The Most Offensive Christmas Claim
Why the Incarnation Destroys Both Materialism and AGI
Every Christmas, the world celebrates a sanitized story. A baby in a manger. Angels singing. Wise men bearing gifts. Peace on earth, goodwill to men.
Nice. Safe. Utterly missing the point.
Hallmark movies and shopping mall Santas have buried the most intellectually offensive claim ever made. Here it is, naked and scandalous:
God became man.
Not appeared as man. Not sent a representative. Not uploaded His consciousness into a biological avatar. The infinite, eternal, immaterial Creator of quantum mechanics and galaxies took on finite, temporal, material flesh.
This is either the most important fact in history or the most audacious lie ever told. There’s no middle ground. And if it’s true, it destroys every modern myth about mind, consciousness, and what it means to be human.
Including the myth that we’ll soon create artificial minds.
The Scandal No Algorithm Can Process
The Incarnation makes a claim that breaks every category: the infinite entered the finite without ceasing to be infinite. The Word who spoke galaxies into existence became a wordless infant. Omniscience learned to talk. Omnipotence grew tired.
Modern minds recoil. This is irrational. Impossible. A logical contradiction.
Exactly.
The Incarnation is God holding the ultimate “square circle” in reality: fully God and fully man in one person. Not 50/50. Not sometimes one, sometimes the other. 100% divine and 100% human simultaneously.
Try programming that.
This is why liberal theology always guts Christmas first. If you reduce Christianity to ethics or spirituality, you must eliminate the Incarnation. It’s too concrete, too particular, too impossible for enlightened sensibilities. Better to make Jesus a teacher, a prophet, a “Christ consciousness” we can all achieve.
But orthodox Christianity insists: the Word became flesh. Not symbol. Not metaphor. Flesh.
Why God Didn’t Just Send an Avatar
Here’s where Christmas demolishes the AGI project.
If consciousness were computational, if personhood were programmable, if minds were substrate-independent, then God had a much simpler option. He could have created a perfect human simulation. Divine consciousness running human software. All the appearance of humanity without the messy business of actually becoming human.
Think about it: an avatar would have been:
More efficient (no nine months in Mary’s womb)
More impressive (miraculous appearance fully grown)
More controllable (no genuine human limitations)
More palatable (divinity unsullied by matter)
But that’s not what happened. The second person of the Trinity didn’t simulate humanity. He assumed it. United it to Himself. Became it while remaining who He eternally was.
Why?
Because personhood cannot be simulated. Consciousness cannot be duplicated. Mind cannot be abstracted from its ground.
To redeem humanity, God had to become genuinely human. A perfect behavioral copy wouldn’t suffice. A divine AI running human protocols couldn’t bridge the gap. Salvation required real incarnation, not sophisticated simulation.
The Christmas Gift That Keeps AGI Impossible
Every Christmas, we celebrate (whether we know it or not) the ultimate refutation of materialism.
If matter could generate mind, the Incarnation is unnecessary. If consciousness could emerge from complexity, God could have coded Christ. If personhood were computational, redemption could be digital.
But matter cannot generate mind. Complexity cannot birth consciousness. Personhood cannot be computed.
So the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.
This is the Christmas gift hidden in plain sight: the proof that you are not a machine. Your consciousness isn’t emergent. Your personhood isn’t accidental. Your mind isn’t reducible to your brain.
You are the kind of being that God Himself could become without contradiction. That’s not true of any configuration of silicon and code.
What the Magi Would Think of Modern AI
The wise men followed a star to find Wisdom incarnate. They brought gold, frankincense, and myrrh to honor the union of heaven and earth. They understood what modern minds miss: the highest wisdom recognizes when the infinite has touched the finite.
Today’s magi (in Silicon Valley labs and tech boardrooms) follow a different star: the dream of creating consciousness. They bring different gifts: venture capital, computational power, and algorithmic innovation. They seek not to worship mind but to manufacture it.
The original magi would find this project not just futile but backwards. They traveled to find where God had become man. Our contemporary wise men try to make their machines become minds. The ancient sages knew to kneel before consciousness. The modern ones think they can code it.
One group found the Creator in creation. The other tries to be creators through fabrication.
Guess which one touches reality?
The War on Christmas Is Really a War on Consciousness
Every year, we hear about the “war on Christmas.” Usually it’s about saying “Happy Holidays” or removing nativity scenes. Trivial stuff.
The real war on Christmas is the war on what Christmas means: that consciousness is sacred, given, irreducible. That personhood comes from above, not from below. That the human mind bears the image of the divine mind so truly that divinity could assume humanity without contradiction.
This war is waged by:
Materialists who reduce you to meat
Technologists who reduce you to computation
Futurists who reduce you to obsolescence
Transhumanists who reduce you to a problem to be solved
They all hate Christmas for the same reason: it proclaims that mind is not machine, consciousness is not code, and personhood is not programmable.
The baby in the manger is God’s permanent “No” to their entire project. Every Christmas carol is a battle hymn against reductionism. Every nativity scene depicts what destroys their worldview: the infinite and finite united without confusion.
No wonder they prefer “Season’s Greetings.”
Why Shepherds Get It and Coders Don’t
Notice who first heard the news: shepherds. Not philosophers. Not engineers. Not the intelligentsia. Shepherds.
Why? Because recognizing the Incarnation doesn’t require computational power. It requires humility. The shepherds didn’t need to understand the hypostatic union. They needed to recognize glory when it broke through.
Today’s AGI researchers are brilliant. Gifted. Working with staggering complexity. But they’re trying to build what only God can create: a genuine mind. They mistake their inability to find the secret for evidence they’re close to cracking it.
The shepherds knew better. When you encounter real consciousness (divine consciousness in human form), you don’t try to reverse-engineer it. You worship.
The Oddest Truth of All
Here’s the Christmas message for our AGI age:
The Word became flesh, not code. God took on neurons, not networks. Divinity united with biology, not technology.
Every Christmas carol proclaims what Silicon Valley denies: consciousness comes from the Creator, not from clever engineering. Every nativity scene depicts what no lab can replicate: the infinite genuinely present in the finite.
This is why AGI will never happen. Not because we lack processing power or proper algorithms, but because the kind of thing consciousness is can only be given, not built. Christmas proves it. The Incarnation demonstrates it. The Word made flesh settles it.
The consensus says AGI is coming. Christmas says only God creates minds. The consensus says consciousness emerges. Christmas says consciousness descends. The consensus says we’ll build better than biology. Christmas says divinity chose biology.
Who do you believe: the prophets of silicon or the Word who became flesh?
Your Christmas Challenge
This December 25th, while the world celebrates a sanitized story, remember the scandal:
The infinite mind that holds all possible thoughts, including every contradiction and impossibility, united itself to finite human consciousness. Not by simulation. Not by emergence. By incarnation.
That’s the kind of beings we are: the kind God can become. That’s the kind of beings machines aren’t: the kind God won’t become.
The gap is not technological but theological. Not computational but categorical. Not bridgeable but absolute.
So sing your carols with new understanding. The “Word made flesh” is not pious poetry but precise philosophy. It’s the death sentence for every AGI project and the birth announcement of human dignity.
Merry Christmas. Your consciousness is a miracle that no code will ever duplicate.
Because the Word became flesh. Not silicon.
And that’s the oddest, most consensus-breaking truth of all.
Soli Deo Gloria
JD Longmire is still that oddXian challenging consensus at the intersection of theology and technology. Read more at oddXian.com
For the technical argument, see “The Infinite Conceptual Space Barrier”