At first glance, at least from a
Judeo-Christian (as well as Islamic, Zoroastrian, etc.) worldview(s),
transhumanism appears as direct defiance against the Creator. It is the living
out of what transpired in the Garden of Eden, when our ancestors fell from
grace.
Now
the serpent was more cunning than any beast of the field which theLord God
had made. And he said to the woman, “Has God indeed said, ‘You shall not eat of
every tree of the garden’?” And
the woman said to the serpent, “We may eat the fruit of the trees of the
garden; but of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, God has said, ‘You shall not eat it,
nor shall you touch it, lest you die.’” Then the serpent said to the woman,
“You will not surely die. For God knows that in the day you eat of it your eyes will be
opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil” (Genesis 3:1-5
NKJV).
Satan’s
first agenda is here displayed, that of lies. Implanting rebellion through
deception, and this deception was intermixed with truth. What truth? The truth
is that God made us in His image and likeness; creating us to grow in that
likeness. Endowing the Adam (Adam+Eve) with volition and intellect, he grew
them in a garden, giving them the job of gardening and naming the animals. Only
one thing was asked of them, not to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good
and evil. All other fruits and herbs they could eat. Papaya, mango, apples,
cherries; you name it. They could (have) even eaten of the tree of life. But
instead of eating the tree of life… they chose poorly, like the Nazi aiding
American who got a huge does of entropy in the Last Crusade. Why the appeal to
“be like God [ YHVH Elohim]”? I mean they were already created in the image and
likeness of God! Here’s the appeal… a fast track: A fast track to knowledge, to
knowing good and evil; a fast track to be more like God. To be like God, not by relationship in
every increasing glory, but through our own efforts, our own volition… and
here’s the crazy part: we… our ancestors, decided that we knew better than God.
We could get closer to being like God by our own means rather than by God’s
prescribed means. What are His prescribed means? They are relational, and like our Lord
said, “If you love me keep my commandments”
(John 14:15). Obedience is better than sacrifice… because obedience
entails trust in the person who commands. Boy! Do I and all of humanity have a
lot of repenting to do! Lord have mercy! The desired fast track is a prideful one which has inevitably led to transhumanism. But the path of theosis is found in humility. There can be no theosis without kenosis ,the emptying of ourselves that God may fill us with Himself (see Philippians 2).
So what
is the big deal? How can a fruit cause so much chaos? First of all, we must
understand that knowledge in the Hebraic sense is not merely understood as being "informational", but more so entails interpenetration. What I mean is that it is
a tangible partaking of someone or something. This is why the Hebrew word to
know, yada, is used to describe
sexual intercourse. So in a true sense when Adam and Eve ate of the forbidden
fruit their very nature became infected, and as a result sin and death entered
into the world. All of humanity became cursed with a hereditary STD, a
Spiritually Transmitted Disease (i.e. evil and spiritual death). Thus began the battle between the Logos and
entropy (sin, decay, and death). The Logos being the very Image of God would
have to take on humanity so that what was lost would be restored. He did so in
His Incarnation and all that followed, His Baptism, Passion, Resurrection, and
Ascension, healed the breech that was a rift between God, humanity, and the rest of the created order. Christ
Jesus restored the righteousness to humanity. By becoming man, God opened up
the way back to union with Himself. Creator and creation merged in Jesus
Christ. Righteousness does not mainly mean obedience to commandments, but it
means right relation to God and creation from which obedience naturally
follows.
So how
does this tie into transhumanism? Well on the flip side in the popular
intellectual playgrounds of today, transhumanism is slowly becoming the
religion of the future. In some ways it already is. For many years now people
(who can afford it) have been cryogenically freezing themselves (or parts of
their body, notably the head), in the hopes of one day being thawed out and
either healed of the ailment that ("nearly") killed them or given a new body… or perhaps
being uploaded into some advance computation. If we are just an assortment of
memory synoptic grey and white matter, DNA and RNA, etc… then we should one
day be able to “copy” that information into a more advance form. This is the
goal of transhumanism. That is to transcend the human limitations of today and
expand into the limitless. The manipulation of the fittest, to evolve beyond
what “natural selection” would hinder is the agenda. Movies like Transcendence,
Limitless, Lucy, and Demon Seed,
are all characteristic of transhumanism. In one sense transhumanism reflects
our innate desire to perfect ourselves, a genuine goal of progress in harmony,
beauty, health, peace, and prosperity. We long to return to the paradise which
has been lost, and we will do our best to fabricate that paradise through
technological advancement. We also want to be like God, which is only natural because
that was and is the purpose of our existence. So desiring to be like God is not
wrong, but it is the means that reveal what is good and what is evil. In the
other sense, the vast majority of transhumanists are fueled by the poison in
the fruit to be like God by their own strength. They deny God so that they can set themselves up as gods. This is the spirit of the age, the spirit of nihilism, of
rebellion. This is what St. Fr. Seraphim Rose spoke of when he addressed the
signs of the times. Indeed, the dominate sign of this age is nihilism; that is,
the formation of our own values and purpose outside of the God ordained order.
“If God does not exist, then everything is permitted” wrote Dostoevsky. God
does exist, but many would prefer that he didn’t, because most of humanity is at
war with God’s Kingdom. Sadly a lot of this is done in ignorance, and under the
influence of demonic forces. But we humans can stand on our own when it comes
to evil. After all we partook of the fruit containing evil and good. A cosmic
contradiction! Heaven and Hell meet in humanity.
Transhumanism may very well lead to a nightmarish future like the one in the anime Akira (1988):
Transhumanism may very well lead to a nightmarish future like the one in the anime Akira (1988):
Or perhaps it will be more like the Lawnmower Man (1992):
Transhumanism
is a return to the days of Noah, to the time when the Nephilim were abundant on
the earth (see Genesis 6 and the book of Enoch). The advancements in technology
will bring way to mass demonic access to re-integrate with man via
bio-synthetics, and advance computing devices, such as androids. This is
speculation. But a look at the book of Revelation, Enoch, and the Gospels leads
me to propose such ideas, and I am definitely not the first or last person to do
so. Think of the image of the Beast in the book of Revelation which the Beast gives life and causes it to
move…. sounds an awful lot like some kind of automata to me. The 1977 film Demon Seed alludes to this possibility;
wherein a woman is impregnated by an advance super computer (possibly a demon
who took over the computer) who traps her in her house, and at the end of the film she gives birth
to a cyborg, which appears to be completely humanoid with the uploaded consciousness of the "super computer" who impregnated the woman (the child having the same voice creepy as the computer).
Another
movie that vividly documents what transhumanism is about, is a film called ‘Technocalyps’, which covers multiple facets
and opinions on transhumanism, some for and some against it.
Throughout
these and other films one can see, that while the specific goals of transhumanism vary;
from bio-engineering to a consciousness upload into some artificial eternity,
the prevailing spirit of progress pervades this philosophy. It is hubris
against the way things are. Its desire is to be free from entropy and decay,
yet it often leaves out, or even kicks out, God from the picture. We want to
blame God for the way things are, but we are the ones responsible for entropy entering
the world… we are the sinners by which Satan has become the father to all who
do not repent.
Now
let’s see more clearly the foundations of theosis. In the Second Epistle of
Saint Peter we read, “… His divine power has given to us all things that pertain to life and godliness,
through the knowledge of Him who called us by glory and virtue, by which have been
given to us exceedingly great and precious promises, that through these you
may be partakers of the divine nature, having escaped the corruption that is in the world through
lust” ( 2 Peter 1:3-4) . This
reality of becoming partakers of the divine nature is foundational to the
Gospel, like Saint John writes, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with
God, and the Word was God… He was in the world, and
the world was made through Him, and the world did not know Him. He came to His
own, and
His own did
not receive Him. But
as many as received Him, to them He gave the right to become children of God,
to those who believe in His name: who
were born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man,
but of God. And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we beheld
His glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and
truth… And of His fullness we have all received, and grace for grace. For the law was given
through Moses, but grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. No one has seen God
at any time. The only begotten Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, He has declared Him” (John 1, 10-14, 16-18 NKJV). We are made
children of the Creator! Restored and glorified as sons and daughters of God
the Father through the Son Jesus Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit. This
is the Gospel. The Gospel which St. Irenaeus described as follows: “Our Lord Jesus Christ, the Word of God, of
his boundless love, became what we are that he might make us what he himself is
“(Irenaeus, Against Heresies, and V).
Almost two centuries later another great defender of the Christian faith wrote,
“The Word was
made man in order that we might be made divine [also translated, “that we might
become God.” Or, “he was humanized that we might be deified.”]. He displayed
himself through a body, that we might receive knowledge of the invisible
Father. He endured insult at the hands of men, that we might inherit
immortality. (Athanasius, On
the Incarnation, 54). Such bold statements! Athanasius’ teaching
became foundational for the defense of the Incarnation and the deity of Christ
when the Church fought the Arian
heresy of its day. This doctrine of theosis continued, and continues, in
exegetic fashion to be built upon by the Church Fathers and later Saints as the Holy Spirit leads the
Church “into all truth” (see John 16:13).
If theosis
is the divinization of humanity and
creation, then we may rightly say that transhumanism is the technoization of humanity and creation.
Yes, being technologized even if it
is advanced bio-engineering, it is still technology. Think about it, our cosmos
and our bodies are technological but they find their original fabrication, not
from a lab, but from the ex-nihilo
creation of God, who creates from nothing, and contains all things within Himself. DNA is a code for life, we did not create it but we can manipulate it.
Theosis is not limited to humanity, but this divinization process is predominately
imbued into humanity, who is made in the image of God… destined to grow in His
likeness. Creation is in fact inexorably linked with humanity, when carefully
reading Romans 8 we can see that the world was brought into the bondage of
futility, of entropy, due to the fall of Adam and Eve. The Incarnation, Epiphany/Theophany, and the
Resurrection, are three of the cornerstones of God’s redemption of the created
order. Particularly when Christ is baptized He is fulfilling all righteousness,
He is not being sanctified by the waters, but is Himself sanctifying the
waters; Jesus is healing creation by uniting himself to it: through baptism. It
is through our baptism with Him that we are united to this new creation, this
new reality, of our life in Christ. In the Resurrection Jesus Christ
recapitulates humanity and creation by “trampling upon death by death, and upon
those in the tombs bestowing life”[i]. We can view this in all
its glory in the Icon of the Resurrection, which shows Christ triumphant,
exiting of His tomb, often pictured holding the wrists of Adam and Eve; whom He
redeems from Sheol as the New Adam. The
Resurrection gives life to the New Humanity and Creation with a great promise, “…the creation itself also will be delivered from
the bondage of corruption into the glorious liberty of the children of God”
(Romans 8:21 NKJV).
What
theosis asserts is not just the redemption of some humans, as in some
extrication from the material realm (like Gnosticism), but theosis asserts the
redemption of all creation. Jesus Christ, the Son of God, came to restore all
things. He came to save, that is to heal the world[ii], not destroy it. Through
a purgation of fire, the elements will melt, but God will not annihilate the universe, nor will creation just get a
“face-lift". But creation will be transformed and glorified in God, being freed from
entropy and being brought into ever deepening communion with the Creator. Human
technology is a product of creation, it is us living out the divine mandate to “…fill the earth and subdue it”
(Genesis 1:28) and Christ came to restore all things (see Acts 3:21 and Matthew
17:11). Can we not conclude then that at least some of our technology will be restored
/redeemed as well? And would it not be
the good things that are retained and glorified in the New Heavens and Earth
(Isaiah 65, Revelation 21-22)? The question is how does God see these
technologies? When (or if) truly sentient A. I. are created what will happen to
them when Christ returns?
May
more research and prayer bring about more discussion that will, by God’s grace,
bring about more action in the right direction when it comes to transhumanism
and theosis.
Lord
have mercy! Amen
“Behold, I tell you a
mystery: We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed— in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the
last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised
incorruptible, and we shall be changed. For this corruptible
must put on incorruption, and this mortal must put on immortality”
(1 Corinthians 15:51-53 NKJV).
[i] This
is a line from the Paschal Troparion, which is sung throughout the 40 days from
the Feast of Christ’s Resurrection to His Ascension.
[ii] John 3:16-17; in the original Greek it uses cosmos meaning universe, not just our
world, that is to say our planet Earth. “God so loved the cosmos”. In the First Epistle of Saint John he also writes, “And He Himself is the propitiation for our sins, and not for
ours only but also for the whole world” (1 John 2:2 NKJV). The same word cosmos
is used here, later in the same epistle St. John writes that we shouldn’t love
the world and the things that are in the world (see 1 John 2:15-17); from this
we can see the differing context. John firstly writes that the Atonement is not
just recapitulating Adam, that is humanity, but also the whole of Creation, and
later he talks about abstaining from the human cosmos, the fallen system,
socio-economical and cultural world that we’ve made for ourselves to exalt
ourselves above God. It is the world of Babylon vs. the world of Zion; the
fallen order vs. the glorious kingdom of Heaven.
