Welcome to Breakpoint, a daily look at an ever-changing culture through the lens of unchanging truth, for the Colson Center. I'm John Stone Street.
Well, thanks to new technology from Neuralink, a woman that was fully paralyzed for over 20 years can now write her name. Through a quarter-sized chip called the Link that was surgically implanted in her brain, Audrey Cruz can now control a computer cursor using only her mind. According to Elon Musk, who founded the company Neuralink, helping individuals with paralysis is just the beginning. He predicts that one day the blind will be able to see and the mute to communicate. And therein lies the challenge of our emerging technologies.
What's promised, especially through advances in medical technology, is simply astounding and nearly irresistible. And of course, we have very good reason to believe in those promises. After all, advances in medical technology have basically eradicated plagues and ailments that were once common. Back in the 1950s, polio cases ran into the tens of thousands. Today, it's virtually nonexistent.
Before 1981, very little could be done for a baby in utero, but today, full surgeries are performed on babies in the womb, and many other technologies make it possible to save newborns that in earlier times would have almost certainly died. And yet these promises are not without peril. We cannot view gene editing technologies like CRISPR or artificial reproductive technologies like IVF or even smartphones with mere indifference. When our technologies outpace our ethics, what we can do becomes what we should do, and anything new becomes automatically good. And we ought not underestimate our human ability to invent new things.
God Himself once said of an especially industrious group of image bearers, and I quote, Behold, they're one people. They have all one language. This is only the beginning of what they will do, and nothing they propose to do will now be impossible for them. Those words from God Himself were both a warning and an evaluation of human ability. And it's because fallen humans can innovate for good or for evil, or at times for both at the same time, our bioethics have to distinguish between augmentation and restoration.
It's notable that whenever Jesus healed someone, it was restorative. he did not augment human ability. He gave the blind man his sight. He did not give him X-ray vision. He healed the legs of the lame.
He did not give the lame wings. Restoration is what happened to Audrey Cruz. A neural implant restored an ability that was lost. Augmentation would be a neural implant that allowed someone to, I don't know, download a book into their brain or Google search using only their curiosity. But even then, a neural controlled exoskeleton that allowed the lame to walk might also enable someone to dominate Olympic powerlifting.
And that would be wrong. But that same kind of strength could be an incredible asset for a soldier or a disaster relief worker.
So where is this line between what we can do and what we should do? All technology is ethical, especially when it affects our bodies. According to moral theologian Christian Brugger, and I quote, there are God-given limits. And if the limits are transgressed, people don't flourish. And one of those limits is respect for our bodily nature, which implies, at the very least, we shouldn't metamorphose that nature into some grandiose more than human reality.
In the transhumanist imperative, there is a whisper of original sin. That's pride. Do it and you will be like God. And that was certainly the very first temptation. But the very same creation account tells us that in a very real sense, Humans are supposed to be like God.
We're made in His image, after all. There's a difference between imaging God and playing God. When we are like God in our actions and intentions, we point the rest of creation to Him. Whenever we act as if we are God, we're not imaging Him any more. Humans create, but not out of nothing.
We take care of God's world, but the world still belongs to him. Our place is not to decide what human nature is or ought to be, and much misery has come whenever humans think that they can and should. We were created to tend God's garden, subdue God's earth, to continue his creative work by forming and filling his creation. What TS Eliot once said about education applies to technology as well. If we're going to properly determine what we should and should not do with something, we have to first determine what that something is for.
In his book Bioethics, A Primer for Christians, Gilbert Meylander described the importance of purpose and intent when it comes to bioethics. We're most tempted, he argued, by the freedom promised to us by technology. But we have to know what freedom is. Here's how he put it: quote: The only freedom worth having, a freedom that does not finally trivialize our choices, is a freedom that acknowledges its limits and does not seek to be godlike. That freedom, a truly human freedom, will acknowledge the duality of our nature and the limits to which it gives rise.
In other words, humans will always be most free, not when they can do or be whatever comes into their minds. We'll be most free when we can do and be what we were created to do and be. Only when our technologies serve our God given created purposes will they be good and restorative. for the Colson Center on John Stone Street with Breakpoint. Today's Breakpoint was co-authored by Dr.
Timothy Padgett. If you're a fan of Breakpoint, leave us a review wherever you download your podcast. And for a version of this commentary to print out or to share online with others, go to breakpoint.org.
