We have been playing Gods since age immemorial, I don't see why aging should be an exception!
I actually think it's inevitable. We can't go on learning stuff, then dying, then having to re-teach same stuff to younger versions of us, but this time a smaller chunk of it cos knowledge is greater, leading to ever-increasing specialization which leads to less wisdom and makes us more like work-robots. Eventually we will reach the limit or how little a single human can learn + our brains having the same capacity as always + society as a whole functioning even though every single human knows so little. How will we be able to function politically, when every single human will know so little about politics that basically they will know nothing? We now have historians specializing in a single year!! What will it be in the future? Historians who specialize in a single day? In a single hour? How long until we can't take this much specialization, and knowledge stops increasing, and we find ourselves in some Groundhog Day scenario?
Defeating aging is also the best way to defeat most chronic diseases. Most young people don't die of cancer, after all! Nor do they get Alzheimer's. Nor do they usually die of our number one killer, heart disease. Instead of trying to treat or postpone all these diseases, or curing them to have them replaced by others, it's better to cut the rotten tree at its root: cure aging and you've cured 99% of diseases.
I don't see why defeating aging is seen as unnatural. I look around right now, as I'm writing to you, and I struggle to find anything that is natural. Is this computer natural? Are the clothes I'm wearing natural or synthetic? My phone? The house? The electricity? The veggies on my plate? Did these veggies exist in this form 10,000 years ago or did we make them to suit our palate?
We have been fighting Nature forever. That's what all animals do. That's how you know something is alive! Beavers build dams, ants build nests... We defeat aging. And, like you said, there are immortal organisms.
Even from a theological perspective, there's persons in the Bible who lived for, like, 500 years or something. So until we reach that age, I don't think there's any reason for the priests to be alarmed :P
whoops, you do have a very strong case here, however, truth be told. Nature has a way of revenging. The consequences sure abound, and this is something inevitable. The cases of cancer and chronic diseases have been on the rise than ever before, possibly as a result of increased interaction with products of unnatural source (just a perspective).
No doubt, virtually everything around us are almost not natural.
Knowledge is passed on from one generation to the other and most times written down for the next generation to develop on. A man with an idea of solving a particular problem might need someone smarter than him to complete the job. This is where human genetics comes into play as well. People are born with different IQ.
To me, defeating aging is like a mirage, though the possibilities are there, however, it will come with a great price and definitely with an unknown consequences. Probably not in my time. haha. You could imagine if we had clones humans working around us. Everything has a price.
the likes of Methuselah, lol.