“Some people, like Larry Page, one of the Google founders, expect the internet to come alive at some point, while other, like science historian George Dyson, think that migh already have happened.”

“The approach to digital culture I abhor would indeed turn all the world’s books into one book. . . . It might start to happen in the next decade or so. Google and other companies are scanning library books into the cloud in a massive Manhatten Project for cultural digitization. What happens next is what’s important. If the books in the cloud are accessed via user interfaces that encourage mashups of fragment that obscure the context and authorsite of each fragment, there will be only one book. . . .”

“The one collective book will absolutely not be the same thing as the library of books by individuals it is bankrupting. Some believe it will be better; others, including me, believe it will be disasterously worse. As the famous line goes from “Inherit the Wind”: ‘The Bible is a book . . . but it is not the only book.” Any singular, exclusive book, even the collective one accumulating in the cloud, will become a cruel book if it is the only one available.”

“According to a new creed, we technologists are turning ourselves, the planet, our species, everything, into computer peripherals attached to the great computing clouds. The news is no longer about us but about the big new computational object that is greater than us.

The colleagues I disagree with often conceive our discussions as being a contest between a Luddite (who, me?) and the future. But there is more than one possible technological future, and the debate should be about how to best identify and act on whatever freedoms of choice we still have, not about who’s the Luddite.”

“Is Avatar a Native American story?”

Answer: “Not exclusively. I think Americans locate the story there most quickly. But Avatar’s now the No. 1 movie in Brazil, and Brazil has a lot of issues with the displacement of indigenous populations and deforestation. There’s a tribe in India that is getting pushed off its sacred mountain for a bauxite mine. The film is hugely popular in China and people there are getting displaced by the govenment to build dams. So people are relating to it from all these different perspectives.”

“Last week, [textbook publisher] Macmillan announced new software to let college instructors rewrite textbooks by substituting new material for what the author wrote . . . We have to wonder about the unintended consequences of a textbook absent an author . . . Technology creates opportunities, and the genie shouldn’t go back in the bottle. Still, the integrity and authenticity that a single author provides should not be lost.”

“Evolutionary views of creation also steer us into a deeper engagement with the natural world, as we see ourselves quite literally connected to the creatures and ecologies around us. The idea that our world emerged from deep time through natural selection implies that the wonderful diversity we see around us is contingent, unique, and precious. They provide arguments for better stewardship of the natural environment, because its current state took an enormous length of time. The creatures of the Earth are not only there for us, but we are also there for them. A Darwinian theology argues that care for creation becomes an important aspect of God’s grace to the natural world through us.”

“Evolutionary views of creation also steer us into a deeper engagement with the natural world, as we see ourselves quite literally connected to the creatures and ecologies around us. The idea that our world emerged from deep time through natural selection implies that the wonderful diversity we see around us is contingent, unique, and precious. They provide arguments for better stewardship of the natural environment, because its current state took an enormous length of time. The creatures of the Earth are not only there for us, but we are also there for them. A Darwinian theology argues that care for creation becomes an important aspect of God’s grace to the natural world through us.”

“Unsurprisingly, to Darwin, God gradually came to seem less personal, benevolent, attentive, and active. Surely, such a loving, personal Deity would have created in another way (other than evolution), a way that involved less trial and error, fewer false starts, fewer mindless species extinction, fewer pointless cruelties, and less reliance on predation to sort out the fit from the unfit. Darwin arguably never lost his faith in God. Rather, he believed that God created through the evolutionary process, but his growing knowledge of that process dramatically transformed his view of God, which left him ill at ease with the anthropomorphic personal theism of his day and at odds with friends and colleagues who believed in a personal, benevolent, attentive, and active divine being.

Christians and othe theists who casually assert that God creates through evolution–as if there is no theological problem with this assertion–should pause and consider Darwin’s faith journey. Darwin was theologically more perceptive than many of his liberal endorsers. He knew that evolution puts enormous stress on the idea of God. . . .”