The Theology of Elon Musk

I take it you have heard the good news? Wait, not the Christian one, that is so Bronze-Aged. About two months ago, at the Recode's code conference in Rancho Palos Verdes, California, Elon Musk took stage and explained "We are almost certainly computer-generated entities living inside a more advanced civilization's video game." Indeed, we are on new horizons, and while we move towards technocracy, we must invest in the new mythology. So it turns out Mr. Musk is ready to lead us. You see, we are literally living life as the Sims at the whim of people we hope are not as mean and capricious as us.

All kidding aside, this revelation points towards some unique qualities of humanity that much ink in the realm of philosophy and theology has been spilled over. That man deeply understands his exceptionalism, and he is religious. We are conscious of our consciousness and no other creature in the universe, that we know, is like us. And our religious inclinations have led to multitudes of differing ideas to grapple with our uniqueness. The Greeks had Olympus, with Zeus, Aphrodite, Hades, Hercules, Achilles, and many more. We had seen the Roman's come and go with their mythologies, and worldwide there are almost as many explanations for advanced life as there are people on the planet. To be expected, the vast majority of these gods in man's image were very human in word and deed. Jealousy, lust, greed, anger, wrath, and other human emotions are on full display in these myths. And so has been the historical case of paganism in general. Often, we find different goals such as the divinity of rulers, but the common thread of these stories have sought to explain what we inherently know but struggle to comprehend. We are unique.

Where western society became exceptional in grappling with it's exceptionalism was manifest in a Jewish carpenter who taught his followers that God was not an angry, vengeful, human like ruler but a Father. That by us being created in His Image, instead of vice versa (as has otherwise been the case), we are inherently unique, but this truth comes with great responsibility. Therefore we must treat one another as brothers and sisters, because in the eyes of our Father we are. These teachings were revolutionary for humanity, because they forced us to acknowledge that we were not the chess pieces of the gods, but children of the one loving Triune God. Jesus knew how this truth would spread throughout the pagan nations, it is the reason He would assign Himself with the sign of Jonah. He would die in the belly of the beast and rise after three days to convert the world.

Elon Musk's beliefs may seem new and exciting, belonging in the rightful place of our unique position in history, but they are actually religion moving backwards. Mankind has already progressed beyond the belief that we are the toys of deities. That our dignity extends beyond some angry lightning bolt throwing character who would deny us the right to possess fire, and thus force us to steal it. Our games may be technologically more sophisticated than what the author of Beowulf could have imagined, but consider what his story would have looked like if he had peered into the future and seen Grand Theft Auto or Fallout? I expect it would look an awful lot like his original story. Jesus taught us of a loving Creator who treated humans like sons and daughters, and the idea ultimately eradicated the god's as manipulators of humanity, and set the West on a collision course with modern life.

But Mr. Musk's belief points to a reality that is often treated with contempt in our enlightened society. The truth is man is a religious creature, and without the stable foundation of our ancestors we are left with little more than our imaginations and really bad philosophy to explain the Goldilocks effect of life as we know it. To be sure, there is a toxic effect of returning to these updated pagan ideas. It upends the concept of human dignity and replaces it with the concept of human as plaything. In this paradigm we are nothing more than ants captive to the joyful whims of a gang of children with a magnifying glass. Which begs the question, if our god's are controllers of a video game and we are nothing but characters, and considering the violence, human and natural, then how are we exceptional? And if we are in our creator's image, then is all life less than us subject to our manipulation?

We have all been fed a heavy dose of "religion is the problem" but what is the solution? Somehow religion is a sickness needing a cure, but the actual issue is religion being used as an umbrella term for all that is wrong in the world. What makes this issue so pervasive is the people really pushing religion as disease is systematically replacing it with a much less coherent idea of human exceptionalism that is eroding the established order. They believe their utopia will never be fully realized until they un-shackle the bonds of religious belief. The Soviets attempted to purge it from their ranks and eventually just attempted replacing it with civil religion. The Romans made deities of their rulers, and you can see similar trends in North Korea. The truth of the matter is the argument has been a classic straw man. The unfortunate side effect has been the philosophical framework that made modern life possible is being offered up as oblations to these strange, new gods. And as Mr. Musk has shown, it may be less challenging to divorce man from the shackles of breath or blood flow than religious belief. The religious creature that we are does not disappear, we only begin to put our faith in much less reasonable beliefs. To explain this new religion in another way, as Thomas Merton once wrote decades ago, "Our idea of God tells us more about ourselves than about Him." I for one, prefer the Judeo-Christian God of my ancestors to the technocratic one of Mr. Musk.