Russell Moore

When the living speech pronounces, the ambitions of the possible “master of the universe” are exposed.

It was a long and adventure of George Washington to Elon Musk, and we may deserve to ask if it has something to do with Jesus.

For many years, some of us have warned that the technological platforms of this moment would take us to the point of the constitutional crisis. However, most of us meant that this would take place, thanks to the erosion of social capital and the building in polarization through social networks.

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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 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. “

“Zuckerberg’s manifesto is a conception of society as a technological formula with a design analogous to that of the Internet,” Carr writes. “Just as the network is a network of networks, so society, in the technocrat’s brain, is a network 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 almost unanimous, which is manifested in other bureaucracy, among the architects of the commercial complex of commercial media, synthetic intelligence, virtual reality. For example, the OpenAI CEO, Sam Altman, created alterations in the global last week when he informed that the type of generative synthetic intelligence that he sees in the turn will result in adjustments “required for the social contract, given the force of what We expect from this generation, “pointing out:” The total design of society itself will be in a position for a safe degree of debate and reconfiguration. “

This mechanistic point of view is not only from society, of a wonderful writing, but of the human person. For years, comedians have laughed at the “terrifying” technological risk capital that, for example, would seek blood transfusions to more young donors to keep their own young people and vitality. People would sign the strip as the leader in Ray Kurzweil, who would talk about downloading their to an automatic cloud to live forever. Few have paid enough attention to such figures to listen to the terrifying echoes of Genesis 3 in the answer that Kurzweil gave to the consultation of Si God exists: “not yet. “

In the past few weeks, my colleague Kara Bettis Carvalho examined tech entrepreneur Bryan Johnson’s claims in the Netflix documentary Don’t Die that he could engineer his body to escape mortality. Once again, few seem to hear the reverberations of Genesis 3: “You shall not surely die” (v. 4, ESV throughout).

All this is easy to attribute to other “terrifying” people with marginal positions and an endless cash supply. But this ideology now dwells not only a complete technological ecosystem, which we are all intertwined, but it is also the engine of the resolution to know if young people in Africa obtain the budget assigned to save them from famine or AIDS, and if the controls Constitutional and force sales among the 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 humans “want to merge with machines to triumph over the ‘existential threat’ of synthetic intelligence. “When pressed about what this means for our sense of truth, Musk said we want to ask ourselves if the truth is real. “We’re the maximum maximum probably in a simulation,” he said, noting that the probability that we wouldn’t possibly live in a simulated global is only one in billions. The implication 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” world through the metaphor of machine has consequences. Seeing humanity and the rest of the world through the metaphor of data is more dangerous still. Once one interprets the universe through a grid of mechanistic mastery—believing what counts is what’s quantifiable and measurable—the end result is a disrespect of the sanctity of a human nature that cannot be understood that way. And once one sees all limits as arbitrary and “analog,” why would one stop at the limits of norms and traditions and laws 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 vision of reality. After all, the word God can make summary and even algebraic. Albert Einstein suggesting that “God plays with the cube with the universe” implied an imuseral structure, a logic, the living God of Abraham, Isaac and “God” of Jacob. Spine will never summon a user to a trial seat. The words that God or faith can be used as substitutes for the same type of self -despection of technological ideology and all their successors demand.

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. “

Dostoyevsky’s wonderful inquisitor in The Brothers Karamazov said that he sought out Jesus to realize because the Jesus of the Bible did not “understand” human nature: that what other people need is the filling of appetites and spectacles of distractions. Yet, against the Inquisitor’s diatribe, however, Jesus, as with Pilate, is there, with a gaze that pierces through all the manipulations of a mechanistic view 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 silenced without problems. The universe is not a simulation. It is created and maintained not through a set of rules even through a word. And this word is not an abstraction to be even decoded a person, who “has flesh and lives among us” (John 1:14).

One million other Babels are found in the ruins of history, and they a million other nimrods, all of which would take the limits of mortality and duty to create simulations of themselves and their rule. They have not all gone and cannot restart.

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 in Nazareth, Jesus read the Roll of Isaiah the Prophet, telling the “good news to the poor” that comes with “the year of the favor of the Lord” (Isaiah 61: 1–2; Luke 4: 18 –19 ). This same prophetic electronic book has taught us to pray: “Oh Lord our God, other gentlemen in addition to you, we have reigned over us, but your call we have memory” (Isaiah 26:13).

After all technological technologies, Jesus remains.

When the living speech pronounces, the ambitions of the possible “master of the universe” are exposed.

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