Last week I made a weekly rant about transhumanism and how it is the natural progression in our materialist society. It sparked more than a few conversations with friends, family and readers who in large part do not know what transhumanism is and what its aims are. I therefore started to research the subject more in depth but found that very few
Christian writers have tackled the subject and even fewer have views I believe to be correct given the Light of Christ. I am no classically trained theologian or philosopher, but I do feel called to write on this subject since it is where trillions of dollars are destined to go. Below are some interesting articles I found that you may want to read.
The Ethical Dilemma of Transhumanism | Catholic Answers Podcasts
The Dangers of Technodeterminism:
Transhumanism and a Catholic Perspective - Word on Fire
The Impossibility of Christian Transhumanism | Wesley J. Smith | First Things
Transhumanism is essentially the idea that we can go beyond our physical limitations of death and fragility and become god-like in our ability to create, know, and live forever. Your Christian spidey sense should be tingling right about now. However, let's try to steel man the transhumanist position in the spirit of the angelic doctor St. Thomas Aquinas, before we shrug it off as secular nonsense.
Best case scenario for transhumanism - We become God like in our abilities and we overcome our vices while maintaining some semblance of free will. The problem is that this plane of existence is finite in both time and space (Big Bang and Contracting Universe). We would therefore be choosing to just live a really long time in a finite place which delays arrival to our true home, communion with an infinite God. Living forever in a finite
reality will eventually lose its luster, but communion with an infinite God will always be Glorious.
Now, maybe we figure out a way to keep the universe alive forever while constantly expanding it into new “territories.” If this is the case and we are able to overcome our vices, gain God-like power, maintain the enjoyable parts of humanity without Losing the joy those parts produce,
then perhaps transhumanism is a good idea. But checking all the boxes on the list below seems ridiculous.
- Recreate the universe to be infinite
- Learn how to live forever while still maintaining some kind of purpose
- Prove that we will still be the ones living, not a program, when our
“consciousness” is uploaded.
- Prove that we will do all the above while at the sametime overcoming vice.
If the above conditions are not meant then the end result of transhumanism would be either sociopathic programs/entities genociding humanity or mindless automatons (and/or obscenely powerful bored humans) just floating
through space.
If all the conditions are meant then I suppose we don't need God, and Christianity is false because we were successful at creating our own heaven.
Yet, one even greater hurdle exists for the end goal of transhumanism. Transhumanists, and all
secular peoples throughout history, are trying to become God when our purpose is to commune with God. If the monotheistic among us are correct, then the true God probably set up existence in such a way that anything but communion with Him would result in chaos and destruction. Not a selfish trait of God but just the reality of Him being Goodness itself being reality. Ultimately, transhumanism is trying to create a material Heaven because it has no Faith in the real Heaven.
There are countless ways we can envision transhumanism going horribly wrong. Just think movies like, The Matrix, Terminator, Prometheus, i Robot, Elysium, ex Machina, etc…And there is only one outrageously difficult path that could potentially lead us to a good outcome (in reference to the conditions listed above).
Now all this is not to say we should be luddites (haters of technology). As I said in last week's rant, curing disease and helping a paraplegic walk are great things to pursue, with caution and sound ethical minds oriented toward God.
The Question is always thus - Does God Exist? If He does, then why would you want to live
forever knowing that your true home is not here but with Him. If He does not exist, then transhumanism makes perfect sense and we should all be striving towards checking those boxes on the list I laid out above!
Personally, I think AI, transhumanism and the like will bring about the second coming because people will wholeheartedly buy into the idea that they can upload their
consciousness and live forever, but in reality they will just let a computer program take a pic of their brains before being executed. Our bodies anchor our souls to this reality, without our bodies our souls move on to the eternal.
