becoming history’s decisive horizon, and governments, businesses, and citizens must reorganize around its arrival.

That premise is already directing decisions about electrical grids, data centers, labor policy, and national security spending. The singularity may never arrive as advertised. The infrastructure, dependency, and concentration of power built in its name can arrive anyway.

This is the point Christians and other serious citizens must grasp. Prophecies can become partly self-fulfilling — not because the predictions are true, but because powerful institutions act upon them. A future repeatedly described as inevitable begins to justify present arrangements that would otherwise receive much harder scrutiny.

Democratic deliberation looks tardy once someone has declared the takeoff underway. Blame slowing AI for lost lives, and restraint starts to resemble negligence rather than caution. Treat superintelligence as inevitable, and concentrated power — corporate and governmental alike — stops looking like a danger and starts looking like a temporary, forgivable necessity.

The story about the future becomes a source of authority in the present. That is the fresh danger.

It is not necessary to believe that every AI engineer intends to become God. Most do not. Many sincerely hope to cure disease, relieve suffering, expand knowledge, or strengthen their country.

The trouble is that the collective project is beginning to answer questions once reserved for philosophy, theology, and democratic politics. What is humanity’s central problem, and what will save us? Those questions used to belong to churches and parliaments, argued out over generations. Now they arrive bundled inside product roadmaps — decisions about what man must become, who should guide the transition, and what sacrifices are justified to reach the promised destination, made by engineers and investors rather than debated by citizens.

In my forthcoming book, “The Final Algorithm,” I examine where the convergence of artificial intelligence, political power, and spiritual deception may lead. But the present question comes first: what beliefs are moving us toward that destination, and who is using those beliefs to shape society before the future arrives?

Christians bring an essential corrective. History has direction, but technological momentum is not providence. Intelligence is a gift, not a savior. Human limitations are not all defects, and every expansion of capability does not constitute moral progress. No corporation, government, or machine owns the future.

The oldest temptation was never really about fruit. It was the promise that man could seize god-like knowledge and steer his own destiny without reference to his Maker (Genesis 3:5, ESV). Every generation dresses that same promise in new material — bronze, steam, nuclear, and silicon. The psalmist supplies a corrective no engineering roadmap can match: “Put not your trust in princes, in a son of man, in whom there is no salvation” (Psalm 146:3, ESV). Algorithms are not princes, but they are already consulted, obeyed, and trusted with decisions that once belonged to conscience and community.

That conviction should not make Christians enemies of innovation. It should make us skeptical of inevitability. We should welcome tools that heal, protect, and enlarge responsible human action while resisting claims that one technological pathway is history’s ordained destination.

Years ago in Jerusalem, I saw how an eschatology could form coalitions, move resources, and influence geopolitics. The same lesson applies now. We must examine not only whether AI’s predictions are technically plausible, but what those predictions authorize, whose interests they serve, and what forms of dependence they normalize.

The future according to AI is not merely being predicted. It is being financed, institutionalized, and politically organized.

Before we accept it, we should ask who wrote the prophecy — and who gains power when everyone else believes it.

Robert Maginnis is a retired U.S. Army lieutenant colonel, senior fellow for National Security at Family Research Council, and the author of 15 books. His latest, “The Final Algorithm,” releases in July 2026.

This article originally appeared here.