Written by C.R. Carmichael |
Tuesday, April 25, 2023
Thankfully, transhumanists will eventually fail in their effort to “lengthen their days” and thwart God’s will (Ecclesiastes 8:13). Yet until that divine judgment comes upon them, they may very well lead much of humanity down a primrose path and pathology that will cause immense harm to those who were specifically created by God to thrive, not in the windmills of the imagination, but in the nourishing physical world our Creator gave to us for our dominion and well-being (Genesis 1:28).

Modern Technology teaches man to take for granted the world he is looking at. He takes no time to retreat or reflect. No rest, no meditation, no reflection or conversation. The senses are overloaded with stimuli. Man doesn’t learn to question his world any longer, the screen provides all the answers.—Psychoanalyst Joost Meerloo in 1956
Now the real world is dying as everybody moves into the cloud…Everyone stares at the screens.—Weezer
Introduction
Whether one realizes it or not, we are currently living through a spiritually-significant skirmish between the Analog and the Digital that will surely decide the future trajectory of humankind and whether we thrive as a God-fearing civilization or fall into further ruin.
The Analog, in case you were wondering, refers to God’s established reality in Creation; and the Digital is the synthetic counterfeit of man’s corrupted imagination.
This seemingly-innocuous controversy between the Analog and the Digital first emerged in the 1970s with the advent of the Third Industrial Revolution when the invention of user-friendly computers and their digitized processing began to have a colossal impact on how society creates, transfers and maintains the world around us. To be sure, many tasks in our daily lives have become more swiftly and efficiently performed with the use of digitization.
Yet now, some five decades later, we find ourselves at the forefront of a so-called Fourth Industrial Revolution that seeks to drive us into the forbidden territory of an indiscriminate, fully-digitized existence outside of God’s natural world. Using the implements of our advancing technology, the aim of these techno-rebels is to force mankind into the evolutionary climax of “Singularity” — that perceived point in time when human beings will be fully integrated with the machinery of artificial intelligence and genetically reengineered into a death-defying “post-human” species.
Sadly, this mad dash to digitize humanity is no longer the stuff of science fiction. In fact, there is a growing global movement called Transhumanism which is actively pursuing this agenda; and if the influential apostles of this godless philosophy have their way, the Fourth Industrial Revolution will, according to one report, soon challenge the “ideas” of what it means to be “human.”
In reality, of course, these transhumanists are not challenging “ideas,” but rather God Himself. Their shameless attempts to step on their Creator’s toes is clear evidence of their rebellion. Despite mankind’s sacred history of being created by God in His image, commanded to bring fruitfulness upon the earth, and toiling away for many thousands of years to build a human civilization that brings glory to the Creator, these techno-rebels still foolishly believe that our only hope of transcendence is to be plugged into a computer and enslaved by the cold calculations of the Digital.
In their spiritual blindness, however, they have failed to see the preeminent nature of the Analog of God and the path to eternal life found, not in digitization, but in the righteous precision and power of Jesus Christ, who is “before all things, and in Him all things hold together” (Colossians 1:17).
The Corrupting Influence of the Digital
It might seem laughable to some folks when our latest digitally-driven technologies are perceived as an existential threat to mankind if left unchecked. Yet this isn’t some wild Luddite speculation. There are many prominent voices out there who have raised legitimate concerns in recent years about where this rapid rise in technology might be leading us.
In 2019, for example, philosopher Nick Bostrom was one of the first to warn about the possibility of there being “some level of technological development at which civilization almost certainly gets devastated by default.” Fast forward to late March 2023, and we already have some confirmation that Bostrom’s concerns are warranted.
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Written by Nicholas K. Meriwether |
Monday, March 13, 2023
The ethical teachings of the Christian faith are the basis for morality in the West. Of this there can be little doubt. In which other civilization was there a war to end slavery, rather than the far more typical wars to enslave another people? Where else have women been emancipated in any way close to the status of women in the West? Where else is racism seen as a great evil, and not common sense? I would submit that these achievements would have been impossible without the ethical influence of the Christian religion.

“Well, the rules of the road have been lodged, it’s only people’s games you got to dodge.” —Bob Dylan, “It’s Alright Ma”
The ethical teachings of the Christian faith are the basis for morality in the West. Of this there can be little doubt. In which other civilization was there a war to end slavery, rather than the far more typical wars to enslave another people? Where else have women been emancipated in any way close to the status of women in the West? Where else is racism seen as a great evil, and not common sense? I would submit that these achievements would have been impossible without the ethical influence of the Christian religion.
So when Christians are asked, “Do you have a moral theory? If so, what is it?” they are likely to be confused. After all, we have the Bible, God’s Word, we have an incredibly rich tradition of ethical reflection going back centuries, as well as many contemporary theologians who regularly opine on ethical topics. We can also draw from thinkers outside the Christian tradition whose moral convictions seem to align closely with Christian morality, such as the commentator Ben Shapiro or the Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson. Why do we need to understand ethics “theoretically” if these resources enable us to answer basic ethical questions?
Perhaps we should start with the question, What is a theory, and secondly, what is a moral theory? A theory is simply an account of the nature of a thing or practice, although this question can be asked at different levels. Richard Weaver describes three levels of abstraction. The first level is practical: How can I find out what time it is? Or perhaps, How do I fix this broken clock? The second level is more of the nature of time in relation to society and culture: Does our understanding of time change over centuries, or across cultures? The third level—the highest (or perhaps deepest) level of abstraction is the level of philosophical and religious reflection: What exactly is time? Is it real? Or is it just a subjective way of understanding our experience? And how does time relate to the nature of God—Is he beyond it, or somehow within it?
So a theory of morality asks the practical question: What should I (or we) do or not do? An easy and quick, and mostly accurate definition of morality is that it has to do with what we are obligated to do or not do, not merely what we want or don’t want to do. The second level explains whether or how morality seems to change over time and across cultures, and perhaps how views of morality play out in, say, public policy or in electoral politics. Historians and social scientists are often extremely good at describing the second level. And the third level asks what morality is, and if you are a Christian, how morality relates to the nature of God.
So a moral theory provides an account at all three levels. The practical, what we should and shouldn’t do, the Do’s and Don’ts—which is what most people think of when they think of ethics. The second level is to understand why it is that morality seems to change. For example, I began above with the observation that if it weren’t for the Christian religion, slavery would likely be seen as a natural feature of social life, as Plato and Aristotle did. This is very much a second level kind of observation: The morality of the West was deeply impacted by the influence of the teachings of Christ and the Apostles. The third level is, of course, how morality relates to the nature and being of God, and to human nature, what we might think of as the metaphysics of morality.
One thing should become readily apparent, however: The three levels can’t ultimately be separated. They interact with and affect one another constantly. For example, a freshman takes a class in cultural anthropology. Strictly speaking, the student should only be learning about level 2: How morality is viewed across time and culture. However, his professor can’t help making comments such as, “So as we can see, morality really isn’t fixed or ‘absolute.’” Well, this is a level 3 observation. The professor is making a false inference from the fact of diversity at level 2 to the very nature of morality itself, one he presumably wouldn’t make if he were talking about, say, the theory of evolution, which many peoples and cultures reject. But because the student wasn’t prepared for level 2 diversity, he thinks that the absolutes he was raised with really aren’t absolutes at all. His level 3 view of morality is affected by a level 2 observation.
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It is never pleasant to think about death. Yet death is real. It is not something we can afford to ignore, to wish away, to sentimentalize, or to trivialize. Scripture owns up to the reality of death and does so from its opening pages. Issues of “life and death” importance mark the first three chapters of the Bible.

We all have questions about death. What is death? Why do we die? Why do we all die? Why is death so scary? Why did Christ die? Why do Christians have to die? How can I face the death of someone I love? How can I prepare for death? How can I help others prepare for death? What happens after death?
To answer these questions, we need to go to the Scripture and see what God has to say to us there. The Bible is God’s Word and is completely reliable and true. If the Bible tells us something about death, then we can stake our lives on it.
We also have a lot of help. Our spiritual ancestors thought deeply and practically about death. Throughout the history of the church, pastors and teachers have sought to help God’s people face death in light of the riches of biblical truth. In the Protestant Reformation five centuries ago, the church recovered the gospel in its full biblical integrity. Martin Luther, John Calvin, the British Puritans, and their spiritual heirs have left us rich reflections on suffering, death, and heaven in light of the gospel.
But we don’t live in the halls of church history. We live in the twenty-first century. Every generation faces its own particular challenges in thinking seriously and biblically about death and dying. The challenges of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are not always our own. To begin, we need to think about where we are. Why does modern Western culture—and sadly, sometimes, even the church—make it so hard for us to think about death?
CHALLENGES FROM OUR CULTURE
What are some obstacles that our culture raises to thinking properly about death and dying? There are at least two. The first is that we live in a culture of distraction. Think about it. We have year-round access to sports—live and televised events; domestic and international; football, baseball, basketball, hockey, soccer. We have cable networks, talk shows, call-in shows—all devoted to sports. We have television and movie streaming—Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime Video, Disney+, and Apple TV+, for starters. In 2019, there were 532 original scripted television series broadcast in the United States; up from 495 in 2018 and 210 in 2009.1 And then there are the twenty-four-hour news channels. You couldn’t begin to watch all that’s offered. There is music streaming—Spotify, Pandora, Apple Music, and Amazon Music. For a few dollars a month, you can stream or download hundreds or thousands of songs. And although social media is a relative newcomer, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, and TikTok entice users to spend hours on their devices.
The point is not that sports, television, music, or social media are bad. They are not. I enjoy each of them. The problem is that our culture overwhelms us with entertainments and diversion. This multibillion-dollar industry keeps us from thinking about serious things—life, death, and eternity. Of course, diversion from serious things is not unique to our culture. It is part of our fallen bent as sinners to distract ourselves from the truth. Why do we do this? Blaise Pascal put it well nearly four hundred years ago: “Being unable to cure death, wretchedness and ignorance, men have decided, in order to be happy, not to think about such things”2 and “It is easier to bear death when one is not thinking about it than the idea of death when there is no danger.”3
Therefore, our culture has not done something brand new in its pursuit of distraction. What is new is that we have taken distraction to new heights. The thought of death is so overwhelming that we would prefer not to think about it at all. Our modern industry of distraction helps us to do just that. We invest billions of dollars annually not to think about the unthinkable.
A second and related obstacle that our culture has raised to thinking seriously about death and dying is that we live in a culture of distancing and denial. We have all sorts of ways to try to keep death at arm’s length. Few young people, for instance, have had direct experience with death. They see dramatizations of death in TV and movies, often in shocking and gory detail.4 But many have never been to a funeral or memorial service, and even fewer have ever seen a dead body. It used to be that most people died at home. Now, most people die in institutions—hospitals and nursing homes, for instance.5 This is not a bad thing, of course, since these institutions are routinely staffed by skilled people who ensure that our friends and family members receive care and comfort in their last days. But this also means that families are often not with their loved ones in their last hours. Further, a routine experience of death in families has been mercifully stemmed: infant mortality. Parents, of course, continue to experience the tragic heartache of the loss of a child, but this is far less common than it used to be.6 The eighteenth-century Scottish pastor Thomas Boston, buried six children before they reached the age of two. The English Puritan John Owen had eleven children, but only one survived to adulthood. No one would want to return to the days when infant mortality was an expected, if not inevitable, part of family life. But that also means that fewer families today know what it is to experience death firsthand in the home.
We have also witnessed a revolution in the way that people mourn in our culture. Increasingly, funerals are called “celebrations of life.” This way of speaking serves to distance both the service and the mourners from the reality of death. One survey from 2019 found that the three most popular songs performed at funerals in the United Kingdom were Frank Sinatra’s “My Way,” Andrea Boccelli’s “Time to Say Goodbye,” and Eva Cassidy’s recording of “Over the Rainbow.”7 It is revealing that these songs equip us to respond to death with sloppy sentimentality (“Time to Say Goodbye,” “Over the Rainbow”) or with bald defiance (“My Way”). The survey’s authors commented that “surprisingly no classical hymns made it on to the most popular top ten list.” Is this a surprise, though? Good hymns capture deep, substantive, biblical truths to bring gospel comfort to mourners. By and large, that is simply not what we want in the West today as we encounter death.
CHALLENGES FROM THE CHURCH
The culture is not the only place that we find obstacles to thinking seriously and substantively about death and dying. Sadly, the evangelical church has added its own set of obstacles. We may briefly reflect on three in particular. First, the church has embraced consumerism. The church too often treats attenders like customers, and these attenders too often act like customers. The church can present itself as selling a product in a competitive marketplace. Church attenders can demand to be kept satisfied or they will take their business elsewhere. If that model informs, even imperceptibly, our understanding of the church, then mortality and death will struggle to find a place in the teaching and songs of the church. If people are not made to feel positive and uplifted, the reasoning goes, they will leave and go elsewhere. There are incredible pressures to keep people coming and to attract more people to our services and programs. Why, then, would you put an unwelcome reality like death before them?
Second, the church has embraced an entertainment mentality. Often the buildings in which evangelical churches meet resemble stages with auditorium-style seating. A band is up front playing loud music (some churches even offer earplugs to attendees as they enter the building). Preaching reflects the influence of entertainment culture. Preaching is dedicated less to opening and applying a text of Scripture than to addressing the felt needs and concerns of contemporary hearers. It avoids being either serious or confrontational, and it is not particularly authoritative. Death and eternity, if they are handled at all, are handled sparingly and gingerly.
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“Number of Original Scripted TV Series in the United States from 2009 to 2019,” Statistica, January 2021, accessed January 19, 2021, https://www.statista.com/statistics/444870/scripted-primetime-tv-series-number-usa ↩︎
Blaise Pascal, Pensées, trans. A.J. Krailsheimer (London: Penguin, 1966), 66 (=Pensée 169). ↩︎
Pascal, Pensées, 72 (=Pensée 166). ↩︎
Timothy A. Sisemore, Finding God While Facing Death (Fearn, Scotland: Christian Focus, 2017), 19. ↩︎
Sisemore, Finding God While Facing Death, 19. ↩︎
Sisemore, Finding God While Facing Death, 19. ↩︎
Georgina Hamilton, “The Most Played Songs at Funerals Revealed—and Some Choices Are Bizarre,” Smooth Radio 97-108, May 2, 2019, accessed January 19, 2021, https://www.smoothradio.com/news/quirky/most-popular-funeral-music-songs. ↩︎