MSLN Reasons to Oppose X-Risks

10 December 2021: See also Disestablishedness vs. Anti-temptation.

Existential risks (things that wipe out the human species (extinction risks); make it so that future humans can never regain our level of civilization; or cause a sufficiently large amount of suffering, perhaps "forever") are of obvious concern to humanists. If there is no God, then it would seem that humans are responsible for stopping X-risks. We can't count on anyone else helping. (A view like this can be found in X-Risk by Thomas Moynihan.)

Should a theist care about existential risk? I'll consider the MSLN point of view.

One reason existential risks that do not cause extinction are a problem is the suffering they cause. Suffering is bad in itself but a broken-down civilization may also not be optimal for drawing people to God. One existential risk is global totalitarian government, which could cause suffering and put people in bondage, no less spiritual than political.

A "clean" extinction could also be a problem from God's point of view. We tend to think that there has been such a thing as moral progress from the early days of humanity. Christians think this came through Abraham, his descendants, and Jesus and his followers. Secular people think this came through civilizational development (or something like that). Either way, it takes a lot of work to get where we are now. For some reason, God didn't create us all with a nice, morally-progressed culture. Perhaps there were reasons why he couldn't. So then an extinction either causes him to say "that's it, that's the total number of people who will ever exist" or "now I have to create another universe and live through the process of civilizational/kingdom maturing again". Neither option would be optimal for God, in seeking rest, unless the extinction happened exactly when he would have ended the world anyway.

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If MSLN were used as the base for a reason (or reasons) to oppose X-risk, it might look something like this:

We have to pay attention to reason because it enables us to deal with the ultimate risk, punishment from God, if we risk hardening through being closed to reason. The voice of God changing us to become fit for him can come through inferences, and if we feel like we are sovereigns who can ignore the implications of facts, when we do so we may be shutting out God. Reason gives us the framework to take everything seriously, and the sense of obligation to facts, so we don't just disregard them when we feel like it. Through that, we oppose X-risk, even if X-risk is not an obvious problem, visible right in front of us. Through reason, we care about future people, as much as through it we would care about people living far away.

The preceding paragraph is provisional. I should make a more developed post on the relationship between belief in God and reason.

God wants civilization to be preserved. He suffered a lot to see civilization this far. Civilization is better than non-civilization for preventing hardening. Or if it's not, civilization is more or less inevitable -- humans seek success and success adds up to civilization. But alternative civilizations to our own could actually be worse from God's perspective, so it's worth preserving it ourselves, until he chooses to end it. Preserving (and improving) our own civilization, it seems, is the best way to prevent hardening. So people's lives (eternal lives) are at stake, in us preserving civilization.

God could always intervene in trying to preserve civilization, and he may be quite active, behind the scenes. But he may not protect us from everything. The genocides of the 20th century weren't what he really wanted, but they happened. But humans might have been able to prevent them, even if he wouldn't or couldn't.

We are motivated by fear (the origin of reason) and also by love (concern for those, including ourselves, who might be hardened in an environment with more contributions to hardening than our own civilization).