January 28 2017
THE RISE AND FALL OF THE NEW TOWER OF BABEL
You may remember the OLD tower of Babel, as related in Genesis 11. Here’s what the Bible says: ”Now the whole world had one language”, not unlike today I might add.
These people felt on top of their world, so they boasted: “Let is build ourselves a city with a tower that reaches to the heavens so that we make a name for ourselves.”
The Lord never likes boastful language (not even from presidents), musing (verse 6) if this Babel crowd pulls this off “nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them.”
So the Lord simply confused their language, which now has resulted in world-wide geographic and scientific progress so that there is not a place on earth not touched by human enterprise.
Today we know too well that this development has not all been favorable. All human actions have had destructive side effects such as Climate Change, acidifying oceans and decimated wild-life. And now its scientific section is starting to modify what it means to be human.
This brings me to the NEW TOWER OF BABEL, not just a gigantic physical structure but, far worse, threatening the essence of our psychical, spiritual and mental makeup, reminding us of God’s earlier thought: “nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them.”
The Last Frontier?
HOMO DEUS is the title of a new book, being published in North America this week, but which has been a best-seller in Great Britain since the fall of last year. The title, HOMO DEUS, says it all, if you know some basic Latin. A few weeks ago I saw the imported book for sale at CHAPTERS, for $40.00, but then I found the entire book on line for free.
Yuval Noah Harari, an Israel based philosopher, is also the author of an earlier book SAPIENS. Sapiens is also a Latin word, stemming from the verb SAPIO which means “be sensible, be wise”. Thus SAPIENS can be translated as MAN COME OF AGE, to speak in Bonhoeffer terms.
In HOMO DEUS he turns his focus toward humanity’s future, and the quest to upgrade humans into gods. Yes, you read this correctly UPGRADE US TO GODS, as the title HOMO DEUS means HUMAN as GOD. It comes with the subtitle: A BRIEF HISTORY OF TOMORROW. Actually Psalm 82: 6 sort of confirms this: “You are gods, you are all children of the Most High, but you will die”. Homo Deus, however, aims for eternity.
An ambitious claim
Harari first traces human development, lauding its achievements. Thanks to penicillin we have managed to limit deadly infections. Also, thanks to fertilizer and irrigation, more people are dying from eating too much than from starvation. Unfortunately, thanks to depression, more people commit suicide than are killed by soldiers, terrorists and criminals combined.
This new book explores the projects, dreams and nightmares that will shape the 21st century, in which – so says the author – we will overcome death and create artificial life.
In what he calls The DATA RELIGION the author claims that our upgrading into gods may follow any of three paths: biological engineering, cyborg engineering and the engineering of non-organic beings.
He writes that “Though the details are obscure, we can nevertheless be sure about the general direction of history. Now, in the twenty- first century, the new big project of humankind will be to acquire for us divine powers of creation and destruction, and upgrade Homo Sapiens – man come of age – into Homo Deus – man become god. We want the ability to re- engineer our bodies and minds in order, above all, to escape old age, death and misery, but once we have it, who knows what else we might do with such ability?”
In other words: science has a new agenda: attaining divinity and eternal life.
When one phase stops, everything stops.
As an aside Yuval Noah Harari, a professor in Jerusalem, claims that science has become so complicated that no one understands the entire system, so no one can stop the progress that is being made. If it is stopped somehow, he says, our economy will collapse, along with our society.
He, in a later chapter, asserts that the modern economy needs constant and indefinite growth in order to survive. If growth ever stops, the economy won’t settle down to some cozy equilibrium; it will fall to pieces.
My comments: everything is connected to everything else: one of the laws of ecology.
That’s why today politicians everywhere want GROWTH AT ALL COSTS (in a FINITE WORLD!) That is why capitalism encourages us to seek immortality, happiness and divinity: only when we are truly GODS can we overcome finiteness. An economy built on everlasting growth needs endless projects – just like the quests for immortality, bliss and divinity. Computers powerful enough to understand and overcome the mechanisms of ageing and death will probably also be powerful enough to replace humans in any and all tasks.” Welcome to a Brave New World!
He continues: “Whereas believing in multiple gods (theism) justified traditional agriculture in the name of God, humanism has justified modern industrial farming in the name of Man. Industrial farming sanctifies human needs, whims and wishes, while disregarding everything else. Industrial farming has no real interest in animals, which don’t share the sanctity of human nature. And it has no use for gods, because modern science and technology give humans powers that far exceed those of the ancient gods. Science enables modern firms to subjugate cows, pigs and chickens to more extreme conditions than those prevailing in traditional agricultural societies.
Cogito Ergo Sum: I think therefore I am.
This theory was upheld by the father of modern philosophy, Rene Descartes, who coined “I think therefore I am”.
In the seventeenth Century Descartes maintained that only humans feel and crave, whereas all other animals are mindless automata, akin to a robot or a vending machine. When a man kicks a dog, the dog experiences nothing. The dog flinches and howls automatically, just like a humming vending machine that makes a cup of coffee without feeling or wanting anything. This theory was widely accepted in Descartes’ day. Seventeenth-century doctors and scholars dissected live dogs and observed the working of their internal organs, without either anesthetics or scruples. They didn’t see anything wrong with that, just as we don’t see anything wrong in opening the lid of a vending machine and observing its gears and conveyors.”
I may add that today, in the early twenty-first century there are still plenty of people who argue that animals have no consciousness, or at most, that they have a very different and inferior type of consciousness.
Yuval Noah Harari, the author, argues that “if we think in term of months, we had probably focus on immediate problems such as the turmoil in the Middle East, the refugee crisis in Europe and the slowing of the Chinese economy. If we think in terms of decades, then global warming, growing inequality and the disruption of the job market loom large.
“Yet if we take the really grand view of life, all other problems and developments are overshadowed by three interlinked processes:
1. Science is converging on an all-encompassing dogma, which says that organisms are algorithms, and life is data processing.
2. Intelligence is decoupling from consciousness.
3. Non-conscious but highly intelligent algorithms may soon know us better than we know ourselves.
“These three processes raise three key questions, which I hope will stick in your mind long after you have finished this book:
1. Are organisms really just algorithms, and is life really just data processing?
2. What’s more valuable – intelligence or consciousness?
3. What will happen to society, politics and daily life when non-conscious but highly intelligent algorithms know us better than we know ourselves? “
He continues:
“Religion and technology always dance a delicate tango. They push one another, depend on one another and cannot stray too far away from one another. Technology depends on religion, because every invention has many potential applications, and the engineers need some prophet to make the crucial choice and point towards the required destination. Thus in the nineteenth century engineers invented locomotives, radios and internal combustion engines. But as the twentieth century proved, you can use these very same tools to create fascist societies, communist dictatorships and liberal democracies.
Indeed: LIFE IS RELIGION
“Without some religious convictions, the locomotives cannot decide where to go. On the other hand, technology often defines the scope and limits
of our religious visions, like a waiter that demarcates our appetites by handing us a menu. New technologies kill old gods and give birth to new gods. That’s why agricultural deities were different from hunter- gatherer spirits, why factory hands fantasize about different paradises than peasants and why the revolutionary technologies of the twenty-first century are far more likely to spawn unprecedented religious movements than to revive medieval creeds.
Islamic fundamentalists may repeat the mantra that ‘Islam is the answer’, but religions that lose touch with the technological realities of the day lose their ability even to understand the questions being asked. What will happen to the job market once artificial intelligence outperforms humans in most cognitive tasks?
“What will be the political impact of a massive new class of economically useless people?
What will happen to relationships, families and pension funds when nanotechnology and regenerative medicine turn eighty into the new fifty?
What will happen to human society when biotechnology enables us to have designer babies, and to open unprecedented gaps between rich and poor?
“You will not find the answers to any of these questions in the Qur’an or sharia law, nor in the Bible or in the Confucian Analects, because nobody in the medieval Middle East or in ancient China knew much about computers, genetics or nanotechnology. Radical Islam may promise an anchor of certainty in a world of technological and economic storms – but in order to navigate a storm, you need a map and a rudder rather than just an anchor.
Hence radical Islam may appeal to people born and raised in its fold, but it has precious little to offer unemployed Spanish youths or anxious Chinese billionaires. True, hundreds of millions may nevertheless go on believing in Islam, Christianity or Hinduism. But numbers alone don’t count for much in history. History is often shaped by small groups of forward-looking innovators rather than by the backward-looking masses.
“Ten thousand years ago most people were hunter- gatherers and only a few pioneers in the Middle East were farmers. Yet the future belonged to the farmers. In 1850 more than 90 per cent of humans were peasants, and in the small villages along the Ganges, the Nile and the Yangtze nobody knew anything about steam engines, railroads or telegraph lines. Yet the fate of these peasants had already been sealed in Manchester and Birmingham by the handful of engineers, politicians and financiers who spearheaded the Industrial Revolution. Steam engines, railroads and telegraphs transformed the production of food, textiles, vehicles and weapons, giving industrial powers a decisive edge over traditional agricultural societies.“
End of quotes.
Again the words of Genesis 11 come to mind: “Nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them.”
Also Satan’s work has a place in God’s design and is made to serve the Coming of God’s Kingdom.
Paul in 1 Corinthians 15: 26 tells us that “The last enemy to be destroyed is death”. Satan has the same goal, but enslaves all in his service. Christ by dying on the cross has guaranteed eternal life for his followers, but grants them full freedom.
HOMO DEUS means HUMAN as GOD. It comes with a subtitle: A BRIEF HISTORY OF TOMORROW.
Here’s how the real history will unfold. The Lord will put a virus, codename ISAAC, which means LAUGHTER (Read Psalm 2: 4) into ALL computers world-wide, destroying them completely. This will cause our world, the world of THE PRINCE OF DARKNESS, to totally collapse, ensuring the fall of the SECOND tower.
In the new world to come the saints will pick up creational development from there, because the Spirit of God will continue to cause new things to appear within the framework of his world order wherein they are potentially enclosed.
Says Revelation 14: 13: “Blessed are the dead who die in the Lord, they will rest from their labor, for their deeds will follow them.”