This post is part two of a three-part series on The Future of Faith: Technology and the Cross. This series grew out of a lunchtime panel discussion hosted in April 2015 by the Siburt Institute for Church Ministry. Facilitated by Carson Reed, the conversation focused on topics such as technology’s impact on community-building, making technology work for the church, and the spiritual implications of artificial intelligence. Thanks to our three panelists, Mindi Thompson, Trevor Thompson, and Robert Oglesby, for translating some of their insights into this blog series.

In 1957, Julian Huxley coined the term “transhumanism.” Huxley, the first Director-General of UNESCO, wrote, “I believe in transhumanism: once there are enough people who can truly say that, the human species will be on the threshold of a new kind of existence, as different from ours as ours is from that of Peking man. It will at last be consciously fulfilling its real destiny.” Transhumanism is the idea that human beings can move beyond current limitations by means of science and technology to the realization of a new humanity. Huxley’s hope for a critical mass of humanity who believes in Transhumanism became a bounding crescendo in the second half of the twentieth century. The pending dénouement of Transhumanism, the so-called Singularity, proposes nothing short of a new mode of being, transhuman/posthuman existence.

The Transhumanist Declaration—a statement crafted in 1998 and subsequently revised and expanded—offers as its first point: “Humanity stands to be profoundly affected by science and technology in the future. We envision the possibility of broadening human potential by overcoming aging, cognitive shortcomings, involuntary suffering, and our confinement to planet Earth.” Through the use of genetic manipulation, nanotechnology, and robotics, transhumanists envision a tomorrow marked by super longevity, super intelligence, and super well-being in which a future hominid, Homo Evolutis, will realize the long latent potential of humanity.

Far from science fiction, the dreams of Transhumanism are quickly coming to fruition. The increasing availability of retinal prostheses, wearable bionic exoskeletons, and Cochlear Implants offer hope and life to some in place of darkness and despair. “The blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, and the deaf hear” (Matt 11:5). Even Death will no longer hold its inevitable status. Calico labs and others seek to demonstrably extend the quality and length of life. The ultimate transhumanist goal is to remedy Death and render it an empty practitioner of its time-honored craft, “O death, where is thy sting?”(1 Cor 15:55).

The aspirations of Transhumanism pose a significant challenge to traditional religious systems and their historic hegemony in claims for quality of life and eternal bliss. Almost all transhumanists regard recourse to the divine and subsequent theological resolutions as unsatisfactory. Nevertheless, Christian assemblies—as well as those of other Abrahamic faiths—are full of earnest patrons and participants in the technological advances that serve as the fuel of Transhumanism and its goals. Many are military veterans with prosthetic limbs, people with poor eyesight who have received LASIK surgery, or heart patients whose pacemakers keep them alive. This active participation in Transhumanism attests to a subtle but profound shift in the true object of trust among those who are religious. Science, medicine, and technology form the front line of first response and advance against the contemplative space once reserved for the unknown and the divine. Attempts to disengage from and/or disable the technological revolution—the so-called Luddite response—fail to recognize the current extent of integration. The transhuman transformation is well underway.

In The Abolition of Man (1943), C. S. Lewis wrote, “Each generation exercises power over its successors: and each, in so far as it modifies the environment bequeathed to it and rebels against tradition, resists and limits the power of its predecessors…In reality, of course, if any one age really attains, by eugenics and scientific education, the power to make its descendants what it pleases, all men who live after it are the patients of that power.” The turn considered by Lewis may have already come and gone, a pivotal moment or series of moments in the twentieth century unmarked on any calendar, a new faith already in place.

If the goals and promises of Transhumanism are fully realized—a significant “if”—traditional religion may find itself in a futuristic John Henry ballad with an alternative ending, man laboring in futility against the machine. However, the promised utopia of Transhumanism may yield a pathological dystopia that displays the worst excesses of inequality, a destiny of scientific misanthropy. In such a world, the Christian tradition may find opportunity to enact its deepest and most abiding principle, care for the downtrodden and the marginalized: “and the poor have the gospel preached to them” (Matt 11:5).

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Header image credit: Transhuman. Appeared on the web in April 2008. Artist unknown. Retrieved June 2, 2015.