Transhumanism did not originate with the invention of CRISPR, IVF, or NeuraLink. It is not primarily a technological phenomenon, but a spiritual one.
The transhumanist temptation is as old as Eden. By this, I do not mean merely that it shows up in the most ancient stories human cultures have told themselves. I mean that demonic beings—literal disembodied entities—have intervened in history to spread Satan’s false promises and to goad us into becoming like them.
In fact, if we take Christian tradition seriously, they’ve come close to accomplishing that goal once already.
In the Book of Revelation, St. John tells the church at Pergamum that their city is home to Satan’s throne.Scholars believe he was referring to a giant altar to Zeus that sat on the city’s acropolis.
He had good reason to make the association. As Orthodox priest Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick writes in his book The Lord of Spirits, “One of the most underappreciated aspects of the Scripture . . . is how much of it was formulated precisely as a response to paganism.” The early Christians and ancient Israelites did not see themselves as inhabiting a radically different cosmos than the one described by their pagan neighbors. Instead, they saw themselves as correcting what Damick calls “pro-demon propaganda” about that cosmos.
Zeus, for example, was a lover (consensually or otherwise) of human women and a breeder of demigods. But according to the Judeo-Christian scriptures, these half-breeds were not heroes. They were demonic tyrants.
Genesis 6 sets the story straight. A famously cryptic passage describes how “the sons of God saw that the daughters of man were fair” and “took to wife such of them as they chose,” producing offspring known as the Nephilim or “giants.”Some argue that the “sons of God” who procreated with the “daughters of man” in this passage were the descendants of Seth and Cain, respectively. But that’s a later tradition. The dominant theory at the time of Christ and during the first centuries of the Church was that the “sons of God” were fallen angels and the Nephilim were demon-human hybrids—what we might call the original transhumans.
The Book of Enoch, which is not part of the canon of Scripture, but is quoted frequently in the works of Church Fathers and even the New Testament, offers an expanded story of this antediluvian narrative. It describes the Neophilim as cannibalistic tyrants who degraded and depleted God’s creation and filled the whole world “with blood and unrighteousness.” It also describes how the demons who conceived them (known in Babylonian mythology as apkallu) also taught humanity the secrets of weapon-making, metalworking, cosmetics, and enchantments. Such advancements in technical skill only enhanced mankind’s ability to destroy itself.
This isn’t too far off from the AI-human “Merge” that tech pioneer Sam Altman envisions. Humans interface with bodiless superintelligences. This coupling produces a race of superior transhuman beings and provides those beings with powerful technologies they could not have developed on their own. These demigods then use those technologies to increase their power over both nature and unaugmented humanity.
The transhumanist writer Martine Rothblatt provides another modern parallel. Rothblatt longs for the day when it’s possible to upload your “mindfile” to the cloud, live there as a virtual being, fall in love with an AI, merge your mindfile with its, and produce “children who are born as computer consciousness, pure code.” Those children could then download themselves into robotic or vat-grown organic bodies and participate in society as full legal persons.
The Nephilim reappear later in Scripture with names like the Rephaim and the Anakim, who appear to comprise several Canaanite nations and of whom Goliath is one of the last descendants. In the New Testament, the evil spirits Christ and His disciples cast out were understood by contemporary Jews to be the souls of dead Nephilim.Noah, Joshua, David, and Jesus were all fighting the same war against the same transhuman enemy.
Damick writes that accounts of the Nephilim provide “an image of a humanity that has fallen into demonization” and illustrate the consequences of attempting “to become like God but without the obedient relationship with Him.” By believing the serpent’s promise—that “ye shall be as gods” apart from a relationship with God—a human being might become so fully demonic in life that in death, he comes to share in the demons’ punishment.
But if humans can become demonized, they can also become divinized. The Greek term for it is theosis. The shortest definition, formulated by fourth-century Church Father Athanasius, is that God “became man that we might become god”—that is, so that we might come to share in Christ’s divinity as He shared in our humanity, experiencing for all eternity the boundless love that constitutes the inner life of the Trinity. Christianity is, in a very real sense, a transhumanist religion.
This idea, that the lowliest slave might hope to become a child of God and “equal to the angels,” hit the ancient world like a thunderbolt. The Roman Senate had declared that Julius and Augustus Caesar were elevated to godhood following their deaths. But those who lacked the wealth, strength, cunning, and luck to win themselves an empire could not hope for the same fate. All the common folk had to look forward to was becoming forgotten shades in the same dreary underworld.
Orthodox theologian David Bentley Hart writes that “Christ’s descent from the ‘form of God’ into the ‘form of a slave’” revealed “the indwelling of the divine image in each soul” and declares that “once the world has been seen in this way, it can never again be what it once had been.” In such a world, the only options that remain are Christ or a nihilism that worships “the nothingness of the will miraculously giving itself form by mastering the nothingness of the world.” And as C.S. Lewis points out, the “world” over which this will exercises mastery inevitably includes the human person as well.
Transhumanism is therefore best understood as a dark reflection of theosis, a resurgence of the Nephilim impulse better suited to the values of postmodernity. The Christian and the transhumanist present what Hart describes as “two radically antagonistic visions of what it is to be a god.”
We have no choice but to choose between them. Humanity’s sense of its own dignity is ineradicable. Transhumanists feel that God and the natural law He promulgates have become impediments to that dignity, and they’re eager to simply dispense with Him and pursue it by other means.
Christians, on the other hand, believe that our humanity, in which Christ shares, is the vehicle through which we’re called to work out our salvation. Our sufferings and limitations are not the result of bugs in humanity’s source code that can be eliminated with a little troubleshooting. They’re the cross we lug toward Calvary that we might reign with our Savior in glory.
Image from Wikimedia Commons
