www.thegospelcoalition.org
How Tech Tempts Us to ‘Play God’ with Birth and Death
The beginning and ending of a life are the most sacred moments in existence. They’re mysterious miracles. God’s domain. A soul is born out of a void of nothingness and begins a story of being. And at the moment of death, a life’s physical reality ends, yet the soul doesn’t return to nothingness—it continues to exist in another place.
Life’s origin and ending are so sacred, so powerful, so profound that fallen humans can’t help but be tempted to control them. One of the great—and oldest—temptations of our flesh is to “play God” by assuming for ourselves what is the Creator’s prerogative.
Our Insatiable Desire for Control
Our high-tech modern world amplifies the ancient human impulse to achieve Godlike control over uncontrollable circumstances (especially those we perceive as threatening, harmful, or inconvenient).
This impulse isn’t all bad. We can’t control inclement weather, but we can minimize its harm through creative interventions like durable shelters, insulation, indoor heating and air conditioning, and weather-appropriate garments. Likewise, we can’t control myriad viruses, sicknesses, and ailments that affect our bodies, but we can reduce pain and preserve life through the wonders of modern medicine. There are good, God-honoring ways to employ technological tools as part of our “subduing the earth” obedience to the cultural mandate (Gen. 1:28).
But as William Edgar points out, the word for subduing (kabash) isn’t meant to be violent but gentle. When we gently intervene to bring order to some chaos in the world, we honor our calling. But when we violently, recklessly, or unnecessarily intervene—especially in ways that might help us but harm others—we fail in our task.
Modern technology conditions us to bypass gentle subduing in favor of reckless, convenience-first control. From smartphones and “app for that” culture, to one-day Amazon shipping, to the instant answers of Google searches and AI prompts, we’re becoming trained to believe we can get what we want when we want it. While none of these things may be problematic on its own, the cumulative effect is that we start to think everything can be optimized and efficient, that all vestiges of inconvenience, discomfort, and uncontrollability can be eradicated from our lives.
Playing God at Life’s Beginning and End
This expectation of control leads us to use technological interventions to “play god” with the beginning of life and end of life. We start to believe a new life can be created on demand in a laboratory or ended on demand via abortion. We start to believe that the circumstances of death can be planned and controlled via euthanasia, that dead loved ones can be brought “back to life” via AI seances or other “digital resurrection” technology, or that death itself can be defeated with enough data monitoring, supplements, and algorithmic tweaking. But this is folly.
Modern technology conditions us to bypass gentle subduing in favor of reckless, convenience-first control.
In his short book The Uncontrollability of the World, Hartmut Rosa argues the modernity is structurally driven “toward making the world calculable, manageable, predictable, and controllable in every possible respect.”
On birth, for example, Rosa argues that even though “there is still something palpably uncontrollable about the emergence of new life,” modern reproductive technologies (including IVF and surrogate motherhood) have “made children more ‘accessible’” as well as more “engineerable” (e.g., embryo screenings and other tests that “allow us to determine, even before birth, whether a child meets our expectations”). Yet he wisely asks, “If whether or not I have children, and what kind, lies entirely within my own power and that of my doctors—does this not change my relationship to life overall?”
On death, Rosa says it “remains fundamentally, categorically, and existentially beyond our control,” with the when, how, and what of death frighteningly out of our hands. Naturally, we try hard to overcome this ominous uncontrollability. Rosa observes how suicide and assisted dying reflect “the modern rejection of the idea that there is anything beyond the control of the subject, that there is any limit to our control beyond what is technically possible.” These practices turn death into “a task to be mastered.”
Mastering Death in Tuesday and Hit Man
I thought about all this recently as I watched two new-release movies: Tuesday (available to rent) and Hit Man (on Netflix). Both films show vividly, and disturbingly, how our fear of death tempts us to desire control over it.
Directed by Daina O. Pusić, Tuesday is a modern fairy tale that follows a mother (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) and her teenage daughter (Lola Petticrew), who is dying of a terminal disease. “Death” in the film takes the form of a talking bird (yes, it’s weird) who visits the dying at their appointed times, ending their lives with a swoop of its wing.
Tuesday powerfully critiques our modern fear of death’s uncontrollability and our pitiful determination to overcome it by any means necessary. Yet the film also ends up perpetuating this posture by positioning death as a benevolent end to suffering—something we need not fear. Death (as a quirky parrot voiced by Arinzé Kene) is characterized not as an enemy but as a friend—one who dances with you to rap music and gets high with you in the lead-up to your death. One mortally wounded man tells Death, “You are doing God’s work. Thank you.” These scenes essentially function as PR for euthanasia: portraying a compassionate agent playing God by hastening death in the name of mercy.
Euthanasia is one way we exert control over death, softening its terror by scheduling it on our terms. Another, less socially acceptable, way humans play God in matters of death is by killing someone whose life represents inconvenience to them. The new Netflix comedy Hit Man, directed by Richard Linklater and starring Glen Powell, humorously (but in the end quite disturbingly) shows the temptation to resort to murder-for-hire to eliminate someone whose life is a source of angst for you.
At first, Hit Man seems like a morally clear condemnation of this practice. Powell plays Gary Johnson, a psychology professor who moonlights as an undercover hit man in police-organized sting operations, wearing a wire to record confessions in murder-for-hire schemes. [Spoilers follow.] But when Gary falls in love with Madison (Adria Arjona), who tries to pay him to kill her abusive husband, he starts to actually become the hit man he previously pretended to be. In the film’s disturbing final moments, we see Gary and Madison living “happily ever after” as a suburban married couple with two kids. They’ve achieved this idyllic happiness, however, only after killing two individuals who stood in their way. To avoid the pain of prison and maximize their pleasure as a couple, Gary and Madison had to play God by ending others’ lives.
Linklater isn’t necessarily commending their actions. He seems to want to make a statement about malleable identity and the risks (or freedoms) posed by the fact that we can change who we are. But what I took from the film’s ending is a representative example of the lengths to which we’ll violently intervene in matters of life and death to avoid pain and maximize pleasure. What Gary and Madison do is just a more extreme, clearly illegal version of what others do to “seize the identity they want for themselves” (to quote Gary’s advice to his students at the end of the film).
The film’s ending is a representative example of the lengths to which we’ll violently intervene in matters of life and death to avoid pain and maximize pleasure.
As we watch Hit Man’s final images—Gary and Madison, two dogs, two kids, at the dinner table eating pie in a gorgeous plantation-style house—we hear Gary say, “Life is short. You gotta live on your own terms.” We can’t help but think of the two bodies left in the wake of this couple’s path to pleasure. But I also thought of the countless bodies of children—aborted in the womb, or discarded frozen embryos from IVF procedures—that also represent collateral damage in our attempts to control the hows, whens, and whats of the “identity we want for ourselves.”
‘Live on Your Terms’
Gary’s “You gotta live on your terms” is the perfect mantra of our control-obsessed age. In some ways, it’s a mantra as old as Eden. Eating the forbidden fruit was nothing if not Adam and Eve’s attempt to live on their terms rather than God’s.
Technology is making it ever easier for us to live with this “on my terms” posture. Optimize-everything tech fuels our delusions of the world’s controllability, tempting us to eliminate all threats and inconveniences. Other technologies tempt us to violently subdue nature—life, death, even our own gender—when it doesn’t suit the whims of our pleasure.
But there’s beauty (Rosa calls it “resonance”) in the world’s uncontrollability. There are lessons in not getting what we want. There’s wisdom in limitation. God is God and we are not.
Accepting these statements—not only in theory but in practice—will be costly and countercultural. But these are the true terms of our happiness.
New Posts (Home)
ChatBox
Popular Posts 
Game Zone
Top PodCasts
