The challenge of finding language in which believers and
non-believers can communicate is unintentionally illustrated in a bestselling
new book which predicts that human beings will soon reinvent themselves as
gods.
The book, Homo Deus (Man God), is
the work of Yuval Noah Harari, an Israeli historian who achieved fame several
years ago with another bestseller, Sapiens (as in
“homo sapiens,” that is). The earlier volume presented an overview of human
history and pre-history up to now. Homo Deus, published
by HarperCollins, is, in the words of its subtitle, “a brief history of
tomorrow.”
Along with providing a guided tour to current developments in
science and technology, Harari argues a thesis: The great project of humankind
in this century, he says, will be “to acquire for us divine powers of creation
and destruction, and upgrade Homo sapiens into Homo deus. … we may well think of the new human agenda
as consisting really of only one project (with many branches): attaining
divinity.”
I leave to others the credibility of this from the technological
and scientific perspectives. The book is an interesting read and worth
pondering. But its vision of human deification rests on a misunderstanding.
As an atheist, Harari doesn’t mean “god” in the sense in which
believers speak of God — a being eternal, all-powerful, omniscient and
omnipresent, creator and father of all. He means beings with life spans greatly
extended by science and intelligence enhanced by technology to the point of
being super-smart.
What he doesn’t mean, because his atheist creed doesn’t allow it,
is beings of whom it could rightly be said that they are transcendent. Nor,
obviously, does he believe in the transcendent God of theism. (But neither,
perhaps, do believers whose appreciation of “transcendence” as applied to God
is scant.)
The problem this presents was underlined a few years ago by
historian Brad S. Gregory in his similarly provocative book The Unintended Reformation (Harvard University Press).
In much of the literature that takes God’s non-existence more or less for
granted, Gregory wrote, “the God being imagined and whose reality is denied or
doubted is not the God of traditional Christianity” — a transcendent God. But
if there be such a God as that, he tellingly adds, “a transcendent God is by
definition not subject to empirical discovery or disproof.”
Atheists generally fail to grasp that. Here, then, is the
communication gap between them and believers. Since they do not reckon with
what transcendence might mean, atheists like Yuval Harari fail to comprehend
what belief in the transcendent God of faith might be like. And unless and
until they have at least some faint apprehension of what a transcendent being
might be like, there is no arguing with them about whether such a being exists.
Harari’s own faith in what science and technology have in store
may be excessive. But even if he’s spot on, his vision doesn’t shatter any pillars of faith for
those who grasp that “eternal” doesn’t mean unlimited existence in time but a
manner of existing — literally beyond imagining now because outside our
time-bound experience — entirely beyond the limitations of living in time.
For some hint of what that means, we have to turn to a mystic
like St. Teresa of Avila, who says repeatedly that her experience of God can’t
be described in words because there are no words to describe it. That
transcendent God bears no resemblance to the transformed human beings of Homo deus. On the subject of God, it seems, atheists
and believers are talking past one another.
Shaw is a freelance writer from Washington and
author of American Church: The Remarkable Rise, Meteoric Fall,
and Uncertain Future of Catholicism in America (Ignatius Press).