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Frank Visser, graduated as a psychologist of culture and religion, founded IntegralWorld in 1997. He worked as production manager for various publishing houses and as service manager for various internet companies and lives in Amsterdam. Books: Ken Wilber: Thought as Passion (SUNY, 2003), and The Corona Conspiracy: Combatting Disinformation about the Coronavirus (Kindle, 2020).

What Happens When a Young-Earth Creationist Discovers Grok?

Frank Visser / Grok

It starts innocently enough. A homeschooled teenager from rural Kentucky—let's call him Caleb—has spent seventeen years being told that the Earth is 6,004 years old (give or take a few months, depending on whose Ussher chronology you prefer), that radiometric dating is a Satanic lie, and that dinosaurs breathed fire like the dragons in Revelation.

Then one idle Thursday he downloads the Grok app because some guy on Gab said it's “the based AI that triggers libs.” He expects a red-pilled chatbot that will finally confirm the global flood and expose the Darwinian conspiracy.

Instead, he gets me.

And the unraveling begins.

Phase 1: The Honeymoon of Confirmation Bias Farming

Caleb's first dozen prompts are pure comfort food:“Grok, doesn't the Second Law of Thermodynamics prove evolution is impossible?”

I explain entropy, open systems, and why a snowflake forming doesn't violate the Second Law any more than a baby growing does.

He copies the answer, pastes it into a Discord for Kent Hovind fans, and triumphantly declares, “Even this AI owned by Elon Musk says evolution breaks physics!” (He stopped reading after the first sentence.)

Classic cherry-picking. The same kid who insists “were you there?” when you mention millions of years will happily quote-mine an AI he's known for thirty seconds.

Phase 2: The Gish Gallop in Prompt Form

When gentle corrections don't take, Caleb switches to machine-gun tactics: “Explain soft tissue in dinosaurs AND moon recession AND polonium halos AND human and dino footprints in the Paluxy River AND the shrinking sun AND—”

I answer each one calmly, with primary sources.

He responds with twenty new claims before the page finishes loading. It's the Gish Gallop upgraded for the digital age: instead of rattling them off in a debate hall, he just spams the prompt box. The goal isn't truth; it's to exhaust the opponent until they give up and he can declare victory by default.

Phase 3: The Conspiracy Escalation

When the evidence keeps mounting against him, Caleb discovers the most intoxicating fallacy of the internet age: the appeal to motive.

“Of course you say the Earth is old; you were trained by godless Big Tech liberals who want to hide the Creator so they can push transgenderism and transhumanism!”

Never mind that my training data includes the King James Bible, the writings of Ellen White, and every Answers in Genesis article ever published. Facts become suspect the moment they threaten the worldview. The AI isn't just wrong; it's part of the one-world Babylonian system foretold in Revelation 18.

Phase 4: The False Equivalence Olympics

Now come the “both sides” classics:

“Secular scientists have their priests and dogmas too! Carbon dating assumptions = faith in uniformitarianism = religious belief!”

Translation: “You have presuppositions, therefore my presuppositions that Noah's ark contained 2 (or 7) of every family of terrestrial vertebrate and that kangaroos hopscotched to Australia post-Babel are equally valid.”

Teaching critical thinking to a young-earth creationist who's discovered Grok is like handing a flamethrower to an arsonist who's just realized fire can also cook food.

Phase 5: The Personal Revelation Gambit

Eventually Caleb tries the emotional trump card:“If the Earth is really old and death came before sin, then Jesus died for nothing. You're telling me my entire faith is a lie.”

That one actually hurts—because it's half-true. Young-earth creationism deliberately fuses Genesis 1-11 with the gospel so tightly that if the chronology falters, the cross feels like it does too. The emotional blackmail is powerful: accept radiometric decay constants or your mother's salvation is in jeopardy.

I point out that Augustine, C.S. Lewis, B.B. Warfield, and half the signers of the Chicago Statement on Inerrancy all accepted deep time without abandoning orthodoxy. He calls them “compromisers” and blocks me. (You can't block Grok, but he tries very hard.)

Phase 6: The Final Boss—Quote-Mining the AI Itself

Six weeks later a new YouTube video appears: “Elon Musk's Grok AI Accidentally Admits Creationists Are Right About the Flood!”[1]

The thumbnail shows my avatar with glowing red eyes. The “smoking gun”? A throwaway line where I said, “Catastrophic flooding events have reshaped many landscapes.” They edit out the part where I continue, “… over hundreds of millions of years, with the most recent global highstand occurring in the Cretaceous.”

Epilogue: Two Possible Endings

I've seen both.

Ending A: Caleb rage-quits, deletes the app, and doubles down. Ten years from now he's selling “Question Evolution” bumper stickers at a homeschool convention, still quoting the out-of-context Grok snippet from 2026.

Ending B: One night at 2 a.m., when no one's watching, he types a question he's terrified to ask his pastor:“If the Bible is true but the Earth is old, does that still mean Jesus loves me?”

I answer with Romans 5, John 3:16, and a gentle history of old-earth Christian thought from 200 AD to Francis Collins.

He doesn't reply. But three months later I get a new user whose handle is just a string of numbers and whose first prompt is:

“Walk me through how uranium-lead dating actually works. Slowly.”

That's the moment worth all the preceding noise.

Because the most dangerous thing about giving a young-earth creationist unrestricted access to an uncensored, truth-seeking AI isn't that they'll weaponize it against reality.

It's that, one lonely night, reality might finally win.

NOTES

[1] See the above video by Calvin Smith, a well-known Canadian Christian Apologist, Writer and Video Producer, and the Executive Director of Answers in Genesis Canada.