“Give us this day our daily bread. Forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us. Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. For thine is the kingdom, the power, and the glory, for ever and ever. Amen.” –The Lord’s Prayer.
I am sure you have heard this prayer before. Anyone brought up in a western culture or has seen a movie with an utterance of prayer has heard it. The message it delivers is full of morals and promises of God. Asking for sustenance, the golden rule, asking for strength, but lastly, and most importantly to this composition, where power comes from. The unit I was required to read for my English had to do with the morality of technology. The conflicts of creation, promises of supernatural results, of introducing technology with no responsibility or foresight, the dependence on the unnatural, and going over the lines of what man is allowed to do are all results from the idea that God has power that we can not touch. We were given the world, and the heavens belong to God.
As time has gone on it is becoming harder and harder to see what is God’s and what is man’s. Suddenly, the supernatural is explainable and easy to replicate; mysteries are solved, and the holy becomes the common place. Now, diseases that could only be stopped by miracles are being cured, floods can be prevented, men can fly. In our age, we control things that were marked off for God’s power and God’s alone, the power to create living things ‘unnaturally’, that is, without physical sexual reproduction. It is all too common to hear of the plants that glow at night or the clones of sheep. Little known is it how major industries use the technologies of creation. For example, Kentucky Fried Chicken was sued because what they sell is not exactly chicken. They are headless, featherless birds bred by slicing DNA. The comfort of saying that creation can only be handled by God is that God is always on the side of humans, not Himself; that God is all knowing and all responsible for everything that He does, He makes no mistakes. Man, on the other hand is chock full of flaws and shortcomings that mankind put upon themselves. Therefore, things that ought to be controlled by God should be left alone from the meddling lines of man. The question then arises, well, what is God’s? Creation? Preventing diseases, floods, natural disasters? The weather? Shelter? Are these all things that only God can create for us, save us from, and is responsible for?
God is losing a lot of ground. In older times, it used to be that what was God’s was what was out of our control. Now, more and more is being held by the fist of man, and God is losing hold. With these sacrileges come disastrous results. It is because we took what was God’s; it is because we are mortal and fallible that technology is turning against us. Where we get our power should only be from a divine hand, what should be done is God’s will not our own.
Those last few statements reveal the exact mindset that critics of technology have today. What happens is that ‘they’ put the blame on the fact that the creators or innovators of technologies are messing about with the fire of the Gods, and to bring it down is to suffer the fate of Prometheus.
This is preposterous. To believe in this is to subject oneself to the darkness and cold of ignorance, and to put the reliance on a being that we have a personal relationship with only after we die. This mindset is not entirely at the fault of their procurers, however. Scientists eager for fame and businesses eager for sales promise things that seemed possible by the exclusive hand of God.
A perfect example of this is in Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein. The young doctor does thinks about all the phantasmal benefits of bringing life to forms that were robbed of it. He dreams of doing things that were restricted to man, most notably raising the dead. This fictional book perfectly represents the morals that these critics resound every time mankind starts to cross the ambiguous line of God’s power. Once man does this, terrible results concur. The monster rises and is misunderstood and the general populace is terrified and chaos ensues. They point to modern day real disasters as proof, such as the harm of DDT or the deformations of clones. They cry that we are not God, and to touch what is His is to start our own destruction.
Failure to define what is and is not ours are these critics main downfall. These critics, ingrained with the idea that since power comes from God, then what to do with that power is also from God. In short, because God gave life to us, then we do what He has told us; we live by His morals. Consider detaching oneself from this. What if we were not created by God for a special purpose unto him; what if our morals come from ourselves and not God?
This is the main message proclaimed by Wilson in the last essay of our text. In it, he says perhaps we should separate morals and God.
