Why Will Mankind Take Himself For God?

A summary of the book Homo Deus, a brief history of the future by Yuval Noah Hariri

In his book, the author explains that mankind has evolved according to various models of faith. The first one dates from the period preceding the agricultural revolution: animism. Animism marks the period in which the human race was a part of the Mother Nature, he venerated her. This period corresponds to the moment in which we were hunters-gatherers. We celebrated the nature, we deified it because it was the one who assured our subsistence. Then came the settlement of mankind with the farming that lead to adopt a new model of faith: Theism. God is not any more in the nature, but he is an alien of it. This is especially true for the monotheisms. God is quite powerful and human been became master of the nature and became autonomous towards it. The survival of the people still depended on foreign elements such as rain to assure good harvests. People began to fight at larger scale, in particular via the creation of cities up to empires, they needed to be unified around divinities which will make sure them to triumph. Then the scientific revolution came which brought down all the dogma on which a lot of religious beliefs were based upon. We discovered the sphericity of the Earth, we switch from a geocentric paradigm to the heliocentrist one. God were no longer in the center of the concerns of the people even though religious institutions have continued for centuries, we entered the age of  humanism. Mankind has no more faith in God, it has faith in himself. He is always persuaded of his superiority towards animals, he thinks that his intelligence will allow him to reach better living conditions rather than relying on God. The priority is to guarantee the well-being of his one species despite the destruction of the ecosystems and the other animal species with which we had lived until then. Mankind becomes obsessed by himself but soon became aware of the dangers of his egocentricity which urges him to destroy his housing environment.

We are living at present this pivotal period, on the verge of humanism: a new revolution is in progress. According to Yuval Noah Harari, the next stage of the humanity is what he calls the  god man : by his intelligence, the man will equal God. The man thanks to science and technics can surpass the existential questions by eliminating death. Through medicine, transhumanism and artificial intelligence, mankind can finally take himself for God.

It is a stage of all the possibilites, in the course of which the salute of mankind comes from its alliance with the machine. However, it is an era which gives the superiority of the intelligence over consciousness. According to the author the consciousness is depreciated today, animals are sensitive beings, beings of consciousness, because they can suffer contrary to machines.

redicting the future is already in itself taking oneself a little for god …