So one night a couple weeks ago, I went out grocery shopping after Bible Study. We were a little understocked in my home away from home. I went to Wal-Mart and made the mistake of walking past the $3.47 DVD bin (that thing can be hard for me to pass). I saw the Johnny Depp movie Transcendence. I remembered seeing the commercials for it when it was in the theaters, thought it looked interesting so in the cart it went. Last night I got a chance to watch it. I’m a sucker for a good SciFi movie and this one was thought provoking.
The basic premise is Depp plays scientist Will Caster. He is working to develop artificial intelligence. In one of the early scenes Caster is addressing a large group of people about AI and about how he wants to develop a computer that can out think all of humanity and how that could heal disease, repair the environment, etc. etc. etc. A man in the audience stands up and asks if he is trying to create his own god. Caster says very arrogantly “Isn’t that what humanity has always done?” At that point I wanted to yell out, “NO!” but then I thought about it, and the answer is, to some degree, “yes.”
Now just to be clear, I have not fallen from the faith, even a little. I love God more than ever. I believe in the God of the Bible wholeheartedly and always will and I know that we are created in His image and not the other way around. Yet when I look at the world around us I see people creating their own gods everywhere. It happens when we find ourselves in disagreement with God and His teachings and so we try to change them. Each time we do that we are creating god in our image. It happens every time we put something in front of God in our lives. It may not be a golden calf, though my point is perfectly demonstrated in that story, but it is an idol nonetheless.
Working through the rest of the movie, without wanting to give you a spoiler, we see what happens. Depp is killed by terrorists with a slow acting poison and so in the last weeks of his life he and his wife download his consciousness into the machine. The result is basically a god created in Depp’s image and the results, even with ostensibly trying to do good, leads to disastrous results and so it is in real life. We could be smarter than everyone else in the world, we could even be smarter than the collective intelligence of the world and we still would not hold a candle to the God of the Bible. Even our best intended plans could be disastrous because only God knows the whole story and only His mind is capable to discerning every possible scenario. Only One knows it all.
Only One can be trusted to be God.
So trust Him.
AMOKArts 