The Theology and Mythology of the Internet: Angels, Demons, and Gods

Bracket for a moment the question of the existence of such things as angels, demons, and God.  Their reality or lack thereof is irrelevant to this discussion, what is relevant about them is that the internet has analogous roles or positions to such things. That’s what I’m going to talk about here.

Imagine for a moment that the internet is like a parallel world.  It sorta is… it had addresses and entities in it (not all humans, either, there are bots), but it is becoming more like it as artificial worlds gain more and more reality. Right now it is a “sub-world” but as tech advances it will become more and more real (hopefully stopping short of the Matrix).

Now, let’s say for a moment that Al Gore actually did invent the internet, and was even now still in charge of it, in a completely legitimate and authoritative way (this charge against Gore – saying that he claimed to have invented the internet – is false by the way).  Well, then he’d be the “god” of the internet wouldn’t he? Currently, there is no-one in control of the internet, just various groups controlling various domains, some vying with each other for power, some satisfied with what they have.  The internet, then, is rather polytheistic.  There are “gods” for different things: whether it be assigning IP addresses, hosting blogs, social media, content providers, etc. Visit and propitiate (username and password, sometimes a fee…) the right god to get the right thing done.

Moving on from this, the notion of “god” begins to fail. These polytheistic entities really are not so much gods as they are more like groups of lesser beings. The internet has no single “god” and instead it has groups of individuals who approximate minor gods. But since humans are not groups, we are individuals, what are we individual humans then, in relation to the internet?

When it comes to the internet, we individual users are not gods: we are like angels and/or demons. In Christian theology, angels and demons do not exist inside of our world; they exist outside of space and time and instead interact with the world by having not a “presence” but a “point of action.” This is exactly how any human works with the internet. We do not “live” or exist in any real way “in” the internet. We exist out here “in real life” and instead we “surf” the virtual world; move our point of action from place to place. This parallel fascinates me because it is an instance of technology beginning to radically alter the way humans can act in the world. On the internet we are no longer so much like apes as we are like angels – the parallel is there whether you think theology is bunk or not.

A group of angels and demons can come together cooperatively to approximate a minor god, as described above. These groups typically cooperate, but not always. Groups like Anonymous throw wrenches into the system, and so do various national governments at times. But overall, the internet has never been threatened with collapse (at least not yet…); it exists in a stable way being supported only by “angels,” and of course our “real” reality itself.  The internet is an angelically synthesized polytheism.

Technology changes the world in such interesting ways – ways so unusual that we may need to resort to our theological and mythological traditions in order to better understand it. Pure tech-speak is not good enough for most of us. The tech wizards understand that stuff, not so with us more minor angels. It helps, but we understand it differently and perhaps better by analogizing with stories that make more sense: the stories of our human ancestral past.

The big difference, of course, with the theologies and/or myths of the past is that now WE are the entities in the stories, not just the subjects of them. This is a novum of history, that technologically and psychologically we have clawed our way up the scala natura from animal towards angel and god.

We may only be such beings in a derivative and virtual sense, but the truth is that this has never been the case before in any sense at all. This is worth pondering as we continue on this arc of progress, as the derivative and virtual theologies and mythologies grow in reality.

And the question I ask is the ethical one: “Are we ready for this?”

Brian’s Links 25 August 2011: Tolkein, Russia, Economics, and Food!

What would Frodo do?  If he designed an economic system, that is. An essay from last year by a friend of mine. Still worth a read. (The answer is, Frodo would follow EF Schumacher: Small is Beautiful.)

And what if Sauron were actually the good guy, the enlightened scientist and technologist seeking to help develop the poor backwards peoples of Middle Earth? A Russian has written the anti-Tolkein, called “The Last Ringbearer,” and it’s a free download. Just in case you always sympathized with the brilliant Sauron against those barbaric and “medieval” hobbits, humans, dwarves, and elves… (and here is some more background on the tale).

Just in case you were wondering, Bert and Ernie are just friends. They are not going to get married.

And now, teenage girl exorcists.  Yeah, that’s right. They’re trained and everything.

Poland’s underground salt cathedral. Absolutely amazing.

When a flash mob becomes a flash rob.

Russia hungrily eyes the arctic ocean. The knives are out for newly globally-warming melted turf… or water, actually.

The Vatican approves of Islamic finance. It’s more Christian than what we have now.

Jedis and Pastafarians: an article on joke religions.

Theologians are a “curse and affliction upon the Church,” says a USCCB representative.

Bill Clinton, now vegan.  He says he’s much healthier now and feels great.

DARPA has money for interstellar travel research.  Even the ethics of it!

Umm, don’t let this happen to you.  Yikes. A protist that eats children’s brains, contracted by swimming in contaminated waters. And a perfect time to cut science research in the Everglades…

Even IEET (Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies… read, transhumanists) readers are opposed to uplifting animals to have human-like intelligence. Fascinating.

Some scientists think aliens will kill us for ruining the environment.

And lastly the far left wing and far right wing can sometimes agree on food (sociologically fascinating, really). They want real food, not factory farmed crud. So what happens? The government raids their little food clubs with guns out like the farmers are vicious drug-dealing murderers. Now, I have to say I have no interest in raw milk, which is one of the items police seized in their raids.  But seriously.  These people are DRINKING MILK! Do you need to pull guns on them and their children? What is wrong with our government? For goodness sakes, do something worthwhile rather than raiding people drinking milk in a club where they all sign a written statement that they are okay with drinking raw milk. Anyway, that’s just part of this movie trailer. And it has a great name: FARMAGEDDON.

Peter Singer Reconsiders His Ethics

Peter Singer is one of the most famous philosophical ethicists in the world.  His book Animal Liberation gave voice to a movement. His views on euthanasia, infanticide (excellent, must-read NYTMag article by a disabled woman critiquing Singer), bestiality (warning, explicit), and incest make headlines.  He gives 20% of his income to charity.  And he doesn’t like global warming.

The last point might not seem so important, except that apparently it has lead him to wonder about his entire ethical system, preference utilitarianism, where good is maximizing happiness by maximizing the attainment of preferences.

At a conference in Oxford in May Singer met with Christian ethicists to discuss various issues in ethics and find common ground where possible. I  heard about the conference from others who were there and Singer definitely pleasantly surprised them.

Apparently global warming has jarred Singer into reconsidering preference utilitarianism. Mark Vernon of the Guardian describes Singer’s position thus:

Climate change is a challenge to utilitarianism on at least two accounts. First, the problem of reducing the carbon output of humanity is tied to the problem of rising human populations. The more people there are, the greater becomes the difficulty of tackling climate change. This fact sits uneasily for a preference utilitarian, who would be inclined to argue that the existence of more and more sentient beings enjoying their lives – realising their preferences – is a good thing. As Singer puts it in the new edition of his book, Practical Ethics: “I have found myself unable to maintain with any confidence that the position I took in the previous edition – based solely on preference utilitarianism – offers a satisfactory answer to these quandaries.”

Second, preference utilitarianism also runs into problems because climate change requires that we consider the preferences not only of existing human beings, but of those yet to come. And we can have no confidence about that, when it comes to generations far into the future. Perhaps they won’t much care about Earth because the consumptive delights of life on other planets will be even greater. Perhaps they won’t much care because a virtual life, with its brilliant fantasies, will seem far more preferable than a real one. What this adds up to is that preference utilitarianism can provide good arguments not to worry about climate change, as well as arguments to do so.

That’s not all.  This is the part that is really news:

He described his current position as being in a state of flux. But he is leaning towards accepting moral objectivity because he now rejects Hume’s view that practical reasoning is always subject to desire. Instead, he inclines towards the view of Henry Sidgwick, the Victorian theist whom he has called the greatest utilitarian

That is incredible. The world’s foremost preference utilitarian, a moral subjectivist, is reconsidering subjectivism and now leaning towards moral objectivism. He’s not all the way there and he’s not becoming a theist. But he is doing something interesting.

For those of us who disagree with Singer, or agree with him, we should know about this “flux” or we might make mistakes when referring to Singer’s thoughts.

So all ethicists out there be aware: Peter Singer’s philosophy is getting more complicated.

Brian’s Links 18 August 2011: Nature, Race, and Eating the World

Save woodpecker, pay 500$ fine. Feed birds, go to jail.

If your factory’s workers commit suicide, replace them with robots.

More electronics, less nature in Oxford junior dictionary. Just like reality. God forbid children know what plants are.

Liquid water on Mars = awesome. And the journal Science abstract.

3D printing and supervillainy. Yup, just design your superweapon and print it out on your printer. Technology? Could you not do that please?

Albert Einstein, civil rights activist. And thank goodness for that good story because there is a horrible counterpoint: White teens in Mississippi kill a black man just for amusement. Beat him and run him over. In case you thought this didn’t happen anymore – it does.

Stuart Kauffman on what’s philosophically interesting about evolution. It’s not a law, it’s in the absence of laws that evolution exists. So reality is free. No more reductionism.

Why are we fascinated by zombies?  Because we are zombies, says the author of this piece. We are made so by our consumerist society.  Distributivist Review is economically and religiously fascinating and I highly recommend it for thought-provocation, even if you don’t agree with their conclusions (or assumptions).

And finally, a game where you eat the world.  You know, just to raise interest in the dangers of nanotechnology and global ecophagy (AKA the “gray goo” scenario for destroying the world). Here’s the promo video:

Angry Gods in India Defend $22 Billion Treasure

Open the vault, get killed by supernatural attack. This stuff doesn’t happen every day.

Officials at Kerala’s Sree Padmanabhaswamy temple – where a treasure estimated to be worth $22 billion was found last month – had warned against opening the last of its sealed vaults, citing the image of a cobra that ominously guarded its entrance. The vault –  Chamber “B” – is still sealed.

But now a group of astrologers say they are sure tragedy will befall those who upset the temple’s deity further.  The god, they say, is already angry about outsiders rummaging through the other five vaults, the contents of which revealed golden idols and diamonds, among other treasures.

After holding a four-day astrological conclave –  a “devaprasnam,” which literally means “inquiring of the god” –  they warned on Thursday that unsealing Chamber “B” and moving the treasure from its temple could, in true treasure legend fashion, unleash the wrath of the gods, according to media reports.

This is a fascinating story. Shows what can accumulate over centuries of collecting donations.

Oddly, while the astrologers are warning people might get killed if the vault is opened, the story mentions that the guy who brought the lawsuit to get the vault opened just died!

T.P. Sundararajan, a police officer who originally filed the complaint, died last month shortly after the re-discovery of the treasure.

No explanation in the article for how he died. Rather curiosity provoking… So I followed the link to his obituary, where, of course, some people mention that they think he was killed by the gods. He died of a fever. He was 70.

And now I’m going to carefully try to avoid angering any gods.

In any case, huge fortunes and angry gods make for a good story! So now you know.

Brian’s Links 10 August 2011: God, Science, & Ethics

Catholic Theological Ethics in the World Church: a website dedicated to promoting a global Catholic conversation. Sign up for their newsletter to hear from ethicists from around the world.

GTU trustee emerita Jane Newhall has died, at the beautiful age of 97. I received one of the GTU teaching fellowships that bear her name, and the course I designed and taught on anthropology and ethics (together with another student) with that award has been a high point of my GTU academic career. God rest her soul.

Seven immoral science experiments that could each us so much if only they weren’t so wrong. Interesting premise for a science article.

Marc Hauser, popular Harvard psychology professor involved in scientific misconduct, resigns.

The morality of the (still hypothetical) morality pill.

Patrica Churchland: Aristotelian-Humean-biological-ethicist.

Amazonian deforestation is revealing ancient human-made structures. Fascinating to discover the ruins of ancient civilizations, depressing that it has to come because of destroying the forest. The only bright side I see other than the knowledge gained of our past is that it shows that the rainforest has recovered from humans once before.

A Swedish man is apprehended trying to split atoms at home. He said it was his hobby, and he did ask (somewhat belatedly) the Swedish Radiation Authority if it was okay. It wasn’t. They arrested him. Besides being extremely unusual, this was very stupid, basically risking turning his kitchen into a nuclear waste site. He was in possession of radium, americium, and uranium.

The Onion has made it official: the nation is down to its very last few grown-ups. Luckily they’ve left us an envelope for when they are finally extinct with some money (“only for an emergency”) and instructions for how to re-light the pilot light in the water heater should it happen to go out.

Speaking of grown-ups, some of the people we might like to think of as grown-ups had a discussion on the Discovery channel Sunday night about Stephen Hawking’s show Curiosity: The Questions of Life Episode 1: Did God Create the Universe? Now I can’t say I was terribly interested in the show (there’s not much suspense for Hawking’s answer), though the discussion afterwards was interesting, consisting of atheist physicist Sean Carroll, Catholic theologian John Haught, and physicist Paul Davies who is something like a deist.  Here are the two parts of the video.

Part 1

Part 2

Japanese Retirees Volunteer to Clean Up Fukushima Disaster

I have been meaning to point out some exemplars of virtue for some time now.  They are not your average people by any means. They are retirees in Japan, ages 60 to 78, doing what extremely virtuous persons might do when radiation from a melted-down nuclear power plant threatened others: they are volunteering to go in first, because they have fewer years to live – and lose – anyway. I highly recommend you read their story. These are an impressive group.

Their logic is impeccable.  They are less likely to experience the effects of radiation because they are already closer to the ends of their lives.  Cancers usually take a while to develop.  And even if they do get cancer they have fewer years to lose than a young person would.

This logic is clear to a virtuous person.  And their virtue makes them unafraid to follow the logic they have discovered.  They are the ones to act.  They know that they are the ones who should be in there, protecting the young from danger.

The heroism is mind-boggling. Some think they are crazy. Some think they are “Kamikazes.” I think they are a combination of smart and courageous. Smart because they know they are at less risk.  Courageous because they are willing to actually act on what they know. Others in the same situation might not know they were at less risk.  And even if they knew it, they might decide it wasn’t their problem. But these folks get it. They feel compelled to act, because it is the right thing to do.

This movement has been building for a while, from 200 volunteers in late May to over 300 now. Many were engineers or scientists before they retired.Their aid has not yet been accepted. Perhaps it will not be.  But they are ready to go if the government and power plant will let them.

In any case, they have already shown their mettle.  These are logical, honorable, good people. Rare in their virtue.  I feel proud just to know they exist.

Philosophy as Plumbing and Saving the Environment

English philosopher Mary Midgely is known for several things.  She didn’t write her first book until she was 55, and now she’s 91. She went to Oxford with several other great women philosophers such as Elizabeth Anscombe, Phillippa Foot, Iris Murdoch, and Mary Warnock (and I think I’m forgetting someone). She’s criticized Richard Dawkins. She has a sharp tongue. And she sees philosophy as being like plumbing.

Philosophy is like plumbing? Why plumbing? Well, Midgely gives a whole host of reasons.  Both are everywhere but not obvious. Both are extremely complex and have been often irregularly cobbled together. Both are typically unnoticed until something goes wrong, and then they make a mess and you have to call a specialist. Both are absolutely necessary if we want to have the kind of society that we currently inhabit. (All in her essay “Philosophical Plumbing”, from The Essential Mary Midgely, p. 146-7)

She goes on to say that while all acknowledge the need for skilled plumbers few even realize there is a need for skilled philosophers. Bad ideas just creep in and mess up our thinking and we don’t know what is going wrong. I can think of economics as a field that could use a few specialists who actually know what they are doing, for example.  But what about some other philosophical ideas in need of thought?

The question of whether nature is neutral or good I think is the greatest (or close to it) philosophical question of our day. The environmental crisis and everything about the human relationship to the natural world, including our own human nature hinges on this question. If nature is neutral, then we get to treat it as we see fit: it has no intrinsic worth, only instrumental value to us.  But if instead nature is good, then it has intrinsic worth and humans need to respect it.

Some may complain that this is an exclusively Christian view of nature (that creation is good) but it is not. Aristotle came up with it completely independently.  Nature is good because every living thing has its own purposes that it seeks to fulfill. They have their purposes whether humans exist to witness them or not. The study of purposes is called teleology, and Western science decided to throw out teleology back in the time of Francis Bacon (the 1600s). With no intrinsic purposes, nature had no “good” to seek. Nature neutralized. David Hume picked it up and spread it to ethics, and the bad idea has been growing ever since.

Now Hume’s law – the “you can’t get an ‘ought’ from an ‘is’” – is considered gospel truth. Science has no relevance to nature, and good is whatever we decide it to be. This gives us license to wreck the Earth, among other things. Too bad for the environment.

And yet we sit here in the midst of an environmental crisis acting like we don’t know what’s wrong, like we don’t have the tools to fix it. Well we do. We admit that nature is good to go about it’s business, and that our role as humans is to respect nature, not shove it into our own little preconceived notions or destroy as we see fit. We could just say “nature is good” and work with nature rather than against it. That would take some convincing and some willpower, but it could be done.

There are many more things to be said about this. It’s not quite that simple, after all. But the basic problem is bad mental plumbing. Our ideational pipes are broken and the house is flooding.  Time to figure out what went wrong.

Catholic Moral Theology Dot Com

I just recently learned of this new blog catholicmoraltheology.com run by several professors of moral theology (some of whom are my friends). Really good stuff, makes this part of the web look a bit dingy… Oh well, all the better for you fair reader! Go forth and learn moral theology. And we’ll do what we can on this end to stay competitive…

Brian’s Links 1 August 2011

Videos from the Understanding Virtue conference I went to in May, joint sponsored by Caltech and Fuller Seminary. Stanley Hauerwas (America’s most influential theologian) and Christian Keysers (one of the discoverers of mirror neurons) talk about virtue ethics.  GTU’s own Center for Theology and Natural Science helped fund this through its STARS project. Great conference.

Man steals one dollar in order to get prison health care coverage.

All about atheist feminists reading Mormon mommy blogs.

How to win the Turing Test – the test where a computer tries to fool a human into thinking it is another human – as a human. A humorous look at trying to convince another person you are not a machine.

Is homework racist and classist?

The al-Qaeda re-brand (a joke).  Rejoicing over the death of an enemy is bad (as I’ve said here) but making fun of the lives of terrorists is good. Besides being murderers, they are buffoons and should be treated as such.

A Swedish preschool with no gendering of anything.

Finally, John Cleese of Monty Python fame hosts a nature program on lemurs.  Go directly to 8:37 to see the minister of silly walks himself leaping through a field like a lemur. Its only a few seconds, but its worth it.