ANOTHER ‘TOWER OF BABEL’ EVENT IS AT HAND.
The New God.
The old world is dying,” Antonio Gramsci once wrote. “And the new world struggles to be born.” In such interregnums, the Italian Marxist philosopher suggested, “every act, even the smallest, may acquire decisive weight”.
The LORD said, “If as one people speaking the same language, they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them.
Genesis 11: The Tower of Babel Story
I greatly admire Ezra Klein, columnist in the New York Times. He interviews knowledgeable people, and is a master in eliciting interesting information.
This past week his topic was AI.
Here are his words.
“Let me zoom in on that. I’ve covered these A.I. companies for a long time. I covered the Anthropic guys when they still worked at OpenAI.
And that is how they all used to talk about it — that it is a race to build superintelligence, the one A.I. that will rule them all. (That refers to The Lord of the Rings, I might add)
Alloway: To build God.
Klein: Yes, to build the machine God.
So far this dialogue.
Alienated from this earth, the world needs a new God.
Let me quote again The Tower of Babel verdict.
The LORD said, “If as one people speaking the same language, they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them.
My question: the Lord stopped the building of the Tower of Babel. How about AI? Will the Lord tolerate competition? No. Then what?
A bit of a detour.
I am rereading BRAIDING SWEETGRASS. When I reread a book, I always discover items, overlooked in my first reading. In this book, written by Robin Wall Kimmerer, an indigenous woman and professor of environmental biology, she records how a question to her 200 students, revealed that they consider humans and nature to be a bad mix. Asked whether they know about any positive interaction between people and land, their response was ‘none’. (This question was directed to third year students in an environmental protection course.)
That brings me to Christianity. Throughout the Scriptures, when God is referred to, God is described as ‘Creator of Heaven and Earth’. I am writing this in the days leading up to Christmas and New Year, and the newspapers I daily read have their pious pieces, outlining the views on Christianity, invariably seeing ‘heaven’ as the goal. Even the most devout among the many Christians I encounter, share that view.
However, this anthropocentric – human oriented – view grew directly from the philosophy of Aristotle’s teacher Plato, who focused his philosophy on separating humans from nature while popularizing the feel-good notion that humans have immortal souls. Basically, this makes the ‘heaven’ faith a pagan notion, exploited by the most godless of humans in power today, Donald Trump, who daily advocates ‘sins against creation’. In my opinion this is equivalent to ‘the sins against the Holy Spirit’, for which there is no forgiveness.
When God finished creating, he called creation ‘good’ seven times. That’s why God wrote: “you return to the ground, since from it you were taken; for earth you are and to earth you will return.” Genesis 3: 19.
When my wife of 67 years was buried in the Anglican cemetery, overlooking the Village of Tweed, now more than 5 years ago, the only words I spoke, were: “Earth we are and to earth we shall return”.
How do I tie these yearend ramblings together?
We today live in a new ‘Tower of Babel’ event. The God/Creator has become an unknown quantity. The time of ‘one language rules them all’ has reappeared: AI- Artificial Intelligence – is the new God. That God has revealed itself in Creation – John 3: 16 – is ridiculed: heaven is the preferred destination, giving us licence to destroy the earth which God called ‘good’ seven times. Religious movements thrive, the one more charismatic than the other. The BIBLICAL truth is that Jesus died to restore creation: this means that salvation of the now universally polluted cosmos and our personal salvation, go hand in hand, are the two sides of the same coin.
The first Tower of Babel resulted in world-wide development. The second Tower of Babel has led to THE MACHINE, Man the Machine.
The time is short. Another “Tower of Babel” event is at hand. This time the earth is saturated with people. This time we are ‘over-developed’ to the point of overheating. This time the only solution possible is outlined in Revelation 21:1:
Then I saw “a new heaven and a new earth,” for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and there was no longer any sea.