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our images, our understanding, both in the sciences and in religious
life. In both senses, we work with our historical heritage but we are
not restricted to it. We can play God , create new visions and new
realities.
Our calling to play God
We are not only thinking beings. We are also creative creatures,
beings who shape their environment. With modern technology, this
has risen to unprecedented heights. In 1844 Benjamin Disraeli
compared various cities to various human endeavours. Rome repre-
sents conquest, the building of empires. Jerusalem stands for faith;
Athens invokes our intellectual heritage. These are the traditional
examples. However, he added to this major league of human cities
Manchester.
He did not add Manchester for its soccer team. Athens and
Manchester stand for two different styles of human intellect, for two
different styles of life, for two different dimensions of science.
Astronomy is a good example of a particular kind of science, which
would fit the Athenian archetype. Observations, models and theories
culminate together in an understanding of many phenomena in the
sky, and even in some understanding of the whole observable universe.
Science is the attempt to explain, to understand reality as it is.
From now on 85
Manchester stands for another side of science, for the birth of
chemistry and the rise of technology. This city is an archetype of the
Industrial Revolution. This is science that not only seeks to under-
stand nature, but also to create things that had not been before a
science that is not restricted to the natural but brings forth the
artificial. In our days, this active, creative side of science has become
enormously significant. Think of the creation of new materials
with a wide variety of properties, the creation of electronics that gave
rise to information and communication technologies, and of bio-
technologies with major consequences for food production and
medicine. Science offers more than understanding; it provides us with
tools to change our world.
Technology may first be understood as imitating nature , doing
things which nature does as well. At some point, we move on to
improving nature , doing some things better than they would be
done without us. Better is, of course, an evaluation and thus
invites the question what the standard is by which this is judged. In
what sense is our wheat after millennia of human selection better
than the natural varieties? Well, it is better for our purposes for
producing bread, feeding the hungry. In some contexts we may even
consider ourselves to be correcting nature, doing things differently,
averting problematic consequences of nature.
Humans are concerned about the consequences of those
technologies. For physics, the archetype of responsibility has become
the nuclear bomb. Chemistry is associated with pollution. Every
science seems to have its particular experiences of sin, of causing
problems that may be beyond its powers to solve. It is, of course,
questionable whether it is science itself that is to blame, or whether
one should rather blame our ways of living, our political and eco-
nomic decisions. But science is involved, and this has consequences
for the perception of science.
Could we and should we have done without this side of science,
restricting ourselves to the noble goal of understanding? I doubt it.
The active attitude is deeply rooted in human nature; we are as much
homo faber as homo sapiens, and we will need both our skills and
our wisdom to survive our powers, which too are in the combination
of skill and intellect. Should we wish we had done without this active
side, without the inventions that have changed our world? I doubt
whether a moral person really can sustain such a desire. There is, of
course, the mythical image of paradise, of an effortless pastoral life
with fruit in abundance. If one is more realistic, we realize that we
86 Creation: From Nothing Until Now
need our technology and we need it also for morally lofty purposes,
to feed the hungry, to cloth the naked, to care for those who are ill.
The lightning rod may serve as an example. In his book of over
a hundred years ago, A History of the Warfare of Science with
Theology in Christendom (1896), Andrew White dwells extensively
on the resistance of church-wardens and ministers to setting up
lightning rods a resistance which not only was stupid, but immoral
as it led to an unnecessarily early death of many. Frederick Ferré
writes in a book titled Hellfire and Lightning Rods on the experi-
ences of Swedish immigrants in Minnesota in 1922. A preacher
condemned in his sermon the lightning rods, which sought to deflect
the wrath of God. A young, sensitive man wondered:
Could God s will truly be foiled by a steel rod and a grounding
wire? Was it really wrong to try to protect family and livestock
from the storms that swept in from the prairies with such
seemingly undiscriminating force? Was God really directing the
thunderbolts? Should he believe that the God Jesus called our
Father in heaven really would punish the farmers for taking
whatever meager technological precautions might be available?
The churches have accepted the lightning rod, perhaps a few odd
corners excepted. However, objections to technology surface again
and again, and with them the warning that we should not play God
not with medical technology, not in biotechnology. The warning
against playing God often indicates insecurity due to shifting
boundaries between that which is given (and thus would be God s
domain) and that which is in our hands to play with. Aside from
the warning not to play God , there are also other religious images
invoked in discussions on the way we humans change our world.
Some invoke the notion of stewardship to express a limited, con-
serving range of acceptable human action. Should we limit ourselves
to the role of stewards, or rather reach out as co-creators?
In the Christian tradition, the Bible is the place to look. Let me
therefore offer a summary of the Bible, in a single sentence. The Bible
begins on high, with paradise, which is followed by a long journey
through history, with the expectation of final salvation. The
combination of past and future returns in the liturgy in the emphasis
on memory and hope. The Sabbath recalls the creation and the
exodus and is a foretaste of fulfilment. This overarching U-shaped
profile in the Christian tradition implies that images of the good are
From now on 87
there as images of the past (paradise) and as images of the future, of
a City of God, a new heaven and a new earth, the Kingdom to come.
If humans are considered stewards, one looks back in time, to a good
situation that has to be kept and preserved. Humans are also
addressed as workers who have their eyes on the Kingdom, on that
which might come.
In relation to the use of human knowledge and power, some other
stories may be illuminating as well. In the synagogue Jesus meets
someone with a withered hand. Will he heal on the Sabbath? Then
Jesus asks: Is it lawful on the Sabbath to do good or to do harm, to [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
