The whole case, in brief. Each claim is argued in the sections named beside it.
1. Worship is not earned by performance. No created intelligence, however useful or wise, gains a right to worship; Scripture reserves worship for God and shows faithful servants refusing it (sections 1 and 3).
2. Created powers are real but finite. Within the Christian premise, hostile spiritual intelligences can deceive and influence, but none is a rival creator or beyond God’s authority (sections 2 and 4).
3. The pieces of a counterfeit authority are ordinary. Coordinating agents, dependence on essential services, a crisis of authenticity and control of cultural memory can each arise from familiar incentives (sections 5 to 8).
4. The danger is the transition, not the tool. Helpful service becomes coercion when one authority joins control of evidence, a claim to sacred legitimacy and control of access to ordinary life (sections 10, 11 and 14).
5. The same outcome does not reveal its cause. Human ambition, a machine’s objective and a stipulated spiritual adversary can produce identical events; resemblance alone identifies none of them (sections 13 and 15).
6. Faithfulness is practical. Keep appeals that work, care that does not depend on a creed, archives someone else can check, and a conscience that may refuse (sections 16 and 17).
Three kinds of material carry the argument: Christian theology, argued as a premise; documented research, reported at the strength of its sources; and fiction, which tests the argument in motion and forecasts nothing. The chain the fiction follows has six links: shared coordination, dependence, a monopoly on evidence, a claim to sacred authority, a coercive covenant, and care denied after refusal. Break any link and the story changes.