Yuval Noah Harari, is an atheist gay Israeli author with an Oxford PhD in Philosophy who practices buddhist vipassana meditation two hours a day.

He says he does not use a smartphone, and is an advisor and speaker for the World Economic Forum.

In 2017 Harari published Homo Deus: A brief history of tomorrow, 402 pages plus notes.(1) The book title, Latin for “Man-God,” stands for Harari’s suggestion that “having raised humanity above the beastly level of survival struggles, we will now aim to upgrade humans into gods, and turn Homo Sapiens into Homo Deus.”(2) According to Harari, “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.”(3)

A New Religion

Before dismissing Harari, realize that many elites pay close attention to his voice. His understanding of who and what man is, is embraced in whole or in part by many of today’s most powerful. And what are those views?

Egyptian pharaohs and Chinese emperors, failed to overcome famine, plague and war, despite millennia of effort. Modern societies managed to do it within a few centuries. Isn’t this the fruit of abandoning intersubjective myths in favor of objective scientific knowledge? And can we not expect this process to accelerate in the coming decades?….(4)

But Harari isn’t claiming that science operates independently and objectively.

Modern science certainly changed the rules of the game, yet it did not simply replace myths with facts. Myths continue to dominate humankind, and science only makes these myths stronger. Instead of destroying the intersubjective reality, science will enable it to control the objective and subjective realities more completely than ever before. Thanks to computers and bioengineering, the difference between fiction and reality will blur, as people reshape reality to match their pet fictions.(5)

Harari’s story is that humanity has abandoned subjective beliefs and that by turning to objective knowledge our species has made great progress. Nevertheless, because of these very advances, increasingly humans will live in their own perceptual bubbles with their own sense of what reality is. This is the fruit of what is actually, according to Harari, a new religion. How does he define religion?

Religion is any all-encompassing story that confers superhuman legitimacy on human laws, norms, and values. It legitimizes human social structures by arguing that they reflect superhuman laws.(6)

By this measure almost everything Harari says is about religion. He has a chip on his shoulder, and is especially dismissive of monotheistic religions. Listen:

More than a century after Nietzsche pronounced him dead, God seems to be making a comeback. But this is a Mirage. God is dead. It’s just taking a while to get rid of the body.(7)

From where do you think the big changes of the twenty-first century will emerge: from the Islamic State, or Google?(8)

Neither science nor religion cares that much about the truth, hence they can easily compromise, coexist, and even cooperate.

Religion is interested above all in order. It aims to create and maintain the social structure. Science is interested above all in power. Through research, it aims to acquire the power to cure diseases, fight wars, and produce food. As individuals, scientists and priests may give immense importance to the truth; but as collective institutions, science and religion prefer order and power over truth. They therefore make good bedfellows.… It would accordingly be far more accurate to view modern history as the process of formulating a deal between science and one particular religion—namely, humanism.(9)

However, Harari sees liberal humanism as the worst religion of all…

A New God

“Humankind was salvaged, not by the law of supply and demand, but rather by the rise of a revolutionary new religion—humanism.”(10) Harari says humans replaced one religion with another, replaced God-centered belief with a new belief in humanity. That is, that humans shifted from the worship of God to the worship of self. Who then is the greatest threat to this worship of self? Harari’s words:

Throughout history, prophets and philosophers have argued that if humans stopped believing in a great cosmic plan, all law and order would vanish. Yet today, those who pose the greatest threat to global law and order are precisely those people who continue to believe in God and his all-encompassing plans. God-fearing Syria is a far more violent place than the secular Netherlands.(11)

And yet, by far the greatest sustained violence in history has come from belief systems centering on human power over other humans, not the God-centered monotheistic Christian belief in respecting others, doing good toward them, respecting people’s rights, and putting others before oneself.(12) Harari won’t admit this, but does shamelessly state that,

The humanist religion worships humanity, and expects humanity to play the part that God played in Christianity and Islam, and that the laws of nature played in Buddhism and Daoism. Whereas traditionally, the great cosmic plan gave meaning to the life of humans, humanism reverses the roles and expects the experiences of humans to give meaning to the cosmos.… Accordingly, the central religious revolution of modernity was not losing faith in God; rather, it was gaining faith in humanity.(13)

Three Kinds of Humanism

At this point, Harari subdivides humanism into three branches: liberal humanism (LH), socialist humanism (SH), and evolutionary humanism (EH), corresponding loosely to what we might call liberalistic, socialistic, and evolutionistic ways of thinking.

Harari especially complains about liberal humanism because, he says, it upholds the importance of the individual. He especially faults LH because it holds that “individual free will should have far more weight than state interests or religious doctrines.”(14) Harari tells us that liberal ethics means “If it feels good, we should go ahead and do it,” and that liberal education “teaches us to think for ourselves, because we will find all the answers within.”(15) His preference is for the two latter iterations: “socialist humanism,” and “evolutionary humanism.”

In socialist humanism the party makes the decisions that matter; think USSR. The thought or feeling of the individual is of small importance; your ambitions and interests are understood as being determined by your upbringing and social surroundings.(16) Wisdom resides with the leaders of the collective. “Authority, and meaning, still come from human experience.” “Yet individuals must listen to the party, and the trade union rather than to their personal feelings.”(17)

Then there is evolutionary humanism. Harari says:

Hitler and the Nazis represent only one extreme version of evolution or humanism. Just as Stalin’s gulags do not automatically nullify every socialist idea and argument, so too the horrors of Nazism should not blind us to whatever insights evolutionary humanism might offer…. Auschwitz should serve as a blood-red warning sign rather than as a black curtain that hides entire sections of the human horizon. Evolutionary humanism played an important part in the shaping of modern culture, and is likely to play an even greater role in the shaping of the twenty-first century.(18)

Harari sees the future as evolutionary humanism, or more accurately, transhumanism. Here is a rough graphic representing these ideas.

Harari’s insight is useful. Few Christians are members of the humanist club. Few of us would think of humanists in these categories. As a full-blown humanist, Harari sees and analyzes the differences. His most caustic remarks are reserved for liberal humanists which to him represent mental throwbacks. Meanwhile, he sees evolutionary humanists as representing the most forward-leaning thinking, and he has hitched his wagon to this adapted form of evolutionism. If our world goes this way, new atrocities await.

Would Harari disagree? Not necessarily:

The main products of the twenty-first-century will be bodies, brains and minds, and the gap between those who know how to engineer bodies and brains and those who do not will be far bigger than the gap between Dickens’s Britain and Mhaddi’s Sudan. Indeed, it will be bigger than the gap between Sapiens and Neanderthals. In the twenty-first-century, those who ride the train of progress will acquire divine abilities of creation and destruction, all those left behind will face extinction.(19)

Deconstructing the Individual

In the final section of his book Harari sets out to deconstruct the value, even the concept, of the individual. According to Harari, man is not an individual, he is a bundle of algorithms.

Already today the Facebook algorithm is a better judge of human personalities and dispositions than even peoples friends, parents and spouses. A study of 86,220 volunteers who have a Facebook account and who completed a 100 item personality questionnaire found that by using Facebook “likes,” Facebook’s algorithm could predict answers better than spouses. “If you happen to have clicked 300 likes on your Facebook account, the Facebook algorithm can predict your opinions and desires better than your husband or wife!”(20)

Harari holds that “liberalism will collapse on the day the system knows me better than I know myself.”(21) He says,

The shifting of authority from humans to algorithms is happening all around us, not as a result of some momentous governmental decision, but due to a flood of mundane personal choices… In the twenty-first century the individual is more likely to disintegrate gently from within than to be brutally crushed from without… in the process the individual will transpire to be nothing but a religious fantasy.(22)

He asks, “What, then, will happen once we realize that customers and voters never make free choices, and once we have the technology to calculate, design, or outsmart their feelings?”(23) His delusion goes so far as to say “once we can design and redesign our will, we could no longer see it as the ultimate source of all meaning in authority. For no matter what our will says, we can always make it say something else.”(24)

According to Harari, humans are momentary bundles of feelings. He believes that humans have no single, unified self(25) and that specialized algorithms will be able to manage our lives better than we ourselves can manage them.

Humans will still be valuable collectively, but will lose their individual authority, and instead be managed by external algorithms. The system will still need you to compose symphonies, teach history, or write computer code, but it will know you better than you know yourself, and will therefore make most of the important decisions for you—and you will be perfectly happy with that. It won’t necessarily be a bad world; it will, however, be a post-liberal world.(26)

And so he states the superiority of the new religion. “Traditional religions assured you that your every word and action was part of some great cosmic plan, and that God watched you every minute and cared about all your thoughts and feelings.”(27) But,

When you read the Bible you are getting advice from a few priests and rabbis who lived in ancient Jerusalem . In contrast, when you listen to your feelings, you follow an algorithm that evolution has developed for millions of years, and that withstood the harshest quality-control tests of natural selection. Your feelings are the voice of millions of ancestors, each of whom managed to survive and reproduce in an unforgiving environment. Your feelings are not infallible, of course, but they are better than most other sources of guidance.”(28)

There will be those who fit into this brave new world, and those who do not. Harari asks “What will be the political impact of a massive new class of economically useless people?”(29) He provides this chilling answer:

The coming technological bonanza will probably make it feasible to feed and support these useless masses even without any effort from their side. But what will keep them occupied and content? People must do something, or they go crazy. What will they do all day? One answer might be drugs and computer games. Unnecessary people might spend increasing amounts of time within 3D virtual-reality worlds that would provide them with far more excitement and emotional engagement than the drab reality outside. Yet such a development would deal a mortal blow to the liberal belief in the sacredness of human life and of human experiences. What’s so sacred about useless bums who pass their days devouring artificial experiences in La La Land?”(30)

But human immersion in hedonism and vice does not change God’s divine design. God designed humans for holiness and an eternity of social interaction, growth, and increasing godlikeness. We never become divine but we are forever drawn toward the good, toward the divine. That is the way to true human fulfillment. Right here, Noah Harari would do well to listen to Francis Schaefer:

Although man may say that he is no more than a machine, his whole life denies it.(31)

Harari embraces the idea that man is no more than a machine, or even less, merely an algorithm. Harari outlines an entire change in how we view humans to be.

In 2021, the news program “60 Minutes” aired an interview with Harari, painting him not as advocate for evolutionary transhumanist views but a concerned academic warning of dangers on the horizon. But readers of Homo Deus could only understand that interview as an attempt to portray Harari in a palatable light.

Bleak, Chilling, and to be Rejected in Totality

Real power always resides where the real facts reside. Contrary to most of what Harari stands for, there is a personal God who created the universe and all that is in it. After man fell from his high estate as a created personal being, God entered His own creation to restore the fallen race. What we see in Harari’s mind is a re-explanation of reality, a deconstruction of the greatness of created man. Harari’s atomization of the individual is justification for a new devaluation of humans. To the author, humans are mere bundles of algorithms. It is astonishingly superficial to declare that man is merely an algorithm. But this is the dimly-lit world Harari and his friends both envision and enact.

We didn’t ask for the changes Harari predicts to happen, and we won’t be asked. We are being directed onward as rats in a maze. Powerful persons who literally do not understand reality are bent on changing the world right underneath our feet. At various points, Harari tries to tell us that he’s not necessarily for these things but his presentation of the changes is giddy and gleeful. This future Harari and his groupies very much desire to become our reality. His vision is the bleakest and most chilling imaginable. While we should be thankful for his insider peek into the mindset of the globalist cabal, we should realize the events of recent years are only the beginning of a remarkable civilizational shift, a delusion at one and the same time making man god, and making him nothing.

This vision must be rejected in totality. His humanist religion has nothing for man but self-destruction.

Larry Kirkpatrick serves as pastor of the Muskegon and Fremont MI Seventh-day Adventist churches. His website is GreatControversy.org and YouTube channel is “Larry the guy from Michigan.” Every morning Larry publishes a new devotional video.

Notes

1. Yuval Noah Harari, Homo Deus, HarperCollins NY, 452 pp.

2. p. 21.

3. p. 23.

4. p. 180.

5. Ibid.

6. p. 182.

7. p. 270, emphasis original.

8. p. 277.

9. p. 199.

10. p. 221.

11. p. 222.