"Playing God" is a meaningless, dangerous cliche
prospectmagazine.co.uk
prospectmagazine.co.uk
Yes, Prometheus was divine, but the point of the myth was not that he stole godly powers but that he gave them to men. But the myth is interesting because it all worked out pretty well for men (but badly for Prometheus), so Prometheus is rebellious to the gods but still a great benefactor.
The closest analogy in the Abrahamic religion is Adam and Eve, who again got godlike powers (the power to understand good and evil) from disobeying a god. Unlike the case of Prometheus this act of rebellion is seen as an extremely bad thing for which we are still being punished.
In the same tradition there's also the Tower of Babel, another story about how man attempts to become Godlike and gets smacked down by god for it. And the Greek tragedies are basically all about folks who hubristically claim to be better than the Gods and wind up suffering horrible fates because of it.
Anyway, human mythology is full of all sorts of stories about humans who try to claim powers of gods. Sometimes it ends well, usually it ends badly. Some stories are teaching us to be happy with what we've got while others are trying to explain why what we currently have sucks. Picking on Prometheus, Daedelus and Faust are lousy examples, I don't know why the author picked 'em.
To understand Prometheus, you have to understand his gift - foresight. He could see the future. In the battle between the Titans (which he was) and the Olympians, he saw that his kind would lose to their own children, so he 'joined' them.
His acts of defiance to Zeus weren't acts of rebellion, they were acts of guerilla warfare. Prometheus took fire, the one thing that truly kept man apart from the gods (IE the ability to change our environment at will), and he didn't just give it to mankind like the myth states, he gave it to his own children - many of which were also Zeus' offspring, and mankind as a whole was allegedly Zeus' greatest love.
Prometheus as it were saw the cycle of the universe. Cronus had usurped Uranus. Zeus had usurped Cronus, and Prometheus did everything in his power to ensure humans usurped Zeus.
As you pointed out, there is his act of stealing fire. However, one of his greater feats (which caused him the need to steal fire) was when an agreement was to be struck between the mortals and the immortals. Prometheus had man wrap beef within the cows stomach as one sacrifice and bones wrapped within glistening fat as another. Zeus chose the latter, setting a precedent for all sacrifices. When man started burning (IE sending to the gods) the junk parts of the animals, Zeus was pissed and took fire from mankind. Then Prometheus stole it back, and got chained to the rock.
However, again if you look at the bigger picture, Prometheus was never disadvantaged. He lifted mankind from the burden of sacrifice, he again gave fire to mankind, which landed him in eternal torture. However, Prometheus has illustrated several times that his foresight far out performs Zeus' omniscience. For him, eternal torture wasn't eternal, he knew Heracles (AKA Hercules) would be along shortly to free him. Prometheus eventually reconciles with Zeus by warning him that he's going to be usurped, and forms a sort of power-sharing agreement if he helps protect Zeus from being overthrown. It also, allegedly, led to the release of the other Titans from imprisonment.
So the real question here is, was Zeus ever going to be usurped in the first place? It essentially went from the Titans being overthrown, Prometheus waging a guerilla war and eventually forming a coalition government between the Titans and Olympians.
I've said this before to people when discussing this, but where in the hell was the imagination in the Abrahamic religions? Prometheus, a singular character in the Ancient Greek religion has a story in such a scope that it would kick LotR's ass, and still be 3-times longer . . . from what we, thousands of years later, have pieced together.
I've said this before to people when discussing this, but where in the hell was the imagination in the Abrahamic religions?
Interesting question. I'm not sure whether to attribute it to ancient Hebrew culture being generally less sophisticated than ancient Greek culture, or whether the Israelites just boxed themselves into a narrative corner by declaring that there was only one god and that he was perfect. It's not easy writing interesting stories when your only character is always right, knows everything and is omnipotent.
This seems true; the "God" invoked in this phrase is not the religious God but more the God represented by nature and that sense of the natural order. I think that the reason this notion has become popular in recent history is that it is only in the last hundred years or so that our technology has advanced to the point where we can really fundamentally disrupt the balance created here by four and a half billion years of evolution. I'm not sure it is fair to single out creating life as especially dangerous as, to me, there are many abilities we have that wield similar amounts of power. I think of cane toads in Australia and the oil spill in the gulf and climate change. All of these are evidence of hubris, of mistakes with long term consequences and few good solutions.
Creating and modifying life (something we have been in the business of doing for quite some time) does fit into this category. We are messing with with incredibly complex systems we don't near fully understand. It's science and it's exciting and we are advancing our knowledge but the possible consequences are indeed dire. I'm not trying to preach anti-technology or anything and I don't think that the fact that we are indeed "playing God" should stop us from pursuing this research and these ideas. But I do think that it is something to be mindful of. We only have the one earth.
EDIT: hugh3 said it better than I did: '"Playing God" to me is just a turn of phrase, shorthand (and somewhat cliched) for "messing with powers beyond your understanding or ability to control".'
This statement is so wrong I don't even know where to start.
For hundreds (if not thousands) of years humans have dramatically altered their natural environment by cultivating land, hunting various animals to extinction and selective breeding. However, evolution never achieved a "balance" for humans to disrupt. Evolution and "balance" are almost diametrically opposite. Are you under the impression that after 4 billion years of evolution, we finally reached a stable terminal point, only to be disrupted by naughty humans?
People conveniently overlook our past whilst condemning our present.
I'm sorry to all those people who blindly don't see, but we are god. We aren't playing as this secular god, we have been it since long before we even acquired fire.
At our present point we can change the world in a heartbeat. If an ice age begins, we have the ability to produce vast quantities of green house gasses far more potent than CO2 or methane. Similarly, if the planet starts heating dramatically, we have the ability to release vast quantities of SO2 into the upper atmosphere and force the planet into a global dimming cycle like it was in between the 1960's-90's.
Similarly, with our construction of vast arrays of wind turbines there has been a noticeable decline in wind speeds in those areas. Incidentally, something many people have failed to remember from basic high school physics is that generators can act as motors and vice versa. If it ever came to it, we have the ability to change the direction of winds in localised areas.
There's even debate over whether we have the ability to cause the formation of rain (we invariably can heat+water, it just takes a lot more effort than the cloud seeding hocus pocus method), and scientists around the world regularly cause lightening.
Really, what do humans do that is not attributed to a god?
Case in point, we accidentally dumped millions of gallons of oil into the ocean, causing a huge mess. One solution, has been using chemicals to disperse the oil, but now after trying that strategy for a bit, we are scaling back its use for fear of causing more problems. These systems we are trying to change a monstrously large and complicated and we don't understand them completely enough to be able to know the concequences of our actions. That is why we must be cautious when "playing God"
I mean, it is hard enough to change pieces of an OS without having unintended consequences, and that is a system entirely of our own creation.
(For details, see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxygen_catastrophe )
Thanks for the link!
The Bible says a lot of things. Come to think of it, all the death-by-stoning punishments make a lot more sense than the "never judge anyone for anything" idea.
The Bible states in the same book (Romans chapter 2 for the first citation and 6 for this one) that the wages of sin is death--meaning this life or the next.
There are lots of hypocritical people and cultures but not all of them are interesting.
Also, "hypocritical" carries an air of condemnation, and perhaps that's not what the poster wanted to emphasize.
Finally, sometimes you get your point across better by letting the reader discover something ("hey, that sounds awfully hypocritical ...") instead of bluntly asserting it.
I don't feel that I've phrased this quite as well as I'd like to. If you'd like elaboration or clarification, please ask.
Sorry, but I refuse to call atheist to anyone who believes that an arbitrary, human-made list of values can be "godlike" in any meaningful sense. If anything, should that person use that list of values to base their political or scientific arguments, I would call them theocrats.
Last night I heard an interview with Craig Venter where the interviewer used the term "playing god", or something similar several times to to characterize the arguments she assumed that some others might be making against this research. Venter actually corrected her at one point when she misquoted one of the commenters -- in this case a representative of the Vatican. It sounded to me as though the "playing god" expression was being used more by the proponents of this kind of research rather than the ones raising objections or concerns themselves. I think that the expression was being attributed to people who weren't raising that specious issue in the first place.
Still, I don't know why the expression,"playing god", whatever it might mean,is "dangerous" unless you're concerned that the uneducated masses might be stirred to some undesirable action as a result of hearing it.
Incidently, stem-cell research has high potential but is also highly speculative. Similarly, gene therapy (using viruses to deliver gene fixes into the body of cells) was and is considered to have enormous potential with very similar hype to stem-cells. But after 35 years and billions of dollars of work, the the actual number of people who have been helped is very small.