Ninth in the PE Series, Reviewing Chapter Eight

Transhumanism: From Noah to Noah, written by Noah Hutchings, posits that man is looking for eternal life in all the wrong places.

He cites Genesis 6:4 as evidence of early man's genetic misadventures: There were giants in the earth in those days; and also after that, when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men, and they bare [children] to them, the same [became] mighty men which [were] of old, men of renown. Likewise, people today are becoming renowned by virtue of enhanced birth methods.

Here is a funny headline and if you click on it you can read the article that is not so funny: A Baby, Please. Blond, Freckles -- Hold the Colic.

I'm learning a lot by exploring references found in or via Pandemonium's Engine. I had not heard of "PGD" (preimplantation genetic diagnosis) that can make "trait selection" in babies a medical service. You can read more about it here.

Noah Hutchings is introduced in the Wikipedia as "the president of Southwest Radio Church Ministries, a Christian broadcasting company based in Oklahoma City. He is the host of their nationally syndicated radio show Your Watchman On The Wall, which is broadcast daily on stations across the USA." One of his books is: The Dark Side of the Purpose Driven Church. His ministry covers a spectrum of issues.

He begins his article by referencing a Feb. 2011 Time Magazine article, "2045: The Year Man Becomes Immortal" that is worth reading. Here is a quotation from it that references "the Singularity," a concept mentioned in several of the PE articles:

Here's what the exponential curves told him. We will successfully reverse-engineer the human brain by the mid-2020s. By the end of that decade, computers will be capable of human-level intelligence. Kurzweil puts the date of the Singularity — never say he's not conservative — at 2045. In that year, he estimates, given the vast increases in computing power and the vast reductions in the cost of same, the quantity of artificial intelligence created will be about a billion times the sum of all the human intelligence that exists today.

Basically, the idea is that we are going to learn how to live forever, yet this "forever" is much different from the one Christians envision as everlasting life with the Lord. A more updated view to it is here.

On the www.singularity.com website that sells Ray Kurzweil's book on the concept, a "blurb" states: "The Singularity is an era in which our intelligence will become increasingly nonbiological and trillions of times more powerful than it is today — the dawning of a new civilization that will enable us to transcend our biological limitations and amplify our creativity."

RABBIT TRAIL: The below quotation from the Time article (referenced above) has nothing to do with the chapter under review but does help us understand the Singularity.

Kurzweil then ran the numbers on a whole bunch of other key technological indexes — the falling cost of manufacturing transistors, the rising clock speed of microprocessors, the plummeting price of dynamic RAM. He looked even further afield at trends in biotech and beyond — the falling cost of sequencing DNA and of wireless data service and the rising numbers of Internet hosts and nanotechnology patents. He kept finding the same thing: exponentially accelerating progress. "It's really amazing how smooth these trajectories are," he says. "Through thick and thin, war and peace, boom times and recessions." Kurzweil calls it the law of accelerating returns: technological progress happens exponentially, not linearly.

You may also enjoy visiting Kurzweil's Accelerating Intelligence website.

Back to our discussion, Pastor Hutchings would like the reader to consider: Do you want to pursue scientific methods to try to achieve a VERY long life — in the metaphorical sense of the word life, or why not choose eternal life — in the biological sense — in Christ Jesus?

ANOTHER RABBIT TRAIL: While exploring the Regulation of New Biotechnologies webpages on the Georgetown U. website, I was introduced to a short story, The Birth Mark, by Nathaniel Hawthorne, which casts great light on the quest for human perfection. This story was discussed at the President's Council on Bioethics meeting in January 2002.