In His Image and Likeness

 

Both Judaism and Christianity teach that humankind is made "in the image and likeness of God", but what that means, exactly, has always been something that has puzzled me.  What does that mean?  Since God is a spiritual being (I suppose), God has no 'image' for us to be made 'in'.  Alternatively, a spiritual being may be able to assume any image at all, but that makes the claim even more mysterious.  It could simply mean that we are created as spiritual beings ourselves.  In that vein, someone once responded to the statement: 'you have a soul', with: "You do not have a soul.  You are a soul; you have a body",  which I thought at the time was a very perceptive observation.

What if that original claim, that we are made in the image and likeness of God, is a promise rather than descriptive?  Instead of 'every man a king', perhaps we are working our way toward 'every man a God'.  Galileo famously quipped

"I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use and by some other means to give us knowledge which we can attain by them." 

Since then, scientific knowledge and talent have grown by leaps and bounds at an ever-increasing velocity.  Moore's Law is a rule-of-thumb among the IT profession that posits 'technology doubles in 14 months'.  Were Benjamin Franklin asked 'how long does it take for technology to double?' he might have said '25 years'.  Carl Sagan would have answered '4 years'.  Now we say '14 months', and there is some speculation that it's now less than Moore's boast when he first made it.  In other words, progress is increasing exponentially.  At some point, the answer may become 'Well, it just did!'.  Our surgeons now do operations that, just a few hundred years ago, would have gotten them burned at the stake for witchcraft.  Clarke's Third Law (Arthur C., not me) stipulates that "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic".  The frontier of our knowledge is advancing so fast that we can envision a world in which Captain Jean-Luc Picard can command his wall unit to produce Earl Grey tea, hot, and fully expect that the requested product will appear in seconds, and that travelling from the Earth to the Moon is done not with loud, noisy, complex, and expensive rockets over the course of a week, but by stepping into a matter-transporter and being beamed there in the blink of an eye.

What if we are made in the image and likeness of God because God expects us to be like Him, to fashion ourselves into the Gods He gave us the capacity to become?  Perhaps being God is a lonely situation and He would enjoy having others of His kind — made in His image and likeness — to keep Him company... as soon as we earn the privilege by figuring out what that entails.