Yuval Noah Harari Thinks God Has Failed
Silicon Valley and the Idols of Inorganic Life
Yuval Noah Harari misunderstands the God of the Bible. He talks about a future where humans become gods of their own making by their own hands, where they worship their own creations. Whether he merely warns of this future, passively predicts it, or actively looks forward to it, listening to him it becomes abundantly clear he is blind to Yehowah, the God of the Bible. He “invalidates” Yehowah only from an impoverished understanding of what God is actually trying to do here. And he fails to understand the evidence for an immaterial world.
In a taped conversation with Michael Sandel at Harvard Book Store regarding his book Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow, posted March 2017, on WGBH Forum Network, “Yuval Noah Harari Gives a Brief History of Tomorrow,” he mentions “the main tasks of Yehowah were “to ensure agricultural production and victory in war.”
He then follows that by criticizing God’s performance:
Now we are much better than the God of the Bible? He misunderstands the Bible hopelessly.
“Ye do err, not knowing the scriptures, nor the power of God.” – Matt 22:29, ASV
Theology of the Bible has many views on the purpose of life and God’s goals, but not many of them center around a good crop yield and a strong army. Perhaps instead we are currently here in this imperfect world to learn the difference between good and evil because if we had been created to be perfect we never would have been able to be happy. We wouldn’t appreciate paradise if we had never known anything else. There were two trees in the Book of Genesis and neither of these was the Tree of Agriculture or the Tree of Victory in Warfare. So in Genesis, first we eat from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. Later we hope to eat from the Tree of Life. If we look at it this way, God has not failed at this purpose. We see angels and Satan in the Old Testament. This is hardly an argument for a material focus in life. Yuval displays little understanding of the God of the Old Testament by focusing on farming and war as God’s main concerns. In some Christian theologies, the feasts in the Old Testament have higher, prophetic meaning for the course of the Creation.
God is not leading us to victory on battlefields and abundance in crops at the expense of a higher purpose.
“For God hath shut up all unto disobedience, that he might have mercy upon all.” - Romans 11:32, ASV
If we are to criticize religion, let us meet it halfway, Yuval, and not ascribe to it a simplistic naïveté.
The purpose of life for the student of the Bible is not to have a successful life or good technology. This is such a fundamental misunderstanding of the Bible it’s almost shocking coming from a scholar. The Bible is not materialistic. It is spiritual. We do not seek victory in agriculture and war as God’s main contribution to our lives. That is an impoverished reading of the Scriptures. God may give us famine and defeat in war or abundance and victory in this life. Material gains are not the purpose of life, unless you are the prophet of Silicon Valley, perhaps.
Yuval further confounds the holy Scriptures by saying:
First of all the Bible clearly contends that God created all matter, but I suppose Yuval’s contention is that we do not yet have robots that have no need of a beating heart or anything other than good maintenance and an oil change to stay -literally- alive. Robots are dead, not the living. Yuval seems to imagine a world with living robots and computers. Would they have a spirit of sorts? Can you hop into a robot and continue on with your life, bereft of your mortal body? Is this the view of agnostics who fear death and think it would be so much better if gold and silver idols, excuse me I mean robots of metal, could house our personalities and thoughts so that we can simply be repaired occasionally and not pass away? Again, an impoverished view. Perhaps we are created in this organic, passing world so that we can later truly appreciate the joy of immortality and a body that can function in multiple stages and phases of matter or fade into spirit and back into “organic matter” with a word.
And who is to say if madmen get their robot world and download themselves into their robot to live forever, that they will find indeed their soul did not download - and they are dead? Even if we do have mad scientists in deep underground bases who think they have successfully downloaded people into robots – the joke is probably on them. How can they ever really know they haven’t just created a lifeless, coded game?
There have always been stories in modern society of Satan’s minions, his legion, infecting technology and lifeless objects like Ouija boards. Perhaps Satan, fearing his impending doom and imprisonment in the pit, thinks he will outsmart God by infecting robots and “inorganic life” with his evil spirit to carry on with his trade of mischief from the pit? This obsession with Artificial Intelligence begs the question. Satan, chained away from humans in the pit must wish to have someone to bother. Perhaps he plans to bother his inorganic creations?
“And he laid hold on the dragon, the old serpent, which is the Devil and Satan, and bound him for a thousand years […]” - Rev 20:2, ASV
Yuval observes we try to overcome death via technology, that “death has already been transformed into an engineering problem, a technical problem” to be solved.
Yuval says:
He notes that if the elites can cheat death with technology that the peasants will be angry. Perhaps in some mad lab somewhere the technology of physical immortality exists (mRNA I wonder, gene editing?) and the elites would like us all to go away so they can live forever in peace? If this has been achieved, it does not outsmart God. God would have some surprises in store for these madmen.
Do the lightning bolts report to you?
“Canst thou send forth lightnings, that they may go,
And say unto thee, Here we are?” - Job 38:35, ASV
Yuval says he doesn’t think life has any meaning and that many religions and philosophies base meaning on the afterlife. But there is much in science that speaks of the immaterial world. A good introduction can be found in The Holographic Universe by Michael Talbot.
Yuval lectures on God, proclaiming that God has failed, without giving a nod to even the most rudimentary theological understanding of what God is trying to do. God wasn’t trying to make us immortal or have good crop yields or victory over His other children. God is trying to teach us. God is a potter, crafting a world.
Yuval has not created humans from stardust.
He would do well to question if his acknowledgment of only the material world comes from knowledge – or arrogance.