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I probably shouldn’t be doing Thought for the Day this morning. For the last couple of weeks I’ve had a nasty chest infection that I can’t seem to shift and indeed I’m asthmatic. It feels like I am sucking air through a wet sponge and I’m constantly exhausted. Yesterday, I finished a course of antibiotics – which usually sorts the thing out. But this time they don’t seem to have worked. Which was why I was particularly alert to the recent warning from the World Health Organisation that antibiotics are becoming less and less efficacious and that we are heading towards a post-antibiotic world. As a spokesman for the WHO put it “Effective antibiotics have been one of the pillars allowing us to live longer, live healthier. Unless we take significant actions to change how we produce, prescribe and use antibiotics, the implications will be devastating.” Perhaps then it makes little ultimate difference who owns AstraZeneca. For just maybe, we are facing the prospect of a terrifying new world in which pharmaceutical technology will no longer provide us with the sort of protection that we’ve got used to since the mid part of the twentieth century. Just maybe, we are losing our immunity from those medical conditions we thought we had beaten. In which case the enlightenment dream of continual never-ending progress looks increasingly hubristic. It seems we are no longer mini-gods after all. And this is where the theology comes in. For one of the things that the Judeo-Christian tradition has always insisted upon is that we are not gods. That is the point of iconoclasm: that radical Biblical distrust of anything other than God that presents itself as being of ultimate concern. Only God is God. And we are mortals, and intrinsically vulnerable. For a while, some people believed that all our technological swagger could augment the human condition in a way that would protect us from our intrinsic vulnerability. There was, of course, always a terrible unreality about all of this – as if, through technology, humanity could find release from the very things that make us human: not least, sickness and death. It was, I believe, an escapist fantasy. And we are reminded of this once again as we entertain the possibility that bacteria can evolve faster than pharmaceuticals. The very real prospect of the end of antibiotics reminds us that we are fragile, vulnerable creatures after all. And maybe we’re better employed in making our peace with this reality rather than pretending we are something other than we are. Speaking personally, I have never been all that impressed by the claims some people make for life-changing technology. This is not a counsel of despair. Yes, of course I’d like my chest infection to go away. And yes, of course I wish the Amoxicillin had done its job. But ultimately, the failure of my physical form is something that I will have to face. For me, that’s always going to be a theological issue: a matter of life, death and ultimate meaning. And no amount of technology can ever begin to deal with that one for me.