The Evil of Digitizing the Analog of God
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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Has the Internet Corrupted Our Moral Outrage?
We should not always be quick to dismiss each other. Instead, our comments should point out our concerns without jumping to the conclusion that the person on the other end of the keyboard needs to be abandoned because they are not infallible. Even if they remain stubborn in their error, we can agree to disagree if the difference is on secondary doctrinal issues.
I recently had an experience that is common to all. After rushing to meet a self-imposed deadline, I hit publish on one of my articles, and I awoke the following day to an unpublished comment by someone who was literally shocked at the ambiguity of the article, its lack of biblical truth, and my dangerous practice. They then let me know that it may be time to unsubscribe.
I occasionally experience this kind of response from people who disdain Christianity, so I usually let the comments roll off my back, but this was different. Though I do not know the commenter, there was no indication that they held strange or heretical views. They seemed to be a fellow believer who valued the same things I value. On top of that, they made two critiques of my post, and both were valid.
The first critique was that I had made a controversial statement without backing it up with scripture. The second involved a misleading lack of clarity on my part, which I failed to see before I published the article. Using the commenter’s critiques, I made a couple of minor edits to my post to remove the sticking points.
Why do I bring this up? Because the internet, especially social media, has trained us to respond to things with moral outrage even before we know if moral outrage is warranted.
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Do Jesus and Paul Contradict One Another?
Attempts to pit the teachings of Jesus and the Apostle Paul against one another will result in a division of the canon. This can lead people to undermine both the Apostolic teaching on redemption as well as the Apostolic ethic for the lives of the members of the New Testament church.
Some have sought to pit Jesus’ ethical teaching over against the writings of the Apostle Paul. Such false dichotomizing is often driven by a desire to distance oneself from the Apostle’s clear condemnation of homosexuality (Rom. 1:26–27; 1 Cor. 6:9; 1 Tim. 1:10) and restrictions regarding roles in the church (1 Tim. 2:12; 1 Cor. 14:35). But interpreting what Jesus taught during His earthly ministry against what His Apostles subsequently wrote reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of biblical revelation. The desire to set Jesus and Paul at odds—or to subtly downplay the fact that the Apostolic writings are the very words of Christ (Col. 3:16)—will inevitably backfire on those who believe they are helping others embrace a more tolerant brand of Christianity.
At the turn of the twentieth century, the church faced the attacks of a theological liberalism in which theologians sought to divide Jesus and Paul. Although the driving factors in the theological liberalism of the twentieth century were somewhat different from our current church controversies, the method and desired end are strikingly similar. Attacks on the organic unity of Scripture led professors at Princeton Theological Seminary to write some of the greatest arguments for the defense of the unity and progressive development of the canon of Scripture. For instance, Geerhardus Vos, professor of biblical theology at Old Princeton, helpfully explained: “The relation between Jesus and the Apostolate is in general that between the fact to be interpreted and the subsequent interpretation of this fact . . . It resembles the embryo . . . which truly contains the structure, which the full-grown organism will clearly exhibit.”1
To understand this principle, we must first recognize that Jesus didn’t personally write down what He taught. The content of the four Gospels, the Epistles, and the book of Revelation were written by “holy men of God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit” (2 Peter 1:21). They are a unified record of the historical facts. Jesus also did many things that were not recorded for the faith and life of believers (John 21:25).
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Help! I’m Raising a Legalist
Written by Ginger M. Blomberg |
Sunday, January 21, 2024
By teaching our children both law and grace, we can help them see the tragedies of both legalism and prodigalism. We can show them the beauty of God’s goodness and mercy through the life, death, and resurrection of his Son who loved us and paid the penalty for us. Once we see God’s grace to us, we can extend it to others in love.Good Intentions
The Best Christmas Pageant Ever opens with this dire judgment: “The Herdmans were absolutely the worst kids in the history of the world.” The book’s narrator then quickly runs through a list of just what made the Herdman kids so bad, saying, “They lied and stole and smoked cigars (even the girls) and talked dirty and hit little kids and cussed their teachers and took the name of the Lord in vain.” Later, the narrator also introduces Alice Wendleken, who wants very badly to play Mary in the church’s Christmas pageant. Alice plays Mary in the pageant every year “because she’s so smart, so neat and clean, and most of all, so holy-looking.” This year, though, Alice is stunned when she ends up losing the part of Mary to Imogene Herdman. Alice starts keeping a list of every naughty and irreverent thing the Herdman kids do, hoping that someone will realize how bad they are and kick them out of the pageant and out of the church.
As Christian parents, we want our kids to do the right things. Some of us have found, though, that in trying to avoid raising Herdmans, we are inadvertently raising Alice Wendlekens, kids who follow the rules not out of love but for control. How do we teach our children to be discerning, both to recognize and to do right, but at the same time to show God’s love and care for the imperfect people around them?
Law
It is vital for us to teach our children what is right, but it is also vital for us to examine our goals in teaching. An old comedy skit said, “Parents don’t want justice; they just want quiet,” and, oh boy, has that been true for me sometimes. I am sorry to say, I have sometimes taught my children the law because I just wanted them to act decently and not embarrass me at church.
But why did God give us his law? For one thing, he knows what is best for us, and he has revealed rules in his word to teach us to act in ways that may seem hard but will usually be for our good and the good of those around us. If we avoid lying, then most of the time people will trust us more. If we honor our parents, we are likely to have a good relationship with them.
Much more importantly, though, God gave us the law to reveal his character. Our God is holy, just, and good. He cares about people who are marginalized by society. He hates when innocent people are harmed. He loves when people do right and are kind to each other. His law teaches all these things about him.
In teaching us about God’s character, the law (and Israel’s history of trying to follow it) also shows so clearly both our need for God and our separation from him. Paul says in Romans 7:13 that through the law, “sin might be shown to be sin, and through the commandments might become sinful beyond measure.” We need there to be goodness and justice in the world. We also need a way to get to it. God’s law shows the standard of his character and also how far we are from reaching it.
We want to teach our kids to follow the law, in the sense that we want them to know and do what is right. As Christian parents, and really just as humans, most of us want our kids to know enough to be happy and to be “healthy, wealthy, and wise” (as non-theological lawgiver Benjamin Franklin advises).
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