Man's Fate and God's Choice by Bhimeswara Challa (ereader for textbooks TXT) 📖

of Arctic ice and mountain glaciers, and accelerate the risk of drought, famine, and flooding. The carbon dioxide levels are now at the level of the Permian extinction, which occurred some 230 million years ago and led to the extinction of 70 percent of all life on earth. That was caused by natural global warming; the current global warming is man-made. While all this sounds scary, there are those who say that climate science has been ‘steadily corrupted’ and has

 

 

 

317 Michio Kaku. Visions: How Science Will Revolutionize the 21st Century. 1997. Anchor Books. New York, USA.

 

“blossomed to assume the undeserved status of dogma.”318 They argue that climate is a part of Nature and the present climate change is not qualitatively any different from the previous ones. They maintain that humanity will survive this one as it did the others, and will come out stronger and more vibrant. Dozens of books are being published supporting both viewpoints. This controversy mirrors the dilemma that a layman faces in coping with science.

We read every day about ‘scientific findings’ that directly contradict ‘scientifically proven facts’ of just a few years vintage. One day, chocolate is bad for the heart, and another day it is declared good. While granting that it is to some extent inherent in empirical and deductive intelligence, such volatility and dramatic divergences are unsettling to an already insecure, nervous and troubled mind that apprehends the worst and does not know what to do. If nothing else, it undermines the confidence in science itself, and even more in human intellect and integrity. Bernard Shaw, perhaps somewhat sweepingly, said “Science is always wrong. It never solves a problem without creating ten more.”319 Compounding the problem is the growing influence of profit-seeking R&D corporations in critical areas like biomedical research, encouraged by governments to reduce the budgetary burden and by scientists as options for additional income generation. Universities have become companies and scientists have become entrepreneurs. As a result, scientific priorities are skewed, reflecting the concerns of the industry rather than those of the public, particularly those of the meek and the marginalized. Man must evolve into a better being with a more balanced consciousness than he has now, to be able to ensure that these technologies are used for the good of man and the benefit of the world.

The creators of mechanical devices are often granted the status of gods. In the case of religion, we have the scriptures to turn to for authenticity, however ambivalent they might appear to be; but science has none. Science has made man knowledgeable, not a knowing person; it is equally intolerant of dissent and difference; and it is more elitist than religion.

And its sights are set on the horizons far removed from the mundane lives of the ordinary. Just as religion has turned away from understanding the meaning of man and from being a calming influence for corrosive impulses, science has turned to catering to the conveniences and comforts of the articulate and the affluent, and to perfecting the means of human destruction. It is coming close to the admonition of Thomas Huxley who said, “Science commits suicide when it adopts a creed.”320 Man has changed course from ‘finding’ God to ‘playing’ God. Scientists claim that they have found what they call the ‘God particle,’ “a mysterious subatomic fragment that permeates the entire universe”, which is said to explain how “everything is the way it is.”321 It is necessary to ask, in the words of the Persian mathematician Omar Khayyam, “Where have we come from? Where are we going? What is the meaning of our lives?”322

 

 

 

 

318 The New York Review of Books, USA. 14 November 2004. pp.87-96.

319 George Bernard Shaw. CreatingMinds.org. Accessed at: http://creatingminds.org/quotes/science.htm

320 Cited in: William S. Harris, et al. Response of Intelligent Design Network, Inc., to a Resolution by the Ohio Academy of Science Advocating the Teaching of Cosmic, Geological and Biological Evolution and the Censorship of “Intelligent Design” in Public School Science Education. 2002. Accessed at: http://www.intelligentdesignnetwork.org/OASresolutionRESPONSE.htm

321 David Adam. Is This the Answer to God, the Universe and All That? The Guardian. UK. 21 August 2004. Accessed at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2004/aug/21/sciencenews.theguardianlifesupplement

322 Cited in: Wikisource. Omar Khayyam. Dmitri Smirnov (tr.). Accessed at: http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Where_have_we_come_from%3F_Where_are_we_going%3F

 

Instead of seeing God in the ‘poorest of the poor,’ as Mother Teresa did, and trying to better their subhuman condition with the aid of science and technology, scientists embark upon attention-grabbing projects like the Human Genome Project, that often begin with a bang and end in a whimper. The fact is, we cannot whitewash or wish away either man’s thirst for spirituality or the reality of scientific power. Any agenda for human betterment or transformation must include how to bring about a rapprochement between the two. Since the discovery of DNA’s fundamental structure by James Watson and Francis Crick less than 50 years ago, man’s capacity to look at his own genome and his ability to artificially create identical twins has exponentially increased. It is also generally acknowledged that many fundamental questions like ‘what is life?’, ‘what is human?’, why is man so unpredictable?’ remain unanswered. Science and scientists rarely exercise self-restraint; they get carried away by the ‘logic of their success’, and there is often big money involved. Human cloning, we are told, is already a technical possibility and what is technically within our reach, man has always clasped. Frontier technologies, particularly biotechnology, might alter the very way we perceive ourselves and turn upside down our ideas of life, death, sex, heredity, and intelligence. New evidence and new theories are emerging, which question some of the ‘sacred cows’ of science. For example, there is serious scientific speculation that consciousness does not reside solely in the brain, and that it could be in every cell of the body; and also that all our cells (not just brain cells but millions of cells in the muscles, skeleton, gut, skin, and blood) ‘talk’ to one another in a kind of network that keeps our experience of consciousness going seamlessly even as billions of cells die and billions of others are produced.323 Scientists are even whispering the dreaded word ‘soul.’ It may be premature even to speculate where all this will lead to. But surely man will not be the same, nor will be the world.

Opinions vary on whether new technologies would usher in the Brave New World of Aldous Huxley, make man a ‘dehumanized happy slave’ or a technicized Utopian. Already the world is governed by a technocracy, and if the mold of man itself is mechanized, the human condition will no longer be human. Technology has already created a ‘virtual world’; maybe, it will create a ‘virtual man’. Technology can be a boon for the betterment of the human condition too. We already have distance learning and healing, annihilating the gap between the giver and the recipient. The education and health gaps can be bridged online. It might be possible for robotic machines to diagnose ailments and even treat patients. Can all these advances coalesce and provide the momentum for a posthuman future in which man, retaining his present form of life, moves on to the higher stage of evolution with a new consciousness, a mishmash of mind-machine-heart? Maybe with a brain that is directed by ‘implanted micro machines’ and a heart whose latent energy is unleashed by other similar machines. Science fiction has come true; but that ‘being’ will not be human. The being may be more ‘efficient,’ live longer and challenge the gods, but it will not be human. The term ‘Brave New World’ (the title of the 1932 book by Aldous Huxley) has become “almost a reflex for commentators worried we are rushing headlong towards a sterilized posthuman society, engineered to joyless joy.”324 Huxley’s book has an arresting passage in which the protagonist ‘Mr. Savage’ says, “I don’t want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness, I want sin.” The ‘interrogator’ Mustapha Mond replies, “In fact, you are claiming the right to be unhappy.” The Savage then says defiantly,

 

 

 

323 Reader’s Digest. Indian Edition. October 2003. p.86.

324 Caitrin Nicol. Brave New World at 75. The New Atlantis. No. 16, Spring 2007. Accessed at: http://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/brave-new-world-at-75

 

“All right then, I’m claiming the right to be unhappy.”325 More than seventy-five years later, man is more robotic and unhappier, and if push comes to shove, he is even prepared to be a robot if only that would make him any less unhappy.

The fact is that, technology, not tradition, is on the cutting edge of change, arguably the most transformative agent in human history. And it has become a self-sustainable system, as the French technological determinist Jacques Ellul noted. Technology is driven by its own dynamic, independent of human control. The most transformative technology, besides biotechnology, is what is called ‘virtual culture’ or ‘cyber culture’, powered by the Internet and the World Wide Web (WWW), a ‘new nervous system’, which you cannot see but touch. Some fear that the web is assuming the role of the collective mind of mankind, and that soon it will be the sole point of reference for all our ‘knowing’. Written text is replaced by the versatile ‘hypertext’, computer-displayed information that is referenced to other text residing elsewhere, which can be rapidly accessed. Information processing technologies are described as extensions of the human mind, which some call ‘psychotechnologies’. Combined with biotechnologies like genetic engineering and cloning, man might be able to manipulate both his body and life more architectonically than ever before. At the same time, the human world bristles with glaring and unconscionable oddities. For instance, it is estimated that every five seconds one human in the world goes blind, that thirty-seven million people in the world are blind, that 124 million are visually impaired, and that the world population of the blind might rise to 75 million by the year 2020 (if current trends continue). But then, there will be electronic eyes everywhere to watch us, and to ‘see’ for us.326 Direct brain-to-computer interfacing, the stuff of science fiction, we are now being told, could be a reality. We could have robotic dogs, servants, soldiers, and machines that “tune into the full spectrum of emotional broadcasting.”327 Scientists are predicting that soon the development of computers that match and vastly exceed the capabilities of the human brain will be no less important than the evolution of human intelligence itself, some hundreds of generations ago, and that by the close of this century non-biological intelligence will be ubiquitous. There will be few humans without some form of artificial intelligence, which is growing at a doubly exponential rate; whereas biological intelligence is basically at a standstill.

So much is being said about where science is going to take us, it is hard to retain any semblance of balance, to come to any reasoned view on what is good and what is bad from the species point of view. Even if a fraction of these predictions come true, how would they affect the human personality and behavior? After all, if we go by the logic of Richard Dawkins (The Selfish Gene, 1976), “We are survival machines, robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes.”328 Further, as noted by Stephen Talbott, “a technologically motivated globalization shows every sign of simply obliterating the local and thereby sacrificing the truly global as well”, and that technology “consists of the machinery embodying our one-sidedly abstract habits of mind.”329 That habit

 

 

 

325 Caitrin Nicol. Brave New World at 75. The New Atlantis. No. 16, Spring 2007. Accessed at: http://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/brave-new-world-at-75

326 Statistics on the Blind. NewMedia Journalism. Accessed