By Rick Plasterer, Juicy Ecumenism. (image: Declan Sun/Unsplash)
Transhumanism has emerged in the early twenty-first century as the cutting edge challenge to Christianity and other traditional religions, picking up on the Enlightenment idea of progress and promising to overcome all human ills, in particular suffering and death through science and technology, in the end perhaps dispensing with humanity itself.
The Institute for Human Ecology presented an extended discussion of the challenge of transhumanism and the problems associated with in a panel discussion on May 15. Jan Christoph Bentz, Lecturer at Blackfriars Studium in Oxford, England led a panel which also included Father Michael Baggot, Professor Aggregato of Bioethics at the Pontifical Athenaeum Regina Apostolorum in Rome, and Wael Taji Miller (publishing as Wael Taji), a systems theory researcher, an editor at the Axioma Center “the first Christian faith-based think tank in Hungary,” and a doctoral candidate in neuro-science at Semmelweis University in Budapest. Bentz reviewed transhumanism from the standpoint of philosophy, Taji from science, and Father Baggot from theology.
The Philosophy of Transhumanism
Bentz said that “transhumanism seems to be one of the great umbrella terms of all kinds of interesting … and potentially even dangerous thoughts about human nature, how to conceive of human nature and specifically how to conceive of a certain type of humanism and how to overcome that humanism.”
The clearest way to understand transhumanism is as a kind of utopianism. Utopianism, he said, should be understood as an ideal which is unattainable, and which we should not strive for. It “is to politics what heresy is to the faith.” In particular it is an “heretical inversion of the order of being … Utopianism is the obstinate post-Christian denial of the fallen condition of man, and the rejection of historical, social, and moral limits that must be acknowledged in any just political order.” The idea of human nature is rejected and final redemption, or eschatology, is understood to result from scientific and technological progress. The result is a “hyperbolic and warped image of the political good, of the common good.” While it may begin from a legitimate political order, utopianism exaggerates its abilities and responsibilities and advances “misplaced hope,” resulting in an ideology and an eschatology that denies reality. It is a project that tries to “immanentize the eschaton.” Most utopianism, he said, “thrives on this core idea.” Rarely do transhumanists “talk about the negative side effects” of their efforts, but only about the desired eschaton.