Table Of ContentPalgrave Studies in the Future
of Humanity and its Successors
RELIGION
HUMAN
and
ENHANCEMENT
Death, Values, and Morality
Tracy J. Trothen
Edited by
Calvin Mercer
and
Palgrave Studies in the Future of Humanity
and its Successors
Series editors
Calvin Mercer
East Carolina University
Greenville, NC, USA
Steve Fuller
University of Warwick
Coventry, UK
Humanity is at a crossroads in its history, precariously poised between
mastery and extinction. The fast-developing array of human enhance-
ment therapies and technologies (e.g., genetic engineering, information
technology, regenerative medicine, robotics, and nanotechnology) are
increasingly impacting our lives and our future. The most ardent advo-
cates believe that some of these developments could permit humans
to take control of their own evolution and alter human nature and the
human condition in fundamental ways, perhaps to an extent that we
arrive at the “posthuman”, the “successor” of humanity. This series
brings together research from a variety of fields to consider the eco-
nomic, ethical, legal, political, psychological, religious, social, and
other implications of cutting-edge science and technology. The series
as a whole does not advocate any particular position on these matters.
Rather, it provides a forum for experts to wrestle with the far-reaching
implications of the enhancement technologies of our day. The time
is ripe for forwarding this conversation among academics, public pol-
icy experts, and the general public. For more information on Palgrave
Studies in the Future of Humanity and its Successors, please contact Phil
Getz, Editor, Religion & Philosophy: [email protected].
More information about this series at
http://www.springer.com/series/14587
Tracy J. Trothen · Calvin Mercer
Editors
Religion and Human
Enhancement
Death, Values, and Morality
Editors
Tracy J. Trothen Calvin Mercer
Queen’s University East Carolina University
Kingston Greenville
ON, Canada NC, USA
Palgrave Studies in the Future of Humanity and its Successors
ISBN 978-3-319-62487-7 ISBN 978-3-319-62488-4 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-62488-4
Library of Congress Control Number: 2017947742
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F
oreword
We humans tend to lack historical perspective, mistaking our own time,
place, politics, and culture as normative. We further extend these taken-
for-granted attitudes to our modern technologies. Flick a switch and the
lights turn on. Turn a tap and potable water appears. Hop in a jet and fly
across continents and oceans in a day (while complaining about uncom-
fortable seats, bad food, and delayed baggage).
Iconic of this tendency is the computer—on which I compose these
reflections—and the smartphone and tablet by my side. These devices have
become indispensable tools of everyday life, as important as running water
and electric lights. Really we should be gobsmacked every time we turn to
these devices, which change how we live and also who we are. A mere cen-
tury ago these now ubiquitous technologies would be seen as magic.
The rapid development of technology in the modern era has inspired
a movement known as transhumanism. Envisioned is a near future in
which human bodies and minds will be transformed and enhanced
through genomics, pharmaceuticals, nanotechnology, robotics, artificial
intelligence, and any number of prosthetic devices inside and outside our
bodies. Advocates also hold out the possibilities of radical life extension
through rejuvenation technologies or alternately reincarnating individu-
als inside of computers. The proponents of transhumanism argue that
the exponential growth in scientific knowledge and know-how is leading
humanity to a “Singularity” sometime in the mid-twenty-first century. In
that Singularity, our technologies will cross a threshold. We will become
post- or transhumans.1
v
vi FOREWORD
For the most part, advocates of transhumanism are secular human-
ists committed to scientific materialism.2 They do not put much stock
in religion or theology. They tend to think philosophical debates have
been largely settled by science. They imagine a new age in which peo-
ple will be freed from mental disease and physical decrepitude, able to
consciously choose their “natures” and those of their children. At first
glance, it all seems like a wonderful thing, life lived more abundantly,
but Francis Fukuyama calls this transhumanist vision “the most danger-
ous idea in the world.”3
Religion and Human Enhancement is a collection of essays by lead-
ing Catholic, Protestant, Mormon, and Jewish thinkers. The theologi-
ans interrogate the vision and values of transhumanism, but reach no
consensus. This volume is more than just another book on science and
religion or a rehashing of the tired debates between secular and sacred
approaches to construing the world and ourselves. Instead, we find here
diverse perspectives that challenge readers to question and rethink funda-
mental assumptions, secular and religious. And while the secular propo-
nents of transhumanism are mostly absent from this volume, readers will
nevertheless encounter their views through careful citations of their pub-
lications. The debate about transhumanism turns out to be an extremely
fruitful field for philosophical and theological inquiry.
If the pace of scientific discovery and technological innovation con-
tinues and indeed accelerates in the twenty-first century, then in short
order we will be a much-transformed species on a much-transformed
planet. Where does God fit into this brave new world? The idea of some
fixed human nature, a human essence from which we derive notions of
humane dignities and essential human rights, seems to no longer apply
in a world of free market, engineered evolution. On what basis then do
we make moral judgments and pursue pragmatic ends? Should we try
to limit the development of certain sciences and technologies? How
would we do so? Is it even possible? Are either traditional religious or
Enlightenment values adequate, if we do indeed face a speciation hori-
zon between “natural” humans and “post” humans? Is the ideology of
transhumanism dangerous independent of the technology? Is the ideol-
ogy of the religious and bioconservatives, those who oppose transhu-
manism, also dangerous and how? Are the new sciences and technologies
celebrated by transhumanists realistic or just another form of wish-
ful thinking? And which utopic and dystopic visions have the power to
illuminate and motivate the future?
FOREWORD vii
Of course, anytime we talk about the future, our hopes or our fears,
we drift into the realms of religion. Projecting a utopic or dystopic future
is a kind of religious activity that changes how we think and act in the
world today. Science fiction, in this view, is a genre of theological anthro-
pology and has contemporary political consequences (no less so than
our religious “fictions”). Humans are profoundly teleological creatures.
Broadly defined, our big hopes and big fears about the future are neces-
sarily “religious” in nature.4
Propitiating our existential fear of death is one of the central functions
of religion. If we can someday “cure” death, as transhumanists propose,
what becomes of religion? God? What becomes of our planet and our
species, when some have conquered death? Life-extension technology in
a materialist culture may be the ultimate “killer app.”
As contributors to this volume point out, the transhumanist move-
ment can be understood as a kind of secular religion promoting its
own apocalyptic and messianic visions of the end times. In this analy-
sis, whether or not the Singularity is plausible or realistic is no longer
the point. The Singularity inevitably plays into old chiliastic tropes in our
culture, and it will function psychologically, politically, and culturally,
much like earlier Christian and Jewish millennialist movements.
The collection of essays in this book presents a valuable introduction
to these issues and more, but offers no final resolution. You will discover
much worthy of debate that will transform how you think about the
world and yourself. Indeed, in many ways we are already radically trans-
formed humans.
It may be that “[t]ranshumanists both overestimate the capabilities
of human technology and underestimate our human limitations and fail-
ings,” as Noreen Herzfeld points out in her contribution to this volume.
It is certainly also the case that we share obligations—religious, human-
istic, and scientific—to help and heal, to minimize suffering, to be all we
can be as individuals, as a species, and as an interdependent community
of many species on a remarkable, evolving eddy of increasing complexity
in an enormous cosmos of entropy. How we evolve as a species—bio-
logically, culturally, technologically—is an open question, but that we
have evolved and will continue to evolve is now a certainty with which
philosophy and theology must now begin to wrestle.
New York, NY, USA William J. Grassie
viii FOREWORD
Notes
1. W illiam J. Grassie, “Is Transhumanism Scientifically Plausible? Posthuman
Predictions and the Human Predicament,” in Building Better Humans?,
ed. Hava Tirosh-Samuelson and Kenneth L. Mossman (Berlin: Peter Lang,
2012); William J. Grassie and Gregory Hansell, eds., H Transhumanism
±
and Its Critics (Philadelphia: Metanexus Institute, 2010); William J.
Grassie, “Millennialism at the Singularity: Reflections on Metaphors,
Meanings, and the Limits of Ray Kurzweil’s Exponential Logic,”
Metanexus, no. 11/05/2009 (2009), http://www.metanexus.net/essay/
h-millennialism-singularity-reflections-metaphors-meanings-and-limits-
exponential-logic.
2. N . Bostrom, “In Defense of Posthuman Dignity,” in H+/-:
Transhumanism and Its Critics, ed. William J. Grassie and Greg Hansel
(Philadelphia: Metanexus Institute, 2011), 55.
3. F rancis Fukuyama, “Transhumanism: The World’s Most Dangerous Idea,”
Foreign Policy, no. 144 (2004).
4. W illiam J. Grassie, The New Sciences of Religion: Exploring Spirituality from
the Outside in and Bottom Up (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010).
C
oNteNts
Part I Introduction
1 Coming into Focus: An Introduction to the Collection 3
Calvin Mercer
Part II “Common Ground” between Transhumanism and
Religions
2 In Extropy We Trust: A Systems Theory Approach to
Identifying Transhumanism’s Religious Philosophy 15
Matthew Zaro Fisher
3 Christian Transhumanism 35
Ron Cole-Turner
4 Mormonism Mandates Transhumanism 49
Lincoln Cannon
5 Technological Apocalypse: Transhumanism as an
End-Time Religious Movement 67
Sean O’Callaghan
ix
