Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Okay. Good morning, everyone.
I'm glad to see you all here for our eighth session of Being Human in a Digital Age. We've now spent eight weeks looking at Genesis 1 to 3 and thinking about the sort of fundamental orienting structures of our world.
We looked at time, space, and matter. And last week we discussed the concept of purpose and how God's speech and intent drive the entire account of Genesis.
Nothing that happens in that account is not something God first intended. There are no accidents or happenstances. Or as we said last week, one thing does not just lead to another in that account, because God was intentional with each part of creation, we can surmise that he has a way that he designed each portion of creation to operate.
Operating outside of that design is then rebellion against the intent of our Creator. And as we will see today, it is also a rebellion against the good design that he made for our created world.
Morality as a concept is bound up in this question of design.
To be immoral is implicitly to reject God's design for the world and to instead attempt to remake this world for ourselves.
But why would we ever want to do this?
So let me start with a question this morning. How do you decide what you want?
Or perhaps a more concrete way to ask this question. What is one thing you want now that you did not want five years ago? And where did that want come from?
It's a bit of a difficult question to ask yourself, but just catalog your wants. What is one of them that rises to the surface for you?
Surely you all want something. I mean, I have to believe you guys want. Yes, a more rural area.
Okay. What made you.
What do you think drives that desire?
Yes, because we feel overwhelmed, sort of exhausted by the amount of stimulus. It could be nice to imagine a calm walk on the beach or living in a rural space. As we imagine these things, we also want these things.
Other thoughts, something else that you want.
And maybe where that want comes from. It can be something pedantic.
Well, let me tell you a story about my son, Bennett and some of the things that he has wanted.
When Aaron was nine months pregnant with our son James, she had been experiencing on one particular day, on and off labor throughout the entire day.
It would come on, it would go away to the point where she was convinced that it was in fact a false Labor.
So about 9pm that night, convinced that it was not actually time yet, we went to sleep.
At about 2am Erin woke me up to let me know that the false labor was hard and she just needed me to be with her. For a while, it didn't take me long to realize that this was, in fact, not a false labor and to rush to get Aaron and Bennett into the car. I grabbed Bennett out of his bed to bring him along with us, and I called Haley Gray to meet us at the hospital to watch Bennett while I went in with Aaron.
When I woke Bennett up, he was very confused, but he was also excited by the prospect of James being born, primarily because he knew that this event triggered my parents coming to town, which triggered him getting to go to Waffle House, which he was very excited about.
So on the way to the hospital, he kept asking about how long it would take until his grandparents got to take him to Waffle House.
During this time, Aaron was praying out loud, which Bennett apparently found annoying because about five minutes into our car ride, he said, and I quote, mom, can you please stop that?
A moment later, mom, can you please be quiet?
Which I'm sure Aaron loved hearing.
Presumably, he asked this so he could ask more questions about Waffle House.
When we finally made it to the hospital, we get Aaron in to see the doctors, and Bennett and I had to wait in the car for a while, since toddlers cannot go into the delivery room.
While sitting in the car, I called Erin to offer verbal support.
She was on speakerphone, and Bennett could hear her, but I kept muting our end of the phone because Bennett kept telling me that this was boring.
He also kept finding his way to the controls on our radio to turn the volume up, playing country music, and really trying to sing along with the song.
Bennett was not aware of the gravity of the situation, and to us adults, he did not have his priorities straight. Of course, he is a toddler, and that is only to be expected.
However, St. Augustine would tell us that basically all of us are like Bennett without knowing it.
We fixate on small things, our Waffle Houses, and miss the big, important things in life.
And this is a problem for us, because to be a human, a moral human, made in the image of God, is to love the right things in the right order. Christ himself taught us this when he identified the greatest commandment as love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your mind, and with all your strength. And the second is, like it, love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commands, Christ tells us, hang all the law and the prophets. If you love things in the right order, everything else St. Augustine tells us will fall into place.
But too often, we love things in the wrong order. We love our pride more than our family, or we love our money more than our neighbor.
God designed us to love things in a certain way, to love them in a certain order. And when we reject that order, we reject both God and and the good or as we'll see today, tov creation that he has made.
We will see that God created reality to provide us with goodness.
And our attempts to recreate the world and our image harm that very goodness.
And as previous weeks we begin with Genesis 1:1. In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.
Two weeks ago, John introduced us to the doctrine creatio ex nihilio.
He walked us through the significance that God did not craft the universe from pre existing material.
God, as Paul puts it, calls into existence the very things that do not exist.
This morning I want to explore an implication of that doctrine.
Last year my wife took up the wonderful hobby of baking sourdough bread. I took great joy in this hobby and she has gotten really good at it.
I was able to watch over time as she slowly refined her process.
And one of the things I noticed was how she kept finding better and better flour to use.
And the flour made a huge difference in how good the bread was.
If she had used bad flour, we would have ended up with bad bread.
This is actually a common theme throughout life. If during the construction of this building, for example, someone had used bad concrete, poorly cured and weak, the floors would in turn be weakened, the construction of this building would be harmed.
If someone had used a poorly cast metal beam above our heads, then I would not want to be standing here right now because the results would be a weaker building.
The ingredients we use when we build things matters.
When God creates, though, he creates out of nothing. This means it is only God's intent and purpose that forms creation. God's will is, as it were, the only ingredient that we have to consider.
It is worth asking then, is God's will a good ingredient?
This may seem like an absurd question to ask. We are, after all, in a church that affirms the absolute goodness of God. But jumping past this question too quickly would keep us from seeing why God's will is good.
This morning I want to draw your attention to one particular reason.
God's creative act here in Genesis is what theologians call gratuitous.
That simply means that God did not need to create the world.
He was not lacking in anything before creation. He was perfect and happy. He was not lonely. He had no ulterior motives. He had no self seeking angle. The creation we see in Genesis 1 is purely a gift, an unmerited act of love. And grace.
And the difference between creating out of need and out of love is actually quite profound.
The other day I got home from work and my son brought me a pack of cookies from the pantry.
At first I thought he was just. Just being kind.
I then noticed how he was lingering around after handing me the pack, waiting for me to open it. This, of course, changed my assessment of why he brought me the pack and changed the nature of the gift. He wanted cookies and me getting cookies was actually never his goal. It was a means to an end, even if I did not realize it at the time, but. But my 3 year old had actually, even if I hadn't realized it, just demonstrated the entire business model of the Internet, which we will come back to later.
God, of course, does not see us as means to an end. Consider Acts 17, where Paul reminds us that God is not served by human hands as though he needed anything, since He Himself gives to all mankind life and breath and everything.
Reality as displayed Genesis and Scripture is unidirectional. It flows from God as the source to us as people who receive anything and everything we give in return is something God gave us first.
Our attention is only ours to give. Because God gave us minds, our love, because he made us with the capacity to love.
He gains nothing from reality and yet gives reality everything that it has purely because he is a loving God.
The only ingredient in the creatio ex nihilio story. God's will is entirely bent toward the good of creation. Which leads us, of course, to point two. Reality is very good.
If the only thing that forms creation is God's will, then we should not be surprised that the reality he crafts is in turn good.
The ingredients shape the product. And that is exactly what Genesis 1 tells us over and over again.
Six times God looks at what he made and sees that it is good.
As in verse 17 and 19. And God set lights in the expanse of the heavens to give light on earth, to rule over the day and over the night, and to separate the light from the darkness. And God saw that it was good. And there was evening and there was morning. The fourth day.
I'm curious, what do you all think God means in this chapter when he calls creation good?
Any ideas?
He's pleased. Yes, he sees that. He is happy with it.
Sufficient. It is sufficient. He's happy with it. He sees it as something that is sufficient for his ends. But what do you think? His goodwill? Yeah, it matches his goodwill, which again, his will is the only thing driving the story. So it makes sense. It matches his will. Yeah, it's necessary. So in the. Yeah. Well, certainly in the sense that as God has laid it out, this is necessarily an extension of God's will. Yes.
There's one more idea that I'm wanting to chase down. Yes, it's perfect.
At the very least, it is perfectly tuned for what God has designed it for, which is, if you remember, the shape of the last eight weeks as we've been looking at the text, the flourishing of life.
Each day throughout creation, God brings into reality new things which order the world. He does this by organizing space, time and matter to create habitats for creatures to live within.
He then ultimately forms humans who are tasked with ruling over creation on his behalf.
This is, as we saw a few weeks ago, something that brings the world away from welter and waste into something crafted for the flourishing of life.
One Old Testament scholar puts it this after the creation of light, God announced His evaluation.
It was good.
The idea of the word good tov is that the light is useful, fitting and healthy. That which is good is conducive for and enhances life.
God is crafting a world that is conducive and enhancing of life. That is the shape of the Genesis 1 story. The whole narrative is built around good things that work the way God intends them to work. God is bringing order and direction to the world.
The ultimate declaration of creation's goodness then drives this point home further. Look with me at verse 31.
After making humans and tasking them with stewarding creation on his behalf, God saw everything that he had made and behold, it was very good.
The grammar here changes. TOV is intensified by the word meot.
Something about the creation of humanity elevates God's evaluation of the entire creation.
The narrative gives us some reasons for this.
Humans are the only creatures given a specific vocation and mission that is meant to take the tove of reality, the good that has been built, and to make more things that are tov to extend the work of God in creation, to be his image, and to do the kinds of things that God does.
Which leads us to point three.
We are made in God's image, and it is good for us to create as he did.
In verse 26, God says, Let us make man in our image after our likeness, and he gives us work to do. Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it and have dominion.
To be in God's image is of course to be like him, to represent him to creation. Like the statue of a king, an image of God looks like God at this point in the account, God has predominantly done one thing.
He has created good things in the world. He has created these things for no selfish reason. In fact, the whole creative act is a kind of self giving. It is gratuitous where God provides for the world with no reciprocity possible.
We too are called to create like God. But of course, we cannot create out of nothing. Only God can create out of nothing.
Instead, we are tasked with taking the raw materials of the world. God has given us the garden. He crafted us in the world around us, vegetation, animals, and to continue to create the kinds of things he made throughout the six days of creation.
Things that are tov or good, things that are beneficial for life.
Just like God creates out of his love, we are to create more things out of our love.
As in heaven, so on earth be holy as God is holy. We are intended to live out a kind of creation narrative, or as JRR Tolkien might have said, a sub creation narrative.
We create within what God has already created. We might call our intended creation narrative or our sub creation narrative, creatio ex bona creation. Out of the good that God has made. We use our skills and time, the raw materials of the world and our creativity with which God blessed us, to further God's creative act for the sake of others.
But you may rightly ask at this point, if the world and everything in it is made entirely good, what then is evil?
And for this I want to introduce you to an alternate creation narrative that we often live by.
And let me ask you a question.
Was the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil good?
This is the part of the morning where you might think I am. You might suspect me of setting a trap.
And in fact, I am setting a trap.
Is the tree good?
Yes.
Yes. The Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil is good.
It is of course good within limits.
It's good within the way God designed it. God says, you may surely eat of every tree of the garden, but of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, you shall not eat.
To receive the tree as a gift is to trust the giver about what it is for. It's good to live by the tree. It was good to look at the tree.
It just was not good to eat the tree. This gift was given with boundaries and the God who tasked Adam and Eve with stewarding creation and did not give them leave to eat it.
So why did they eat it? Why did they want it? After being gifted with so much with everything in the cosmos, why reject God's Kindness and choose their own path.
Adam and Eve grew to see the tree as a means to an end, as a tool or what we might call a technique which was able to give them more power.
The serpent suggests that God is keeping power and knowledge from them and that if they eat of the tree, they will not die.
They will be like God, knowing good from evil.
And this is of course a half truth.
In this act where Adam and Eve question God's character as a loving God and supplant his rule over creation with their own.
They do know evil for the very first time.
Before that, they had only known tov or good.
They were introduced to the knowledge of good and its counterpart evil. I want to draw special attention to the motivation of Adam and Eve in this act. In God's creation story.
Creation out of nothing, God gives freely, without selfish expectation. In the creation story we are called to live out creation out of the good, we are called to act likewise, loving God and loving others, not operating from self seeking intent.
But in this act, Adam and Eve attempt to create a new reality, one in which they are like God.
Ironically, this is the exact opposite of God's creation story. It is using your creation for your own ends, to further your own power.
And as a steward of creation, they do create a new reality.
But it was not creation out of the good.
It is instead what we might call creatio ex machina.
By creation out of the machine. I am suggesting that they began to look at creation as a means to an end, as a tool to further their own interests.
This creation narrative treats the whole of reality as a system in which we build to get results out of the world and out of other people.
I want to suggest that this is the spirit of our technological age.
God's creation centers on a giver who needs nothing. The sub creation story Adam and Eve were meant to live out would have been them caring for that narrative, loving others as God has loved them. But instead the story that they spawned or was a story in which creators operate out of a selfish desire toward the things they create.
This selfish desire, this change in ingredients, changes the nature of the things we make.
Which of course brings us to the digital, the most recent and far reaching iteration of this creatio EC machina.
Let me begin with a bit of a bold claim.
If everyone who labored to build the digital world and everyone who used it, wanted what was right and had the will to choose it, digital technology would be nothing but a blessing.
What I mean is the latent capacity of creation to give rise to digital technology.
Silicon that can be turned into computer chips. The ability we have to send these waves that transmit information.
All of this was there in God's original creation.
God called this very good.
But this world where people are choosing for the good is not the world we live in anymore.
Which leads us to point 1.
Creatio EC Machina corrupts the good world we live in by using it as a technique to to further our own desires. The digital world is built in part on our selfish desires. Imagine with me what this does to the shape of our digital experience.
Years ago, the designers of Google couldn't agree on which shade of blue to use for the links on the search page.
This may seem small to you, but to them, it was a very big deal. And so Google did something that would have been strange to any earlier generation of designers.
It showed different shades of blue to different groups of people, measuring which shade of blue led to the most clicks.
In the end, it tested around 40 different shades of blue across thousands and thousands of users.
And they eventually found the specific blue color that attracts the most clicks from a human.
One of the Google executives later said that that the winning blue color brings them in about $200 million a year over the alternatives.
So what's this cost us?
Well, if you remember the cookies I got from Bennett, he was not malicious in what he did, but he certainly had an ulterior motive. And the same is true here.
This simple shift in blue leads to more people spending more time in the digital world. The motivation, of course, is the advertising money. The negative impacts that this might have on humans was not even considered in the calculus.
Tove was not the focus.
Monetizing people's attention was.
People became a means to an end.
Mixpanel is a company that sells app makers the tools to track what their users do. Every tap, every swipe, the amount of time you spend on every single page.
In 2014, it announced a new report for its clients.
The report measured how many separate hours throughout the day you came back to the same app. Because after all, an app that keeps your attention throughout the day is worth more on advertising money than one you only open once. This report allows app makers to then test, if I change the color of this portion of the app, do people open it more often?
They named the report addiction.
Not engagement, not loyalty.
Someone in that marketing office or executive suite looked at the word addiction and said, that's the one.
Addiction is what makes money. And so the digital world, in millions of little ways, is being crafted towards this end.
This is, of course, not new.
Creatio EC Machina stretches back to Adam and Eve, attempting to use the tree to further their own ends. But there is a part of this that seems new to me.
Casinos may have existed in the past to generate addiction, but not until the digital did we have the capacity to measure so closely as people engage and rapidly adjust the design of a system around what is most addictive to those people.
The digital gives humans unprecedented power to build things that manipulate other people.
Making money, of course, is not bad at all. It is good to build profitable things, but making money with no regard to how you harm others is bad.
And the digital so distances the creators of things from the impact of their creations that it's actually easier to ignore the harm being done.
In the first creation story, the only ingredients used were a will bent towards the good of those being made.
In this digital story, the will is always bent towards getting something out of you.
And that selfish will is, of course, the corrupting ingredient. Which leads us to point 2.
The world of Creatio EC Machina offers a frictionless path to believing that that what is wrong is actually right.
In December 2013, a public relations executive named Justine Sacco, who had all of 170 Twitter followers, posted a series of tweets.
Some of them were quite innocuous.
At the Heathrow airport, for example, she said, chili, cucumber sandwiches, bad teeth. Back in London.
Then, before jumping on the final leg of her journey to cape town on December 20, 2013, she posted a tweet that she would grow to regret.
She said, going to Africa.
Hope I don't get aids.
Just kidding. I'm white.
This was of course, a bad and crude comment laced with racism.
But consider what this comment generated on the Internet.
While she was in the air, a writer at Gawker found her tweet and shared it with his 15,000 followers.
And Twitter came alive.
One tweet said, I'm an IAC employee and I don't want Ustine Sacco doing any communication on our behalf ever again.
Her employer then IAC said, this is an outrageous, offensive comment. Employee in question is currently unreachable on an international flight.
After people learned she was on a flight, a kind of weird joy overcame people.
Oh man, Ustine Sacco is going to have the most painful phone turning on moment ever when her plane lands.
Looks like ustineSacco lands in 9 minutes. This should be interesting.
Buzzfeed counted over 100,000 tweets about this woman, which of course Twitter profited from.
The people felt better about themselves after they criticized her tweet.
Google profited from it as well. In December 2013, 1.2 million Google searches were for Justine Sacco, and one economist's cautious estimate was that Google earned about $120,000 from the outrage generated by her tweet.
The algorithm fed people this tweet to generate more outrage.
The algorithm, of course, is concerned only about one your attention. One very effective way to gather that is through outrage. And while everyone can agree that Justine's tweet was wrong, the kind of joy people took in her downfall was also unhelpful for us and unhealthy.
But it felt right to them, because the entire Internet was on their side. We imagine ourselves as free moral agents simply surfing over the top of the Internet, picking and choosing which particular waves we want to ride.
But the water is moving underneath us. The algorithm is drawing us places.
And when it does, we move without ever deciding to do so.
The digital world is changing us. I began today asking what you want, and part of what I am hoping to demonstrate here is that what you want is being driven by the digital world you are now inhabiting.
Back in 2006, a team of researchers at Columbia University built a music website and filled it with 48 songs by bands no one had ever heard of. They then let around 14,000 people use the website, and they asked each of them to just, you know, listen to whatever they like, rate it, and download the songs they found interesting.
Here was the catch. The researchers had split those 14,000 people into nine separate worlds, and in eight of them, you only got one extra piece of information.
How many other people had downloaded the song already?
In the world with no download counts, the good songs did fairly well, and the bad songs did poorly, as you would expect.
But in the eight other worlds where you can see what other people wanted, something changed. The same song might be a hit in one world and a total flop in the next. For no reason, anyone could identify, whichever song happened to pick up. A few early downloads kept picking up. More. People saw what other people wanted, and they came to want it as well.
Two years later, the same researchers ran this experiment again. But they flipped the rankings and began the experiment by showing the least popular songs as the most popular.
And for most of the songs, the false popularity came true.
People came to like what they were told other people liked.
In a world where sin has corrupted us, it is not hard to imagine how instant exposure to this kind of network effect might shape us.
A few years ago, a team of psychologists ran a different experiment. They gave one group of people a story about injustice, villagers who had been denied aid after a tsunami. And they gave another group of people an innocuous story, something simple about changing in shopping habits.
Then they asked everyone a few questions about how they felt. The people who had read the story about injustice were angry, as you might expect, but they also rated themselves as more moral people than the group who had just read about groceries.
The outrage they felt gave them a sense of morality.
The researchers then offered everyone a choice of what to read next, and the angry group chose more stories that that would cause additional anger, more stories about injustice over stories that might have calmed them down. The feeling of outrage inside of us can generate feelings akin to morality. But when we live our lives and hand them over to digital outrage, we are robbing our neighbors who are in need of our time and attention.
Digital outrage, after all, is frictionless. Truly caring for others takes work.
If the digital offers us the feeling of moral action without any of the actual labor, is it any wonder that people keep opting out of actual effort?
I have personally solved several national crises from the comfort of my couch.
These examples tease out a deeper reality. The digital is powerful in the way it shapes us, and in this way it offers us a frictionless path to believing that what is wrong is actually right. By going along with the crowd, thousands of people are creating this world, all with an ethic of creatio EC machina that we should craft the world to more efficiently meet our own ends without any reference to God's good original design.
And in the end, we are remade in the image of the digital.
John put it this way. For me this week, brokenness is baked into the tech.
But the problem isn't the tech. It's the human heart.
In the Genesis story, we were made in God's image and given dominion. In Adam's sub creation story, he ended up choosing to use reality like a machine to further his ends. And over time that machine began shaping him and all of us. Scripture says this is what happens to people when they put their trust in what they have made rather than their Creator. Consider with me Psalm 115.
Their idols are silver and gold, the work of human hands. Those who make them become like them, and so do all who trust in them.
To demonstrate this, I'm going to play you a video, a 2013 ad for a product called Facebook Home. And I want you to just see what you notice about this ad and what it must have taken. For someone to say, this is a good ad for our product.
Go ahead.
[00:33:48] Speaker B: I finally found the pet aisle.
So I start walking down the pet aisle.
Kitty cats, you know, they're seniors now. I got them when they were 2 and 3, but they're now 12 and 3 13th. So there were three seafs together.
Another time I went to the market and I had to buy a chicken. I checked the date and it was like a month ahead. So I thought, okay. There was a long.
[00:34:39] Speaker C: Welcome to Facebook home. A whole new experience for your phone.
[00:34:47] Speaker A: Someone looked at that and thought it was a good ad for their product.
Any observations? Anything that really just sticks out to you here? Yeah.
What did it say?
Oh, it said Holy Trinity Church. Yeah.
Anything else? Anything? All the distraction. All the distraction. Well, they viewed the distraction as good.
It got her out of having to listen to her boring, presumably aunt, I think in this video was what it was implying. But Facebook would never run this ad now.
They would never run this ad now because we've learned as a society that letting children be addicted to smartphones is damaging to them. Right? Facebook learned it the hard way through a multi billion dollar lawsuit that they had to settle.
But whichever executive approved this ad was either blind to that reality or just didn't care.
And the logic that runs Facebook structure is still the exact same. They will still capitalize on the attention of teenagers to make money, even if it meant they are ignoring family dinner, which is not tov, right? Not flourishing. When humans abdicate their job to steward creation in God's image, we make things that are bad for us and for our neighbors. We should be careful as we evaluate the digital world to take seriously the deformative impacts that it poses for for us.
And it poses for our desires and what we make. The digital world is not value neutral. It has a creation story rooted in sinful people.
These people are not creating gratuitously like God. We do not create gratuitously. We have ulterior motives. And if we are not careful, the digital will shape us to be.
Well, like Bennett, except it won't be Waffle House that we are longing for.
We'll be chasing outrage anxiously soothing our fears with new news articles that never actually seem to calm us down.
If to be a moral human means to love things in the right order, in the order God designed us for, then our engagement with the digital world will make a welter, a confusing mess out of our moral lives.
Part of the solution is to be careful how much of our lives we hand over to the digital.
But the Far greater answer is to spend our lives more fully on attending to Christ.
God's generation of new creation, after all, is not done.
Paul says, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation.
Attending to Christ will transform us into his image.
And we all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another.
What we pay attention to shapes our desires.
And the digital, whether you realize it or not, is really shaping your desires. It is shaping what you love.
Okay, so homework for this week.
Try to assess what you love and where those loves are coming from.
Since love is a loaded term, just think about what you want.
What do you want in life?
Where does that wanting come from?
Can you identify any ways that your wants have been changed by the digital world? For example, has fear induced by a constant barrage of news designed to keep your attention changed you?
If so, how?
What is it making you want to?
Has anger induced by the polarization of our online communities changed you?
If so, how?
What is it making you want?
The digital ecosystem we inhabit is an ecosystem. It changes what we see and how we see it. And the fact that it mediates to us the constant shifts in our world in a way that the human brain can barely even keep up with is going to influence us. And if the whole structure is built around people's motives, ulterior motives that are not for your good, you should be very attentive to what those ulterior motives are leading to. Let me pray for us.
Father, we love you. We thank you that you made the world out of your love and grace, that you made the world good and for our good.
We thank you that you designed things in such a way that we could go forth, fill the earth, subdue it, reproduce, flourish, that life would be good.
God, we repent of the ways that we reject your creation and try to supplement it with our own vision of what the world should be.
God, we pray you'd give us wisdom to sort through the constant barrage of visions of the world that we receive in the digital.
We pray that you would help give us peace, grace, love, long suffering, and that we would not be caught up in the digital streams that now live in our pockets.
We love you. We pray for these things in your name. Amen. Amen. Thank you all.
