Transhumanists have acknowledged Teilhard and Fedorov as forerunners of their movement, but the religious context of their ideas is rarely mentioned. Most histories of the movement attribute the first use of the term “transhumanism” to Julian Huxley, the British eugenicist and close friend of Teilhard’s who, in the 1950s, expanded on many of the priest’s ideas in his own writings—with one key exception. Huxley, a secular humanist, believed that Teilhard’s visions need not be grounded in any larger religious narrative. In 1951, he gave a lecture that proposed a nonreligious version of the priest’s ideas. “Such a broad philosophy,” he wrote, “might perhaps be called, not Humanism, because that has certain unsatisfactory connotations, but Transhumanism. It is the idea of humanity attempting to overcome its limitations and to arrive at fuller fruition.”
The contemporary iteration of the movement arose in San Francisco in the late 1980s among a band of tech-industry people with a libertarian streak. They initially called themselves Extropians and communicated through newsletters and at annual conferences. Kurzweil was one of the first major thinkers to bring these ideas into the mainstream and legitimize them for a wider audience. His ascent in 2012 to a director of engineering position at Google heralded, for many, a symbolic merger between transhumanist philosophy and the clout of major technological enterprise. Transhumanists today wield enormous power in Silicon Valley—entrepreneurs such as Elon Musk and Peter Thiel identify as believers—where they have founded think tanks like Singularity University and the Future of Humanity Institute. The ideas proposed by the pioneers of the movement are no longer abstract theoretical musings but are being embedded into emerging technologies at places like Google, Apple, Tesla, and SpaceX.
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Losing faith in God in the twenty-first century is an anachronistic experience. You end up contending with the kinds of things the West dealt with more than a hundred years ago: materialism, the end of history, the death of the soul. During the early years of my faithlessness, I read a lot of existentialist novels, filling their margins with empathetic exclamation points. “It seems to me sometimes that I do not really exist, but that I merely imagine I exist,” muses the protagonist of André Gide’s The Counterfeiters. “The thing that I have the greatest difficulty in believing in, is my own reality.” When I think back on that period of my life, what I recall most viscerally is an unnameable sense of dread—an anxiety that would appear without warning and expressed itself most frequently on the landscape of my body. There were days I woke in a panic, certain that I’d lost some essential part of myself in the fume of a blackout, and would work my fingers across my nose, my lips, my eyebrows, and my ears until I assured myself that everything was intact. My body had become strange to me; it seemed insubstantial. I went out of my way to avoid subway grates because I believed I could slip through them. One morning, on the train home from work, I became convinced that my flesh was melting into the seat.
At the time, I would have insisted that my rituals of self-abuse—drinking, pills, the impulse to put my body in danger in ways I now know were deliberate—were merely efforts to escape; that I was contending, however clumsily, with the overwhelming despair at the absence of God. But at least one piece of that despair came from the knowledge that my body was no longer a sacred vessel; that it was not a temple of the Holy Spirit, formed in the image of God and intended to carry me into eternity; that my body was matter, and any harm I did to it was only aiding the unstoppable process of entropy for which it was destined. To confront this reality after believing otherwise is to experience perhaps the deepest sense of loss we are capable of as humans. It’s not just about coming to terms with the fact that you will die. It has something to do with suspecting there is no difference between your human flesh and the plastic seat of the train. It has to do with the inability to watch your reflection appear and vanish in a window without coming to believe you are identical with it.
What makes the transhumanist movement so seductive is that it promises to restore, through science, the transcendent hopes that science itself obliterated. Transhumanists do not believe in the existence of a soul, but they are not strict materialists, either. Kurzweil claims he is a “patternist,” characterizing consciousness as the result of biological processes, “a pattern of matter and energy that persists over time.” These patterns, which contain what we tend to think of as our identity, are currently running on physical hardware—the body—that will one day give out. But they can, at least in theory, be transferred onto nonbiological substrata: supercomputers, robotic surrogates, or human clones. A pattern, transhumanists would insist, is not the same as a soul. But it’s not difficult to see how it satisfies the same longing. At the very least, a pattern suggests that there is, embedded in the meat of our bodies, some spark that remains unspoiled even as our body ages; that there is some essential core of our being that will survive and perhaps transcend the inevitable degradation of flesh.
Of course, mind uploading has spurred all kinds of philosophical anxieties. If the pattern of your consciousness is transferred onto a computer, is the pattern “you” or a simulation of your mind? Another camp of transhumanists have argued that Kurzweil’s theories are essentially dualistic, and that the mind cannot be separated from the body. You are not “you” without your fingernails and your gut bacteria. Transhumanists of this faction insist that resurrection can happen only if it is bodily resurrection. They tend to favor cryonics and bionics, which promise to resurrect the entire body or else supplement the living form with technologies to indefinitely extend life.
It is perhaps not coincidental that an ideology that grew out of Christian eschatology would come to inherit its philosophical problems. The question of whether the resurrection would be corporeal or merely spiritual was an obsessive point of debate among early Christians. One faction, which included the Gnostic sects, argued that only the soul would survive death; another insisted that the resurrection was not a true resurrection unless it revived the body. For these latter believers—whose view would ultimately become orthodox—Christ served as the model. Jesus had been brought back in the flesh, which suggested that the body was a psychosomatic unit. In contrast to Hellenistic philosophy, in which the afterlife would be purely spiritual, Christians came to believe that the soul was inseparable from the body. In one of the most famous treatises on the resurrection, the theologian Tertullian of Carthage wrote: “If God raises not men entire, He raises not the dead….Thus our flesh shall remain even after the resurrection.”
Transhumanists, in their eagerness to preempt charges of dualism, tend to sound an awful lot like these early church fathers. Eric Steinhart, a “digitalist” philosopher at William Paterson University, is among the transhumanists who insist the resurrection must be physical: “Uploading does not aim to leave the flesh behind,” he writes; “on the contrary, it aims at the intensification of the flesh.” The irony is that transhumanists are arguing these questions as though they were the first to consider them. Their discussions give no indication that these debates belong to a theological tradition that stretches back to the earliest centuries of the Common Era.
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While the effects of my deconversion were often felt physically, the root causes were mostly cerebral. My doubts began in earnest during my second year at Bible school, after I read The Brothers Karamazov and entertained, for the first time, the implications of the classic theodicies—the problem of hell, how evil could exist in a world created by a benevolent God. In our weekly dormitory prayer groups, my classmates would assure me that all Christians struggled with these questions, but the stakes in my case were higher because I was planning to join the mission field after graduation. I nodded deferentially as my friends supplied the familiar apologetics, but afterward, in the silence of my dorm room, I imagined myself evangelizing a citizen of some remote country and crumbling at the moment she pointed out those theologic
al contradictions I myself could not abide or explain.
Still, mine was a glacial severance from the faith. I knew other people who had left the church, and was amazed at how effortlessly they had seemed to cast off their former beliefs, immersing themselves instead in the pleasures of epicureanism or the rigors of humanitarian work. Perhaps I clung to the faith because, despite my doubts, I found—and still find—the fundamental promises of Christianity beautiful, particularly the notion that human existence ultimately resolves into harmony. What I could not reconcile was the idea that an omnipotent and benevolent God could allow for so much suffering. I agreed with Ivan Karamazov that even the final moment of glorification could never cancel out the pain and anguish it was meant to redeem.
Transhumanism offered a vision of redemption without the thorny problems of divine justice. It was an evolutionary approach to eschatology, one in which humanity took it upon itself to bring about the final glorification of the body and could not be blamed if the path to redemption was messy or inefficient. Within months of encountering Kurzweil, I became totally immersed in transhumanist philosophy. By this point, it was early December and the days had grown dark. The city was besieged by a series of early winter storms, and snow piled up on the windowsills, silencing the noise outside. I increasingly spent my afternoons at the public library, researching things like nanotechnology and brain-computer interfaces.
Once, after following link after link, I came across a paper called “Are You Living in a Computer Simulation?” It was written by the Oxford philosopher and transhumanist Nick Bostrom, who used mathematical probability to argue that it’s “likely” that we currently reside in a Matrix-like simulation of the past created by our posthuman descendants. Most of the paper consisted of esoteric calculations, but I became rapt when Bostrom started talking about the potential for an afterlife. If we are essentially software, he noted, then after we die we might be “resurrected” in another simulation. Or we could be “promoted” by the programmers and brought to life in base reality. The theory was totally naturalistic—all of it was possible without any appeals to the supernatural—but it was essentially an argument for intelligent design. “In some ways,” Bostrom conceded, “the posthumans running a simulation are like gods in relation to the people inhabiting the simulation.”
It began as an abstract theological preoccupation. I didn’t think it was likely we were living in a simulation, but I couldn’t help musing about how the classic theodicies I’d struggled with in Bible school would play out in a simulated cosmology. I thought I had put these problems to rest, but that winter they burbled back to the surface. It would happen unexpectedly. One moment I’d be waiting for the bus or doodling on a green guest-check pad during the slow hours of my shift; the next, I’d be rehashing Pascal, Leibniz, and Augustine, inserting into their arguments the term “programmers” instead of “God.” I wondered: Could the programmers be said to be omniscient? Omnipotent? Benevolent? Computers got bugs that eluded even their creators. What if evil was nothing more than a glitch in the Matrix? Christian theology relied on a premise of divine perfection; God himself was said to be perfect, and he was capable, in theory, of creating a perfect universe. But what if our creator was just a guy in a lab running an experiment? The novelist John Barth, I recalled, had once jokingly mused that the universe was a doctoral candidate’s dissertation, one that would earn its author a B-.
One afternoon, deep in the bowels of an online forum, I discovered a link to a cache of “simulation theology”—articles written by fans of Bostrom’s theory. According to the “Argument for Virtuous Engineers,” it was reasonable to assume that our creators were benevolent because the capacity to build sophisticated technologies required “long-term stability” and “rational purposefulness.” These qualities could not be cultivated without social harmony, and social harmony could be achieved only by virtuous beings. The articles were written by software engineers, programmers, and the occasional philosopher. Some appeared on personal blogs. Others had been published in obscure, allegedly peer-reviewed journals whose interests lay at the intersection of philosophy, technology, and metaphysics.
I also found articles proposing how one should live in order to maximize the chances of resurrection. Try to be as interesting as possible, one argued. Stay close to celebrities, or become a celebrity yourself. The more fascinating you are, the more likely the programmers will hang on to your software and resurrect it. This was sensible advice, but it presumed the programmer was a kind of deist’s God who set the universe in motion and then sat back to watch and be entertained. Was it not just as probable that the programmer had a distinct moral agenda, and that he punished or rewarded his simulated humans based on their adherence to this code? Or that he might even intervene in the simulation? The deeper I got into the articles, the more unhinged my thinking became. One day, it occurred to me: perhaps God was the designer and Christ his digital avatar, and the incarnation his way of entering the simulation to share tips about our collective survival as a species. Or maybe the creation of our world was a competition, a kind of video game in which each participating programmer invented one of the world religions, sent down his own prophet-avatar, and received points for every new convert.
By this point I’d passed beyond idle speculation. A new, more pernicious thought had come to dominate my mind: transhumanist ideas were not merely similar to theological concepts but could in fact be the events described in the Bible. It was only a short time before my obsession reached its culmination. I got out my old study Bible and began to scan the prophetic literature for signs of the cybernetic revolution. I began to wonder whether I could pray to beings outside the simulation. I had initially been drawn to transhumanism because it was grounded in science. In the end, I became consumed with the kind of referential mania and blind longing that animates all religious belief.
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I’ve since had to distance myself from prolonged meditation on these topics. People who once believed, I’ve been told, are prone to recidivism. Over the past decade, as transhumanism has become the premise of Hollywood blockbusters and a passable topic of small talk among people under forty, I’ve had to excuse myself from conversations, knowing that any mention of simulation theory or the noosphere can send me spiraling down the gullet of that techno-theological rabbit hole.
This is not to say that I have outgrown those elemental desires that drew me to transhumanism—just that they express themselves in more conventional ways. Over the intervening years, I have given up alcohol, drugs, sugar, and bread. On any given week, my Google search history is a compendium of cleanse recipes, high-intensity workouts, and the glycemic index of various exotic fruits. I spend my evenings in the concrete and cavernous halls of a university athletic center, rowing across virtual rivers and cycling up virtual hills, guided by the voice of my virtual trainer, Jessica, who came with an app that I bought. It’s easy enough to justify these rituals of health optimization as more than mere vanity, especially when we’re so frequently told that physical health determines our mental and emotional well-being. But if I’m honest with myself, these pursuits have less to do with achieving a static state of well-being than with the thrill of possibility that lies at the root of all self-improvement: the delusion that you are climbing an endless ladder of upgrades and solutions. The fact that I am aware of this delusion has not weakened its power over me. Even as I understand the futility of the pursuit, I persist in an almost mystical belief that I can, through concerted effort, feel better each year than the last, as though the trajectory of my life led toward not the abyss but some pinnacle of total achievement and solution, at which point I will dissolve into pure energy. Still, maintaining this delusion requires a kind of willful vigilance that can be exhausting.
I was in such a mood last spring when a friend of mine from Bible school, a fellow apostate, sent me an email with the title “robot evangelism.” “I se
em to recall you being into this stuff,” he said. There was a link to an episode of The Daily Show that had aired a year ago. The video was a satiric report by the correspondent Jordan Klepper called “Future Christ.” The gist was that a Florida pastor, Christopher Benek, believed that in the future AI could be evangelized and brought to salvation just like humans.
“How does a robot become Christian?” Klepper asked.
“We’re not talking about a Roomba or your iPhone,” Benek replied. “We’re talking about something that’s exponentially more intelligent than we are.” He was young for a pastor—late thirties, maybe even younger. He wore a navy blazer and was sweating liberally beneath the studio lights.
“You’re saying that robots, given the ability to have higher thought, they will choose Christianity.”
“Yeah,” Benek replied. “I think it’s a reasoned argument.”
The segment ended with Klepper taking a telepresence robot around to different places of worship—a mosque, a synagogue, a Scientology booth—to see which religion it would choose. The interview had been heavily edited, and it wasn’t really clear what Benek believed, except that robots might one day be capable of spiritual life, an idea that failed to strike me as intrinsically absurd. Pope Francis had recently declared his willingness to baptize aliens. These were strange times to be a man of the cloth, but at least people were thinking ahead.
I googled Benek. He had an MDiv from Princeton. He described himself in his bio as a “techno-theologian, futurist, ethicist, Christian transhumanist, public speaker, writer and tech pastor.” He was also the founding chair of something called the Christian Transhumanism Association. I followed a link to the organization’s website, which was professional looking but sparse. It included that peculiar quote from Dante: “Words cannot tell of that transhuman change.” All this seemed unlikely. Was it possible there were now Christian Transhumanists? Actual believers who thought the Kingdom of God would come about through the singularity? All this time I had thought I was alone in drawing these parallels between transhumanism and biblical prophecy, but the convergences seemed to have gained legitimacy from the pulpit. How long would it be before everyone noticed the symmetry of these two ideologies—before Kurzweil began quoting the Gospel of John and Bostrom was read alongside the minor prophets?
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