by Michael Stonecipher

Created on: February 07, 2009

From the blurred beginnings of human history, man's survival has been dependent upon his ability to use his mind and finer fingers to manipulate the raw and seemingly anarchic environment and to create what he needed from what he found lying at his once bare feet. In the dark recesses of history there dwelt a solitary man. This man may have been afraid. This man may have felt powerless. He lived at the mercy of the elements and in constant horror of rustling in the tall grass. In time, he learned to master fire and did battle with the cold. He learned to fashion weapons that could ward of mighty claws and fearsome teeth. Man is a manipulator, and through this genius of taking what is there and making what is needed, great power is garnered. It is the power to know, to survive, and to speak, "Ordo Ab Kaos." (Order out of Chaos)

History teaches us that this man even began to develop ideas about the origins of the elements, and the sources of the spirits that ruled the rustling, and then began to manipulate them through ritual and supplication in order to garner a sense, however contrived, as the case may be, of power. Even in this, it seems, man, unlike other animals, is the creator of his own power. It is now, in modern times that the power to manipulate and the power to imagine the ultimate manipulator come into conflict.

Let us traverse the millennia between that man who shivered, powerless, before he picked up a rock and shattered it into a shard, and examine the newest scion
of this noble race of primate, this apotheosis of the animal. We manipulate. He has mastered his environment so completely that nearly all of that original birthing
earth, primordial and pregnant, is gone. Man now sends eyes to the stars and sets number to the galaxies, he has probed the smallest fragments of matter and learned to manipulate the myriad and complex mechanisms of the flesh. This knowledge tempts us, perhaps even corrupts us, to envision our own omniscience. How long after patenting genetically modified tomatoes will he seek to patent a man. This statement in itself, "to patent a man", sends shivers down the spine. Out of the power to remake his environment has grown the power to, potentially, remake himself. This power tempts us to envision
our own omnipotence.

Omniscience? Omnipotence? These are words usually kept within the purview of the theologian. Why and when did we begin to apply these most weighty of words to men and women? Is it heresy? Is it blasphemous to devise tests

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