Theology of Bioshock (Part I)

One of the greatest games of all time (PC Gamer placed it 28^th all time (Feb 2010)), Bioshock will most assuredly stand the test of time.  Of course you can discuss the gameplay, which I thought was good; or you can discuss the art design, which I think is the best any game has ever had; or you can discuss the philosophy, which is extremely intriguing; but what I will discuss here, which admittedly will touch on philosophy, is rather the Theology of Bioshock, or rather a Theological interpretation of the game. 
But first, since some of you may not be familiar with the game, and may not even play computer games, I will explain the basic plot so that the following discussion makes sense.  The plot runs as follows.  A man named Andrew Ryan, who is essentially infinitely rich, has some ideals.  If you are aware of the work of Ayn Rand, such as Atlas Shrugged, and her theory of ‘Objectivism’, then you are fully aware of Andrew Ryan’s philosophy, for they are one and the same.  His name, after all, is but an anagram of Ayn Rand.  A good summary of this philosophy, to start us off, is provided by the game at the very beginning by a recorded message by Andrew Ryan himself.  Here is the message:

"Is a man not entitled to the sweat of his brow?"
"No!" Says the man in Washington, "It Belongs to the poor."
"No!" Says the man in The Vatican, "It belongs to God."
"No!" Says the man in Moscow, "It belongs to everyone!"
"I rejected those answers.
Instead, I chose something different. I chose the impossible. I chose...Rapture!
A city where the artist would not fear the censor, where the scientist would not be limited by petty morality, where the great would not be constrained by the small!
And with the sweat of your brow, Rapture can become your city as well..."

Rapture, as he mentions, is the underwater city that he builds to assure the success of his ideology, cut off from the outside world.  I do not have time to treat the philosophy at length, so I will simply summarize it.  Objectivism believes that humankind will only flourish when all men selfishly seek out their own interests.  A sign towards the very beginning of the game states “Altruism is the root of all evil” which states this succinctly.  It is essentially a form of Social Darwinism, which believes that given the right conditions, the cream will rise to the top, and the rest, well, swim or sink.  There are numerous articles on Ayn Rand’s philosophy, and its application in Bioshock, so I will not dwell on that so much as the theological implications the game makes, and what they say about the system that Ryan champions in his city of Rapture.

            None of this directly implies a theological significance to the game until we are introduced to the genetic wonder slug that can change your DNA into whatever you want, that happens to be called ‘Adam.’  This miracle discovery allows the people of Rapture to take on Godlike talents.  From shooting sparks from their arms, to climbing on the ceiling, to teleportation, the citizens of Rapture are no longer quite human, but have taken the powers of the gods for themselves.  Dr. J.S. Steinman, the head surgeon, writes:

ADAM presents new problems for the professional. As your tools improve, so do your standards. There was a time, I was happy enough to take off a wart or two, or turn a real circus freak into something you can show in the daylight. But that was then, when we took what we got, but with ADAM... the flesh becomes clay. What excuse do we have not to sculpt, and sculpt, and sculpt, until the job is done?

But sculpting is not the only option:

Ryan and ADAM, ADAM and Ryan... all those years of study, and was I ever truly a surgeon before I met them? How we plinked away with our scalpels and toy morality. Yes, we could lop a boil here, and shave down a beak there, but... but could we really change anything? No. But ADAM gives us the means to do it. And Ryan frees us from the phony ethics that held us back. Change your look, change your sex, change your race. It's yours to change, nobody else's.

Adam gives man the power to do whatever he wants, even to reshape oneself, the only thing holding back humanity is ‘toy morality.’  Reality is whatever he say it is with Adam, but Adam is not alone in the garden.  Julie Langford, who invents a way to resurrect trees, says: “…ADAM, ADAM, ADAM... It's bathtub gin, times the atom bomb, times Eve with the serpent. Let's go see what it can do.”  These godlike powers are obtained in the name of Adam as well as Eve, for while Adam changes your DNA, ‘Eve’ is the ‘ammo’ to use those changes.  The choice of words ‘Adam and Eve’ are of immense importance.  To understand this, we must have an excursus into what Catholic doctrine has called ‘Original Sin.’

            In the Garden of Eden, Adam and Eve were created, and they lived in harmony with their surroundings and most importantly, with God.  God gives them a single condition, “…but of the tree of knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall die.” (Gen 2:17)  When Eve is asked about this command by the serpent, the serpent replies “You will not die.  For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.” (Gen 3:4-5, emphasis added) We all know, of course, what happens.  Adam and Eve eat of the tree, see that they are naked, and hide themselves.  God finds Adam and asked him why they are hiding, and gets the truth that they have eaten from the forbidden tree.  Adam then accuses Eve, who in turn accuses the serpent.  All are punished.  The serpent is made to crawl on the ground, Eve is made to have pain in childbirth, and most interesting for our discussion, Adam is made to labour and “By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food” (Gen 3:19) Interestingly Adam’s punishment seems to be what Ryan praises so much, but we will delve more into this later.  Adam and Eve are subsequently driven from the Garden, and the whole history of sin and death begins. 

            Why does Bioshock place such extraordinary importance in the story of Adam and Eve?  Even one of the most important locations in the game is called Eve’s Apple.    It is because the entire city of Rapture, the entire project of Andrew Ryan, is essentially the same as Adam and Eve, which is the desire to be like God.  All the names of the city are from mythology, and most of them are gods.  Hephaestus Core, Arcadia, Apollo Square, Mercury Suites, Neptune’s Bounty, and Steinman’s love for Aphrodite are all examples.  The people of Rapture are obsessed with becoming like God, and will do anything to achieve this.  What seems in contraposition to this is the very first banner one see upon entering the city, which states: “No Gods or Kings.  Only Man.” This banner has a huge bust of Andrew Ryan above it, leaving an ironic feeling as we are made to believe that Andrew Ryan has broken the first rule of his city before we have even entered it, for we come to find out that he is both King and God of Rapture, and all of it is a temple to him.  In fact everyone in the city, in their foolish attempt to fully follow their selfish desires, have made themselves, each and everyone, a god.  And one thing a god cannot stand, it would seem, is competition.  The irony of the Objectivist theory is that it states that if everyone is selfish, if everyone is competitive, society will somehow work peacefully.  The real answer is if you set up a city this way, worshipping competition, all you will end up with is the ultimate form of competition, war.  Look again at Adam and Eve, they were made for peace, to coexist with each other, but by their grasping at godhood, they drove a wedge between each other, which in the end was the loss of everything they held dear.  For one moment Adam exclaimed “Finally this is bone of my bone, and flesh of my flesh!” in regards to Eve, and shortly thereafter he accused her and refuses to take blame.  Objectivism essentially enshrines this competition that happens after the Fall as the end all and be all of human existence, but the only end point of that is destruction.  Andrew Ryan gives us a perfect example.

Ryan, the founder of Rapture, supposedly believes most fully in his belief of Objectivism, but what we see in the story is quite the opposite. Ryan brutally abuses his power as the city’s main administrator to the destruction of many people’s lives.  We see his handy work throughout Rapture, but I would like to show a few examples.  First, there is a point in the story where a mobster, named Frank Fontaine, who has grown exceptionally powerful through the invention of Adam and Eve, is a threat that Andrew Ryan can no longer tolerate.  Once believing in the ideal of the Free Market, Ryan brutally takes down Fontaine with his police force in a shootout, and then ‘nationalizes’ Fontaine industries.  This is precisely the exact opposite of what a good Objectivist would do, which makes these actions so stunning.  Anther event in the game that is both shocking and tragic, is the death of Diane Culpepper, who is an artist who had writen songs against the evils that Ryan has been committing.  We find out that one of Ryan’s goons is told to kill her, for no more reason than her use of free speech.  This does not sound like the Objectivist ideal.  A third clue to Ryan’s own betrayal of his philosophy can be found in this quote:

Doctor Suchong, frankly, I'm shocked by your proposal. If we were to modify the structure of our commercial Plasmid line as you propose, to have them make the user vulnerable to mental suggestion through pheromones, would we not be able to effectively control the actions of the citizens of Rapture? Free will is the cornerstone of this city. The thought of sacrificing it is abhorrent. However... we are indeed in a time of war. If Atlas and his bandits have their way, will they not turn us into slaves? And what will become of free will then? Desperate times call for desperate measures.

What we see here is when Ryan is pushed, his philosophy falls like a house of cards in a slight breeze.  For a society built completely on selfishness can never function as a society, for in the end Andrew Ryan is actually a victim of his own philosophy.  When he had to choose between the free will and control, he chose control.  Why?  Because it was the best thing for him to do, he was looking out for his own interests.  For when we reject God, as Ryan does explicitly, what we find is that we must replace him.  And the god Rapture got was a poor replacement.

Again, the story of Original Sin can enlighten us here, for Adam and Eve’s sin was not the fact that they took some fruit from a tree, but rather that they sought to be like God.  They, like Ryan, sought to eliminate God and place themselves in his place.  To grab from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil is to reject what God calls good and evil, and rather place oneself as the arbiter of all that is good and evil.  But when one does that, our relationships with others collapse, as we see when Adam and Eve turn to mutual distrust and accusation in their attempt to become God.  We see this clearly displayed in Ryan, who, instead of staying true to his philosophy, which states that mutual selfishness builds both of us up, rather his selfishness destroyed countless lives.  But what of this desire to be God?  Is that itself an evil? John rights “Dear friends, now we are children of God, and what we will be has not yet been made known. But we know that when he appears, we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is.” (1 John 3:2)  The Christian tradition down through the ages has always held that the spiritual life is essentially about divinization, becoming like God.  Then what did Adam and Eve do wrong in their grasping at the tree, and what does Ryan do wrong in his grasping at Godhood in his city?  The problem is that this becoming like God is, simply put, a gift from God to the human race.  But all gifts must be accepted, and this one is no different.  This gift asks us to accept one other thing: to call evil what God calls evil, and to call good what God calls good.  Isaiah writes: “Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness, who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter.” (Isaiah 5:20) We see this “Woe” in clear display in Rapture.  For Ryan’s rejection of God, and his renaming what is good and evil, brought the destruction of his city upon himself.  For Isaiah’s warning is that when we choose a law contrary to God’s, we do not free ourselves, but rather put ourselves straight onto the path of slavery and destruction. Adam and Eve were truly the first ‘Objectivists’, and their plan failed.  For God is not our enemy, and when we chose against his plan we divide ourselves from each other and condemn ourselves to lives of slavery and pain.  While the game has many supports for this, one final one that is befitting is one of the first things the character, named Jack, sees upon entering the city, some protest signs lying on the floor.  They are protesting Ryan’s dictatorship, and one of them says “Ryan doesn’t own us.”  They lie on the floor alone, abandoned.  The people who had one day come to this Objectivist paradise amide joy and hope, had simply become one more victim in the tyranny of Ryan.

This is how the game treats of the sinful grasping at being God, which can only result in death and destruction, but what of the sin itself?  What we read from Paul says: “For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.” (Romans 6:23)  The game has two great points that deal with this, and they will be dealt with in turn.  The first is what sin does to us, the second is how we are truly to be saved from sin.