Russell Moore
When the Living Word speaks, the ambitions of every would-be “master of the universe” stand exposed.
It’s been a long, strange trip from George Washington to Elon Musk—and maybe we should ask if that has anything to do with Jesus.
For many years, some of us have warned that the technological platforms of this moment would bring us to the point of constitutional crisis. However, most of us meant that this would take place, thanks to the erosion of social capital and the edifice in polarization through social media.
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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.
There are, of course, massive constitutional, social, economic, and foreign policy implications to this time, implications that will no doubt reverberate through the decades and perhaps even the centuries. But what if there are theological causes and effects too?
Nicholas Carr one of Paul’s first reverences to warn about what virtual generation would do to human attention capacity. He writes in his new Electronic Book Superbloom: how connection technologies are destroying us about what the barons of the maximum technology industry “will move fast and fast and break” to make effective (although that is in fact) but also a specific vision of human nature.
The statements of the founder of Meta Mark Zuckerberg, for example, would talk about the social network as a “graph”, which, for Carr “, an art term taken 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 view of society is widespread—almost unanimous, though manifesting itself in different forms—among the architects of the social media–artificial intelligence–virtual reality industrial complex. For example, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman created disturbance across the world last week when he suggested that the type of generative artificial intelligence he sees around the bend will result in changes being “required to the social contract, given how powerful we expect this technology to be,” noting, “the whole structure of society itself will be up for some 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 “scary” tech venture capital that, for example, would seek blood transfusions to more young donors to maintain their own young people and vitality. People would sign the strip as technology leader Ray Kurzweil, who would talk about offloading his to an automatic cloud to live forever. Few have paid enough attention to such figures to hear the terrifying echoes of Genesis 3 in Kurzweil’s answer to the question of whether God exists: “Not yet. “
During the beyond a few weeks, my colleague Kara Bettis Carvalho has been examining the claims of the technological businessman Bryan Johnson in the Netflix Don’s documentary, could design his body to escape mortality. Again, few seem to listen to Genesis 3 reverberations: “You will not die” (v. 4, ESV everywhere).
All of this is easy enough to chalk up to “creepy” people with fringe positions and an endless supply of money. But this ideology is now not only inhabiting an entire technological ecosystem—to which we are all entwined—but also is the driving factor behind decisions about whether children in Africa get the funds allocated to save them from starvation or AIDS, and whether the constitutional checks and balances of power among equal branches dies in front of 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 “had to merge with machines to succeed over the” existential risk “of synthetic intelligence. ” When it came to what it means to our sense of truth, Musk said we have to ask ourselves if the truth is real. “We are the maximum probably in a simulation,” he said, noting that the probability that we are not living in a simulated global is only one or thousands of millions. Participation is transparent: in the other aspect of the veil of the universe that surrounds us is a cosmic musk.
Seeing humanity and the rest of the global “real” through the metaphor of the device has consequences. What counts how quantifiable and measurable: the final result is a lack of respect for the holiness of a human nature that cannot be understood in that way. And once we all limit them as arbitrary and “analog”, why would we avoid? According to the limits of norms and traditions and legislation and constitutional orders, the things that make up a society?
In the end, the “cold” ghost of the “hot” eruption of chaos are opposite, however, two facets of the same horror. The mentality that sees humanity and society as the knowledge that is manipulated naturally provides ways to force the will of strength that does not see limits to appetite and libido. Elon’s musk called to one of its young people “X æ A-12” (before the Arab numbers had to eliminate for the good of the California Law), a “name” that reminds of a QR code or number of number or number of number or number of Series, while you also engenders young people with several wives. Why did the constancy import if the global is only knowledge? What are the consequences if the global is a simulation that can be restarted?
“God” is a challenge in this point of view of reality. After all, the word God can make 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 siege of judgment. Words that God or faith can be used as a substitute for the same type of self -determination of the ideology of Bredrino and all his successors require.
Jesus, on the other hand, is not rejected without problems. Once understood, not as a theoretical avatar that gives authority to a confident ideology, but for the genuine words he has spoken, the genuine gospel he delivered, the ambitions of the “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 digital view of humanity cannot fit with the vision of James Madison and the framers of the American constitutional order. Utopian revolutionaries have always offered some version of “One must break a few eggs to make some omelets,” regardless of the price of actual eggs at the moment. But behind that utopianism is always a theology—and the theology can co-opt almost everything. Christianity can be co-opted by a digital utopianism, but only by silencing 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 other babels are discovered in the ruins of history, and they a million other Nimrods, which would take all the limits of mortality and duty to create simulations of themselves and their government. They are all gone and cannot be restarted.
Technological technologies have inherited the Earth for now. It’s not their fault. It’s ours. We believe what we were told about ourselves: that in the end we have only knowledge and algorithms to be decoded, the appetite to be appeased. And so we look for programmers and coders of our simulation: what past generations would call “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 technological technologies, Jesus remains.
When the living speech is delivered, the ambitions of the would-be “master of the universe” are exposed.
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