Dear atheist, knocking down the cardboard cutout of an opponent is easy. It makes you smug to win against a comic book superhero or super villain (atheists won’t mind) of a God. It is easy, it really is. Incidentally, you fight against a doddering, sluggish opponent and that does not make you the strongest. Not your fault, that.
Existential angst is a hallmark of the human condition. We might live in comfort and ease, we may be rational and intelligent, but unanswered questions about our essence still bother us. What is the meaning of my life? How do I lead my life? What is important; what is not? In fact, atheism itself is a journey of such existential questioning
The current era of epigenetics has revealed a much more sophisticated and complex system of nature at play. Borrowing a charming and simple analogy from the website epigenetics.com, epigenetics can be described as the director of a movie where DNA is the script, and the cells are actors. The DNA sequence would be the words of the script, and certain combinations of these words would be the genes.
Why is there disease and poverty, conflict and violence? Why is there greed and evil, bigotry and terrorism? Why the town- drowning tsunamis, the city-leveling earthquakes, the country- effacing wars? We don’t seem to be getting any good answers at all. In fact, the most easy argument for atheism has become, “If there is a just, loving God, how can he allow suffering and evil?”.
Human life is the epitome of uncertainty, we do not have the capacity to understand what is absolutely, equivocally, good or bad for us! Heck, we don’t absolutely understand how in a long chain of unconnected events we came to acquire our personalities and our bearings in life, do we?
I ask once again; what do you think is the goal of your life? For a moment I want to you to think differently. Humour me, for a minute. Assume my position first, and you could end up getting convinced. Let us reorient the goal of human life. Epigenetics has shown us that a species or a class of species can, and does have a purpose other than survival and procreation, within a larger eco-system.
A beautiful promise of Technology was equality and prosperity. Democratization of opportunities, where everyone has a chance to pursue a better life, where economic or physical limitations can be transcended. A lofty ideal which is apparently quite achievable. Right?
Apace with the relentless progress of technology is a growing hubris, an overbearing cockiness that comes from power. Power from conquering nature, from grabbing the controls away from it. Self- determinism can be heady and intoxicating, without a doubt. It is well reflected in the direction and face of our modern philosophy.
The old religions of the world may be dying, but newer religions are rushing in to fill the vacuum. The religion of technology is now demanding a blind, unquestioning faith in its messiah of Artificial Intelligence. When it comes of age, this messiah will lead us to salvation, they say. It will ease our suffering, deliver us into trans-human heaven and make us eternal.
IBM’s WATSON defeated world Jeopardy champions in 2011, and Deep Blue’s AlphaGO defeated the world GO champion last year. If algorithms have defeated the best of humans at games as intuitive and complex as GO and Jeopardy, nothing can stop them from developing other cognitive abilities and superhuman ones too. You may think so.