I’ve been reflecting on the next wave of internetness: “the internet of things” — that ability for our toasters and cars and devices to talk to each other in real time and automate our physical world! Intro in Part 1; Church Ideas in Part 2
So, as Christians, do we have Biblical and theological thoughts about technology automating our lives? Is this good? Bad news? How do we reflect on this?
One thought experiment is to think through the “theological anthropology”—just a fancy term for “being human the way God intended us to be.”
Like God? No and Yes.
With our stuff ready to obey our every whim, and our knowledge extending into a virtual omniscience about things we aren’t anywhere near (“whoa, turn down the A/C back at the house!”), it could be tempting to say we are becoming a little more like God. And this, of course, often sets off the blasphemy alarm and it should. We know the sin of putting ourselves in God’s place is the most core of them all: it’s Adam and Eve’s apple.
But if we think again, we realize “becoming more like God” isn’t always a theological black plague. In fact, when God made the world and gave Adam the command to steward and tend the garden, he was making us like himself in the sense that we were to sort and build and make stuff (yes, even in PHP). This is part of the imago dei (the image of God): our ability to create!
But can it go too far?
Like Humans? Yes and No.
Here’s a second angle on the same question. Does automating our world affect the definition of what it means to be human? As we increasingly don’t do the more physical tasks of life, does this change who we are?
The less we need to physically interact with our world (because it’s doing it for us), we might say that we lose part of what it means to be a human. Of course, for many of us, this has already been happening in our information-based economy. I mostly make my living in a coffee shop from a MacBook Pro. Am I less human than I was made to be?
Christian poet-theologian Wendell Berry has made much of our separation from the Food we eat and the Land we live with. You gotta think web developers aren’t doing much farming.
Yet priest and scholar Walter Ong saw technology as a core human quality. “Technology is artificial, he writes, “but for a human being there is nothing more natural than to be artificial.”
A Theological Question
If we connect Wifi to the fridge and have it order our groceries, is this:
- Making us into Gods like the tower of Babel?
- Being creative with the world, as God intended (image of God)?
- Separating us from the physical world around us?
- Engaging the world around us?
What do you think?
Speak your mind...