Can a Christian be a Transhumanist?
Faith in God and the Future of Humanity
“All modern theories of life are to be understood against this backdrop of an ontology of death, from which each single life must coax or bully its lease, only to be swallowed up by it in the end.” –Hans Jonas
The COVID-19 pandemic serves for us as memento mori — a reminder that death is a part of our journey of life. We’re all vaguely aware of death at any given time, but according to existentialist philosophers like Søren Kierkegaard, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Martin Heidegger, that awareness of our inescapable death forces us to act in a truly authentic manner. When they really understand that death is on its way, people talk about “bucket lists,” re-evaluate their priorities, repent of sins and make up broken relationships. But how do we feel when we see the threat of death before us? Our initial reaction is fear; philosophers from Plato through Hans Jonas have said that fear is a natural response to perceived threat, i.e., death.
Christians, however, have a different attitude toward death. The heart of Christian theology is the death and resurrection of Jesus. Paul testifies to us in Romans 6 that “if we have been united with [Jesus] in a death like his, we will certainly also be united with him in a resurrection like his,” and both the Nicene and Apostles’ Creeds state in unison that we believe in the resurrection of the dead. Yes, we mourn the dead, and many of us fear what will happen to us, but the whole content of our faith is beautifully summarized by Jesus’s words to Nicodemus in John 3:16, “God so loved the world that He sent His one and only son, so that whoever believes in him will not die but will have everlasting life.”
The Christian attitude toward death should be complete trust in God’s promises to us for salvation and restoration. And yet, many of us still harbor doubts and worries and fears. How do I know if I’m really saved? How can I be certain there’s really a heaven? We can pray and read our Bibles and talk to our pastors all we’d like, but some of us will still be troubled in the face of death. So what if there was another way?
Better Humans or New Beings?
Transhumanism is a broad school of philosophies popular among tech workers and futurists. The main tenet of transhumanism is that human beings can and should direct the next step of human evolution using advanced sciences and technologies. Its main proponents include philosopher Nick Bostrom, Google chief engineer Ray Kurzweil, cryogenics pioneer Max More, anti-senescence researcher Aubrey de Grey, Sirius XM founder Martine Rothblatt, and the late AI pioneer Marvin Minsky.
Above all, transhumanism wants to make “being human” better, or still more, for us to become a better type of being. That vision has taken a range of forms from minimal intervention to extreme transformation. A very minimal type of transhumanism seeks to simply improve life by getting rid of most diseases, including genetic, lifestyle, environmental and pathogenic ones, and by amplifying natural abilities. In other words, through biotech and pharmacology, they seek to make our lives better.
A more ambitious form of transhumanism seeks to give us different lives. Through computer and machine augmentation, nanorobotics and somatic cell restructuring, we can live superhuman lives, taking flight like Icarus and Daedalus to escape the “rat race” of ordinary human existence.
The most extreme versions of transhumanism, however, seek to make us totally different. The concept of “morphological freedom” among some transhumanists gives license to shape our person into anything we can, including uploading our minds into computers, radically re-structuring our bodies and genetics, or even combining our consciousnesses with other entities (including other human persons and artificial persons). To paraphrase Mr. Spock, we will have “life, but not as we know it.”
Certainly, to the average Christian reading this, some of this sounds dangerous, if not outright repulsive. Who would realistically want to integrate their mind with, say, HAL 9000? But to others, the prospect of new or better bodies may seem appealing: why not make our lives longer, or seek immortality here and now? What’s so wrong about using the science and technology God has given us to overcome the natural evil that claims so many of our loved ones every year? Is it okay for a Christian to be a transhumanist, if even a moderate or minimalist one?
Life in Abundance
To answer this question Christians need to think about where technology fits into our eschatological beliefs. Eschatology is theology related to our death and the end of times (the final judgment, the return of Jesus, etc). Without venturing too far into the Book of Revelation, we can talk about the deceptively simple problem of resurrection of the dead. Resurrection is a reassuring promise, but how is it carried out? It is wholly tempting to let our imaginations run wild with this dogma: is it the cells, the matter or the mind that is primarily resurrected? At what stage in our life are we resurrected (St Augustine suggested age 33 like Jesus)? By what power is this accomplished?
Theologians have long argued that being imago Dei, that is, the image of God, we have the capacity to imagine, envision and create the way that God does. It is natural, then, for us to ask these questions. And what is most uncomfortable to us is having questions which do not have a definitive answer. What is heaven? What is God like? How will we be resurrected? Here again, we want an answer, even if it risks error for the sake of simplicity.
Transhumanism is appealing precisely because it offers ready answers to this question. Ray Kurzweil, for example, writes about how he hopes to bring back (read: resurrect) his father using DNA from the grave to clone him. Transhumanism offers, in fact, several options for resurrection, including cryonics, cloning and consciousness uploading. And, more importantly, transhumanists trace this vision through the Christian philosopher Nikolai Fedorov, who believed that Christians are called to use science and technology to carry out God’s vision for the end times, including resurrection of the dead.
But where is the line between working with God and taking the place of God? Christian theology tells us that the fundamental weakness of our first parents lay in their desire to be like God (Genesis 3:5). This is the root of sin, according to St. Augustine: pride. Many stories warn us of the danger of playing God, from the Tower of Babel to the fall of Icarus to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. It is important for Christians to not seek to take the place of God, but rather seek to work with God. Many theologians attested to this throughout the twentieth century, including Walter Rauschenbusch, Jürgen Moltmann, and, perhaps most famous for us, Martin Luther King, Jr. They all envisioned Christian work as being “builders” of the kingdom of God, working with God to realize the eschatological vision. The key here, though, is that what God calls us to do is not resurrecting the dead, but rather caring for the living, as outlined in Matthew 25: feeding the hungry, welcoming the stranger, clothing the naked, healing the sick and visiting the prisoner. This is what God Incarnate tells us we will be judged on. Our hope lies in the resurrection of the dead, but our faith in Christ calls us to act on behalf of the living.
What God calls us to do is not resurrecting the dead, but rather caring for the living.
In this way, transhumanism is not out of the question. The visions of people like Lincoln Cannon, Ronald Cole-Turner, and James Hughes all include peace and prosperity for all of humanity as the aim of transhumanism more than the transgression of death. The best use of science and technology we can pursue is the elimination of disease and the potential to better meet human needs. Nevertheless, we ought to be careful; our support of given technologies and their aims must be directed toward God’s aims and providential work, not taking the place of them. We have work enough on our hands without trying to take the place of the Divine.
Levi Checketts, PhD, is an associate pastor at Jesus Love Korean United Methodist Church in Cupertino, CA, and an adjunct professor in philosophy and religious studies at Holy Names University and in Graduate Pastoral Ministry at Santa Clara University. When he’s not ministering, teaching, or researching, he enjoys taking care of his precocious three year-old Dory and experiencing Northern California’s natural beauty with his wife Jiyoung.
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