Russell Moore
When the word living speaks, the ambitions of the possible “master of the universe” are established.
From George Washington to Elon Musk, it was long and strange, and perhaps we deserve to wonder if it has anything to do with Jesus.
For many years, some of us have warned that this moment’s technological platforms would lead us to the point of constitutional crisis. Most of us, though, meant that this would happen indirectly—through the erosion of social capital and the heightening of polarization by social media.
This site is made through Recaptcha’s and Google’s privacy policy and the terms of service apply.
Thanks for registering.
Sorry, something went wrong. Please try again.
Few of us have planned the crisis that occurs as it has done: with Elon Musk, the richest type of the global and a small organization of 20 -year workers with an almost unilateral veto right over the appropriate budget and the law followed through of the United States Congress.
Of course, there are constitutional, social, economic and economic and economic implications at this time, implications that will undoubtedly have repercussions in the decades and perhaps even centuries. But what happens if there are also theological reasons and effects?
Nicholas Carr, one of the first Paul, the caution of what the virtual generation would make to the duration of human attention. He writes in his new Superbloom book: how connection technologies demolish us about what the maximum barons of the technical industry “will move temporarily and break” gain cash (although that is in fact) but also a specific vision of the human nature.
Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg’s statements, for example, would speak of the social network as a “graph,” which, for Carr, “an art term borrowed from the mathematical field of network theory. “
“Underpinning Zuckerberg’s manifesto was a conception of society as a technological system with a structure analogous to that of the internet,” Carr writes. “Just as the net is a network of networks, so society, in the technocrat’s mind, is a community of communities.”
Carr argues that Zuckerberg had long held to “a mechanistic view of society,” observing that “one of the curiosities of the early twenty-first century is the way so much power over social relations came into the hands of young men with more interest in numbers than in people.”
The mechanistic vision of society is widespread, almost unanimous, which is manifested in other bureaucracy, among the architects of the commercial media complex, synthetic intelligence, virtual reality. For example, OpenAi CEO Sam Altman created disruptions in the Global last week when he reported that the kind of generative synthetic intelligence he sees in the turn will result in adjustments “required for the social contract, given the strength of what we expect from this generation,” noting, “The total design of society itself will be in a position for a certain degree of debate and reconfiguration. “
This mechanistic view is not only of society, of wonderful writing, but of the human person. For years, comedians have laughed at “creepy” tech venture capitalists who, for example, would seek blood transfusions from more young donors to their own young people and vitality. People would say hello on the fringes of technology to Ray Kurzweil, who would communicate about uploading his consciousness to an automatic cloud to live forever. 3 In Kurzweil’s answer to the question of whether God exists: “Not yet. “
In the weeks beyond, my colleague Kara Bettis Carvalho tested tech entrepreneur Bryan Johnson’s claims in the Netflix documentary, Don’t Die so he can design his framework to escape mortality. Again, few seem to hear the reverberations of Genesis 3: “Thou shalt not die” (v. 11). 4, ESV at all times).
All of this is easy to attribute to other “scary” people with marginal positions and an endless supply of cash. But this ideology now inhabits not only an entire technological ecosystem, to which we are all intertwined, but is also the engine in the resolution of whether young people in Africa get the budget allocated to save them from famine or AIDS, and whether constitutional checks and forcing sales between equivalent branches die before our eyes.
And this is what leads us to God.
Several years ago, Elon Musk told Axios journalists Mike Allen and Jim Vandehei that human beings “want to merge with machines to succeed over the” existential threat “of synthetic intelligence. ” When pressed on what this means for our sense of truth, Musk said we want to ask ourselves if the truth is real. “We are the maximum probably in a simulation,” he said, pointing out that the probability that we would not be able to live in a simulated global is only one of millions of millions. The involvement is transparent, perhaps in the other aspect of the veil of the universe that surrounds us is a cosmic musk.
Seeing humanity and the rest of the “real” global through the metaphor of the device has consequences. Seeing humanity and the rest of the global through the metaphor of knowledge is even more dangerous. Once the universe is interpreted through a master mechanistic grid, which counts the quantifiable and measurable, the end result is a lack of respect for the sacredness of a human nature that cannot be understood that way. And once all boundaries were arbitrary and “analog,” why would we avoid the boundaries of criteria and traditions and legislation and constitutional orders, the things that make up a society?
Ultimately, the “cold” illusion of mastery and the “hot” eruption of chaos prove not to be opposites but two aspects of the same horror. The mindset that sees humanity and society as data to be manipulated naturally gives way to the will-to-power that sees no limits to the appetite and the libido. Elon Musk named one of his children “X Æ A-12” (before having to remove the Arabic numerals for the sake of California law), a “name” reminiscent of a QR code or a serial number, while also fathering children with multiple women. Why would fidelity matter if the world is just data? What are the consequences if the world is a simulation that could be rebooted?
“God” is a challenge in this view of reality. After all, the word God can be made summary and even algebraic. Albert Einstein suggesting that “God plays Cube with the Universe” referred to an imuseral structure, a logic, the living God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Spinoza’s “God” will never summon a user before a trial siege. Words that God or faith can be used as a substitute for the same kind of self-determination that Breadrino’s ideology and all his successors require.
Jesus, on the other hand, is not rejected without problems. Once it is heard, not as a theoretical avatar that provides authority to a safe ideology, but for the real words he has spoken, the true gospel he has delivered, the ambitions of each and every “master of the universe. “
The great inquisitor of Dostoevsky in the Karamazov brothers said that he sought that Jesus came true because the Jesus of the Bible did not “understand” human nature: that what other people need is the filling of appetite and the shows of the distraction. , however, Jesus, as with Pilate, is only there, with a look that crosses all manipulations of a mechanistic vision of the universe.
The virtual vision of humanity cannot be adapted to the vision of James Madison and the framers of the American constitutional order. UTOPIAN revolutionaries have presented an edition of “You have to break some eggs to make omelettes”, regardless of the value of the real thing. The eggs at this time. Behind this utopia is a theology, and theology can co-opt almost anything. Politeness can be co-opted through a virtual utopia, but only through the silencing of Jesus.
However, Jesus is not gently silenced. The universe is not a simulation. It is created and maintained through a set of rules even through a word. And this word is not an abstraction to even decode a person, who “has flesh and lives among us” (John 1:14).
A million different Babels lie in the ruins of history, and behind them a million different Nimrods, all of whom would storm the limits of mortality and of accountability to create simulations of themselves and of their rule. They are all gone, and they cannot be rebooted.
Technological technologies have inherited the earth for now. It is not your fault. It is ours. We believe what they told us about ourselves: in the end we have only knowledge and algorithms to be decoded, the appetite to be placated. And therefore, we seek programmers and encoders of our simulation: what the past generations would have called “gods. “
In his inaugural sermon at Nazareth, Jesus read from the scroll of Isaiah the prophet, recounting the “good news to the poor” that comes with “the year of the Lord’s favor” (Isa. 61:1–2; Luke 4:18–19). That same prophetic book taught us to pray, “O Lord our God, other lords besides you have ruled over us, but your name alone we bring to remembrance” (Isa. 26:13).
After all the promises of the tech-bros are gone, Jesus abides.
When the living speech is delivered, the ambitions of the would-be “master of the universe” are exposed.
As we grieve our losses, I’m comforted and humbled to know that the persecuted church is interceding on our behalf.
Walter Strickland talks about non -secular formation, the constancy of God and the five anchors of black Christianity.
A Congolese Christian struggles with depression after the M23 organization disrupted his family’s life in Goma.
Christian partners around the world—suddenly fired, defunded, and without answers—worry that the new administration is done with the development agency.
Can Christianity today elevate what is good, to triumph over what is evil, and to heal what is damaged by elevating the stories and concepts of the kingdom of God.
Look for the kingdom.