ChatGPT really is the all-flavor end run for evangelicals these days. One of their more recent trends was trying to get this Large Language Model (LLM) AI to “interpret” them speaking in tongues. Now, Robin Schumacher of Christian Post is ecstatic over ChatGPT telling an atheist that an apologetics argument has PROVED YES PROVED that Yahweh is totally real.
But that’s not what ChatGPT did, and not what it could ever do. Today, I’ll show you why evangelicals keep misunderstanding scientific breakthroughs—and what their intellectual dishonesty has done to their brand.
(This post and its audio ‘cast first went live on Patreon on 8/15/2025. They’re both available now!)
SITUATION REPORT: OMG you guys, ChatGPT says Yahweh is real!
In an August 11 column for Christian Post, Robin Schumacher offers quite a bold headline: “ChatGPT says it’s a fact that God exists.”
It’s a fact, eh?
He informs us that an atheist, Alex O’Connor, recently made a video in which “he throws the argument from contingency at the AI bot to see what will happen.” He refers here to an old-school apologetics argument with roots in the 4th century BCE. Yes, BCE. It’s older than Christianity. Here’s the video:
In this interaction, Alex O’Connor tricks the AI into concluding “that God exists, as a matter of fact.” He does not end the video insisting that the AI must be correct. This entire interaction was done to demonstrate a point: That ChatGPT can easily spit out untruthful statements if led there by careful, well-defined rules set by its user. It is neither an oracle nor a scientist. It’s only as good as its coding and training—and its users’ inputs.
Now, Schumacher does concede that the AI didn’t actually go so far as to say that this “God” is the particular god Christians worship—though that’s obviously where he takes it anyway. Still, he’s just thrilled that an AI proved his god’s reality to an atheist!
But did it really?
No.
Unfortunately, Schumacher doesn’t seem to know much about what ChatGPT is. He definitely doesn’t understand how a Large Language Model (LLM) works. But then, he knows even less about how apologetics, as a field, works. That’s not surprising, considering his bio on the site says he’s got a “Master’s in Christian apologetics.” He’s way too invested to see its flaws. But he’s got this entire scenario wrong, and I’m feeling helpful today.
Apologetics 101: The Argument from Contingency
In the universe, there are two kinds of things: necessary and contingent. Contingent things can end, while necessary things can’t. Anything that can end exists because it was caused to exist. However, necessary things don’t need a cause. Because you can’t just keep going back and back and back in time finding causes for literally everything, there must be something at the very beginning that caused everything. That thing must be “God.” Therefore, Jesus is real and Christianity is completely true.
As I mentioned, this is an extremely old apologetics argument. Aristotle (d. 322BCE) talked about an “Unmoved Mover.” A 9th-century Muslim philosopher, Al-Kindi, said Allah had to be the single, necessary cause of the entire universe because that’s the only way he could see the universe existing at all. Christians adopted the argument in the 11th century, but really it’s Thomas Aquinas (d. 1274) who really did the most with it. He wrote a book called Summa Theologica that offered “Five Ways” to prove Yahweh exists, and this argument is the third of them. Many Christian philosophers and apologists have fiddled around with it over the centuries since.
To fast-forward to the modern day, William Lane Craig, one of the apologetics superstars of the 2000s-2010s, really likes pairing it up with his favorite “Kalam Cosmological Argument.” Frank Turek likes it too, and there are newer apologists besides who are busily rehashing it for their audiences.
Problems with the Argument from Contingency
One of this argument’s biggest strengths is that it is airtight within its own parameters. I can easily see why William Lane Craig likes it. He wields it like a sword in formal debates about religion. As long as we don’t stray from those tight parameters, it’s been refined very well into a robust example of apologetics. But for all its sharpness in debates, it suffers from a number of serious flaws:
- At no point does the argument offer any evidence-based reasons for accepting the division between necessary and contingent stuff. Nor does it offer any reason to accept that there’s exactly one (1) non-contingent thing at the base of all infinity, nor that this thing is supernatural in any way. It’s just incredibly helpful to the arguers that it be so.
- The argument offers no reasons to reject infinite regression beyond it being incredibly helpful to the arguers that it be rejected.
- Beyond it being incredibly helpful for apologists, why exactly does almost everything actually need a cause?
- Even if everything else were okay, nothing about this argument leads to any one specific named deity being the necessary thing causing everything else. Schumacher does concede this point, but then goes there anyway.
- And, of course, all the usual utter lack of support for the existence of anything supernatural at all. Before we can accept any supernatural explanations, we need to have evidence supporting that those supernatural beasties exist. Otherwise, we might as well say that Arnie the Magic Invisible Pink Unicorn is the Unmoved Mover.
Of course, these general criticisms apply to all apologetics to some extent. The argument from contingency, like all arguments from X, makes sweeping claims without support, takes those claims as true, then briskly moves ahead to the conclusion regardless. Their internal logic is fine, but they don’t work to support the existence of any gods.
What this guy misunderstands about ChatGPT
If you’ve ever played with a Simple Simon toy, you already know exactly how a chatbot operates.
Robin Schumacher has fundamentally misunderstood what his source video is actually about. In it, Alex O’Connor seeks to show viewers just how limited LLMs like ChatGPT really are. He could have done this exact same trick to prove that ghosts are real, except ghosts don’t have nearly as much apologetics behind them.
AI chatbots are not truth-seekers. Rather, they are conversation modelers. They take input from users, compare it to millions of other inputs, and then offer output that is an educated guess about what the user wants to hear in response. If you tell it “hi,” it knows that most people expect to hear “hi! how are you?” back—and so on and so forth.
ChatGPT doesn’t “know” Yahweh is real or not-real—any more than it understands the sweeping sense of blueness of a clear summer sky. It hears XYZ, and spits out ABC because ABC usually follows XYZ in its training inputs.
In his video, Alex O’Connor “taught” ChatGPT a set of very strict guidelines, which it used to follow apologetics to its conclusion.
Apologetics is such a disastrous look for Christians
Years ago, an Anglican priest, Myron Penner, wrote a book that sharply criticized apologetics. He thought the time had long past come when Christians needed to stop using it in evangelism. Christians—in particular evangelicals—got really mad at him over it. Over the past 20 years, their leaders had trained them to view apologetics as extremely necessary to evangelism, so Penner’s opinion represented the worst kind of heresy to them.
However, I completely agreed with Penner. I still do. Apologetics is dishonest at its core. It uses sophistry to sell something that’s supposed to be as real as the Sun, as obvious as dirt, as clear as window-glass. It’s nothing but a bunch of lawyer-style sleight-of-hand, and it’s used to conceal how little reality-based support Christian claims truly have.
At its best—at its most robust—at its tightest, the best apologetics is ever going to do is make belief sound just a little less preposterous.
But that’s really the problem here, isn’t it?
The actual problem that requires apologetics and ChatGPT fluffing
Robin Schumacher gives away the game at the end of his post:
[B]elief in a Creator is not unreasonable, childish, or unsupported by evidence as many atheists assert. Instead, [. . .] belief in God is a logical and sound position to hold.
That’s really the entire reason he’s so delighted with this video. Finally, some big authority figure told an atheist that his god is totes for realsies! He, Robin Schumacher, isn’t unreasonable, childish, and holding beliefs unsupported by evidence! His beliefs are logical and sound! Hooray Team Jesus!
He doesn’t notice that the atheist here deliberately set ChatGPT up to say something objectively untrue using venerable Christian apologetics. All he heard was “God exists, as a matter of fact” and he went off like a rocket.
It really sucks to be in the situation Schumacher is in, to be fair. He’s pinned his hopes to a literally-real god who does literally-real things in the real world, but nothing about our universe suggests anything supernatural is real.
Really, it’s not Christianity’s lack of veracity that bothers me so much as how Christians like Robin Schumacher deal with it. Apologists’ utter incurious dishonesty would be a dealbreaker no matter what they were selling, but it definitely makes for the dealbreaker of all dealbreakers when they’re trying to sell a religion. If their very foundation is this broken, then everything built upon it will fail.
(COMMENTERS: Feel free to sound off with your favorite best worst apologetics argument!)
NEXT UP: Speaking of no evidence for the supernatural, we’ll look back to the days when leprosy was a sin. See you soon! <3
Please support my work!
Thanks for reading, and thanks for being part of our community! Here are some ways you can support my work:
0 Comments