Life and death matters

PLAYING GOD:
Science, Religion and the Future of
Humanity
By Nick Spencer and Hannah Waite
SPCK. 208 pages. £19.99
ISBN 978 0 281 090 037

It’s easy to feel as if our heads are continually spinning with the rate of progress in modern life. Things that were the domain of science fiction films 20 years ago now appear to be genuine possibilities, and we’re playing catch-up when it comes to the ethical and moral considerations of these advances.

In Playing God, the authors argue that science and religion need each other to stop our relentless forward progress landing humanity in a place where it doesn’t really want to be. For example, there’s currently huge momentum behind medical efforts to extend life almost indefinitely. But the question of whether we would want to live forever is impossible to answer if we don’t have a clear idea of what it means to be human. In this, science is trying to provide a solution to death, but it can’t answer the question of what it means to live. Similar thoughts abound with the progress of Artificial Intelligence and the question of whether it could ever be considered a real person, which all depends upon us knowing what a person is and what it means to be alive. The Christian belief in humanity being made in the image of God provides a compelling answer to what it means to be human, and it’s an answer science itself is ill-equipped to provide.