Robot or Child?

Which one of your children would you exchange for a robot? Suppose it were possible today to produce a perfect facsimile of the human body. Would you want to trade?

Visualize a robot that is an exact copy of your child. Because he (or it) is a robot, he rises exactly at the preset time, brushes his teeth, eats a tidy breakfast, hurries to the school bus, efficiently digests all that his teachers tell him, and returns home clean and unscarred. He is perfectly obedient. Under his shirt is a panel containing electronic controls. To activate the “child” you need only set a number of dials and throw some switches; and to program him for the entire day is also simple: you just thread the appropriate tape in the tapedeck.

Who wants a robot for a child? We prefer a thousand times the not-so-perfect children we now have. They may have contrary notions, and their development may sometimes seem tortuously slow. They may now and then frighten us. But they are our own children and we’ll keep them. They are real; they are humans, not robots. And by the grace of God they may some day be men.

In creating, God faced this same choice. Children or robots? Should he make a creature with a mind of his own and the ability to choose for himself? Or should he crown his creation with an elaborate robot? Of robots he had enough. There were the creatures already crowding the air and the seas and covering the face of the earth—robots all. They were completely programmed; the switches had all been thrown, the dials set, the magnetic tape of their instincts recorded and put in place. They would learn more, as an IBM learns. And they would act as a computer acts—by conditioned response.

And so “God created man in his own image; in theimage of God created he him.” The divine daring gave life to a creature that was intelligent, pure, yet self-determining. The divine greatness created within its own territory, yet outside its perfect control, a free agent. You choose your own child rather than a robot—your own child, an individual with a will of his own—because you are made in the image of God. This was his choice, and so it also is yours.

This freedom with which man was created is a basic and necessary part of the “goodness” that delighted God as he contemplated his finished work. Had man been less than free, had Adam been created unable to sin, he would not have been a good man. The best of the animals, perhaps, but infinitely distant from humanity. For freedom is fundamental to human goodness. It is absolutely necessary for the creature made in God’s image.

The child whom God made was therefore innocent in two ways. He was innocent in the common meaning of the term—he was guiltless, and of a perfectly pure heart. But he was also innocent in the sense that he was naïve or unsophisticated. His purity was not the tried and confirmed righteousness of the mature man but the purity of the still-sheltered child. In order to realize the image of God, he had to make his own choice. To “become as one of us,” he had to “know good and evil” (Gen. 3:22).

For the holiness of God is an active holiness. It is not that he has no awareness of evil and no choice concerning it but that he, by a majestic free act, puts away evil. It is not that evil can never come near him (Job 1) but that, recognizing it and knowing it for what it is, he forces it away, eventually to destroy it. God’s goodness, in other words, is a positive goodness, an intelligent and selective goodness. And so also must be the goodness of the creature made in his image. Adam had to be a child who could swiftly grow and develop. He could not be an iron-headed and heartless robot that came forth finished from the workshop with depreciation already begun, nor a beautifully crafted doll “with smooth bands of contractile plastic articulating his fingers, with plastic face and muted eyes.” He had to be human, with a will and an opportunity to exercise it.

And so the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. The franchise would have been meaningless without a polling place. It needn’t have been a tree. It could have been a forbidden Stream of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. Or a forbidden word or a forbidden motion. Or the test-object could have been something commanded. But there had to be, if man was to be man, a Something of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.

The working concept is not tree but knowledge. Good was clearly known as the will of God, and evil was clearly known as that which contradicts the will of God. And there—at the tree which God appointed—in the presence of clearly differentiated (equal and opposite) alternatives, Adam had to make his choice. If he chose good, the difference between good and evil would be indelibly impressed upon his mind; he would be confirmed in the knowledge of good and evil, always thereafter choosing the good with its sure pleasure and putting away the abhorrent evil. And if he chose evil, then too he would always have a sense of good and evil. But the distinction between them would be increasingly muddled, and evil would be his master.

And so indeed it happened. At the tree Adam chose another will in place of his Creator’s. He said of the other will, “This is good,” and of God’s will, “This is evil.” And so, forever, he and his descendants were bound to confuse good and evil. Calling each by the other’s name, they have trampled holy things in the dust upon the authority of goodness and have defended vice in the name of virtue.

Why? No one knows. The choice was Adam’s to make. And any reason furnished for why the choice had to go as it did is only another form of denial that the choice was actually free.

But it was man’s choice. Adam did it. And God, whose Word we trust and in whose Son we believe—this God is shown to be, not a bungler who let his perfect model fall from its shelf nor a schemer who pitches men into darkness, but rather a generous Father who gave to men so much liberty that in the abuse of it they could damn themselves. “Yea, let God be true, but every man a liar.”

Understanding these things, Adam’s children may raise their eyes from where their ancestor fell to where the Second Adam now stands. For the Second Adam also faced a choice. In the wilderness, Satan pointed him to the Stones of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. Jesus refused the temptation. And similarly he refused the Heroic Leap and the Demonic Genuflection. And finally he refused the easy retreat from Gethsemane. Again and again he confirmed the good choice for himself and all his seed. Let God be praised for such perfect repair of man’s damage. And let him be thanked that in his Son every believing child can still be raised to that state to which he first called Adam—and beyond: “unto a full-grown man, unto the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ.”

Among the more pathetically amusing traits man has exhibited over the period of his recorded history is his untiring effort to blame somebody or something else for his predicament. That he is in a predicament he never seems seriously to have doubted; but that the mess is not his fault he has vociferously insisted. “The woman whom thou gavest to be with me …,” said Adam, pointing accusingly in the earliest recorded version of a defensive ploy now equally automatic among children and adults. Many debates in the council chambers of the world, including the United Nations, are elaborations of this instinct to divert the blame—“He started it.”

Speaking more broadly, it may be said that natural man’s view of himself ranges from this of innocent bystander (“There came out this calf,” said Aaron with well-simulated wonder when the wrath of Moses was unveiled) to that of lord of creation. When the going is rough, as it usually is, he adopts the former posture; when he feels perky and the sun is bright, he cries “Glory to man in the highest,” with Swinburne. In sum, if it is bad, “he” did it; if it is good, hurray for me.

The one view man cannot adopt without divine prodding and much assistance is that of the Bible: “All we like sheep have gone astray” (Isa. 53:6). “But they refused to hearken.… Yea, they made their hearts as an adamant stone, lest they should hear the law, and the words which the Lord of hosts hath sent in his spirit by the former prophets …” (Zech. 7:11, 12). “Therefore thou art inexcusable, O man, whosoever thou art that judgest: for wherein thou judgest another, thou condemnest thyself; for thou that judgest doest the same things” (Rom. 2:1).

The most popular version of the “don’t blame me” syndrome today may be found in two tightly clutched beliefs: first, man has not “fallen” from any higher previous condition; and second, man’s problems are entirely due to ignorance (which is not his fault), not to evil.

The first of these views runs counter to the uniform conviction of every known ancient culture—that man has, owing to some primal disaster, fallen from high estate. The “Golden Age” was believed to have been in the past, not to be in the future. The alternative view came late. Indeed, as Harvard Professor Crane Brinton has reminded us in his preface to The Portable Age of Reason, “They [the men of the eighteenth century] had begun to believe in progress—a word that before 1700 meant in both French and English no more than a physical moving, as when a royal personage made a progress through the realm.”

Sin—An Error In The Sum?

The second of the two beliefs—that man’s predicament is the consequence of innocent ignorance, not culpable evil—is one of the proudest achievements of that same Age of Reason and involves several corollary and necessary beliefs: that man is by nature good, and hence perfectible; that reason supplied with enough information is capable of reaching, and will always reach, the ultimate truth; that the truth, once known, will always be believed and acted on; and that (in the words of William Godwin) “vice is error.” “Sin,” in short, is the mistake in the sum at the bottom of a column of figures. Add the column correctly and the “sin” disappears.

One rather odd feature of these dogmas is that though they depend heavily on a philosophy of science now outmoded, they are uttered in our time as if they were quite up to date and compatible with “modern sensibility.” Whatever nostalgia some of us may have for Newtonian physics, the consensus among scientists seems to be that it is no longer valid in the larger dimensions of reality; and yet the chief originators of the doctrines of progress through knowledge and of human perfectibility rested their faith on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century philosophies of science.

Over and over again in the writings of the prophets of perfectibility we read the assertion that total reality, once sufficient information about it is acquired, will be totally understandable by the average intelligence. “Every truth of this kind is comprehensible by all understandings,” wrote Claude Adrien Helvetius in his A Treatise on Man in 1773.

And observe the Marquis of Condorcet staring into the crystal ball in 1794: “Since,” he wrote, “as the number of known facts increases, the human mind learns how to classify them and to subsume them under more general facts …; since, as more relations between various objects become known, man is able to present them in such a way that it is possible to grasp a greater number of them with the same degree of intellectual ability, …” so the day will arrive, he asserts, when all the most profound truths of the universe will be known and universally comprehended. Conduct, then based on perfect information, will be perfect, because men are always as good as they know how to be.

Today it is difficult to imagine a more stumbling prophecy. Instead of becoming more unified, more “rational,” more understandable, more available to the average intellect, scientific knowledge has become more esoteric, more fragmented, and more impossible of comprehension save by the very few. And appallingly, somewhere along the line it has picked up the very un-Newtonian burden of the irrational, the indeterminate, the unthinkable.

It was a beautiful dream. How encouraging to have believed that once the Encyclopédie, which was founded by Denis Diderot and contained every fact about everything, was published, man could “with almost complete assurance” predict everything and hence control everything.

True, even the encyclopedists had a few qualms about the nature of the ultimate victory over death. “It is reasonable to hope,” wrote Condorcet, “that all … diseases may … disappear as their distant causes are discovered.… Certainly man will not become immortal; but will not the interval between the first breath that he draws and the time when … he expires increase indefinitely?… We are bound to believe that the average length of human life will forever increase.” An oddly self-defeating prediction—at least to modern materialist existentialists, who assert that the inevitable extinction of every human life, no matter how long deferred, irrefutably demonstrates the Absurdity of human existence.

My chief aim, however, is not to rehearse this rather obvious portion of the history of ideas but to point out certain interesting irrationalities in the way the dogma of human perfectibility is preached by its contemporary adherents. As a matter of fact, the chief points I wish to make all appeared in a recent address by an eminent educator who said, as if the idea were not a rather quaint one based on outmoded science but a new one conceived at least partly by him: “Man’s difficulties, it seems to me, are the consequence of his ignorance, not of something the theologians used to call ‘evil.’ ”

The Doubling And Redoubling

The first rational tangle in his talk came with the predictable assertion about the doubling and redoubling of man’s “knowledge.” In recorded human history, so that rubric runs, knowledge first doubled (from what? presumably zero?) in 1750. It doubled again in 1900, again in 1950, and again in 1960. It is expected to double again by 1965, and about every two hours on the hour after that.

The seeming sanctity lent by this pretense of statistical evidence is impressive to the unthinking listener. But a moment’s thought will reveal the statement to be pure speculation. Note only two of many basic difficulties. First, no man knows all that the world has previously known. We are constantly amazed to learn that the ancients knew things that a generation ago it was not known they knew. Thus no man can measure the relative increase. When you don’t know what you are talking about, you cannot say it doubled. Furthermore, there is no definition of the word “knowledge” as used in the dogma. “Information,” presumably, would be a better word; for what seems to be meant is a body of qualified data, not knowledge, which is significantly qualitative, not quantitative. The distinction is vital, for we all realize that we “know” (comprehend) little about lots of things on which we have incalculable masses of information—electricity, gravity, the ultimate nature of the universe or of man; but we know a good deal about many things on which we have little information (quantified data)—the power of love, the appeal of beauty, the nature of happiness, the imperatives of the moral nature.

As the talk progressed, a second rational difficulty gaped: if man’s only problem is ignorance; and if knowledge is the cure of ignorance; and if knowledge is doubling and redoubling at incredible rates—why is not man’s demonstrable well-being now proportionately upgraded? Where is evidence of that vastly increased betterment in the human condition that should follow knowledge as the thermometer follows the temperature? (One finds himself as unimpressed as when he is told that “90 per cent of all scientists who ever lived are living today,” which is almost analagous to saying that more people born in the twentieth century are alive today than all people born in previous centuries.)

There is a third difficulty, usually implicit, that normally appears in these utterances. We are told that with every discovery in science, more areas of our ignorance, previously unsuspected, are opened up than are illuminated by the new knowledge. The speaker to whom I have referred said, seemingly without awareness of the conflict with his main thesis, that scientists now believe there is no end to the quest for new knowledge. It would seem to follow, therefore, that man’s cause of misery, ignorance, is forever incapable of solution. We are left moaning with Housman: “The troubles of our proud and angry dust are from eternity and shall not fail.”

Search For The Center Of Meaning

A fourth built-in futility of the information-will-save-us view is the unusability of much of the incredible amount of information that has been stocked up. Most of it, according to Sir Julian Huxley, is “lying around unused,” and much of it is unusable because it is so esoteric that few brains are capable of seeing basic relations. “If the situation is not to lead to chaos, despair, or escapism,” writes Sir Julian in The Humanist Frame (quoted in the Graduate Journal for Fall, 1964), “man must reunify his life within the framework of a satisfactory idea-system.” Agreed; but “satisfactory idea-systems” cannot emerge from the kind of computered mountains of quantified information referred to rejoicingly as man’s “fantastic growth of knowledge.” One does not even begin from there. “What seems lacking,” runs an editorial in the same journal, “is something not altogether tangible—the critical values that give compelling meaning and a sense of direction to human life.” No electronic retrieval system will ever be capable of giving the kind of knowledge needed to find the motionless center of meaning from which alone a purposeful direction of life can be charted.

Amid such illogicalities and internal contradictions, the dogma of salvation through knowledge is preached today to the faithful. Often the capping argument is added near the end: “We’ve tried Christianity for two thousand years. It has failed. Now let us try knowledge.” It would appear that if anything about the past two thousand years is obvious, it is that the world has not been run in strict obedience to Christ’s teachings. But when Christian principles have been tried, even with very imperfect obedience, the alleviation of human misery has been immediate and dramatic. In our present daily life, we are much more the beneficiary—in freedom, law, moral principles, justice, compassion, love—of Christianity than of modern technology. Indeed, “knowledge” (qualified data) has nothing really significant to say about any of these values; yet these values are what make life worth living.

Happily, when we weary of the tons of marvelous but irrelevant information that are the pride of our age, we can still turn to the Bible and there come to know the essential things. First, that the Lord, the Creator of all things, is. (Note that in the Book of Ezekiel alone there are over forty instances of the phrase, “… shall know that I am the Lord,” or its equivalent.) No pile of statistics can ever reach this knowledge, any more than Babel could reach heaven.

Second, we come to know what we are—creatures of the Lord, made in his image for his glory and our happiness, but fallen, “a rebellious people, which walketh in a way that was not good, after their own thoughts” (Isa. 65:2). And, most transcendently, we come to know who the Saviour is, who came to seek and to save that which is lost. “Jesus said unto her, I am the resurrection, and the life: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live” (John 11:25).

Of these truths it might be said what T. S. Eliot once said about his own works: “I doubt whether what I am saying can convey very much to anyone for whom the doctrine of original sin is not a very real and tremendous thing.” Clio, the muse of history, might say the same thing; for these truths, though unpalatable to natural man, are not offensive to human reason or to the student of human history. In fact, to try to understand history without allowing for the reality of evil is to make man’s past a conundrum, a tissue of contradictions. The intellectual journey of a brilliantly endowed man like the late Dr. C. E. M. Joad illustrates this. As professor of philosophy and psychology at the University of London, he was characterized by Time magazine in 1948 as “an annoying, church-baiting agnostic” and in 1953 as “brilliantly voluble, … variously known as a socialist, pacifist, patriot, agnostic, and advocate of free love.” No other man was so learnedly conversant with every modern theory of human moral no-responsibility. “Sin,” he later wrote, “I dismissed as the incidental accompaniment of man’s imperfect development.”

But as the years went by, Joad grew less and less sure that such a dismissal was in accord with reason, history, and modern knowledge; and he later wrote: “I have come lately to disbelieve all this. I see now that evil is endemic in man, and that the Christian doctrine of original sin expresses a deep and essential insight into human nature.” But he also found light in the darkness: “The more I knew of it, Christianity seemed to offer … consolation, strengthening, and assistance.… Once I had come as far as this, there was nothing to be lost and everything to be gained by going the whole way. What better hope was offered than by the Christian doctrine that God sent His Son into the world to save sinners?”

What, indeed?

T. Leo Brannon is pastor of the First Methodist Church of Samson, Alabama. He received the B.S. degree from Troy State College and the B.D. from Emory University.

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