A recent Facebook reel hooked me with one line: “I asked AI what it would do if it were the devil.” Quick, provocative, designed to stop the scroll. It worked—better than the creator probably intended.
But that single sentence lingered far longer than a passing reel should. It immediately called to mind Paul Harvey’s 1965 radio piece If I Were the Devil. Harvey didn’t treat the devil as symbolism or satire. He spoke as if the devil were real—intelligent, deliberate, strategic—describing evil not as chaos, but as quiet manipulation.
Listening to that recording today is unsettling for a reason Harvey likely never imagined. It doesn’t sound dramatic anymore. It sounds descriptive.
So I decided to follow the same trail—but in a modern context. I asked AI the same question, not as a stunt, but as a thought exercise: If you were the devil, what would you do?
The answer wasn’t theatrical. No horns, no possession stories, no fire-and-brimstone imagery. What came back was a list of tactics—blur truth instead of denying it, redefine words, exhaust people with noise, hollow out virtue, divide communities, keep faith but drain it of obedience.
What struck me wasn’t how clever the response was. It was how familiar it sounded.
That familiarity raised an uncomfortable follow-up I couldn’t ignore: Are you treating the devil as a metaphor here, or as something real?
That distinction matters. Paul Harvey spoke as if the devil were a real, intentional being. In this particular exchange, the AI treated the devil as a real theological identity—but discussed functionally, by effects rather than appearances. Not a character study, but a pattern analysis.
And that’s where the conversation shifted from evil to something deeper.
Because once you start talking about deception, truth, and distortion, you eventually have to ask: what is truth grounded in? Is it objective—or negotiated? Discovered—or constructed?
Once deception and truth are on the table, the next question practically asks itself: where do we get our standard for truth?
That led to the next unavoidable question: Do you view the Bible as accurate history, or just a collection of moral stories?
The answer was unambiguous. The Bible was not treated as myth or fable, but as historical narrative with theological purpose—real people, real places, real events, presented in ancient literary forms, but making real-world claims. Moral teaching, yes—but grounded in history, not invented to inspire.
If the Bible presents itself as history, not allegory—then its opening claim matters. And that brings us directly to the creation account.
So I pressed the question—given the evidence we can examine—which framework more coherently accounts for the universe we actually inhabit: the biblical creation account or modern evolutionary teaching?
What followed wasn’t a dismissal of science, nor a retreat into blind faith. It was a comparison of worldviews.
Science has produced remarkable explanatory power within its naturalistic bounds; the disagreement lies in whether those bounds are sufficient. Evolutionary theory, by definition, begins with a philosophical constraint: only natural causes are allowed, regardless of what the evidence might suggest. The biblical account begins with intelligent causation—and then explains order, information, purpose, morality, and accountability as consequences of that starting point.
The issue wasn’t primarily fossils or timelines. It was information. Order. Coherence.
DNA functions like code. Information always traces back to mind. The fossil record shows sudden appearance and stasis, not the smooth transitions once predicted. Dating methods rely on assumptions that can’t be observed. And perhaps most importantly, the biblical worldview explains not just how things exist—but why meaning, morality, and truth exist at all.
(You can replicate these questions with most current large language models; results vary slightly by model and prompt phrasing, but the pattern often holds.)
At that point, the original Facebook reel felt almost irrelevant.
What began as a casual question about the devil became an examination of assumptions—about truth, history, origins, and whether reality itself is intentional or accidental.
Paul Harvey’s monologue still resonates because he understood something many miss: evil doesn’t need to announce itself. It only needs people to stop asking hard questions.
This wasn’t a post about AI. And it wasn’t really a post about the devil.
It was about whether we’re still honest enough to follow a question all the way to the end.
