Pulse
21 April 2025
A Christian critique of transhumanism can be approached from various angles. For example, it can examine the way in which transhumanists have so exalted the current and potential achievements of science and technology that they end up embracing a naïve scientism and technologism.
One of the most important aspects of the transhumanist movement that must be subjected to critique is surely its fundamental understanding of what it means to be a human being. For, as we have repeatedly seen in previous articles, transhumanism as a philosophy and movement is profoundly anthropocentric – its focus is on how the human condition can and should be radically enhanced and even transcended.
For example, Nick Bostrom, the movement’s most sophisticated and eloquent evangelist believes that when we use current and future technologies to the fullest extent of their capabilities, we will be able to bring about such profound improvements to human nature that all its present limitations will be surmounted. What will eventually emerge is the posthuman.
Bostrom boldly maintains that the posthuman condition will include some if not all of these features:
• Life expectancy that is greater than 500 years,
• Large percentage of the population will have cognitive capacity that far exceeds current capacities,
• The majority of people will have control over sensory inputs most of the time,
• Psychological suffering or disorder will be rare, if not totally eliminated.
Some transhumanists also believe that posthumans will eventually defeat what the apostle Paul has called ‘the last enemy’ – death – either through novel genetic modifications or through the use of machine substrates to ensure the ‘immortality’ of the individual, such as mind-uploading.
THE DIS-EASE WITH BEING HUMAN
According to transhumanist anthropology, among all the animal species, the human animal is in most need to be fixed.
To be sure, this is partly due to the anthropocentrism of the movement, its fixation on the human species. But the transhumanists’ negative assessment of the human nature they have been so unfortunate to possess is also due to their high ideal of the good life, and super-human capabilities they covert.
That is why transhumanism is largely focused on human enhancement by whatever technological means.
In his book The Mythologies of Transhumanism, Michael Hauskeller describes the excitement over the possibilities of human enhancement thus:
Philosophers fantasise about the wonderful lives we are all going to enjoy once we have shed our mortal shell and become post-human (which, it is believed, will be very soon), and the media are eager to spread the good tidings and do their best to whet our appetite for our own terminal transformation into something else.
The transhumanist vision of human enhancement, Hauskeller continues, ‘involves a determination to propel us forward into the future, driven by the deep conviction that the present condition of humanity is utterly deplorable and a diseased state.’
Making the logic of the transhumanists plain, Hauskeller adds: ‘If the human condition is the primary disease, then radical enhancement is the cure.’
Most transhumanists unquestioningly accept this assessment of human nature and the possibilities of its transformation. On the basis of this fundamental view, then, they argue that human beings are ethically bound to use whatever means available to change their future for the better.
An eminent example of this kind of argument comes from the pen of the philosopher John Harris, whom some regard as the most important voice in British bioethics. In his 2010 book Enhancing Evolution, Harris makes the case for enhancement baldly when he writes:
Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we humans could live longer healthier lives with immunity to many of the diseases like cancer and HIV/AIDS that currently beset us? Even more wonderful might be the possibility of increased mental powers, powers of memory, reasoning and concentration, or the possibility of increased physical powers, strength, stamina, endurance, speed of reaction and the like. Wouldn’t it be wonderful?
Harris then goes on to argue that it is a matter of moral obligation to create a new and better human future, if the technologies to accomplish this are at our disposal.
Like most transhumanists, Harris is an evolutionist. But also like his fellow futurists, he is impatient the pace at which human evolution is currently unfolding.
He therefore proposes that we should replace ‘natural selection’ with ‘deliberate selection’, and ‘Darwinian evolution’ with ‘enhancement evolution.’ He believes that only when we pro-actively steer and accelerate human evolution with our different technologies will we, as ‘ape-descended’ persons, achieve our fullest potential.
Because it is our moral obligation to use technology to fashion better versions of ourselves or create a posthuman future, we should not set any limits to what we should hope to achieve. This includes all attempts to exponentially increase the life span of humans, and even to defeat death itself.
In an article published in 1993 in the journal Bioethics, Harris candidly states that ‘death postponing’ is after all simply ‘life saving redescribed.’
WONDERFULLY MADE
The Christian critique of the anthropology of the transhumanists must begin with its negative view of the human physiology in particular, and the human condition in general. As we have seen, transhumanists are constantly seeking to transcend human nature, due not only to their dissatisfaction with but near revulsion of the nature they have received from evolution.
The Christian understanding is radically different.
Christians recognise the fact that human beings are bestowed with profound dignity by God, and given the privilege of bearing the divine image (Genesis 1:26-27). Furthermore, not only are human beings ‘fearfully and wonderfully made’, God is intimately involved in bringing each individual into being (Psalm 139:13ff).
Failing to appreciate this, the quest of the transhumanists to enhance human nature to the point that speciation takes place may lead to monstrous outcomes that desecrates the very dignity that God has bestowed upon human beings.
Can the creation of a cyborg, that is, a human being who has his limbs, eyes and ears replaced by mechanical substitutes – not for therapeutic but for enhancement purposes – be said to be respectful of human dignity? Can a computer containing information extracted from a human brain, and attached to a robotic body be regarded as a human person, a bearer of the original dignity bestowed by God?
Transhumanist anthropology also suffers from the failure to fully understand that to be a creature necessarily means to be finite. The writings of some transhumanists are diffused with a discernible tone of defiance, suggesting that it is not just a matter of a failure to understand creaturely finitude, but a staunch refusal to accept it.
The great German theologian, Helmut Thielicke, has identified the human being’s wilful rejection of its own creaturely finitude as sin. For Thielicke, this is the fundamental rebellion of our first parents, the very essence of Original Sin.
In failing to accept their own creatureliness, transhumanists have willy-nilly followed in the footsteps of Adam. For Adam, too, had refused to accept the limits of being a creature. His rebellion has to do with his rejection of his creaturehood and his desire to be more than a finite being – to be God.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer elucidates this eloquently (and with appropriate sarcasm) in his little book, Creation and Fall. Temptation. In his rebellion and sin, Bonhoeffer writes, Adam now
… stands in the middle, now he is without limit. That he stands in the middle means that now he lives out of his own resources and no longer from the middle. That he is without limit means that he is alone. To be in the middle and to be alone means to be like God. Man is sicut deus [‘like a god’]. Now he lives out of himself, now he creates his own life, he is his own creator. He no longer needs the Creator, he has become creator himself, to the extent that he creates his own life. With this his creatureliness is finished and destroyed for him. Adam is no longer creature. He has torn himself away from his creatureliness. He is like God, and this ‘is’ is meant very seriously. It is not that he feels himself so, but that he is. Together with the limit Adam has lost his creatureliness. Limitless Adam can no longer be addressed in his creatureliness (italics in original).
This passage describes (almost to a tee) the hubris of the transhumanists! Their confused anthropology (total dissatisfaction and disdain with the human condition on the one hand, and an inflated view of their – very human! – capacity to improve their lot through technology, on the other) is but a mirror-image of ‘limitless Adam’.
The transhumanists regard salvation as nothing short of the creation of a new (post/trans) ‘human’ with a new future. But in thinking themselves capable of this task, the transhumanists have assumed the role of creator – they have sought to play God.
Will the outcome of their endeavours truly be salvific? Or will they result in an abomination?
Dr Roland Chia is Chew Hock Hin Professor at Trinity Theological College (Singapore) and Theological and Research Advisor of the Ethos Institute for Public Christianity.