There are already prototypes of artificial wombs imitating natural womb environment (which might potentially be in the mother's home)
https://pressbooks.pub/psycholinguisticsfall2017section2/cha...
> I’ve never heard of babies learning English or French or whatever in utero.
Don’t expect a baby jumping out and saying “a lovely day to all. What are your further plans for the rest of the evening Mother?”
It is more like that structures in the baby’s brain get subtly influenced to better pay attention to certain sounds while paying less attention to others. This is the theory at least. There is some experimental evidence mentioned in the link, but i haven’t reviewed all of it.
So, I'm curious what the driver for reproduction will be in the future once robots are capable of doing all the work and humans live for a very long time. I don't have children nor intend to - so likely this is a very cold take that doesn't apply to most - but the cynic in me says we've so far focussed on reproduction as individuals and at a country level to maintain productivity and extend the health and wealth of their elders. Without that pressure, would people choose to have fewer children on a scale we've never seen before?
Leaving behind and continuing your legacy and heritage.
Personally I have no interest in pushing my blood, interests, and achievements and their endurement upon my hypothetical children, among many other reasons I have no interest in having children, but if someone wants to be that person then more power to them since it's none of my business.
the people without such driver are naturally weeded out, so due to such weeding out the majority of the population always naturally consist of the people who have such a driver, it may be some crazy one in any given particular case, yet it is there.
>in the future once robots are capable of doing all the work and humans live for a very long time.
and with artificial uterine it would mean that some people, the wealthy ones, would be able to have a hundred, or a thousand of children. Just look at for example Elon Musk and imagine if there were no need for physical pregnancy which i think is the major limiting factor here.
>would people choose to have fewer children on a scale we've never seen before?
the people who wouldn't be able to afford it as having children would be less beneficial for society as you correctly noted and it will be more like a personal luxury/indulgence and thus would be treated accordingly - taxed, no child support help from government, etc
I agree that is a very likely outcome. We've seen that behaviour before in history, e.g. the Ottoman Imperial Harem contained a minimum of several hundred women at its peak. We would almost certainly see it again. Remember, though, that those children still need to be cared for after birth, and that requires humans.
I think AI and robots would make human involvement minimally necessary, be it basic physical care or education.
On the other, super-rich people can already afford a lot of humans to assist with raising their kids. AI isn't strictly necessary for this, as seen with e.g. Genghis Khan.
But yeah, if the G and the I in AGI is good enough and general enough, then robots directed by it could do a good job of raising kids — but at some point, you have to ask what life is even for, why you're having kids at all if you don't want to be involved in raising them.
it willn't be just kids. It will be "designer babies". Cleaned-up DNA with imports from Mozart and Einstein DNAs, and countless other improvements and enhancements for higher IQ, stronger muscles, faster reaction, better health, etc and cyber-enhanced with Neuralink style connection from may be even before being born, etc. There would be not many humans who would be able even to just keep up, less serve as teachers and trainers to such kids.
> to be involved in raising them.
engineering them is also involvement.
Have you ever played video games with cheats enabled? Some of them are still fun, others feel pointless. If you want to treat your offspring as a machine to be engineered rather than raised, why bother with flesh in the first place, why not regard the AI itself as the offspring?
If a child were engineered as thoroughly as you suggest, the distance between them and their parents would necessarily be as severe as the distance between them and their potential human teachers.
But also there is a practical issue:
Musk specifically may well test such things on his own kids before the tech is actually ready, but any sensible person would want these interventions to have passed a full clinical trial before reaching their offspring. Such trials would necessarily lead to there being many humans with any one of those enhancements before all of them, making any gap much smaller in practice than you anticipate.
raising is engineering, just very slow and with very limited results just because of the very limited toolset currently available. Look how parents using hormones and blockers, etc. - that is about max engineering available today and they do it because it benefits their children (i'm making pure engineering-wise point, and i'm not qualified nor have any intention to discuss whether it is really beneficial or not)
>why bother with flesh in the first place, why not regard the AI itself as the offspring?
The people replacing flesh children with AI would naturally be weeding their DNA out thus leading to the significant share of the population still preferring flesh ones.
>he distance between them and their parents would necessarily be as severe
parents want their kids to succeed, to do better than the parents. It is a biological imperative (as otherwise your DNA is weeded out by the one's who do get their children to do better, and thus those have been and will be the majority of the population). The first-gen immigrant parents working as say janitors and their college kids - huge difference and the parents are happy for it.
And don't forget that the parents here are themselves would already be the N-th generation of improvement, much ahead of the rest of the population.
>with any one of those enhancements before all of them
with any one, yet not all. Being a test subject for one feature is very different than having a package of those features.
>making any gap much smaller in practice than you anticipate.
in addition the test subjects may be prevented from propagating their DNA. (Cetaganda from the Vorkosigan saga :)
(Even then, the really extreme examples of polygamy were more about social status than practical concerns around succession; again, this is now largely obsolete in most societies.)
So if any, could remember that there were 'telephone boxes' ...changing clothes...
[Reports:Humor]
HINT: Action Comics #1 (published April 18, 1938).[1] Superman has been adapted to several other media...
(-;
[1] quoting: wikipedia
Time could be the great equalizer here. Spending time with your children is pretty universally accepted as beneficial, so we could make it mandatory for extrauterine births over some threshold. It could be structured such that the more extrauterine children you have, the more of your 24 hours per day must be spent with them. I’m intentionally hand-waving over specifics of what that would look like and enforcement, but I’m sure you can come up with ideas. The goal is: if you want to artificially have hundreds of extrauterine children, society will take from you all the time you could have spent building rockets and running companies.
Say it's a requirement for an hour per day per child — no matter how many drugs Musk takes to stay awake, he can't have more than 24 kids.
Genghis Khan set the rules, which is why actually changing them would be very difficult.
I can easily imagine a punishment of forced sterilisation for non-compliance. It wouldn't be the first time human society had that as a punishment.
UK, 2015, due to the mother not being capable of looking after her kids: https://www.bbc.com/news/health-31128969
Also, one of the main things that made it stop wasn't specifically democracy, but that eugenics became unacceptable, otherwise you'd have to explain why you think the US wasn't democratic until 1942: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skinner_v._Oklahoma
You have a higher regard for pubic opinion than me, if you think public opinion would prevent it — in the UK it's fairly easy to run into support for this as a penalty for various things that were already crimes, along with various other things that the speaker thought ought to be.
This was even (jokingly) suggested as a thing to be done to former prime minister Boris Johnson, due to his frequent affairs and unknown number of children.
https://www.pbs.org/independentlens/blog/unwanted-sterilizat...
"More recently, California prisons are said to have authorized sterilizations of nearly 150 female inmates between 2006 and 2010. The Center for Investigative Reporting reveals how the state paid doctors $147,460 to perform tubal ligations that former inmates say were done under coercion."
To the response below: if something happens in the open and systematically, and nobody punished for it that means people are supporting it. They may clutch their pearls and turn their noses away for show, yet they support it nevertheless.
I also don't believe people generally have children to fulfil a wider societal responsibility. As a parent myself, we had children mostly because we thought it would be nice to have children around. It has been much more than "nice," in a way that I could never really put into words. However, I can honestly say that the maintenance of my own health and wealth into old age has never been remotely a concern; if anything, I spend my time trying to find ways to insulate them from the consequences of an ageing society. I don't see those aspects of parenthood changing.
Maybe we eat because of social pressure, but obviously there is something deeper too.
One aspect of growing older that I eagerly can't wait for (unlike most others) is getting old enough that people will stop fucking pestering me about marriage and kids.
All those people can sincerely fuck off into their own bedrooms, pun intended.
Just about 20 years more of this noise...
While Putin feeds humans to the dogs of war, he will at the same time chide his countryfolk that they are not having enough children.
There is a softer version in the west where elders and the wealthy are 'concerned about birthrates' while at the same time squeezing their young on living costs(shelter+food).
In the UK there has also been a cultural shift to regarding children as a lot of work - parents are under more pressure to do more and be perfect. That also deters people from having children.
Then there are those who argue that there are too many children so people should not have children.
There are pressures to have kids, of course, but its not clear to me that there is a net societal pressure towards having kids.
I had kids because I like having kids. Its fulfilling in a way nothing else is in most parents lives.
If robots are doing all the work, my bet is humans won’t be dominating for too long
Then if robots take over, and they spare us, the driver for human reproduction (for them to reproduce us) might just be to have pets
>Without that pressure, would people choose to have fewer children on a scale we've never seen before?
They already made that choice, decades ago, and there's no evidence anyone is rethinking it. Fertility levels are sub-replacement.
Did we read the same book?
Totally not our society!
But yeah this invention is a good thing
Yes, and the engineered factory humans is part of the dystopian point it makes. The dehumanization begins at that, it's not just the soma.
Which is also why the normally born people (in the wildling "reservation"), the regular aging, the regular pregancy, are also in the book as a antithesis to the dystopian society (but one which they can not belong as outsiders, like we can't be "natives", only LARP it).
I want to. And the book's age has nothing to do with whether it's points are valid or not.
Literature doesn't have an expiration date. And some ideas about what it means to be human aren't meant to be transient - though their adoption might be.
But I was also trying to convey that "this piece of literature argues X, therefore X is true" can't possibly hold up for every given work of literature. You can find an author for any viewpoint! They can't all be true at once!
Fear of the unknown is strong in us, especially when it comes to our bodies. See also, anti-vaxxerism.
I think some of the concern is reasonable and some isn't.
And rightly so. It's used as a patch for many social issues (like declining fertility and careerism).
Outside rural Sahel or Afghanistan, the world has moved on to an industrial or post-industrial society, where it is no longer desirable to keep women illiterate and start having babies at 17, when the natural fertility is at its peak, then immediately employing small kids as goatherds.
IVF is a partial patch for increasing educational levels of the general population. I am fine with a more educated population.
Too general a statement to answer - if anything and everything can be considered a "patch".
The course of civilization solves some problems and creates others. Some of the issues it solves are huge wins. Other times, the problems can be way worse than what there was.
For example, if we accept, for argument's sake, that the AI doomers are right, and AI kills or enslaves us all, that would be an example of a civilization's patch being worse than the issue patched.
>IVF is a partial patch for increasing educational levels of the general population. I am fine with a more educated population.
If the alternative is decline and death, I'd chose life. Goat-herder sure beats office drones and depressed doom-scrollers, which is what we increasingly produce.
Do you speak from experience?
Goat-herding in a state of constant food-, water- and physical insecurity, with zero amenities or healthcare, might be enjoyable for some (though maybe less so at the age of five), but "sure beats" sounds like a hot take from the social media.
It is still possible to move to South Sudan or Niger and start a goatherding career there, but few office drones have walked the walk. Quite to the contrary, there is a significant outflow of economic migrants away from such conditions, into the richer parts of the world.
If you are not a birthing person, have you ever been with a birthing person for the duration of their pregnancy?
That's more "Brave New World" style shortcuts to hapiness and convenience...
We already did beat evolution first with wheels, later with steam, then with jet engines, nuclear reactors, heart transplants, vaccines, exogenous steroids, etc.
Evolution hit a constraint with us, our increased brain size making childbirth unusually difficult for humans compared to other species; all of us are born premature by the standard of our nearest wild relatives, and have to be premature just so the mother doesn't die all the time, merely unusually often.
My kid (born when I, his mother, was 40) is a second generation C-section baby who, had my own mother (who had me at 35) been born in the 60s instead of the 40s, likely would have been a 3rd generation C-section baby. My mother was 10.5 lbs at birth and left my grandmother unable to have another child in her early 20s. Perhaps I can't eat crustaceans and have a stuffed nose for several weeks in the spring because I didn't get my mother's microbiome. I'll take that trade; my mother was then able and willing to go on to have my little brother.
I'll also wager that as a Western middle-class middle-aged professional who had my kid about a decade after I "should have" (can't plan everything!), my child's material circumstances and opportunities would be the envy 90-95% of his agemates worldwide. I'm definitely providing a better education than a semi-literate 17-year-old Afghani woman who could only have hers "the old fashioned way".
(I've read about what life in urban Afghanistan was like for women in the 1960s and 1970s, so I'm well aware of how far we can fall, given the right religious nutjobs in charge. Franco's Spain freaks me out, too.)
It’s definitely possible to facilitate this type of genetic line in the context of wealth and abundances, but if it became the more than the norm, any war or famine would be devastating.
[citation needed]
It will be a huuuge time until extrauterine reproduction is viable even for mammals as small as mice. We barely understand pregnancy and its effects in humans as it is - IMHO it's barely ethical to research around pregnancy on mice, even less on "higher" levels of intelligence such as great apes. It's only a relatively recent discovery for example that fetal cells transfer via the placenta into the mother's organism [1], but it's only extremely recent that further discoveries into the mother-fetus interactions were studied [2].
Hell we're not yet sure if cloning humans actually works - it took a great deal of effort for sheep, and to this date we haven't even managed to work out the ethics for humans in gene-editing, just look at the controversy around He Jiankui [3].
Not saying it isn't worth the effort to hold a debate around human germ line research... but I think the time is premature, we should have it once we have proven it possible and safe in primates.
[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2633676/
[2] https://scienceblog.cincinnatichildrens.org/moms-ability-to-...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/He_Jiankui_genome_editing_inci...
Yes, formula exists and has created billions of healthy children. However, breastfeeding is a signifiant commitment of blood, sweat and tears for many moms that want to do best by their babes.
I've been thinkingg about this for a while, that the way we're approaching growing artificial meat from stem cells is the wrong way to use this kind of technology.
Is anyone using this technology to grow chicken eggs and dairy milk in the lab for human consumption?
It will remain tricky to get subtle things like colour, taste, and the texture profile right for lab grown meat but will that hold the same for the output of a rtificially grown tissue like milk or eggs?
What happens to the inevitable baby who's parent's die before they can be decanted? They will stack up over time since who wants someone else's baby when you can get your own so easily.
This will also be abused by some jacka## like Musk who wants to build a labor force for something distasteful. Imagine a Mars colonization effort with exclusively young people who were raised in a sealed environment and don't know anything that was not fed to them.
This is already a problem for children of single mothers who die during childbirth. I’m not saying we have a solution to that problem (we are far from one), but it’s at least not a new problem.
It would be a world where the Ghadafis and the Putins could breed armies of 100,000, a million, all raised in barracks and surveilled from birth. The critics would have no say, none of these children are theirs. The political enemies would become allies, just so they might have influence in where those armies are pointed. Entire crops of insect-people, superficially human, but psychologically tortured into compliance, outnumbering anyone who might want to put a stop to it. And don't get me wrong, I think the United States would do it too, even if it might need to hide it for awhile.
>Imagine a Mars colonization effort with
Imagine a Californian colonization effort with hundreds of thousands of psychopath soldiers exactly 15 yrs old, hopped up on roids, raised by a few hundred drill sargeants since they could hold their heads up, slowly marching through and getting rid of anyone who wasn't flagged as an elite.
The reason you don't have stormtroopers doing this now is because there are only a few hundred of them who would be willing to do that at any given point at time. But when you can literally multiple humans with machines, then their numbers could grow quickly and to absurd degree.
You're describing peasant armies since time immemorial.
> reason you don't have stormtroopers doing this now is because there are only a few hundred of them who would be willing to do that at any given point at time
The reason is it's expensive to train and equip them. Human beings, particularly the ones used for cannon fodder, have historically been cheap.
California is already colonized. What you're describing sounds more like some of the horrors of the DRC wars, which have seen the use of child soldiers. Moral horror is perfectly possible for those who wish to build it, without requiring any kind of artificial birth.
The US doesn't really have the former, and does have the latter. But artificial gestation would give it the former (to a degree not really seen in the modern world), even as the latter crumble.
Heinlein also explored that possibility a bit in one of his juveniles — in the novel, the tank farms were called "creches."
Friend just gave birth. I honestly don’t understand how anyone who has been proximate to childbirth can believe in intelligent design.
Everything about human birthing is a hack. The placenta. The rotation and cord and length of the process. The ridiculous frequency of stupid fuck-ups which often result in the death of a baby or the mother or both. Pregnancy strikes me as one of those processes proximate technology could absolutely do better than nature in 9/10 cases.
> "[The] debate that will fundamentally alter Barrayar's future is being carried on right now among their wives and daughters. To use it, or not to use it? Too late to keep it out, it's already here. The middle classes are picking it up in droves. Every mother who loves her daughter is pressing for it, to spare her the physical dangers of biological childbearing. They're fighting not the old men, who haven't got a clue, but an old guard of their sisters who say to their daughters, in effect, We had to suffer, so must you! Look around tonight, Mark. You're witnessing the last generation of men and women on Barrayar who will dance this dance in the old way."
-- Mirror Dance by Lois McMaster Bujold
Right, and partly to forestall any appeal-to-nature responses, I'll borrow from another top-favorite author, with emphasis added:
> The Patrician took a sip of his beer. “I have told this to few people, gentlemen, and I suspect I never will again, but one day when I was a young boy on holiday in Uberwald I was walking along the bank of a stream when I saw a mother otter with her cubs. A very endearing sight, I’m sure you will agree, and even as I watched, the mother otter dived into the water and came up with a plump salmon, which she subdued and dragged on to a half-submerged log. As she ate it, while of course it was still alive, the body split and I remember to this day the sweet pinkness of its roes as they spilled out, much to the delight of the baby otters who scrambled over themselves to feed on the delicacy. One of nature’s wonders, gentlemen: mother and children dining upon mother and children. And that’s when I first learned about evil. It is built into the very nature of the universe. Every world spins in pain. If there is any kind of supreme being, I told myself, it is up to all of us to become his moral superior.”
> The two wizards exchanged a glance. Vetinari was staring into the depths of his beer mug and they were glad that they did not know what he saw in there.
-- Unseen Academicals by Terry Pratchett
Conception, yes. Hell, many animal childbirths (and egg emergences), also yes.
Human childbirth? Obviously subject to personal taste, but I'm not seeing it. To approach its messiness we must look to some of the most inbred animals we've engineered, e.g. French bulldogs [1].
[1] https://www.frenchbulldogbreed.net/blog/can-french-bulldogs-...
One way to believe in intelligent design despite how awful human childbirth is compared to those for other animals -- is found in Genesis:
Humans decided they knew better than God about what is best for themselves so they didn't listen to His one and only (at the time) command. So He imposed some consequences, including "I will make your pains in childbearing very severe; with painful labor you will give birth to children." Genesis 3:16.
Parents allow or impose consequences to signal to children when their choices could be wiser.
Torture is generally off limits. And then God didn't think through the invention of epidurals for his punishment which didn't say it would expire once they were invented, or only wanted to keep punishing the poorest most downtrodden without access to hospitals?
But they are consequences, not punishment. For punishment, see a sibling comment elsewhere on this page that has a massive quote.
edit: found it. Adams gets to eat plants from the soils (instead of form the trees?) and will work hard to produce those plants.
Just before, the Serpens deceive the women by telling her eating the fruits not in the middle of the garden is ok. She was suspicious but the Serpens was very convincing (by lying) However when Eve told Adam to eat the fruit, he didn’t ask anything and did it. IMHO the man is more in fault here because he didn’t even try to understand why he should eat Eve fruits while god said no.
> To Adam he said, “Because you listened to your wife and ate fruit from the tree about which I commanded you, ‘You must not eat from it,’
“Cursed is the ground because of you; through painful toil you will eat food from it all the days of your life. 18 It will produce thorns and thistles for you, and you will eat the plants of the field. 19 By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground, since from it you were taken; for dust you are and to dust you will return.”
https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Genesis%203&ver...
Edit: the supposition in Genesis is if they hadn't ever eaten, they'd be alive today.
If someone tells me “You can have any drinks in the fridge but don’t drink that bottle under the sink, or you will die” means the bottle under the sink is poison, not that they plan on murdering you if you drink it. They can choose not to murder you, that is on them, not on the sink bottle. But when you are the all power supreme being, I guess you can say or do anything you want.
Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent.
Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil?
Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?
QED.
Human childbirth is terrible because we walk upright and the four-limb vertebrae with pelvis+spine design is built for quadrupedal movement. The changes necessary to make bipedal movement work (combined with larger complex brains) make childbirth difficult. A case of competing requirements that can't be improved without redesigning the entire skeletal structure from scratch - something a God could trivially do but evolution has trouble with over such a short time span.
The nutritional requirements for a large brain plus quirks of our evolutionary path are also responsible for menses/monthly cycles. That is literally a mechanism to flush out fertilized embryos that may not be well-formed. It is extremely uncommon in animals. Most animals that have some need to pause or terminate fetal development do it cooperatively; the mother's chemical signals will command the fetus to slow, stop, or even kill itself and the fetus obeys. Humans are among the extreme few where mother-fetus interactions are adversarial.
Miscarriages are relatively common for the same reason: a human baby is expensive and hard on the mother. Any hint it might be developing incorrectly and better to dump it so we can start over.
Let's not even get to the fragile disaster that is the human back.
But I used the word Consequence.
As for Punishment, I found this quote to be helpful in understanding:
"It is just with God eternally to cast off and destroy sinners."- For this is the punishment which the law condemns to- The truth of this doctrine may appear by the joint consideration of two things, viz. Man's sinfulness, and God's sovereignty.
I. It appears from the consideration of man's sinfulness. And that whether we consider the infinitely evil nature of all sin, or how much sin men are guilty of.
1. If we consider the infinite evil and heinousness of sin in general, it is not unjust in God to inflict what punishment is deserved; because the very notion of deserving any punishment is, that it may be justly inflicted. A deserved punishment and a just punishment are the same thing. To say that one deserves such a punishment, and yet to say that he does not justly deserve it, is a contradiction; and if he justly deserves it, then it may be justly inflicted.
Every crime or fault deserves a greater or less punishment, in proportion as the crime itself is greater or less. If any fault deserves punishment, then so much the greater the fault, so much the greater is the punishment deserved. The faulty nature of any thing is the formal ground and reason of its desert of punishment; and therefore the more any thing hath of this nature, the more punishment it deserves. And therefore the terribleness of the degree of punishment, let it be never be so terrible, is no argument against the justice of it, if the proportion does but hold between the heinousness of the crime and the dreadfulness of the punishment; so that if there be any such thing as a fault infinitely heinous, it will follow that it is just to inflict a punishment for it that is infinitely dreadful.
A crime is more or less heinous, according as we are under greater or less obligations to the contrary. This is self-evident; because it is herein that the criminalness or faultiness of any thing consists, that it is contrary to what we are obliged or bound to, or what ought to be in us. So the faultiness of one being hating another, is in proportion to his obligation to love him. The crime of one being despising and casting contempt on another, is proportionably more or less heinous, as he was under greater or less obligations to honour him. The fault of disobeying another, is greater or less, as any one is under greater or less obligations to obey him. And therefore if there be any being that we are under infinite obligations to love, and honour, and obey, the contrary towards him must be infinitely faulty.
Our obligation to love, honour, and obey any being, is in proportion to his loveliness, honourableness, and authority; for that is the very meaning of the words. When we say any one is very lovely, it is the same as to say, that he is one very much to be loved. Or if we say such a one is more honourable than another, the meaning of the words is, that he is one that we are more obliged to honour. If we say any one has great authority over us, it is the same as to say, that he has great right to our subjection and obedience.
But God is a being infinitely lovely, because he hath infinite excellency and beauty. To have infinite excellency and beauty, is the same thing as to have infinite loveliness. He is a being of infinite greatness, majesty, and glory; and therefore he is infinitely honourable. He is infinitely exalted above the greatest potentates of the earth, and highest angels in heaven; and therefore he is infinitely more honourable than they. His authority over us is infinite; and the ground of his right to our obedience is infinitely strong; for he is infinitely worthy to be obeyed himself, and we have an absolute, universal, and infinite dependence upon him.
So that sin against God, being a violation of infinite obligations, must be a crime infinitely heinous, and so deserving of infinite punishment.- Nothing is more agreeable to the common sense of mankind, than that sins committed against any one, must be proportionably heinous to the dignity of the being offended and abused; as it is also agreeable to the word of God, I Samuel 2:25. "If one man sin against another, the judge shall judge him;" (i.e. shall judge him, and inflict a finite punishment, such as finite judges can inflict;) "but if a man sin against the Lord, who shall entreat for him?" This was the aggravation of sin that made Joseph afraid of it. Genesis 39:9. "How shall I commit this great wickedness, and sin against God?" This was the aggravation of David's sin, in comparison of which he esteemed all others as nothing, because they were infinitely exceeded by it. Psalm 51:4. "Against thee, thee only have I sinned."-The eternity of the punishment of ungodly men renders it infinite: and it renders it no more than infinite; and therefore renders no more than proportionable to the heinousness of what they are guilty of.
If there be any evil or faultiness in sin against God, there is certainly infinite evil: for if it be any fault at all, it has an infinite aggravation, viz. that it is against an infinite object. If it be ever so small upon other accounts, yet if it be any thing, it has one infinite dimension; and so is an infinite evil. Which may be illustrated by this: if we suppose a thing to have infinite length, but no breadth and thickness, (a mere mathematical line,) it is nothing: but if it have any breadth and thickness, though never so small, and infinite length, the quantity of it is infinite; it exceeds the quantity of any thing, however broad, thick, and long, wherein these dimensions are all finite.
So that the objections made against the infinite punishment of sin, from the necessity, or rather previous certainty, of the futurition of sin, arising from the unavoidable original corruption of nature, if they argue any thing, argue against any faultiness at all: for if this necessity or certainty leaves any evil at all in sin, that fault must be infinite by reason of the infinite object.
But every such objector as would argue from hence, that there is no fault at all in sin, confutes himself, and shows his own insincerity in his objection. For at the same time that he objects, that men's acts are necessary, and that this kind of necessity is inconsistent with faultiness in the act, his own practice shows that he does not believe what he objects to be true: otherwise why does he at all blame men? Or why are such persons at all displeased with men, for abusive, injurious, and ungrateful acts towards them? Whatever they pretend, by this they show that indeed they do believe that there is no necessity in men's acts that is inconsistent with blame. And if their objection be this, that this previous certainty is by God's own ordering, and that where God orders an antecedent certainty of acts, he transfers all the fault from the actor on himself; their practice shows, that at the same time they do not believe this, but fully believe the contrary: for when they are abused by men, they are displeased with men, and not with God only.
The light of nature teaches all mankind, that when an injury is voluntary, it is faulty, without any consideration of what there might be previously to determine the futurition of that evil act of the will. And it really teaches this as much to those that object and cavil most as to others; as their universal practice shows. By which it appears, that such objections are insincere and perverse. Men will mention others' corrupt nature when they are injured, as a thing that aggravates their crime, and that wherein their faultiness partly consists. How common is it for persons, when they look on themselves greatly injured by another, to inveigh against him, and aggravate his baseness, by saying, "He is a man of a most perverse spirit: he is naturally of a selfish, niggardly, or proud and haughty temper: he is one of a base and vile disposition." And yet men's natural and corrupt dispositions are mentioned as an excuse for them, with respect to their sins against God, as if they rendered them blameless.
2. That it is just with God eternally to cast off wicked men, may more abundantly appear, if we consider how much sin they are guilty of...
It doesn't make any sense because it isn't rational to begin with.
But it makes sense if one does two things:
1. hold all the rest of existence to be as the light dust of the balance in worth compared to God
2. see what other parts of the Bible say about the troublesome passage in question.
> ... people thousands of generations removed who have no responsibility ...
If you grew up with this stuff, then you already know:
- even without Adam's representation, each of us has already committed the same error of thinking we know better than God, or holding something else as worth more to us than God
- rejecting the idea that someone could represent you before God would include rejecting the offer that Jesus could represent you and take your sentence and allow God to see you with Jesus' record.
From what sentence? Hell isn't part of the old testament and was borrowed from other religions or later inventions after the torah, it was Sheol.
By contrast, science can make synthetic insulin for example.
> By contrast, science can make synthetic insulin for example.
Can it? Afaik all insulin is completely organic in nature. We still fully rely on existing life to create insulin. Not to dissimilar from IVF actually.
> IVF still relies on the human reproductive machinery to produce the gametes and gestate the baby. You’re still using human reproductive machinery to do 99% of the work.
Right and with insulin the bacterium performs 99.9% of the work. Yet, there you don't have a problem of calling it technology. So that's why I asked the very clear question. What is the threshold for you?
If you’ve written software, you know that bug-compatible replications can take longer than the original for sufficiently complex original.
Except we can perform nuclear fusion which is the essence of a star, it's just without gravity giving us a hand it takes too much electricity right now to do it at a large scale.
From Genesis 3:16, “To the woman he said, ‘I will make your pains in childbearing very severe; with painful labor you will give birth to children.’”
Someone only read the first part of the book.
I think a lot about proton pumps. I know it has to have evolved naturally, but it looks so engineered. I am certain there's a lot more to the process of evolution than we currently know.
To be fair most versions of intelligent design arguments I know are also quite naive.
The number of things that can go wrong are significant. And yet despite all that, a birth happens. That is a miracle in itself. It goes against probability.
Growing children in a vat, to be bought and sold. That's what you're talking about. As a kid or young adult I never fully understood the Butlerian Jihad plot point of the DUNE universe, but as an adult and a father I certainly do now.
Being around those moms, especially my wife, it's fascinating to learn about how pregnancy is the foundation of mother-child bonding. So it's easy to see how artificial wombs would be much worse. I guess that's the point of Brave New World, how destructive the loss of that and other bonds is.
That is a bold claim, so please back it up with references to published peer reviewed research.
Just so it is said, not all cultures on the planet are as equally bad at supporting parents.
so, are those the key markets for expensive fertility treatments?
1. Get married
2. Buy house (by 30)
3. Have kid 1 by 32, to allow 2 year birth spacing for X children
etc.
People like to be wishy-washy and romantic about finding partners, settling down, having kids... but the people who end up where they want to be are usually far more intentional about it.
Currently eggs would be matured inside the mother with artificial hormones.
Now they can be removed before maturing and inflated after in a dish. Then fertilized. Then be injected back into the mother. Hormones are still used in the next step.
Still, this is a great development to lessen the entire ordeal for women undergoing IVF.
That's that country where, if you do anything such that these eggs don't make it, you're an abortionist.