Dubai’s Attempt at Playing God Results in Wrath
Humans have always had a fascination with replacing God with science
On Tuesday, videos made the rounds on social media of an epic storm in Dubai. In what looked like footage from a movie about a dystopian future, lightning flashed through thick black clouds, rain fell in quantities that would have made Noah quiver and huge jets took off down runways that looked like lakes.
Now, as you may know, Dubai is considered one of the nicest cities in the world. It’s located in the United Arab Emirates in the Middle East. The entire area is basically one giant desert. It averages 3.7 inches of rainfall per year. On Tuesday, 5.6 inches fell on the city in one day. What in the world was happening?
Dubai had fallen victim to playing God.
Having one of the most cosmopolitan cities in the world is great but seeing less than 4 inches of rain in a year is less than ideal. So someone, I’m assuming the UAE government, decided to hire a company to “seed the clouds” above the city to make it rain.
Making it Rain
Cloud seeding is not a new idea – way back in 1946 the first attempts were made to force clouds to create rain. Seeding is done by flying an airplane into the clouds and releasing some substance like dry ice or silver iodide – in Dubai’s case it was something called “salt flares” – into the clouds.
The idea is that ice crystals will form around these “seeds,” which will condense into water, and when enough water has collected, the clouds will dump it in the form of rain.
Although it’s been around for a long time, it’s seldom worked any better than a Native American rain dance. But recently there’s renewed interest in the concept as a way to make arid areas like the Middle East deserts and the United States’ Southwest more habitable.
One U.S. company, appropriately named Rainmaker, says it has pumped up its rainmaking capabilities by using microphysics to create better seeds, radar tracking to find the ideal condition for seeding and unmanned drones for more accurate seeding.
It sounds great, but the deluge in Dubai suggests that maybe playing God isn’t such a great idea.
A Long History of Playing God
But the concept of replacing God with science is such an attractive idea. In the Middle Ages, it was alchemists trying to turn lead into gold. Four years ago it was creating a “vaccine” that would stimulate our immune systems but turned into a DNA-altering nightmare.
Even fiction writers have enjoyed the idea of scientists becoming God-like creators but having their creations turn on them, from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein in 1819 to Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park in 1990.
Science has, of course, given us many wonderful things, from medicine to technology. We now have antibiotics that can easily cure an illness that we would have died from 200 years ago. We can receive information from around the world in an instant that would have taken days or weeks 200 years ago.
But there are also disasters. In the 1950s a drug called thalidomide was prescribed to pregnant women to treat anxiety, sleeplessness and morning sickness. The result was the birth of babies with horrible deformities. Asbestos was long used as an effective fire retardant in many buildings, but when it began to crumble it led to cancer.
Even seeming natural solutions could backfire. In the mid-20th Century, a Japanese vine called kudzu was planted in areas of the Southeast United States to fight soil erosion caused by lack of vegetation. It seemed like a great solution because it grew fast – up to a foot per day. But the problem was that it grew fast. Today in many areas of the South fences, telephone poles, buildings, even entire trees have been overtaken by kudzu. It is now considered a nuisance species.
Knowledge and Wisdom Needed
Still, our quest for God-like abilities continues, from cloud seeding to research into reducing or even reversing human aging. On one hand, we want that. On the other, we fear it.
One danger in playing God is knowledge, or our lack of it. In Isaiah God has this to say about the difference between Him and us: “For My thoughts are not your thoughts, and your ways are not My ways.” This is the Lord’s declaration. “For as heaven is higher than earth, so My ways are higher than your ways, and My thoughts than your thoughts.” (Isaiah 55:8-9)
But another danger is a lack of wisdom, best summed up by a quote from Jeff Goldblum’s character in the movie Jurassic Park regarding the creation of dinosaurs. “Yeah, but your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could that they didn’t stop to think if they should.”
Wisdom without knowledge is impotent; knowledge without wisdom is dangerous. Progress is good and beneficial only when it combines both wisdom and knowledge.
Cloud seeding could eventually turn out to be a good idea if people use both knowledge and wisdom. Otherwise, someone should probably start building an ark.