A healthy incubated baby chicken, breathing, resting and drying its feathers seconds after getting out of its shell.
A little marvel of human innovation.
Gott ist tot
or are we the gods?
It appears that people who read and study Nietzsche, Kant, Kafka, Dostoyevsky and such are considered to be philosophers, moralists, ethicists; Enlighted people with a mission to understand humanity and our purpose in the world. Industrialists, businessman, entertainers seldom concern themselves with these concepts perhaps because there are only so many hours in the day and time is money and philosophy, study of morality and ethics does not pay well. I would like to put one page of thought into what brilliant thinkers dedicated their lives to and I will share my simple thoughts with you and wonder about your opinion.
Our modern concepts of humanism and enlightenment explain god as a system invented by people to explain the unexplainable, to establish a codex of laws or rules to either guide people towards cooperation and building of populous societies or to establish control over masses. What if in this modern world we would allow ourselves to think that there was a god or gods and in some way he/she/it/they invented or evolved humans via technical progress in biogenetics, biochemistry and other advanced sciences? As such we allow ourselves to assume that humanity received help in evolution to the point that it became self-sufficient. Invention of religion as an institution was a part of progress to build more complex societies which then sped up the pace of advancement. But now we are functioning to the point of being able to further invent and use higher level technology and sciences to advance without the need for our creator.
Suddenly as Nietzsche pointed out humans killed god; “Gott ist tot” (I am using god as opposed to God because I do not want to personify the concept and prefer to keep discussion at a theoretical level). God is dead means that now we humans are so “advanced” that we do not need further help. We no longer need a set of rules, laws and books to tell us right from wrong. We became autonomous and can now make these decisions based on what feels right and what feels wrong and we learn these concepts from life experiences and the environment around us. If someone steals something from me, I feel bad so I should not steal from someone else because I might make them feel bad and morally making other people feel bad is not right. We killed god in the name of advancement, progress, evolution. We explain many phenomena scientifically; we no longer need to be afraid of thunder, we can predict weather, heal diseases and eliminate many other fears.
Life moves on with fewer and fewer religious congregations and fewer and fewer believers. No more is there a need for a set of values given to us by a higher power. Because of the advanced knowledge, we humans are now becoming gods in a way. We now can improve the physical world around us and also the biological world, we become a driver of evolution. We change organisms including our own. We are in the control center speeding up the pace of evolution, we are becoming gods and creators. Now I postulate that as we speed progress forward and become gods, history will repeat itself and our advanced creation, whatever it might be, will take over and the time will come when such a creation will kill god … think about it!
Is there a way to stop the cycle of history? If so, I would propose that ethics and morality have something to do with it. If ethics can keep up with the pace of invention, ethics can help us not to kill god and therefore ourselves as we know us.
