God, Human, Animal, Machine: Technology, Metaphor, and the Search for Meaning

• Published in: Perspectives on science and Christian faith 2023-03, Vol.75 (1), p.70-71
• Main Author: Lake, Christina Bieber
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• ISSN: 0892-2675; 0892-2675
• DOI: 10.56315/PSCF3-23OGieblyn

GOD, HUMAN, ANIMAL, MACHINE: Technology, Metaphor, and the Search for Meaning by Meghan O'Gieblyn. New York: Doubleday, 2021. 304 pages. Hardcover; $28.00. ISBN: 9780385543828. *Meghan O'Gieblyn's God, Human, Animal, Machine is the most honest, insightful, and therefore challenging book of its kind I have ever read. Part intellectual memoir and part philosophy, it walks us through O'Gieblyn's journey away from the Christian faith of her youth toward seeing herself "more or less as a machine" (p. 7). God, she has become convinced, is a projection of the human imagination, a product of our solipsism. "For centuries we said we were made in God's image, when in truth we made him in ours" (p. 12). *This is such a common late modern narrative of disenchantment that the reader expects the usual suspects to follow. Namely, vitriol against the ignorance of theologians, and a solid articulation of the merits of scientific naturalism. But that is not what we get here. What we get is the kind of intellectual honesty that is willing to admit that if humans are inherently meaning-making creatures, then all of us could be getting it wrong. *O'Gieblyn maps her own disenchantment narrative onto that of the modern western world. Descartes couldn't be sure of anything but his being a thinking thing; Kant couldn't be sure that those thoughts had anything to do with the world as it actually is. Once you go through this door, the only honest position is that every human belief about ultimate reality is based on faith in something. She makes this point brilliantly through David Chalmers, who endeavored to explain the idea (said of philosophers) that "one starts as a materialist, then one becomes a dualist, then a panpsychist, and one ends up as an idealist" (p. 180). Chalmers knows that each of these perspectives necessarily entails accepting different metaphorical lenses, none of which can be definitively proven by science or philosophy. *O'Gieblyn thus finds Bernardo Kastrup's "shortcut through this trajectory" particularly fascinating. For Kastrup, consciousness is all that exists, and the "entire observable world is patterns of excitation" of a "universal mind" that is the cosmos (p. 185). "By the time you seriously consider all the options and their limitations," O'Gieblyn writes, "the idea of God begins to seem just as crazy as anything else" (p. 185). She knows how this sounds, and immediately wonders if she's predisposed to this position because of her previous faith and