Transformers the Movie

Movie Prologue: “Before time began, there was the Cube. We know not where it comes from, only that it holds the power to create worlds, and fill them with life. That is how our race was born...

Using a cube (called "The All-Spark") to represent a supernatural creator was an arbitrary choice made by producers of Transformers. A cube is comprehensible to the human mind, which proves that a human came up with it.

But there some significant parallels between the All-Spark and the Living God.

Notice that the All-Spark is vulnerable to its own creation. The typical manmade deity sits far off from mankind, invincible and unapproachable. However, the good guys in Transformers end up saving the day by "killing" the All-Spark. Here is one simple parallel between Jesus Christ and the All-Spark: Jesus stepped down from His place at God's right hand to make Himself vulnerable to men, even to the point of letting men torture and kill Him. This was the unexpected method by which Christ saved mankind and demonstrated His Divinity.

The creators of Transformers did right by pointing out the divine genius of biology. They attributed their intelligence and mechanical complexity to biological roots.

This appropriate because flesh is not terribly different from metal. Both flesh and metal come from the ground. They are both made from basic elements found in nature. Either flesh or metal might carry around consciousness, depending on the Creator's choice. Metal just happens to be simpler; simple enough for humans to mold and manipulate. Machines resemble the life God created they require creativity and deliberate engineering. They only lack that one mysterious element that humans will never be able to conjure up on their own: Consciousness.

Any biologist who takes a minute to contemplate their profession will admit that life, or the origin of life, is truly mysterious. It must have been a Supernatural Force that invent life.

Do you see how creative life is? We consider ourselves intelligent for our manipulation of the biological systems that God put in place... but God invented the idea of life. Life as we know it didn't exist until God came up with this clever idea.

God decided that we should have the capacity to manipulate life. He chose to give us this ability. Therefore, we mortals can only revise and reorder the elements in God put in place. Someone who manipulates this physical reality better than other people (such as a chemist or an abstract artist) might be considered especially smart, or creative. But God is the Author of the concept of creativity. You can’t beat that.

The origin of life must be supernatural. There must be something to spark life into lifeless dirt or metal. Life, especially consciousness, is an inexplicable mystery.

We might invent a robotic quality of artificial intelligence, but we can never re-invent life or an artificial consciousness. Computers can do what humans tell them to do, which is a limited kind of intelligence; they might even “learn” to make decisions on their own one of these days. But life is something beyond microchips and hard drives.

Men, who were given life, were also given certain limitations. All supernatural authority (and indeed all authority in general) is reserved for the the Original Divine One, the Originator.

Many of those who deny God would like to think that life is nothing more than complex, biological mechanisms. Such a limited understanding of life might inspire a man to spend his whole life welding silicon and metal together in a futile attempt to recreate life. This man might come up with a more-fancy-than-average computer, but his metal and silicon will never attain to consciousness.

We can’t crack open a person to find their consciousness the same way a clock maker cracks open a clock to see its inner mechanisms, and yet we admit that we are conscious. Yes, our bodies are made of biological mechanisms, but these mechanisms in themselves do not make us valuable. Our value is a spiritual trait that God instills in us.

It's no coincidence that people who don’t know God would like to throw away the lives of people who are crippled or flawed in some obvious way... because they don't know God they don’t understand what makes people valuable. For this reason, the further our society strays from God, the more acceptable it will be to throw away people's lives because they are too young or too old or because they don’t seem productive enough. If we were machines, then our inherent value would be dictated by our measurable productivity.

But Jesus' actions demonstrate the fact that our value is immeasurable by human standards.

The closer we are to God's heart the better we will understand that human life is precious in itself.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hmm. All I got out of it was a bunch of robots beating the tar out of each other.
Shows how much attention I was paying.

Pat R said...

no harm, that's usually what i get out of it too