In this book, the contributors examine how various religious traditions engage with transhumanism and its vision for the future.

Resenha do livro de GOUW, Arvin M.; GREEN, Brain Patrick; PETER, Ted (orgs.). _Religious transhumanism and its critics_. Lanham, MD: Lexington / Rowman & Littlefield, 2022. 494 p. ISBN 978-1-4985-8413-5.

In the second half of the twentieth century, humanism— namely, the worldview that underpinned Western thought for several centuries—has been severely critiqued by philosophers who highlighted its theoretical and ethical limitations. Inspired by the emergence of cybernetics and new technologies such as robotics, prosthetics, communications, artificial intelligence, genetic engineering, and nanotechnology, there has been a desire to articulate a new worldview that will fit the posthuman condition. Posthumanism is a description of a new form of human existence in which the (...) boundaries between humans and nature and humans and machines are blurred, as well as a prescription for an ideal situation in which the limitations of human biology are transcended, replaced by machines. The transition from the human condition to the posthuman condition will be facilitated by transhumanism, the project of human enhancement that will ultimately yield the transformation of the human species from the human to the posthuman. As an intellectual movement, transhumanism is still very small, but transhumanist ideas exert deep and broad influence on contemporary culture and society. This essay highlights the religious dimension of transhumanism and argues that it should be seen as a secularist faith: transhumanism secularizes traditional religious themes, concerns, and goals, while endowing technology with religious significance. Science‐Religion Studies is the most appropriate context to explore the cultural significance of transhumanism. (shrink)

Mormon Transhumanism is the idea that humanity should learn how to be compassionate creators. This idea is essential to Mormonism, which provides a religious framework consistent with naturalism and supportive of human transformation. Mormon Transhumanists are not limited to traditional or popular accounts of religion, and embrace opportunities and risks of technological evolution. Although usually considered secular, Transhumanism originates partly in religious Humanism and sometimes functions as religion. Accelerating change contextualizes Mormon Transhumanist narratives, which illustrate parallels (...) between Mormonism and Transhumanism. Mormon Transhumanists have produced secular arguments for faith in God and religious arguments for Transhumanism. This is a revision and update of “What Is Mormon Transhumanism?”. (shrink)

Transhumanism first offers itself as a means to save oneself from an embodiment that is judged as being far from perfect. One needs to ask in its wake what comes of desires to escape limitations that come from the body, as they are means of an overcoming of the self. The AI project seems to be governed by norms for what the mind is, that could easily be judged inconsistent. Religious and theological traditions have looked at what the (...) meaning of an ineliminable image of God could mean. We try to map the meaning of extending this further into God’s resemblance. We then try to map this on a relationship of image and resemblance that would not have God come into competition with the doings of man. (shrink)

The worldwide transhumanist movement upgrades technological hopes and expectations to a level of religious fervor. When looking through the eyes of the public theologian, we see in H+ a disguised religion replete with faith in techno-salvation and even immortality. This is unrealistic. Apologetic theologians can offer the wider public a more realistic assessment of technology's potential while providing genuine hope in a future vision based on divine promise.

Transhumanism is a modern expression of ancient and transcultural aspirations to radically transform human existence, socially and bodily. Before the Enlightenment these aspirations were only expressed in religious millennialism, magical medicine, and spiritual practices. The Enlightenment channeled these desires into projects to use science and technology to improve health, longevity, and human abilities, and to use reason to revolutionize society. Since the Enlightenment, techno‐utopian movements have dynamically interacted with supernaturalist millennialism, sometimes syncretically, and often in violent opposition. Today (...) the transhumanist movement, a modern form of Enlightenment techno‐utopianism, has evolved a number of subsects, from the libertarian utopians funded by billionaire Peter Thiel, to religious syncretists like the Mormon Transhumanist Association, to the left‐wing technoprogressives and their bioliberal intellectual allies. In reaction to accelerating technological innovation and transhumanist ideas, apocalyptic Christians, and even secular catastrophists, have begun to incorporate human enhancement into their End Times scenarios. With all sides believing that the fate of humanity hangs in the balance, there is a growing likelihood of violent confrontation. (shrink)

Transhumanism and Unitarian Universalism are both the result of filtering ancient religious aspirations through the sieve of Enlightenment rationalism, humanism and individualism. The transhumanists aspire to transcendence through individual adoption of human enhancing technologies, while the UUs encourage transcendence through the critical, selective construction of personal spiritualities. Today, most religious reject the promises of human enhancement and transhumanism. But Unitarian Universalists are in the unusual position to be interlocutors between faith and science, between spirituality and techno-transcendence, (...) between liberal religion and transhumanism. One area in which both UUs and transhumanists could especially benefit from dialogue is in reimagining virtue, which both have left behind as illiberal, moralistic anachronisms. Our ability to technologically enhance moral sentiments and behavior has made defining a liberal, and yet bounded, concept of the good life urgent for both UUs and the human enhancement movement. (shrink)

Transhumanism and Unitarian Universalism are both the result of filtering ancient religious aspirations through the sieve of Enlightenment rationalism, humanism and individualism. The transhumanists aspire to transcendence through individual adoption of human enhancing technologies, while the UUs encourage transcendence through the critical, selective construction of personal spiritualities. Today, most religious reject the promises of human enhancement and transhumanism. But Unitarian Universalists are in the unusual position to be interlocutors between faith and science, between spirituality and techno-transcendence, (...) between liberal religion and transhumanism. One area in which both UUs and transhumanists could especially benefit from dialogue is in reimagining virtue, which both have left behind as illiberal, moralistic anachronisms. Our ability to technologically enhance moral sentiments and behavior has made defining a liberal, and yet bounded, concept of the good life urgent for both UUs and the human enhancement movement. (shrink)

Christians have always been concerned with enhancement—now they are faced with significant questions about how technology can help or harm genuine spiritual transformation. What makes traditional and technological enhancement different from each other? Are there theological insights and spiritual practices that can help Christians face the challenge of living in a technological world without being dangerously conformed to its values? This book calls on Christians to understand and engage the deep issues facing the church in a technological, transhumanist future.

This article presents Franz Rosenzweig’s concept of redemption as a vehicle for raising some important questions for confronting the contemporary movement of Transhumanism. The upshot of our discussion is located in the existential questions asked, following a philosophical comparison of Rosenzweig’s religious and philosophical commitment to human life in its most robust form, with Transhumanism’s scientistic vision. To do so, the article first discusses some techno-scientistic assumptions of Transhumanism, showing that it presumes what was once a (...) core principle of German Idealism, the identity of reason and being, against which Rosenzweig rebelled. Then, the article turns to examine Rosenzweig’s humanistic redemptive vision and its emphasis on the corporeal, the temporal, and the worldly. The conclusion makes explicit the ways in which Rosenzweig’s redemptive vision provides a contrasting model to the one set forth by Transhumanism. (shrink)

The author of the article contrasts the objection to transhumanism, which proceeds from the fact of success technoscience, with the objection, that takes the very fact of technoscience as a problem. Transhumanism itself gives rise to the problematization of science. It is the top of its development, and at the same time it fits into a single line of continuity of the forms of transformation of human nature known in history, as another, new link of it, following Christianity (...) in this serie. The identification of this kind of "religious" roots of transhumanism brings back the relevance of the problem of the connection between science and Christianity and provides additional resources for reviewing this problem today. The author of the article shows the connection between the problem of the mathematization (transformation) of nature, known even to the Eleatics, the new possibilities opened for it by Christianity, and the new European tradition of the I-cogito. The Cogito presented itself as a human nature transformed through union with God, as the very unit that Zeno had once sought, but never found. But while posing as something new to western european philosophy and thus defining its development, the cogito was not what it claimed to be. The transition from Descartes' pseudo-discoveries to Zeno's conclusions was inevitable. It has declared itself as a transition from classical epistemology to non-classical epistemology. In view of the fact that non-classics do not just indicate the failure of the classics, but call into question the very possibility of science, two paths open up: the way back or the way forward. The way back brings us back to the problem of the genesis of science, to a radical revision of its possibility. The way forward is the path of transhumanism as a rehabilitation of the pseudo-unity of the I-cogito in the new, extremely favorable conditions, when postmodernism has already abolished the polarization of the top and the bottom, the upper and the lower, that set the problem of unity. (shrink)

An ontology of information belies our common intuitions about reality today and animates and governs both explicit scholarly study in philosophy and the sciences as well as the ideologies that are growing out of them. Transhumanism is one such technoscientific ideology that holds to a very specific ontology of information which need not be the only one on offer. This article argues that the transhumanist ontology of information exhibits gnostic and docetic religious overtones in it and that it (...) devalues physical existence. At the same time, despite claiming a rejection of supernature, hypothetical transhumanist practices (such as mind‐uploading) posit the infosphere as a kind of supernatural realm that is often set in opposition to the natural world. This article presents a critique of transhumanist conceptions of information and offers an alternative ontology of information that more adequately accounts for the distinction between the natural and supernatural as well as the integrity of the physical world. (shrink)

Reservations concerning the ontologies of theism, transhumanism and posthumanism compel an explicatory discourse on their influences on Nursing and rehabilitation healthcare. Key journals in Nursing and health sciences have recently devoted themed issues on intelligent machine technologies such as humanoid healthcare robots and other highly technological healthcare devices and practice initiatives. While the technological advance witnessed has been a cause for celebration, questions still remain that are focused on the epistemological concerns. The purpose of this article is to discuss (...) theistic ontologies such as the Judeo‐Christian, Shinto‐Buddhist and Islamic religious belief systems on transhumanism and posthumanism in the assimilation of symbiotic technological beings in Nursing and rehabilitation healthcare practice. In view of the approaching technological singularity dominating arguments regarding the future of human beings, a treatise on Nursing and rehabilitation health care is positioned well within the realms of human care. Theism, transhumanism and posthumanism are directing discussions regarding human beings and healthcare processes. It is imperative that the beneficial effects of these discussions be acknowledged within the highly technological world of Nursing and rehabilitative healthcare. (shrink)

This article distances the classic Patristic teaching of Eastern Orthodoxy on theosis from the pseudo-religious ideology of transhumanism. By appealing to the Silver Age of Russian theologians a century ago, today’s transhumanist vision is dubbed Mangodhood, an idolatrous construction of a technological Tower of Babel. In contrast, the classical Orthodox teaching of deification or theosis relies on the spiritual grace of the true God, rendering the true goal of religion to be Godmanhood.

In recent decades, recourse to notions of human dignity has increased extensively within the field of bioethics. In particular, the notion has been utilised in arguments that seek to constrain a variety of biotechnological endeavours, examples of which include human cloning and transhumanism. In this regard, transhumanism is frequently described as an affront to human dignity in a manner that appears to be aimed at halting the possibility of further debate. The efficacy of the concept of human dignity (...) has itself, however, been questioned. Criticisms include its ambiguous nature and thus the lack of adequate definition by those who utilise it, its supposedly religious undertones as well as the fact that it may be used to argue for diametrically opposing positions within the same argument, due to the existence of distinct and conflicting interpretations. In this paper, I briefly discuss the aims of the transhumanist movement and explicate the concept of human dignity in order to assess one of the most renowned dignity arguments that has been lodged against transhumanism, namely, the argument of the bioconservative thinker Leon Kass. In addition, I discuss the counter-argument of the transhumanist Nick Bostrom. These findings have implications for the concept’s efficacy to adjudicate the complex ethical conundrums posed, not only by transhumanism, but in the bioethics arena in general. (shrink)

As a result of the developments in science and technology, humanity began to experience a digital transformation after the 19th century. With this digital transformation, it is seen that a serious change has occurred in human beings biologically, socially, and, more specifically, religiously. One could say that different trends have emerged at many points where human relations, the relationship of the human with the environment and with God are also affected. Among the most comprehensive and prominent of these trends is (...) transhumanism because of its aims for humanity and the world. Transhumanism, which views technology as the main point of reference for the future of humanity, is also considered a cultural, social, and ideological human movement with its statements intended for society. It considers immortality as a goal, along with such claims as improving welfare, extending human life, and wiping out diseases by using technology in every aspect of human life. Transhumanists, who claim that they can achieve immortality thanks to technology, argue that this will happen in two ways. The first is biological immortality. It will be achieved by eliminating all kinds of biological factors that lead to humans aging and death. The second is digital or virtual immortality, which is achieved by transferring human consciousness from the biological body to computer interfaces and installing it in any desired entity. This perspective must be critically examined as it can be considered an attempt to challenge death, which is the basic doctrine of classical religions. In the present study, human immortality, considered the most important claim made by transhumanists, is criticized within kalām, Islamic theology. Of course, transhumanists’ account of human immortality is impossible, according to kalām. It can be said that transhumanists view of immortal human can be considered in the category of created beings, which is defined in kalām as "the being created later and needs another being in order to exist and to continue its existence". Given that transhumanists base the idea of the immortal being upon biological healing or digital transmission, it is clear that both types of beings need someone else. Therefore, one could say that it would be more reasonable to define transhumanists’ notion of immortality as the act of prolonging human life. It is because the life of immortal beings, accepted as biological or digital entities, is shaped by many factors. If these factors disappear, so does the being. On the other hand, the attribute of immortality, which belongs to the eternal being only, according to kalām, must come from itself without needing any other being. Therefore, the notion of immortal being suggested by the transhumanists must be reexamined within kalām and be redefined as the extension of life. The redefined immortality as the extension of life hardly poses kalāmī (or theological) problems. In fact, Islam encourages using all types of tools and equipment to enable humans to have a healthy and blissful life. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to study the methodological foundations of the humanities education for international students as an alternative to transhumanist ideology. The paradigmatic approach is used as a factor analysis of students' educational processes. Particular attention is paid to the substantiation of the methodological foundations of the education humanisation on the basis of modern ontologically anthropological and religious‐anthropological achievements of the philosophical field of knowledge. The novelty of the study is due to a discussion of the (...) contradictions caused by all‐round technocratisation and informatisation, the fall of moral standards and the degradation of human behaviour. The practical significance of the study is determined by the need to develop a different pedagogy and model of education for modern students. It was concluded that the value‐oriented pedagogical cocreation is able to direct the learner's self‐development and strengthen it with effective means of self‐change. (shrink)

The paper analyses various metaphysical and eschatological implications of transhumanism, especially in the light of its idea of the immortality of the human species. Through a concise interpretation of the historical framework of the emergence of the transhumanist movement, the paper highlights its main features such as human improvement, overcoming human nature, and overcoming inherent human deficiencies using modern scientific disciplines and modern technologies. Those features help understand metaphysics and eschatology as formed by some aspects of transhumanism. These (...) aspects are unquestionably technological and secular in their principles, as they distance themselves from the religious understanding of human longing and death. Often, death is understood as a mistake, while the process of ageing is seen as a pathological, humiliating but curable condition. Transhumanism thus marks the end of the humantranscendental perspective of a free individual, created by the goodness of God and saved by the love of God, through the mystery of Jesus Christ. The paper argues that technocratic solutions cannot fulfil fundamental human longings. (shrink)

Religious views of the future often include detailed expectations of profound changes to nature and humanity. Popular American evangelical Christianity, especially writers like Hal Lindsey, Rick Warren, or Rob Bell, offer extended accounts that provide insight into the views of the future held by many people. In the case of Lindsey, detailed descriptions of future events are provided, along with the claim that forecasted events will occur within a generation. These views are summarized and compared to the secular idea (...) of a coming “intelligence explosion” or technological singularity as advanced by Ray Kurzweil, which is described in terms of its history as an idea and in terms of its specific proposals for the coming transformation of the cosmos, which is also predicted to occur within a generation. While profoundly different in important ways, these two perspectives share many features with each other—for example, in their respective predictions of distinct stages in the unfolding of the future of the cosmos. (shrink)

Nanotechnology—the control of matter at the level of atoms and molecules—has evoked a large body of literature on moral and ethical issues. Almost all of this is expressed in secular voices. Religious commentaries about nanotechnology have been much more rare. And yet survey research indicates that religious belief will be one of the most powerful influences in shaping public views about nanotechnology. This paper argues that it is worth knowing what religious voices have said about nanotechnology, so (...) that we might anticipate additional religious reactions in the future. After that, this paper presents seven cases of religious reactions to nanotechnology from a variety of faiths. This information gives us some insights about how religious individuals and institutions think about this technology, and also insights about how a new technology evokes a variety of hopes and fears. (shrink)