Before his death, Jesus told his disciples that he was going away but would one day come back for them to take them to a place he was going to prepare for them in the presence of his Father (John 14:1–4). They initially did not understand what he was talking about, but with his resurrection and ascension, it all became much clearer.
With Jesus’ death and resurrection, God’s great project for the redemption of the world took an immense step forward as the apostle Peter announced in his second major sermon recorded in the book of Acts. Peter and John healed a lame man at the gate of the temple, and this attracted a large crowd. Peter then publicly explained the significance of the miracle, putting it into the context of what had been happening in Jerusalem in the previous days. Peter directly accuses the crowd of killing the “Author of life” (Acts 3:15) and yet appeals to them by giving them a way out of their dire predicament:
“And now, brothers, I know that you acted in ignorance, as did also your rulers. But what God foretold by the mouth of all the prophets, that his Christ would suffer, he thus fulfilled. Repent therefore, and turn back, that your sins may be blotted out, that times of refreshing may come from the presence of the Lord, and that he may send the Christ appointed for you, Jesus, whom heaven must receive until the time for restoring all the things about which God spoke by the mouth of his holy prophets long ago.”
Acts 3:17–21
It was a devastating indictment of those who murdered Jesus, but it was also a gracious offer of salvation for those willing to repent and trust him. Peter answers the unspoken question (Where is Jesus, then?) by pointing out that he had gone to heaven and would remain there until the next great step in God’s programme happened – the restoration that will be triggered by Jesus’ return.
Sadly, the public face of Christianity has become so insipid and watered down that the vibrant central hope of the return of Christ that should be at its heart has been all but lost – or relegated to the lunatic fringe of naive prophecy mongers. The warning of C. S. Lewis is ignored: “Do not attempt to water Christianity down. There must be no pretence that you can have it with the Supernatural left out. So far as I can see Christianity is precisely the one religion from which the miraculous cannot be separated. You must frankly argue for supernaturalism from the very outset.”1
Inevitably, one of the consequences of the Enlightenment’s rejection of the supernatural was that, as David Bosch says: “Little room was left for the ‘great eschatological event Christians had long awaited, namely the Second Coming.’ Belief in Christ’s return on the clouds was superseded by the idea of God’s kingdom in the world which would be introduced step by step through successful labors in missionary endeavor abroad and through creating an egalitarian society at home.”2
Behind this kind of thinking lies the notion of progress that marked the Enlightenment and the great strides that were made in science, technology, and industry that brought so much wealth to Europe. Unbridled optimism in human potential reigned, and a brave new world was just around the corner. But the imagined Marxist Utopia that was to arise out of the workings of the inexorable laws of history turned into a nightmare of human carnage and cost the lives of millions. Not only Marxism of course. Extreme nationalism of different kinds has produced similar results. History has taught the hard lesson: there is no pathway to paradise that bypasses the problem of human sin.
Nevertheless, well-known Harvard psychologist Stephen Pinker thinks that violence is decreasing, specifically as a result of Enlightenment thinking, a view that John Gray, a British professor of the history of European thought, is swift to rebut in his review of Pinker’s book, The Better Angels of Our Nature.3 In his review entitled “Stephen Pinker’s Delusions of Peace,” Gray writes:
Like other latter-day partisans of “Enlightenment values,” Pinker prefers to ignore the fact that many Enlightenment thinkers have been doctrinally anti-liberal, while quite a few have favoured the large-scale use of political violence . . .
The idea that a new world can be constructed through the rational application of force is peculiarly modern, animating ideas of revolutionary war and pedagogic terror that feature in an influential tradition of radical Enlightenment thinking.4
The word Utopia means “no place”5 and is, ironically, highly appropriate in this context. Every attempt so far to realise Utopia has failed because the visionaries who tried to create such a state did not take into account the fact that human nature is seriously flawed as a result of the entry of sin and alienation into the world at the Fall. They did not see, as we pointed out earlier, that humans need saving much more than they need upgrading. The utopian visionaries had no message of salvation, no connection with a divine power capable of changing what human beings are like. As a result, the twentieth century was the bloodiest in history.
Pinker thinks violence will decline. Gray thinks not, and in this he is in line with biblical teaching. Jesus himself issued warnings about future events that are as much a part of his teaching as is the Sermon on the Mount. He spoke of the risk of deception by imposters and false prophets who, amidst a rising tide of wars, famines, and earthquakes, will lead many astray. All this will build to a climax towards the end:
“Then will appear in heaven the sign of the Son of Man, and then all the tribes of the earth will mourn, and they will see the Son of Man coming on the clouds of heaven with power and great glory. And he will send out his angels with a loud trumpet call, and they will gather his elect from the four winds, from one end of heaven to the other.”
Matthew 24:30–31
Jesus said these things 2,000 years ago, and the intervening time has been characterised by “wars and rumors of wars” (Matthew 24:6). But according to Jesus, these things are not evidence of the end – he explicitly says that such things will happen, but the end is not yet. The end of history as we know it will not occur until certain specific things happen that will culminate in the cataclysmic return of Christ to rule.
It is vitally important that those of us who are Christians are not embarrassed at the return of Christ, since he himself made it a central plank in his teaching. He not only taught his disciples in private that he would return; he made it a key point at his trial when questioned about his identity:
Again the high priest asked him, “Are you the Christ, the Son of the Blessed?” And Jesus said, “I am, and you will see the Son of Man seated at the right hand of Power, and coming with the clouds of heaven.” And the high priest tore his garments and said, “What further witnesses do we need? You have heard his blasphemy. What is your decision?” And they all condemned him as deserving death.
Mark 14:61–64
The high priest regarded Jesus’ reply as blasphemous because he and all the court understood that Jesus was citing a famous passage from the book of the prophet Daniel that referred to a divine Son of Man who would come on the clouds of heaven and be given universal authority and power to reign forever:
“I saw in the night visions,
and behold, with the clouds of heaven
there came one like a son of man,
and he came to the Ancient of Days
and was presented before him.
And to him was given dominion
and glory and a kingdom,
that all peoples, nations, and languages
should serve him;
his dominion is an everlasting dominion,
which shall not pass away,
and his kingdom one
that shall not be destroyed.”
Daniel 7:13–14
The return of Christ is not some peripheral, add-on idea concocted by hotheads in backstreet fringe sects. It is evident from what occurred at Jesus’ trial that he was crucified precisely because he claimed to be the august Son of Man who, according to the prophet Daniel, would one day come on the clouds of heaven to take up universal rule.6 And because his return is an essential part of the hope he held out to the world, not surprisingly, the New Testament has much to say about it.
God will eventually deal with physical death, but not by solving it by technological means, as Yuval Harari suggests. Firstly, by the raising of Jesus from the dead, God has demonstrated that physical death is not insuperable. The New Testament says that God “has destroyed death and has brought life and immortality to light through the gospel” (2 Timothy 1:10 NIV). Death is not going to have the last word. Christ’s bodily resurrection is but the beginning of the restoration of the human race and of the whole of creation, which will happen at his return.
Furthermore, by his death and resurrection, Christ frees from the fear of death all those who trust him:
Since therefore the children [i.e., Jesus’ disciples] share in flesh and blood, he himself likewise partook of the same things, that through death he might destroy the one who has the power of death, that is, the devil, and deliver all those who through fear of death were subject to lifelong slavery.
Hebrews 2:14–15
We must be careful to understand exactly what this passage is saying. It is not claiming that those who trust Christ will not experience fear or the onset of illness, severe pain, and the physical anguish of the process of dying. Fear of these things is a natural, automatic reflex action of our human make-up, part of the preservative mechanisms built into our bodies, so that nature itself fights against dying.
People are afraid of death for two opposite reasons. Firstly, some fear that there is nothing after death. Therefore, this present life is all there is, and so, rather than lose physical life, some people will compromise loyalty to God, to truth, to faith, to honour, to principle, and even descend to shameful cowardice – anything to save physical life. Fear of death holds them in moral slavery.
Secondly, other people are afraid of death, not because they think that there is nothing after death, but because they are afraid that there will be far too much after death for their liking, namely, a Final Judgment with eternal consequences.
Christ’s death and physical resurrection as a real human being combine to deliver believers from both of these fears. Firstly, it frees them from a sense of hopelessness at the death of a loved one by informing them that their loved one, now “absent from the body” is “present with the Lord” (2 Corinthians 5:8 KJV), or as the Lord himself expressed it: “with me in Paradise” (Luke 23:43). It is also the secret of the courage of Christian martyrs who are prepared to die rather than deny Christ.
Christ’s death also frees those who trust him from the second kind of fear. They have God’s assurance that Christ, by his sacrificial death, has paid in full the penalty for their sins.7 Physical death comes but once, and the Judgment comes after death. For believers, Christ’s death atones for their sin – that is, it covers every sin of theirs that the Judgment could take cognizance of. In consequence, believers are given the following magnificent assurance: “Just as it is appointed for man to die once, and after that comes judgment, so Christ, having been offered once to bear the sins of many, will appear a second time, not to deal with sin but to save those who are eagerly waiting for him” (Hebrews 9:27–28). And Christ, who himself will be the final Judge (John 5:22), declares: “Truly, truly, I say to you, whoever hears my word and believes him who sent me has eternal life. He does not come into judgment, but has passed from death to life” (John 5:24).
And now comes the solution to one of Harari’s key problems of the twenty-first century – conquering physical death. However, death will not be overcome by medical advances. The good news is that Christ’s bodily resurrection instils into everyone who believes in him sure and certain hope of their own eventual bodily resurrection. To get this spectacular truth across to us, Christ’s own resurrection is referred to by Paul as the firstfruits of a great harvest to come (1 Corinthians 15:20). Just like the early pickings of fruit promise more fruit to come, so the resurrection of Jesus heralds a great harvest that will take place at Christ’s Second Coming – a resurrection of all persons of all centuries who are Christ’s. Those who have died before that Coming will be resurrected; those who are still alive at that Coming will be changed without dying. All will be given bodies like Christ’s glorious resurrection body (1 Corinthians 15:50–57; Philippians 3:20).
This means for believers, as it did for Christ, that there is to be a physical embodiment after death. One interesting aspect of this in view of the attempt to make silicon-based life is the hint in the New Testament that Jesus’ resurrected body was not exactly the same as the body that was buried. It had new properties – it could pass through closed doors, for instance, so that, in a way, it appeared to belong to a different dimension.
In 1 Corinthians 15, Paul contrasts the natural body with the resurrected spiritual body. A spiritual body does not mean a body made in some sense of spirit any more than a petrol engine means an engine made of petrol. Jesus told his disciples he was no spirit: “A spirit does not have flesh and bones as you see that I have” (Luke 24:39). If we put this alongside Paul’s statement that “flesh and blood” shall not inherit the (future) kingdom of heaven, then we see that he is indicating that there is a physical difference between the human body as it is now and what it one day will be. My continued existence as me is guaranteed, but it will not depend on the development of technology to upload the contents of my brain onto silicon.8
Some people think that the idea of bodily resurrection is absurd, since when we die, the atoms of our bodies disperse and become part of the surrounding vegetation, and so may well subsequently become part of other animals and even other humans. How then, they argue, can it make sense to talk about a bodily resurrection of the dead? But this objection seems to overlook certain important facts.
To start with, it is true that at death the atoms in our bodies disperse. But, of course, we do not have to wait until death for this to happen. The cells (and therefore the atoms) in our bodies are constantly changing and dispersing. None of the cells now present in my body were present in my body ten years ago (except, perhaps, certain specialised cells in the brain). Yet in spite of this constant change and replacement of atoms and cells, and in spite of ageing, the formal identity of my body remains recognisably the same. Clear evidence of that is given by the fact that a person’s fingerprints (which are unique to that person) remain the same throughout their lifetime (apart, of course, from scarring or mutilation). This fact, first demonstrated by Sir Francis Galton in 1888, plays a decisive role in the identification of culprits. Similar things could be said about identification using DNA.
The complex coding, and whatever else is responsible for maintaining the identity of a body through its time on earth, is known by God for every human being who has ever lived. At the future resurrection, God, who, after all, created matter in the first place, will not be hard up for whatever substance in which the unique bodily identity of each person will be expressed. The result will be that each individual believer will have a body like Christ’s glorious resurrection body (and therefore with capacities and glories that our present bodies do not have). But each person will be individually identifiable through the unique form of their resurrection body as the same person who was identifiable by their body here on earth:
Just as we have borne the image of the man of dust, we shall also bear the image of the man of heaven.
I tell you this, brothers: flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God, nor does the perishable inherit the imperishable. Behold! I tell you a mystery. We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised imperishable, and we shall be changed . . . This mortal body must put on immortality.
1 Corinthians 15:49–53
The deduction that each individual believer is taught to make from the certainty of bodily resurrection is that life in this present body in this world is worth living to the full of one’s energies, abilities, and circumstances, in spite of all life’s pains and sufferings, old age and eventual death: “Therefore . . . be steadfast, immovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, knowing that in the Lord your labor is not in vain” (1 Corinthians 15:58). This means that, though our bodies here on earth, inherited as they are from a fallen race, are subject to decay and death, what each person does in the body is eternally significant.
As a further example, we might consider the apostle Paul when he visited Thessalonica and preached there for three weeks or so – not a particularly long time. Yet as he reminded them in a letter he subsequently wrote, during that brief visit he told the Thessalonians about the coming of Christ in considerable detail. In fact, their conversion to Christianity was described by some as follows:
For they themselves report concerning us the kind of reception we had among you, and how you turned to God from idols to serve the living and true God, and to wait for his Son from heaven, whom he raised from the dead, Jesus who delivers us from the wrath to come.
1 Thessalonians 1:9–10
In fact, at the end of each chapter of his letter, Paul encourages the believers to live their lives in light of the future coming of Christ. This, together with some of the parables of Jesus that emphasise the unexpectedness and suddenness of his coming – “The Son of Man is coming at an hour you do not expect” (Matthew 24:44) and the statement by Christ in Revelation: “Surely I am coming soon” (22:20) – has erroneously led some people to think that Jesus led the early Christians to expect his return almost immediately, and when this did not turn out to be the case, the hope of such a return faded into the background. However, Jesus himself, in Matthew 24, had warned that the time-scale would be long rather than short. The reason for this apparent paradox is not far to seek: emphasising only a long time-scale might lead some, as some of the parables suggest, to think: “my master is staying away a long time” (verse 48 NIV), and that therefore their behaviour didn’t matter.
The resolution of the paradox is surely this: we all move towards the return of Christ at two “speeds” – the speed of earth history and the speed with which we approach death. Jesus and his apostles were not cheating when they encourage believers to live as though Christ could return at any time, as this is the only way to live that will allow our expectation of his coming to have the moral and spiritual effect it should have on us. If I die today, the time of Christ’s coming measured in years AD is irrelevant to me.
It was, however, inevitable in those early days, when believers began to die and there was no sign of Christ’s return, that questions would be asked about them. In response, at the very end of his first letter to the Thessalonians, Paul reassures the living believers:
But we do not want you to be uninformed, brothers, about those who are asleep, that you may not grieve as others do who have no hope. For since we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so, through Jesus, God will bring with him those who have fallen asleep. For this we declare to you by a word from the Lord, that we who are alive, who are left until the coming of the Lord, will not precede those who have fallen asleep. For the Lord himself will descend from heaven with a cry of command, with the voice of an archangel, and with the sound of the trumpet of God. And the dead in Christ will rise first. Then we who are alive, who are left, will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air, and so we will always be with the Lord. Therefore encourage one another with these words.
1 Thessalonians 4:13–18
Paul expected Christians who lost loved ones to grieve but not to grieve in the same way as people who had no hope. To cut through their tears, he gives them more detail about what the return of Christ will mean both for their departed loved ones and for themselves. Paul’s own understanding of death was to be “absent from the body” and “present with the Lord” (2 Corinthians 5:8 KJV), and his great hope expressed here is that one day all believers will be with the Lord – and some of them will not even experience physical death at all! This is way beyond anything AI could even dream of.
AI may well make many good and helpful advances that will improve the lot of humanity. However, no matter what the promise might be, the central claim of Christianity is that the future is far greater than anything AI or AGI can promise since something infinitely bigger than either of them has already happened on our planet: God, who is responsible for the existence of the universe and its laws and the architecture of the human mind, the divine Logos who was in the beginning, has coded himself into humanity – the Word became flesh and dwelt among us. This is not artificial intelligence; this is Real Intelligence – way beyond anything conceivable, let alone constructible, by humans.
And the fact that God did become human is the greatest evidence of the uniqueness of human beings and of God’s commitment to embodied humanity. Humans, original version, are demonstrated to be unique precisely because God could and did become one. And those of us who have received him will one day at his return be gloriously “upgraded” to be like him and share in the marvels of the eternal world to come.
This was the plan from the beginning – and it has implications for the new heaven and the new earth. And since this new creation has a physical dimension, what might we be then allowed to create in the way of heavenly technology?
All of this means that Christians (and indeed others) need to think hard about the implications of these fundamental Christian doctrines of the resurrection and return of Christ for AI and the race to create Homo deus. For if the Christian teaching is true, the race to conquer death as a technical problem will prove to be ultimately futile, although the technology developed along the way may help ease old age and solve many outstanding medical problems. However, humans were not made to live indefinitely on this planet. Something much bigger is possible that makes Yuval Harari’s scheme seem rather insignificant.
Let us now see what the Bible has to say about what is to happen on this planet in the future. John Gray picks up a comment by Yuval Harari that Homo deus will resemble the Greek gods and concludes: “Humans may well use science to turn themselves into something like gods as they have imagined them to be. But no Supreme Being will appear on the scene. Instead there will be many different gods, each of them a parody of human beings that once existed.”9
Gray, who otherwise has many valuable things to say, is wrong here. According to the biblical narrative, history is leading up to the appearance of a Supreme Being, one who has already been here and who, when he was here, promised to return. That fact was, as we have seen, a fundamental part of Christian teaching. It also has major implications for the world, as we see from the second letter Paul wrote to the church at Thessalonica. Apparently, false teachers had turned up in that city who were perverting the Christian message by infecting it with erroneous ideas such as asserting that Christ had already returned. Not only that, but the church was bravely holding out against intensified persecution (2 Thessalonians 1:4). On hearing of this development, Paul wrote to them once more.
As we read what he said, we should bear in mind what we mentioned earlier that, according to the book of Acts, Paul spent only three weeks or so in Thessalonica, yet he felt it was important for those converted to Christianity in that short time to know about the future in some considerable detail. Here is what he wrote:
Now concerning the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ and our being gathered together to him, we ask you, brothers, not to be quickly shaken in mind or alarmed, either by a spirit or a spoken word, or a letter seeming to be from us, to the effect that the day of the Lord has come. Let no one deceive you in any way. For that day will not come, unless the rebellion comes first, and the man of lawlessness is revealed, the son of destruction, who opposes and exalts himself against every so-called god or object of worship, so that he takes his seat in the temple of God, proclaiming himself to be God. Do you not remember that when I was still with you I told you these things? And you know what is restraining him now so that he may be revealed in his time. For the mystery of lawlessness is already at work. Only he who now restrains it will do so until he is out of the way. And then the lawless one will be revealed, whom the Lord Jesus will kill with the breath of his mouth and bring to nothing by the appearance of his coming. The coming of the lawless one is by the activity of Satan with all power and false signs and wonders, and with all wicked deception for those who are perishing, because they refused to love the truth and so be saved.
2 Thessalonians 2:1–10
Paul reminds them that on his first visit to them he had carefully explained that Christ would not return until certain things had happened – things that would be so publicly visible, striking, and obvious that you wouldn’t need to be told about them. Recall that Jesus himself said this in the Olivet Discourse in Matthew 24, warning us that many would turn up saying that they were the Christ but that we shouldn’t listen to them since the true Christ will return under circumstances that will be spectacularly obvious. Nevertheless, it would appear that false teachers had turned up in Thessalonica who were unsettling the believers by contradicting Christ’s teaching and suggesting that the Day of Judgment had already come.
Such erroneous teaching made life even more difficult for the Christians who were suffering persecution at the time. Paul was quick to reassure them that although the Judgment Day had not yet come, it one day would, and in such a manner as to put an end to persecuting powers.
The trigger for the events that Paul mentions here are a rebellion and the appearing of a person described as the “man of lawlessness” (2 Thessalonians 2:3), whose main characteristic is opposition to gods in any shape or form, who nevertheless proclaims himself to be God. Again, no one will fail to recognise this development since, as Paul tells us, this tyrannical leader will be energised by Satanic power and enabled to deceive people by lying wonders. The climax will come when the returning Christ bursts onto the scene and destroys him by his appearing. Clearly nothing on this scale had yet happened in Paul’s day, and it has clearly not happened subsequently. Its intensity and global dimensions ensure that when it does happen, the whole world will be all too aware of it.
This scenario is just as far as it could be from the view that Christian teaching will gradually permeate the planet until peace reigns. No, Paul says that there will be a cataclysmic supernatural intervention by God that will put a stop to a regime of maximal evil. The question is: How do we know whether this apocalyptic scenario is true or not?
Paul says that one of the ways in which the Thessalonians could know that this would happen is that the seeds of the thinking that would lead to it were already visible in the Roman culture of the day: “For the mystery of lawlessness is already at work” (2 Thessalonians 2:7). Paul clearly does not mean lawlessness in the sense of the absence of civil law – Rome was famous for its laws, and to this day, some of those laws form the basis of European law. Paul, as the context shows, is talking about spiritual lawlessness, the blasphemy of human beings who claim divinity, as many kings in the past had done and as some of the Roman emperors were already doing at the time. Christians who refused to acknowledge this were often persecuted and killed.
We have already seen that the idea of Homo deus is rooted in Genesis. That, however, is only the beginning of the narrative of the human endeavour to play God or to be God. From time to time in the Old Testament record it rears its head – we read of emperors like the Babylonian Nebuchadnezzar (Daniel 3) and the Greek Antiochus Epiphanes (Daniel 11:21–32), who arrogated divine powers to themselves, the latter using those powers to justify violence.
The ruling Roman emperors assumed divine honours. For example, Julius Caesar was regarded as a god – Divus Julius – and in later New Testament times, that element in the Imperial Cult led to periods of persecution for Christians who bravely paid with their lives for refusing to bow down and worship the emperor as a Homo deus.
At every turn, it would seem, humanity’s efforts to achieve divinity have been associated with an overweening arrogance and a sense of superiority that, far from achieving something superhuman, has produced something terrifyingly subhuman and bestial. The more they try to elevate themselves, the more they sink into a morass of violence and tyranny, as was horrifically demonstrated in the twentieth century. Hannah Arendt, who wrote one of the first books on totalitarianism – The Origins of Totalitarianism (published in 1951) – was convinced that totalitarianism was rooted in a utopianism based on the rejection of God and the deification of man. She wrote perceptively:
What binds these men together is a firm and sincere belief in human omnipotence. Their moral cynicism, their belief that everything is permitted, rests on the solid conviction that everything is possible . . . In trying to create a perverse heaven on earth, totalitarian systems acknowledge no limit on either their conduct or their aspirations. They take Dostoyevsky’s chilling warning that “if God does not exist, everything is permitted” and institutionalise it in the Party. From there it is but a short distance to the mass killing and terror endemic to totalitarianism – from Nazi Germany’s Auschwitz and Treblinka, to the Soviet Union’s Lubyanka prison and Perm-36 gulag, to Communist China’s Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution . . . The concentration and extermination camps of totalitarian regimes serve as the laboratories in which the fundamental belief of totalitarianism that everything is possible is being verified.10
According to Paul, the same dark shadow looms over the future of humanity. The horrific totalitarian vision Paul outlines in his second letter to the Thessalonian Christians is very likely to be characterised by rigid and oppressive civil laws, but at the spiritual level, it is in its essence lawless rebellion against Almighty God – hence the description, “man of lawlessness.” Paul told the Thessalonians that what will happen in the future is the inevitable harvest of the attempt to deify humans that was already visible in their Roman culture at the time.
We should not, therefore, be surprised to see it played out in the future on a global scale. And as we observe developments in China, we shall scarcely be surprised either to see it associated with totalitarian social control. It is, alas, not difficult to imagine that programme being rolled out around the world. The way world politics are going, it’s not impossible to think that power will be concentrated into the hands of fewer and fewer people, so that we could well imagine the existence of a world-state in the future that is controlled by a single person with extraordinary authority – a Homo deus whose powers of rule and deception are derived from the most sinister of all superhuman intelligences – the devil himself.
It is the fact that the Homo deus idea pervades history that makes the biblical scenario more than plausible. Of course, it contradicts the widespread idea that human beings are basically good and are improving all the time so that eventually bad behaviour will be eliminated and one of Max Tegmark’s more humane and benevolent scenarios will be more likely to characterise the future – Protector God, Benevolent Dictator, or Egalitarian Utopia.11 That seems like wishful thinking in light of the biblical material and of the experience of the twentieth century. Interestingly enough, it also seems like wishful thinking in light of Yuval Harari’s sobering conclusion to Sapiens:
Moreover, despite the astonishing things that humans are capable of doing, we remain unsure of our goals and we seem to be as discontented as ever. We have advanced from canoes to galleys to steamships to space shuttles – but nobody knows where we’re going. We are more powerful than ever before, but have very little idea what to do with all that power. Worse still, humans seem to be more irresponsible than ever. Self-made gods with only the laws of physics to keep us company, we are accountable to no one. We are consequently wreaking havoc on our fellow animals and on the surrounding ecosystem, seeking little more than our own comfort and amusement, yet never finding satisfaction.
Is there anything more dangerous than dissatisfied and irresponsible gods who don’t know what they want?12
1. C. S. Lewis, God in the Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2014), 99.
2. David J. Bosch, Transforming Mission: Paradigm Shifts in Theology of Mission (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2011), 328.
3. Stephen Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (New York: Penguin, 2012).
4. John Gray, “Best of 2012: Stephen Pinker’s Delusions of Peace,” ABC Religion & Ethics, 20 January 2013, www.abc.net.au/religion/best-of-2012-stephen-pinkers-delusions-of-peace/10100056.
5. From the Greek ou = “not” and topos = “place.” The homophone Eutopia (Greek Eu = “good”) means a “good place,” and the two are often confused. In 1872, Samuel Butler published his novel, a satire on Victorian society, called Erewhon, which is (almost) “nowhere” spelt backwards. The fictional country Erewhon at first appears to be a Utopia, but that turns out not to be the case.
6. We should notice how often the clouds of heaven are mentioned in connection with Christ’s return – it is to be a literal and visible coming.
7. Many people find the idea of vicarious suffering difficult. I have written about it in Gunning for God (Oxford: Lion, 2011), 145–64.
8. There is discussion here: if such an upload were ever to be possible, would the result be recognisably me? See David J. Chalmers, The Character of Consciousness (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).
9. John Gray, Seven Types of Atheism (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018), 70.
10. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951; repr., London: Penguin, 2017), 387, 437.
11. See “Summary of 12 AI Aftermath Scenarios,” Future of Life Institute, https://futureoflife.org/ai-aftermath-scenarios.
12. Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens (New York: HarperCollins, 2015), 415–16.