Search

The Online Encyclopedia and Dictionary

 
     
 

Encyclopedia

Dictionary

Quotes

 

Christian transhumanism

Christian transhumanism refers to any approach which attempts to reconcile Christianity with transhumanism. Even though transhumanism and traditional religions such as Christianity are normally considered antithetical, more recent thought has questioned this assumption.

Contents

Singularity and the Second Coming

An example of a Christian transhumanist theology is to identify the singularity with the Second Coming, which implies that Jesus would return around the year 2030, thus potentially placing transhumanism within the tradition of doomsday predictions.

The identification of the technological singularity with Christian escathology requires a postmillennialist viewpoint, in which posthumanity is viewed as a good thing, the fulfillment of God's promises. (The "technical jesus" site linked below can be viewed as having a postmillennialist theology.) However, a premillennial theology could also be developed, in which the singularity is identified as the triumph of human pride over faith, a triumph in which Christ will intervene to prevent from occurring (thus placing the Second Coming before the technological singularity).

Uploading and the Resurrection

The Christian theology of the Resurrection has a modern parallel in the transhumanist concept of mind uploading, extending the notion of the Singularity as the postmillennial Second Coming. The transhumanist dream of uploading one's intelligence into a powerful computer network and living a new life as a simulated entity in a virtual utopia or dystopia can be seen as a direct technological implementation of the resurrection into a spiritual body existing in the conceptual realms of heaven or hell. Variations where a posthuman is incarnated as an android or robot would map more directly to Christian subsects, such as the Mormons, who believe in a physical resurrection.

Deification in Mormonism and Transhumanism

Mormonism's doctrine of deification may be considered a variant of transhumanism with an emphasis on humans progressing beyond their mortal human state to become like god. A Mormon-consistent-transhumanism would replace the more widely held concept of transhumanism's predilection with cyborg-type technological progress of humanity with the ideology that the god-like potential of the mortal, physical body is yet far from being fully realized.


External links

The contents of this article are licensed from Wikipedia.org under the GNU Free Documentation License. How to see transparent copy