Painting ourselves into the ‘God corner’
Posted on October 7, 2007
Filed Under All, Green Tech, Taking Faith, Technology |
In church today, I was listening to the sermon, offered by Father Fred Heard, who was preaching about faith, as presented in today’s Gospel of the mustard seed. As usual, I was viewing this through my weird faith/science duality (and here): I love faith communities, but don’t believe in a human-like God who is active on a personal level in people’s everyday lives. I believe that evolution and science are God’s plan.
Indeed, I was thinking how we humans have painted ourselves into what I’ll call the ‘God corner.’ What I mean by that, is that we’re going to have to begin doing some God-like things, and do them ethically and well, if we expect the species to survive. Craig Venter’s creation of artificial life is exactly the sort of thing we’re going to have to deal with.
Basically, we’ve changed the planet more quickly than God’s great process - called Evolution - can deal with and ensure the survival of humans. We either take over responsibility for ourselves and our planet, or trust in God’s evolutionary processes - which take tens or hundreds of thousands of years to even begin to effect change. Humans may not be winners on those time scales, especially given current behavior.
We need organisms that can create fuel - cellulosic ethanol comes to mind - and technologies like Tesla’s 70-pound electric car motors and high-performance, cheap PV cells that will someday allow grids to power a solar-powered electric car fleet for US and China-size populations. God is calling us to take responsibility for our actions, and those of our ancestors, IMHO, but the work of getting there is ours to do. God helps those who help themselves…
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amen
drawing old cars…
The responsible plan of action is to do your research wholly….