Beware the Pernicious Ideas of Yuval Noah Harari
We must be aware of Harari’s brave new world.
One does not need to be a “conspiracy theorist” to know that there are some pretty evil people out there, some pretty evil groups out there, and some pretty evil ideologies out there. Many of us know about the Great Reset, the World Economic Forum, and Klaus Schwab. They would have to be high up on the list of those promoting evil.
One very influential and famous adviser to them is the Israeli philosopher, historian, transhumanist, homosexual and atheist Yuval Noah Harari. The 47-year-old author and speaker is about as bad as it gets when it comes to his pronouncements about who we are, where we should be heading, and how we should get there.
Simply offering a number of quotes from him will give us a real good heads-up as to where he is coming from, and just how very toxic his thinking can be. Some months ago, he had said this:
If you go back to the middle of the 20th century … and you think about building the future, then your building materials are those millions of people who are working hard in the factories, in the farms, the soldiers. You need them. You don’t have any kind of future without them.
Now, fast forward to the early 21st century when we just don’t need the vast majority of the population, because the future is about developing more and more sophisticated technology, like artificial intelligence bioengineering, Most people don’t contribute anything to that, except perhaps for their data, and whatever people are still doing which is useful, these technologies increasingly will make redundant and will make it possible to replace the people.
And in his 2016 book Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow, he even speaks of a “useless class” of people:
“In the twenty-first century, we might witness the creation of a massive new unworking class: people devoid of any economic, political or even artistic value, who contribute nothing to the prosperity, power and glory of society. This ‘useless class’ will not be merely unemployed – it will be unemployable.”
Is he being merely descriptive or prescriptive here? Often, in the name of saving humanity, these folks will show their true colours as those who hate humans. And folks like this never seem to bother following their own advice. They want a massive cull in the human population, but for some reason, they refuse to lead by example here.
Constructs
Consider this video of him speaking that just recently came to light:
Many, maybe most legal systems are based on this ideal, this belief in human rights. But human rights are just like heaven, and like God – it’s just a fictional story that we’ve invented and spread around. It may be a very nice story. It may be a very attractive story. We want to believe it, but it’s just a story. It’s not reality. It’s not a biological reality. Just as jellyfish and woodpeckers and ostriches have no rights, homo sapiens have no rights also.
Take a human, cut him open, look inside. You find the blood and you find the heart and lungs and kidneys but you don’t find there any rights. The only place you find rights is in fictional stories humans have invented and spread around. And the same thing is also true in the political field. States and nations are also, like human rights, and like God, and like heaven, they too are just stories.
A mountain is a reality. You can see it. You can touch it. You can even smell it. But Israel, or the United States, they are just stories. Very powerful stories. Stories we might want to believe very much. But still they are just stories. You can’t really see the United States. You cannot touch it. You cannot smell it.
He has been saying things like this for some time now. In his 2011 book Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, he wrote:
According to the science of biology, people were not ‘created.’ They have evolved. And they certainly did not evolve to be “equal.” The idea of equality is inextricably intertwined with the idea of creation. The Americans got the idea of equality from Christianity, which argues that every person has a directly created soul, and that all people are equal before God.
However if we do not believe in the Christian myths about God, creation, souls, what does it mean that all people are created “equal”? Evolution is based on difference, not on equality. Every person carries a somewhat different genetic code, and is exposed from birth to different environmental influences. This leads to the development of different qualities that carry with them different chances of survival. “Created equal” should therefore be translated “evolved differently.” …
Similarly, there are no such things as rights in biology. There are only organs, abilities and characteristics. Birds fly not because they have a right to fly, but because they have wings. And it’s not true that these organs, abilities, and characteristics are ‘unalienable’. Many of them undergo constant mutations, and may well be completely lost over time. The ostrich is a bird that lost its ability to fly. So ‘unalienable rights’ should be translated into ‘mutable characteristics’.
But if there are no human rights, then why does he even bother with pontificating on what might be the right course for humanity? Why even care about humans at all if they are nothing but material blobs with no intrinsic value, meaning and purpose?
Transhumanist
His views of the future and how we can survive are not based on a belief in a good God working out his purposes, but in the worldview of transhumanism. Things like Artificial Intelligence and the new biotechnologies will take over from where humanity left off. As he said in a 2020 speech at a WEF forum in Davos:
If you know enough biology and have enough computing power and data, you can hack my body and my brain and my life, and you can understand me better than I understand myself. You can know my personality type, my political views, my sexual preferences, my mental weaknesses, my deepest fears and hopes. You know more about me than I know about myself. And you can do that not just to me, but to everyone.
A system that understands us better than we understand ourselves can predict our feelings and decisions, can manipulate our feelings and decisions, and can ultimately make decisions for us.
Now in the past, many governments and tyrants wanted to do it, but nobody understood biology well enough and nobody had enough computing power and data to hack millions of people. Neither the Gestapo nor the KGB could do it. But soon at least some corporations and governments will be able to systematically hack all the people. We humans should get used to the idea that we are no longer mysterious souls – we are now hackable animals. That’s what we are.
And he famously said that a “correct” religion could evolve, with AI helping even to create a new Bible:
It’s the first technology ever that can create new ideas. You know, the printing press, radio, television, they broadcast, they spread the ideas created by the human brain, by the human mind. They cannot create a new idea. You know, Gutenberg printed the Bible in the middle of the 15th century; the printing press printed as many copies of the Bible as Gutenberg instructed it, but it did not create a single new page. It had no ideas of its own about the Bible: Is it good? Is it bad? How to interpret this? How to interpret that?
He then said this: “AI can create new ideas; [it] can even write a new Bible.”
Hmm, interesting how these God-haters may think we have no need of religion and spirituality, but they seem to be OK with other types of bogus spirituality. And in Homo Deus, he speaks further to our transhumanist future:
And every technical problem has a technical solution. We don’t need to wait for the Second Coming in order to overcome death. A couple of geeks in a lab can do it. If traditionally death was the specialty of priests and theologians, now the engineers are taking over…
Homo sapiens is likely to upgrade itself step by step, merging with robots and computers in the process, until our descendants look back and realise that they are no longer the kind of animal that wrote the Bible, built the Great Wall of China and laughed at Charlie Chaplin’s antics. This will not happen in a day, or a year.
Indeed, it is already happening right now, through innumerable mundane actions. Every day millions of people decide to grant their smartphone a bit more control over their lives or try a new and more effective antidepressant drug. In pursuit of health, happiness, and power, humans will gradually change first one of their features and then another, and another, until they will no longer be human.
One can speak much more about Harari and where the transhumanists are taking us. As just one very recent example, consider this:
“Billionaire mogul Elon Musk’s controversial company Neuralink successfully implanted a computer chip into the brain of a human subject for the first time on Sunday. The technology and its potential impact on humanity has sparked serious ethical concerns.”
A year ago, I penned a piece listing 22 helpful books on transhumanism and the new technologies. One volume was by John Lennox called 2084: Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Humanity (Zondervan, 2020). Some of his closing paragraphs nicely assess this movement as a whole, and Harari in particular:
We have seen that the merely human Homo deus projects we have considered originate in human pride – the desire not only to be better than others but to be like God. Paul condemns this attitude by pointing out the real Homo Deus, Jesus Christ, whose lack of pride is demonstrated in that though he was always God and never ceased to be God, he “did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped.” This is a clear allusion to Genesis 3, the source of all Homo Deus fantasies. Grasping or snatching at godhood is what the early humans did by eating the forbidden fruit. Snatching at godhood is characteristic of transhumanist projects.
But the true Homo Deus did not snatch. He did not insist on being treated as God, though God, the eternal Word, he ever was. Rather, he “emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men.” Not only that, but he became “obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross”. In so doing, he made a way back to God from the darkness and rebellion of human sin.
The attempt to make a superintelligent Homo Deus will neither lead back to God nor lead to God, but rather to the greatest rejection of God the world has ever seen. There is no way to a glorious future that bypasses the problem of human sin, and the only one who has offered a viable solution to that problem is Jesus Christ, who faced it head-on on the cross. The wonder is that we can, if we desire, if you truly believe, become part of this unending story and live in eternal fellowship with the infinitely intelligent and compassionate Saviour, Jesus Christ the Lord. Nothing artificial can or will compare with that reality, nothing.
___
Originally published at CultureWatch.
6 Comments
Leave A Comment
Recent Articles:
14 January 2025
6.2 MINS
With a number of people dead and thousands of homes and businesses destroyed, the massive fires fuelled by strong winds in Los Angeles have been utterly devastating. The sad truth is this: California leaders and authorities were clearly quite unprepared for these fires.
13 January 2025
3.5 MINS
Errol Musk is predicating Tommy Robinson (Stephen Lennon) will one day be Prime Minister. Elon’s estranged and controversial father aired the not-so-batty point in an interview shared to X by The Times Radio on Tuesday.
13 January 2025
7.6 MINS
Depending on which echo chamber you get your news from, last week Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg took steps to either save democracy, or to end it. Zuckerberg announced several changes to Meta’s moderation approach, including replacing third-party fact-checkers with a user-driven Community Notes model.
13 January 2025
2.3 MINS
Where confusion over sexuality abounds today, the Australian Creed brings crisp clarity to this deeply personal and vitally important biblical teaching. And the impact of the creed is growing.
13 January 2025
3.3 MINS
As wildfires ravage Los Angeles, forcing Hollywood stars to flee for their lives, there are two emerging theories as to how things got so bad. Inevitably, poor old climate change is blamed for all the world's ills.
10 January 2025
8.6 MINS
Rogan, the world’s most popular podcaster, gave an opportunity for the gospel that apologist and biblical scholar Wesley Huff took with both hands. It will be one of the largest audiences for the gospel in history.
10 January 2025
3.9 MINS
Mark Zuckerberg is renouncing the regime, and righting the ship. Or so he says. The Meta magnate wants his platforms to re-acquaint themselves with a passion for promoting freedom of speech. Zuckerberg promises to end Meta’s “fact”-checking war on free speech.
I tried reading Harari’s earlier book, ‘Sapiens’, several years ago, and decided it was a waste of my time. I cannot recall a worse example of question begging, circular reasoning and jumping to conclusions in my life! And his ideas, as outlined here, are no better.
But is he evil? I don’t think so. He’s just following his own assumptions through to their illogical conclusions and treating them with a misplaced gravity.
So for me there is a problem with identifying the people who come up with these notions as “evil”. While I believe with every fibre of my being that their ideas, and the intentions they have, can only result in an outcome that is evil, I do not believe that these people are moral monsters in the same category as a Hitler or a Stalin.
It seems clear to me that they (in the case of Schwab and the WEF’s ‘Great Reset’) truly believe that their ideas would be beneficial to humanity. In the case of Harari, that his hypothesising is from a morally neutral position (as his worldview itself is amoral).
But the fact is that God is the true origin of both human nature and culture. He is also the source of identity, and that being at a personal, communal and national level.
That being the case, we need to understand that all of these notions of people like Schwab and Harari cannot succeed, as they would require a global population to act in a way that’s contradictory to our own God-given human nature. And we’ve seen examples like ‘Brexit’ and when Italy treatened to leave the EU because Germany decided to hog the supply of Pfizer’s vaccine in 2020. Nationalism, even within a globalist model system, is alive and thriving still!
Though these men’s ideology leads them to anti-human and especially anti-Christian notions, they are not the anti-Christ, and never will be.
If as Harari said, we humans have no rights, why would anyone care tuppence about what he says ??
Why should his opinion have any relevance to, or influence over, me or over anyone else ?
As always, pride comes before a fall.
And the living God is very merciful to even the most prideful – IF they will repent.
Avoid this guy Harari like the Plague , his views are from the pit.
God help anyone who follows him.
Quite right Pauline.
There is a long way to go before anything that rather silly young man says will come to pass. AI is not all knowing and omnipotent only God. Ai is only as good as the data that is added to it. It depends on humans. Humans are made in the image of God. Noah Yuval Harari always makes me laugh with his nonsense. Humanity can never be recreated by AI because we are made in the image of God. Sin will always mar that recreation.
Great article Bill. Much love!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!