The phrase, playing God, appears to be one a theologian might use. But in contemporary parlance it has taken on secular significance. It refers to the powers that science, engineering, and technology confer on human beings to understand and to control the natural world.

Celebration and Criticism

The playing God metaphor has been used in both celebratory and critical contexts. In celebration, H. G. Wells's novel Men Like Gods (1923) describes an advanced human civilization in which people lead the life of demigods, very free, strongly individualized ... a practical communism." Indeed the communist movement sometimes described itself as realizing previously thwarted divinelike possibilities in human nature. Inventor R. Buckminster Fuller proclaimed the advent of No More Second-Hand God (1963) through science and technology. The psychologist Erich Fromm, in his book You Shall Be as Gods (1966), argued the need to assume responsibilities for many new powers that were once...