Recently, Time magazine announced, “The future is already here.” That claim was a lead-in to several pages describing the fruit of human beings’ God-given capabilities. (But, I didn’t find any references to God in the feature story.) New devices, scientific breakthroughs, new methods, and new insights in all sorts of human endeavors gave the magazine much to report, even to celebrate. In my reading, I was introduced to a new word,
Transhumanism is the belief that by various means, primarily science and technology, the human race can evolve beyond its current physical and mental limitations. Those who follow this belief argue that we can eliminate aging, use more of the brain’s capabilities, become “superhumans.”
Maybe that sounds like science fiction to you. Maybe you laugh and shake your head when you hear such ideas taken seriously. But my first thought when I read of the ideas and the work behind the goals of transhumanism was Genesis 11:1-11, the Tower of Babel Story.
Review the story when you have an opportunity. It seems almost harmless. The people who were filling the world all had a common language. As they grew in number and spread across the land, they began to worry about being scattered. So they determined to build a tower “with its top in the heavens” (Gen. 11:4 ESV). God’s intention, though, was for humankind to fill the earth and have dominion over it, not try to scale the heights of heaven. So He intervened, forcing people to scatter, to develop new languages. God was not against people working together, but God had a plan that He was about to put in play—the calling of Abram and his descendants. Literally, the rest is history.
In the Babel story, people were using their God-given capabilities—language, thinking, planning, building—but they were not using the capabilities as God intended. Transhumanism seems to reflect that same human desire for a great leap forward without any knowledge of or concern for God’s will and work.,
Transhumanism is not some boogeyman we need to fear nor some fictional daydreaming that we can ignore. It’s an idea that some folks want to be true. Its growing popularity (under various names) seems to be a result of our thinking that science and the technology it produces will solve humankind’s problems.
Neither the biblical account of the Tower of Babel nor this blog are anti-progress or anti-science. In creating us and giving us a mandate to live in and to care for His creation, God gave humankind great abilities. But those abilities—technical, intellectual, relational, spiritual—were to be developed and used under the gaze of God. God’s mandate was not “Go and do whatever you can do and whatever you want to do.”
Humankind has now the capability to dismantle the atom releasing untold energy, to modify the human genome, to send our sensors to the edge of the universe and beyond, to create and destroy, to use our world for our own purposes. We seem to be in danger of letting our capabilities push us into areas before our sense of right or wrong has even been consulted. Are, then, these capabilities becoming a Tower of Babel, building and doing what we can and what we want without regard for God’s purposes?