Deja vu, man. Transhumanism is just Christian theology retranslated. An ex-Christian writes about her easy transition from dropping out of Bible school to adopting Ray Kurzweil’s “bible”, The Age of Spiritual Machines.
Many transhumanists such as Kurzweil contend that they are carrying on the legacy of the Enlightenment – that theirs is a philosophy grounded in reason and empiricism, even if they do lapse occasionally into metaphysical language about “transcendence” and “eternal life”. As I read more about the movement, I learned that most transhumanists are atheists who, if they engage at all with monotheistic faith, defer to the familiar antagonisms between science and religion. “The greatest threat to humanity’s continuing evolution,” writes the transhumanist Simon Young, “is theistic opposition to Superbiology in the name of a belief system based on blind faith in the absence of evidence.”
Yet although few transhumanists would likely admit it, their theories about the future are a secular outgrowth of Christian eschatology. The word transhuman first appeared not in a work of science or technology but in Henry Francis Carey’s 1814 translation of Dante’s Paradiso, the final book of the Divine Comedy. Dante has completed his journey through paradise and is ascending into the spheres of heaven when his human flesh is suddenly transformed. He is vague about the nature of his new body. “Words may not tell of that transhuman change,” he writes.
I’ve never trusted transhumanism. There’s a grain of truth to it — we will change over time, and technology is a force in our lives — but there’s this weird element of dogmatism where they insist that they have seen the future and it will happen just so and if you don’t believe in the Singularity you are anti-science. Or if you don’t believe in Superbiology
, whatever the hell that is.
Anyway, read the whole thing. I’m currently at a conference at HHMI, and we’re shortly going to get together to talk about real biology. I don’t think the super kind is going to be anywhere on the agenda.