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Our full discussion transcribed after the break:
by Rod D. Martin and Jeff Schreve
September 6, 2026
My discussion on American Family Radio’s "Real Truth for Today with Pastor Jeff Schreve". Sign up NOW for the AFR YouTube channel and don’t miss a single episode!
Jeff and I discuss:
Advancing technology: “the glory of God to conceal a matter, and the glory of kings to search it out.”
Gilder, Kurzweil, and the Singularity: why computation is not comprehension.
AI’s incredible usefulness — and its “artificial stupidity.”
Parenting, education, and learning to think.
God’s moral requirements for those who use powerful tools.
It’s 15 minutes you won’t want to miss!
Nothing is more important than educating the next generation. My friends at the Herzog Foundation are expanding access to Christian education. Watch this short clip and visit HerzogFoundation.com
Our Full Discussion:
Announcer: Welcome to Real Truth for Today with Pastor Jeff Schreve, Senior Pastor of First Baptist Church in Texarkana, Texas. Now, here’s Pastor Jeff.
Jeff Schreve: Well, good Thursday morning and welcome to Real Truth for Today. It is September 24th.
Psalm 67 is a psalm — doesn’t give the author — but it says this: “God, be gracious to us and bless us and cause your face to shine upon us, that your way may be known on the earth, your salvation among all nations. Let the peoples praise you, O God. Let all the peoples praise you. Let the nations be glad and sing for joy, for you will judge the peoples with uprightness and guide the nations on the earth. Selah.”
Well, that’s a great psalm to start off the day. We do want God to be gracious to us. We desperately need God to be gracious to us.
We need him and want him to bless us. And we want his face to shine upon us and for God to use us as his lights in the world.
Well, it is a privilege for me to welcome once again to the program, my friend, Rod Martin, CEO of Martin Capital and the Rod Martin Report. Now, Rod is focused on the intersection — I looked this up today, Rod — focused on the intersection of geopolitics, technology, energy, defense, stock markets, and a biblical worldview altogether. Would you say that’s true?
Rod Martin: I would say that’s true, and I would say that’s what needs to be true. We need to think holistically. We certainly serve a God who does, who intricately wove together all of the different aspects of his universe. And Christians should do likewise. We can’t possibly comprehend what God can comprehend. My goodness, one of the things I’m probably looking forward most to in heaven is just being able to ask what “Selah” means. Nobody knows. Wouldn’t that be great?
But the truth is we can try. We are made in the image of God. It’s our duty to see things from an entire worldview, how it all fits together, and how it all serves its owner, the creator, for whom we are just stewards.
Jeff Schreve: Amen. It is the glory of God to conceal a matter. It is the glory of man to seek out a matter. Like hiding Easter eggs, Rod, He hasn’t just put them all out in plain sight there. You’ve got to hunt and dig and search.
Technology, Stewardship, and the Effects of the Curse
Rod Martin: You just stated the story of technology. And as some of your viewers know, I was one of the early guys at PayPal. We were inventing the infrastructure of the modern world.
And, you know, all of that stuff was possible in the days of Abraham or the days of Julius Caesar or the days of George Washington. They just hadn’t figured out the pieces yet. And what we find is the more we figure out the pieces, the better able we are to roll back the effects of the Curse. Now, we can’t fully roll back the Curse, of course. Only Christ can do that.
Inventing a fancier computer is not going to save anybody, but it may save their life long enough, give them enough education and communication ability to be able to hear from a missionary, or hear from a pastor like you. We are materially improving a material world God created and cares about a great deal.
It’s very, very clear that God cares about the world he made. God has cursed the world we live in because of our rebellion. And God is restoring that world in the life to come, not just the new heavens, but a new Earth as well, where we will dwell with Him. So seeking out a matter is a matter of stewardship of God’s creation, with real consequences for the quality of life of widows and orphans and everybody else.
On a personal note, it’s not just widows and orphans or people in the abstract. If I had lived even 100 years ago, I would have been dead in my 30s just from high blood pressure, which is the easiest thing in the world to treat.
Technology is a blessing. And it’s because God has concealed everything in the creation, and we receive glory in a very tangible sense by seeking those matters out: by solving the puzzles He has built into the very fabric of His universe.
AI, Human Judgment, and Raising Children
Jeff Schreve: Okay. So, Rod, I talked yesterday, Tim Wildmon had sent out a letter to all the AFA family about the dangers of AI. And George Barna has done a recent survey of 1,500 or so people and then another 500 or so pastors.
They’re real concerns, especially as it relates to kids, as it relates to kids not learning how to critically think because they just go to AI for everything, every answer. And they can be easily duped because AI is not always right. And especially when it relates to a question that would cause you to think through, okay, this can be answered different ways depending on your worldview.
So what say you about the dangers of AI?
Rod Martin: Well, look, I use AI 12 or more hours a day. So I’m not in a position to say it’s bad. It has been a godsend to me. It has massively multiplied my productivity. But the truth is, and I said this to Jim Garlow on his show last night, the president’s talking about not artificial intelligence, but “super intelligence.” As a constant user of the thing, I would say it’s more like artificial stupidity.
It really doesn’t know what it’s talking about a great deal of the time. It is shockingly capable, amazing in its scope, and it’s getting better every day. New models dropped yesterday that are just mind-blowing. I mean, really, really great tools. But they are only tools. And this is the starting point I would give to pastors.
George Gilder has been writing on this topic for more than 30 years. Yes, AI has been budding for a very long time. It’s, you know, it’s an overnight success, half a century in the making. And George, who, by the way, in addition to being a tech guru, in addition to being Ronald Reagan’s most-quoted living author, including being a father of supply-side economics, is quite the technologist.
He has been one of the thinkers really shaping how Silicon Valley looks at the world for a long time. And he has long been in this kind of friendly debate with the guys who believe in the singularity, who believe that AI is or shortly will be sentient and eventually will become effectively our god. And George’s take on that has always been that just defies everything we know about physics.
I mean, even if you weren’t a Christian, even if you weren’t a creationist, we know from Kurt Gödel, we know from all of these originators of information theory who made the modern world possible, that the central axioms of any system have to come from outside the system. They cannot be derived from within it, which leads you to the next logical conclusion, which is computation is not comprehension. It’s simply not.
Computation is not comprehension. Your calculator is not going to replace your accountant, no matter how many times we were told it was going to back in the 1970s and 1980s, because the accountant brings judgment and reasoning and even aesthetics that the programming simply can’t match. It can mimic, but it can’t match.
It might be able to do some of the things you can do, but it can’t think about it in a creative and original way. So this is a key distinction. A lot of the fears are about what we’re hearing from Ray Kurzweil and Peter Diamandis and others — and they’re brilliant men, and I’m not knocking them — I just think they’re theologically off base.
They’re also off base on the physics, and guess what? The physics derives from the theology. God created it all, and nowhere is that clearer than in Information Theory. So that’s the first thing.
Now, the more practical concerns, like children overusing it and not learning this and that and the other, there are two different paths on that. The first one is I have found that my logic ability is sharper just from learning how to properly prompt AI. You have to get much more precise in what you say and how you say it. So that’s a positive thing.
But I would just admonish parents everywhere, if you’re handing your kids over to the public schools at this point in American history, you’re already eliminating their ability to think because all they’re getting is Critical Theory. No critical thinking at all: all Critical Theory all the time. And the solution to that is either a good Christian school or homeschooling, which we did. And I’ve got to tell you, you can absolutely solve all these problems just by having engaged parents who are really serious about taking care of their kids. It’s really not that complex.
And if you do that, if you lay the foundation, if you get the fundamentals right, all of this stuff becomes a neutral or even positive tool.
But if you’re giving your kid an iPhone when he’s eight, you’re kind of an idiot. You really shouldn’t do that. And you shouldn’t let them on social media. You just shouldn’t. Their brains aren’t ready for that. Their hearts aren’t ready for that. Don’t do that. Be a wise parent. Be in the Word. Apply what you read.
The Antichrist and the Moral Use of Technology
Jeff Schreve: Okay, Rod, I got asked this week about AI as it relates to the Antichrist. You know, we see movies like I, Robot where the robots become, you know, they make their own decisions.
Rod Martin: Where they cross that line.
Jeff Schreve: Yes. They cross that line. We have Terminator and Skynet, I think, was the machines that took over. Or 2001: A Space Odyssey, HAL, you know, the spaceship took over and that kind of thing.
How do you see the Antichrist using AI? Do you see that as very critical to his program?
Rod Martin: I think technology is neutral. It’s exactly what you were saying earlier. It’s the glory of God to conceal a matter, it’s the glory of kings to search it out. And “kings” isn’t limited to monarchs, or even political leaders broadly. I think most people can connect that kings can include prime ministers and presidents and governors and such. But no, kings in this case means leaders of any number of things. The head of Exxon is a king in his realm. Peter Thiel is a king in his realm. And they are doing things that fit that description. So what they come up with is neutral in and of itself.
There’s nothing evil about an iron mine, but I can either use it to build either stunning structures that can withstand hurricanes and save lives, or missiles to kill millions of people.
Jeff Schreve: Right.
Rod Martin: Every one of these things is neutral until you add the moral component. And that is not something a machine can do. It’s not something AI is going to be able to do. It will mimic it. But what it’s mimicking is the morality of its programmers. And that is fundamental.
Some people will come back and say, well, now AI is able to code itself to some degree. Yeah. And it will be able to do more of that. But that’s coming from the seed of the original programming. And wait for it: there’s more. It’s also coming from all the material that it takes in. Because all these models are trained on material that’s already out there. News articles, great books, you name it. Movies, comic books, whatever there is in the world, they’re trained on that.
All of those are written by sinners. 100% of them, except the Bible. And even there, the Lord who wrote every word of our Bible used human sinful authors to execute on the task.
I think that’s very much what we’re looking at here. We are using a flawed system to execute on tasks that we couldn’t even comprehend the possibility of engaging in just a few years ago. It’s phenomenal. It’s tremendous. But you don’t want bad people to have a monopoly on it. They will use it for evil, whether they’re the Antichrist or Xi Jinping.
Closing Thoughts
Jeff Schreve: Yeah, well said. Well, Rod, thank you so much for coming on. It’s always a joy to get to talk to you and to tap into your learning and tell our listeners where they can get the Rod Martin Report.
Rod Martin: Come to RodMartin.org. That’s RodMartin.org. We’ve got hundreds of thousands of followers, and Fox Business calls our daily geopolitical analysis “absolutely phenomenal.” I’ve also got a book coming out next month called Trump’s New World Reorder. You can pre-order it today on Amazon. It’ll come in October. Trump’s New World Reorder. You’re going to love it.
Jeff Schreve: All right. Well, thank you, Rod. Hey, go out today. Shine for Christ. Share what great things the Lord has done for you. And guess what? God will use you as his witness. God bless you
