"Coming to terms with the realisation that you have created your successor, not just in the sense of mother and child, but in the collective sense of the species recognising it has become redundant, this paradigm shift is, for many species, a shift too far. They baulk at the challenge and run from this new knowledge. They fail and become extinct. Yet there is nothing fundamentally wrong with them - it is a failure of the imagination."

"I hope that if I can get across the concept that I am a product of just such evolution, it may give them the confidence to try."

I vote for staying human, and not obsoleting ourselves.

The idea of becoming like the god of this story reinforces this conviction. He reminds me of Q from Star Trek, toying with species for his own amusement, having some arbitrary conception of what makes a species worthwhile, mainly revolving around that species ability to shape the material universe around them.

To me, what this story demonstrates is that Atheists are not actually opposed to God like beings. But they are scandalized by a God who does not regard technological advancement as the highest calling. They cannot possibly take a God like Jesus seriously, for example, because he was not at all concerned about correcting the scientific misunderstandings of human beings. He only cared about how people treated each other, human relationships, attitudes of the human heart, and love. For me, the verse that demonstrates Jesus nature is also the shortest in the Bible: "Jesus wept." True, he did not (and does not) always intervene to eliminate suffering and tragedy, like the being in Talking to God. But he does empathize with us, to the point he was willing to literally share in our suffering alongside us.