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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