Salvation Through Technology?

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4.6 • 8.7K Ratings

🗓️ 18 January 2023

⏱️ 18 minutes

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Summary

Human aspirations for technology are vast. One day, maybe we'll develop technologies that cure cancer. Rid us of viruses. Perhaps fix that pesky climate change. Even, deliver us from death altogether.... But is the increasing belief in salvation through technology just religion in new clothes? Meghan O'Gieblyn is the author of the book God, Human, Animal, Machine: Technology, Metaphor, and the Search for Meaning. In the fall of 2021 Brooke spoke to O'Gieblyn about the shared assumptions of Christian creationists and transhumanist tech leaders, the flawed metaphor of the mind as a computer, and the relationships of humans to the machines we build.

This is a segment from our October 15th, 2021 program, Against the Machine.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Music
0:06.0	Human aspirations for technology are vast.
0:10.0	One day, maybe our tech will cure cancer,
0:13.0	riddance of viruses, fix that pesky climate change,
0:17.0	even deliver us from death.
0:19.0	Elon Musk.
0:20.0	Everything that's encoded in memory, you can upload,
0:22.0	and ultimately you could potentially download them into a new body
0:25.0	or into a robot body.
0:26.0	The future is going to be weird.
0:28.0	Our Megan O'Giblin put her faith in technology after leaving the fundamentalist
0:32.0	evangelical church that nurtured her.
0:35.0	Her teachers at Bible College, who embraced a resurgent Calvinist theology,
0:40.0	believed in a God O'Giblin couldn't accept.
0:44.0	Calvinism in the form that I was taught was very much focused on predestination.
0:49.0	You know, we don't have a choice in our own salvation.
0:51.0	It's decided for us before we're ever born.
0:54.0	We don't really have free will.
0:56.0	And it also brought up a lot of problems for me just about the nature of God,
1:01.0	this idea that people were going to suffer for eternity and hell
1:06.0	when they didn't even have a choice in accepting or rejecting the gospel.
1:12.0	O'Giblin is the author of the book, God Human Animal Machine,
	...

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