Technologies of Life Winter 2000

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Beware the easy metaphor.

To be sure, metaphors exist to make things easier. But as we prepared this issue on the technologies of life, it didn't take long to discover that some metaphors are just too easy to be useful.

We've heard a lot about the dangers of "playing God" since the successful sequencing of the human genome. "Playing God" certainly sounds ominous … until you realize that it's a charge that could be leveled against every form of technology, from irrigation to anesthesia. In fact, you can sort technologies by the classical attributes of God: airplanes confer a measure of omnipresence, computers (or libraries) do the same for omniscience, and bulldozers or, less happily, atomic bombs, take us closer to omnipotence. The most popular and powerful technologies-cell phones, the Internet-manage to promise several attributes of God at once.

This is equally true of the technologies of life, which human beings have been developing as long as they have bred animals and, for that matter, planted gardens-just as God did in Genesis 2. In fact, Genesis suggests that human beings, made in God's image and given stewardship over God's world, are actually intended to "play God." Even clothing, one of the most basic and universal of human technologies, echoes God's own provision after the Fall.

So it will not do to raise alarms about new technology giving us the chance to "play God." The question, rather, is which god we are going to play? Put another way, of which god do we believe ourselves to be the image? Will we play out the story of Marduk and Tiamat, attempting to overcome chaos by violence? Will we play Astarte, seeking fertility through promiscuity? Or will we play in the image of the enigmatic "us" of Genesis 1:26? To ...

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