Christian History Of Transhumanism Save page

Christian Transhumanism is the name for a strain of Christian thinking going back through the Protestant Reformation, to the Patristic era, to the Jewish and Christian scriptures. It strongly influenced the Scientific Revolution, the space race, and the emergence of modern futurism.

Secular Transhumanism in modern times derives from Julian Huxley, who was explicit in his aims to create a secularized Christianity for a secular world.

In current times, Christian Transhumanism is a conversation, an area of study, a revival of ancient Christian theology, and an ethics of science and technology. Its most prominent form is the Christian Transhumanist Association, which seeks to promote dialogue and awareness between people of faith, and the leading edges of science and technology.

Patristics & Early Church

• Justin Martyr proclaimed the Resurrection of the Body
• Saint Irenaeus described a Transcendent Humanism
• Saint Macrina the Younger used science to prove resurrection of the body
  • see Scientific Resurrection
• Gregory of Nyssa claimed God designed human anatomy to make us the technological species

Middle Ages

• 1320s Dante's Divine Comedy
  • "Words cannot tell of that transhuman change..."

Early Modern Era

Martin Luther on Reformation as precursor to Scientific Revolution:

[We] are presently living in the dawn of the age to come; for we are beginning to acquire once again a knowledge of the creatures that we lost through Adam’s fall. Now [that the reformation has come] we can look at the creatures much more correctly.

The 17th Century Scientific Revolution

Key figures of the Scientific Revolution, like Francis Bacon, are often seen as originators or precursors of transhumanism. Bacon, like Robert Boyle, and other members of the Royal Society, believed that the pursuit of science and technology was a religious imperative, and that it should lead to the elimination of diseases and the radical extension of human life. Bacon's key work, The New Organon (1620), was in part a theological argument for scientific institutions. Bacon's influential work The New Atlantis (1627) was a fictional account of religious reform leading to scientific reform, leading to radical technological progress, life extension, virtual reality, and so on.

These scientific/theological viewpoints were incredibly sincere, influential, and formed in close dialogue with leading theologians of the time.

In short, Christian eschatological belief, as well as contemplation of the Creation Mandate of Genesis 1, and the consequences of the Fall, fostered the new empirical science. And that was explicitly formed in anticipation of radical longevity, biological transformation, and other elements of what would now be described as a transhumanist platform.

“Bacon, Locke and Newton. I consider them as the three greatest men that have ever lived, without any exception, and as having laid the foundation of those superstructures which have been raised in the Physical and Moral sciences.” — Thomas Jefferson

Royal Society

• 1620s Francis Bacon
• Robert Boyle
• Robert Hooke
• John Lock (1632 - 1704)
• Thomas Sprat
• Isaac Newton

American thought

• American Postmillennialism was a form of Renewal Eschatology
• Stone-Campbell Movement often embraced Scientific Revolution, Renewal Eschatology
• Benjamin Franklin?

Modern Era

The Russian Cosmists

• 1800s religious imperative to use science to defeat death, and colonize space
• Nikolai Fedorov (1829-1903) was Russian Orthodox, and believed that humankind had a duty to embrace "the common task" of Scientific Resurrection, and with it, Space Exploration.
  • Fedorov influenced
    • was friends with Tolstoy
    • tutored Konstantin Tsiolkovsky

Early Secular Transhumanist Precursors

• 1929 The World, the Flesh & the Devil
• 1949 TS Elliot; The Cocktail Party (1949)
• J. B. S. Haldane (1892-1964)

Dawn of Transhumanism

• 1930s Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, jesuit priest and paleontologist, sees evolution as the outworking of Christian eschatology. Envisions a global network, and a future singularity. Teilhard strongly influences Julian Huxley.
  • Quotes on Omega Point
  • connections to Singularity
  • connections to Internet
  • References by Current Popes
  • association with Julian Huxley
• 1940s WD Lighthall
  • "Paul's Transhumanism" — first use of the term "transhumanism"
• 1957 Julian Huxley formulates Secular Transhumanism as a philosophy.
  • Huxley sees transhumanism as non-Christian reworking of Teilhard de Chardin's religious vision. He expressed a similar aspiration for a "non-religious religion" in Religion without Revelation.

  • "The human species can, if it wishes, transcend itself — not just sporadically, an individual here in one way, an individual there in another way, but in its entirety, as humanity. We need a name for this new belief. Perhaps transhumanism will serve: man remaining man, but transcending himself, by realizing new possibilities of and for his human nature. "I believe in transhumanism": once there are enough people who can truly say that, the human species will be on the threshold of a new kind of existence, as different from ours as ours is from that of Pekin man. It will at last be consciously fulfilling its real destiny." — Julian Huxley

Early Christian engagement with Secular Transhumanism

• 1958 CS Lewis
  • CS Lewis critiqued the secular transhumanism of his own day, and articulated a vision—incomplete at times—of a Christian Transhumanism, expansive, immersive, colorful, and full of diverse forms of life, drawn from the Eastern and Patristic traditions of Christianity.
    • https://www.cslewis.com/religion-and-rocketry/
    • https://www.cslewis.com/us/books/paperback/miracles/9780060653019/
    • https://www.cslewis.com/us/books/ebook/the-space-trilogy-omnib/9780062340870/
    • https://www.cslewis.com/us/books/hardcover/mere-christianity-gift-edition/9780061350214/
    • https://www.cslewis.com/us/books/hardcover/lion-the-witch-and-the-wardrobe-a-celebration-of-the-first-edition/9780061715051/
• 1968 John Warwick Montgomery; Cryonics and Orthodoxy

Current Transhumanist Movement

• 1980s FM-2030
• 1988 Extropianism
• 1994 Frank Tipler publishes The Physics of Immortality (1994) describing the Omega Point Theory
  • Wolfhart Pannenberg endorsed the theology of the theory
• 1998 World Transhumanist Association
• 2003 Simulation Argument by Nick Bostrom
• Ray Kurzweil
• Kevin Kelly
• David Deutsch

Current Christian Transhumanist Movement

• History of the Christian Transhumanist Association
  • Other Influences on the modern Christian Transhumanist movement
    • Eastern Orthodoxy
    • GK Chesterton
    • Dallas Willard
    • CS Lewis
    • NT Wright
      • Physical Eschatology — "heaven on earth"
    • Steven Kotler, Peter Diamandis, Aubrey de Grey
  • Resources for Christian Transhumanists