THE INTERNET AS A METAPHOR FOR GOD?
by Charles Henderson
The Internet provides humanity a new window through which to
look upon the Infinite.
CHARLES HENDERSON is Executive Director of CrossCurrents.
In her ground-breaking study of human identity in the age of the
Internet (Life on the Screen), Sherry Turkle reports that
numerous computer users she has interviewed talk of their online
experience in spiritual terms. In these narratives people tell her that
computer networks "resonate with our most profound sense that life
is not predictable. They provoke spiritual, even religious
speculations." She cites one interviewee who concludes: "To
me, it's God coming together with science, and computers have made it
all possible."
Subsequently Turkle goes even further in an interview with a Time
magazine correspondent referenced in the cover story, "Jesus
Online": "People see the Net as a new metaphor for God."
The reason for this, she explains, is that they experience electronic
networks, like life itself, evolving by a force they can neither
understand, nor control. "The Internet is one of the most dramatic
examples of something that is self-organized. That's the point. God is
the distributed, decentralized system." Turkle is putting together
these sentences, not as a religious person trying to prove a point, but
as a scientist trying to understand what is happening in the culture
at large.
Just how good is the Internet as a metaphor for God? As a committed
Christian, a theologian of culture, and one who happens to be, like
Turkle, both personally and professionally involved every day with this
new medium, I want to take a closer look at what she is observing. If
the Internet is becoming so heavily weighted with sacred meaning, just
what kind of a symbol is it?
For many people it may seem a stretch to connect God and the Internet
in a single sentence. There are several obvious sources of this
resistance. The computer is, after all, a machine. Clearly, God cannot
be identified as a machine, which by definition is an object of human
rather than divine origin. Further, machines belong definitively to the
world of matter, whereas most people think of God as spirit -- or at
least invisible, an unseen force, perhaps. Of course, a large part of Life
on the Screen flows from Sherry Turkle's observation that today's
digital networks are far more than simple machines connected by wires.
In contemporary networks, the boundaries between the human and the
merely mechanical are breaking down. As computers are able to do more
and more of what was once done only by human beings, and as people merge
more and more of their daily tasks into their computers (including that
most human activity: communicating), computer networks will come not
only to feel like a part of one's self, they will be an
extension of the self. Moreover, from its very inception, the Internet
seems to have been growing, both in size and function, with a force both
unpredictable and unplanned. Its popularity has surprised even experts
as proficient in the technology as Bill Gates. The Net shows all the
signs of growing beyond the capacity of its creators to control. That
may mean it has more in common with Dr. Frankenstein's monster than
with the creative and loving God depicted in the Bible. If the Internet
is functioning as a symbol for God, we must ask what kind of a symbol it
is. Or, perhaps more important, what kind of a God would it
be referring to?
In one the opening numbers of the movie, Evita, the narrator
asks of the character played so effectively by Madonna: "What kind
of a goddess has lived among us?" If the Internet is a symbol of
God, it at first appears as far removed from traditional images of God
as Madonna is from the mother of God whose name she bears. Clearly the
Internet is quite a different symbol than the ones popularly associated
with the deity of the Judeo-Christian tradition. In this context, we
recall Michelangelo's images on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel: God,
the strong and creative Father, calling whole worlds and planets into
being by a simple command. These images are today being refreshed in the
human imagination by their presence on the Internet. In seeing these
images, lifted from their context in ancient chapels and cathedrals and
placed before our eyes on the unflattering surface of a computer screen,
it is apparent how little credibility they retain. At a time when the
institution of patriarchy is itself in question, it's not all that
appealing to envision God as an all-powerful Father. At a time when
communism is receding into history, as did fascism, imperialism, and
monarchy earlier, it is not very convincing to picture God on a throne,
even if the throne is in heaven. At a time when we are increasingly
aware of the interdependence of humanity and the natural world, it
appears to be largely an expression of pride to see humanity at the top
of a hierarchy of being simply because humans are alleged to be the one
species created "in the image and the likeness of God."
In this postindustrial society, traditional symbols and metaphors of
the spiritual life have been deconstructed and rendered irrelevant to
human experience. For a long time now American school children have been
trained to see the world from a scientific perspective. Planets, stars,
and whole galaxies are spread at random throughout the universe. What
does it possibly mean to speak of heaven above, and hell below, when we
know from a scientific perspective that "above" and
"below" are purely human constructs? In our day and time,
science has driven a sharp wedge between people's sense of how this
world really works and the traditional, religious pictures of how it is
supposed to work.
With the waning power of certain religious symbols, others rise to
take their place. With renewed appreciation for both the beauty and
fragility of nature, we tend to see objects from the natural world as
having symbolic potency. Mountains, rivers, oceans speak of a power and
a presence beyond themselves. Plants and animals are seen, not as
objects created by God for human consumption and enjoyment, but as
integral parts of a larger whole. We are all part of a web of creation.
Moreover, this changing array of sacred symbols is driven not by the
whim of individual believers, but by the cultural, social, and political
settings out of which they arise. Clearly, the landscape of American
religion is undergoing seismic upheaval. Since the founding of the
republic, Americans have lived out their religious life by affiliation
with one of several denominations: Presbyterian, Congregational,
Episcopal -- and these, among a few others, shaped the spiritual life of
the new country as well as its constitution and government. In the last
two centuries these groups were joined by a host of others, including
Catholics and Jews as parallel and analogous groups, sharing in what
came to be known as the "denominational system." Today these
denominations, around which the history of this nation can be written,
are in a state of decline -- one might better say, free fall. As the old
denominations die, a host of new religious groups and expressions have
sprung up to fill the void: parachurches and telechurches, the Moral
Majority and the Christian Coalition, Campus Crusade for Christ and the
Million Man March. At the same time, the native American sweat lodge and
the Buddhist temple, the Muslim mosque and the New Age book store have
become an integral part of what we mean by "spirituality" in
America today. Rather than being shaped and nurtured within the
traditional denominations, spiritual life in America is now being formed
in and through a host of movements, associations, networks, ministries,
and of course, the mass media itself. Chaotic though it may appear to
the casual observer, this eclectic array that we would associate with
the word "spiritual" actually begins to reveal clear patterns
and themes as order emerges out of the apparent chaos.
If in the past God was perceived to be an all-powerful monarch, in
the information age God is increasingly visible in the commonplace and
the ordinary and is available in the intensity of the present moment. If
in the age of empire, God ruled from a throne on high, in the age of
democracy God lives within the hearts and minds of individual believers,
and all creatures hold an equally important place in the circle of life.
If in the age of hierarchical government, God communicated by issuing
commands from on high, in a networked world God is relational; the God
of the information age speaks from within the relationships and events
that constitute daily life. If in the Industrial Age, God was thought of
as the great Designer who invented the very laws of nature, in the chaos
of the present God is seen as a Creator who is available to all people
in the interstices of their personal relationships. The God of the
Information Age is not the unchanging, remote, unmoved mover of old, but
the passionate partner and lover who inspires us continually to grow,
change, and learn -- to become the just and loving people who in fact
live and move and have their being in the image and likeness
of God.
If the Internet is coming to be seen as a metaphor for God, it is not
because the new metaphor dropped magically from heaven, but by the same
process through which most religious symbols have been born: naturally
out of the everyday experience of real people. God spoke from the
mountaintops to people living near the mountains; God was spoken of as
King when real kings ruled the nations of the earth; likewise, in the
Information age, God will be perceived as being present in and through
that network which connects us with each other and with the world in
which we live. In some ways that network is the Internet.
If this is so, one must ask, "Why?" And what does it mean?
Why, for example, has the Internet become such a symbolically rich icon,
and not the telephone? Aren't telephones also communications devices
that facilitate all kinds of human relationships over a network of
wires? What about television? Or the telegraph? Or the mother of them
all, the printing press? Neither the telephone, television, or the
printing press seem to have figured importantly in the iconography of
organized religion. If these technological inventions did not
become religious symbols, why would computer technologies become so
sacred? Is this phenomenon simply another quick passing fad -- this
particular technology's fifteen minutes of fame?
I believe that what we are seeing now is more than a passing fad. I
am confident in drawing this conclusion because the evidence of history
is that the Information Age has been a long time coming. The changes
have been incremental and cumulative; we had not noticed the deep
currents that were about to sweep us away until recently. It takes some
time before events of such magnitude are noticed. As Marshall McLuhan
and Quentin Fiore put it in The Medium is the Massage:
"When faced with a totally new situation, we tend always to attach
ourselves to the objects, to the flavor of the. . . past. We
look at the present through a rear-view mirror. We march backwards into
the future."
This is particularly true within the realm of organized religion
where, uniquely, it is considered a virtue to hold on, sometimes
ferociously, to the symbols and metaphors of times-gone-by. In the
opening hours of the twenty-first century changes are happening so
rapidly that even those who are most committed to the values and beliefs
systems of the past are forced to take their eyes off the rear view
mirror, if for no other reason than they wish to stay on the road. As we
rush headlong into the Information Age, understanding where we are
headed has become as important as where we are coming from -- in fact,
it has become a matter of survival.
Furthermore, in looking at the past, from the perspective of the
future, we begin to notice things we missed as we were passing by. One
notices, for example, that computer-mediated communications technologies
represent not so much a quantum leap forward as one more step along a
road that has its origins in the ancient near east and the written
alphabet itself. People of Jewish, Christian, or Muslim faith are coming
to realize that their sacred books have been produced for several
centuries now by a machine, the printing press, and distributed through
networks constituted of publishing houses and bookstores. The apparently
sudden appearance of these same texts on the Internet represents one
more step along a path that is as long as history itself. For centuries
now, Jews, Christians, and Muslims have been pleased to be identified as
"people of the book." In this they have seen how their deepest
beliefs -- their most intimate knowledge of God -- has been irrevocably
associated with a product of human manufacture, their sacred
"book." What has not been seen, although it is equally true,
is the degree to which that commitment and those beliefs have been
shaped by the technology that made books possible. The printing press
was a tool that had a profound effect upon the tool maker. Throughout
the history of organized religion, technology, for better or worse, has
tended to become theology.
Sensing the magnitude of these changes, many people of faith are
likely to experience a sense of anxiety, fear, or even shock. Many faith
communities will react by denying the significance of the events
transpiring around them. This accounts, in part, for the rise of
fundamentalist movements in and among all the world's religions.
Fundamentalism is a symptom of rapid social change; its sudden
resurgence a sure sign of the rapidity of change, especially those
changes touching the hearts and minds of the people.
It is not only fearful fundamentalists who will be alarmed by the
magnitude of the changes that are transforming the spiritual iconography
of popular religion. Thoughtful, well-educated people with knowledge of
both science and computer technology will have some deep skepticism
about the new iconography. Does the commitment of modern culture to
computer technology mean there will be an ever-widening gap between the
information haves and the have nots, between the rich and the poor? Does
the new God of the information age care only about those persons
fortunate enough to possess state-of-the-art-computers? Are computer
networks evolving in the same direction that television has evolved,
into a medium of entertainment rather than enlightenment, and into a
technology which succeeds only when its users become passive consumers?
Will the experiences mediated by the new technology represent a cheap
substitute for an authentic, spiritual life? Will computers become the
present-day gods and goddesses before whom people bow down, rather than
continuing to seek the living Creator who liberates and empowers all? In
a wired world, will religion tend to become, as Karl Marx said it would,
a powerful new opiate of the people?
Ironically, of course, the very intensity of such questions is
perhaps the most powerful indication that the Internet is, in fact, a
very good metaphor for God. As the great theologian, Paul Tillich,
pointed out several decades ago, the effectiveness and power of a
religious symbol can be measured in two very different ways. In the
first place religious symbols become powerful because there is perceived
to be a connection between some finite object in the world and the
infinite realm to which that object points. So today the Internet is
perceived to be offering humanity a new window looking out upon the
Infinite. Yet, said Tillich, there is also a very different and in
someways contradictory standard by which the power of a religious symbol
can be measured. An object from the real world can become a potent religious
symbol only when its "meaning is negated by that to which it
points." If then, the Internet is a good metaphor for God, it will
not betray us by becoming a new, more powerful, opiate, but will
continue to draw us out, beyond ourselves, and beyond whatever it is
that Internet is now or ever could become, to that which actually is the
Web of God's own creation. In the end, God may in fact be that Web
greater than which none other can even be conceived.
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