The Road to The Machine-Man, Pt. 1

The transhumanist desire seeks to do away with the limitations that protect us and cause us to flourish

Contemplating the future is an exercise in uncertainty. Staring into the abyss of the unknown, we are confronted with rumours of wars or declarations of peace, growing inflation or economic growth, future pandemics or miracle cures. Which of these scenarios will happen we simply cannot tell. Very few things are known with certainty about the future. But for those of us looking to the future with a critical eye, there seems to be an ominous figure rising on the horizon, one who if he comes to us will force us to make an ethical decision of the highest order — about what it means to be a human. This figure, a mixture of man and machine, is the creation of transhumanism — he is a posthuman¹, and there are some who say his coming is certain.

Transhumanism might be an alien word to you now, but soon it won’t be. As an ideology, Transhumanism has been around since at least 1998, but the technologies needed to achieve its visions are only now becoming available — and the pace of this technological progress is picking up speed. What the transhumanist desires is the merging of man and technology, to create something that is more than human — a posthuman. This posthuman is an enhanced human, who is able to transcend the current limitations our biology and genes impose on humanity. This vision is clearly articulated in the first statement of the Transhumanist Declaration²:

“Humanity will be radically changed in the future. We foresee the feasibility of redesigning the human condition, including such parameters as the inevitability of ageing, limitations on human and artificial intellects, unchosen psychology, suffering, and our confinement to planet earth.”

This all may seem improbable and abstract, the domain of science fiction perhaps. But, to dismiss this ideology is naive to the extreme. The transhumanist movement is slowly but surely gathering momentum and is working hard at priming us through our current use of technology to accept the changes they are envisioning³. And they have powerful allies — the giants of Silicon Valley are throwing their influence and investment behind this vision:

They are dedicating billions of dollars and the greatest minds in science and engineering to develop a range of human-enhancing innovations. Virtual reality promises to transport us anywhere. Wearable devices put us closer to connecting the human brain to the digital cloud. Genome editing allows us to design our babies and cure any disease or disability, up to and including death itself.⁴

With the weight of this much power and research behind the movement, you can be assured that change is afoot and change in the modern era tends to be rapid. Perhaps sooner than we realise, we will all be confronted with the choice of surrendering a part of our humanness in exchange for becoming an enhanced human and thus part machine or resisting and being left at a disadvantage as the world embraces the transhumanist future.⁵ To quote Wendell Berry, “the next great division of the world will be between people who wish to live as creatures and those who wish to live as machines.”⁶

Like Wendell Berry, I am convinced that the issue of transhumanism poses one of the greatest and most challenging ethical questions and battlegrounds of the 21st Century. It gets to the heart of issues such as what it means to be a human, and what it means to be made in the image of God. It forces us to ask questions such as “do we have the right as creatures, to recreate ourselves in our own image guided by our own desires and individual freedom?” It poses huge threats to our communities, natural environments, and ourselves through the limitlessness that it promises. And it threatens the Good Life — the life of long, quiet and slow love of a place, with its traditions, environments, and people which features prominently in what I have written about before.

So, seeing that what I love and cherish is under threat I have decided to write in response. Sadly, a pencil and paper won’t do, and I will have to use a computer to get my thoughts across, but such a compromise I am willing to make. Over a series of three essays (with breaks for other essays in between), I will be addressing this impending issue of our modern age. I will look at how the transhumanist vision conflicts with the goodness of our limitations, how it misunderstands death, and how the trajectory it is heading on is actually towards dehumanisation, not the enhanced post-human future it envisions.

So to start with, I shall look at an issue I have written much on lately — the goodness of human limitations and how the transhumanist future threatens these limitations and the good life our limitations enable.

No limits!

A core tenet of transhumanist belief is that the limitations our bodies impose on us are worth fighting against and ultimately transcending — and for some adherents that includes all our limitations. They desire “life expansion” — a rejection of the finitude, frailty, and limitedness of human life and in its place an unbounded unlimited future.⁷ They believe "we have been made glorious, yet deeply flawed", and that "it is time to amend the human constitution."⁸ The reason for this hatred of limitations is due to their total embrace of the potential of human beings to create what is in their vision the Enhanced Life — one of unprecedented and unlimited freedom, creativity, richness, and growth⁹. To them, only this life is worth living, and enjoying — and it must be achieved¹⁰. Standing in the way of achieving this ‘Good Life’ are our human limitations. Therefore, our limitations have to be dispensed with and removed, no matter how much man needs to become a machine in order to accomplish this.

On the one hand, as Norman Wirzba states, these desires for greater creativity, progress, and freedom from suffering, are natural and even caring. Throughout history, human progress has eliminated some forms of suffering such as smallpox and has lessened the pain and hindrances of many disabilities. Our knowledge and intellect have expanded leading us to make new discoveries about the world we live in and helping us to do better work. And our use of technology has enabled us to travel further, connect with more people (and keep us connected), become more efficient, and many other positive outcomes.

Even Christians can find commonality in some of these desires as we too look to a future free from suffering, pain, and death. But whereas the Christian sees the limitations that humans have as good, designed, and integral to the Good Life on earth, the transhumanist sees only roadblocks. It is here that our paths diverge, for not only do we need to accept our limitations to live the Good Life but — as someone once challenged me — we are to embrace them¹¹. The reasons for doing so are many, but I want to focus on two: our limitations help us to flourish as humans and our limitations protect us.

Limits are for our flourishing

We as humans are creatures. According to our Maker’s instructions, we function best within the limitations we have been given — and He knows best. These limits are His gift to us, He has given us all we need to glorify Him, and our limitations are a fundamental part of this endowment¹². The chief end for man is to glorify God and to enjoy him forever¹³ and in addition, He has commanded us to steward and nurture the creation and human relationships He has given us responsibility over. To achieve these ends, we don't need to know-it-all, fix-it-all, be everywhere-for-all for only God can do these things¹⁴. Instead, we need to do the limited tasks God has given us to do in light of the limitations we have been bestowed with. These limitations keep us grounded and humble and remind us to seek God's perfect help and aid — which we would otherwise feel we could dispense with. With His help we can fulfil our chief end — without Him, we can do nothing.

In contrast, if we try to do it all on our own, neglecting to work within our limitations and thus attempting to achieve too much and too quickly we head towards burnout and spread ourselves too thin — reducing the quality of our work. The transhumanist may respond this is exactly why we need our bodies to be technologically enhanced, but even machines can only do so much before they too burn out, and as we will see limitations are not a problem.

For there is a further means by which our limitations help us to flourish — and paradoxically this can be seen in the challenges they impose on us. It is through facing and overcoming these challenges that we grow in strength, wisdom, skill, and virtue. Using technological enhancements as a shortcut may be positive for short-term economic efficiency, but it doesn’t lead us to become improved workers and better citizens of society. This can only come through the long and hard work of character and skill development — which we all know comes from persevering through challenges.

Work is though only one side of the coin as to why we are here on this earth. We need to come again to our Chief End. We have been placed here on earth to glorify God and we do this by worshiping Him and becoming more like His Son (who was also born with bodily limitations — the ultimate affirmation of the goodness of limitations¹⁵). It is through enduring the suffering and trials that our limitations and the fallenness of this world impose on us that we grow in virtue and faith — and thus become ever increasingly conformed to Christ, and able to praise and enjoy God even amidst life's storms.

Limits are for our protection

In seeking to overcome the physical and mental limitations God has bestowed on us through merging man with technology we are playing God to the highest degree. This is severely dangerous ground. Our Creator knows us better than we do, He called us very good when He made us (with our limitations and all) — to believe that our limitations are wrong and need to be erased if we are to flourish is to charge God with wrong by saying that He has designed us flawed and deficient. It is to say that His creation is not good and thus to question His judgement¹⁶. Such an attitude puts us in a perilous position in front of our Maker — for such an attitude He will not tolerate.

Moreso, when we try to transcend the physical limitations of our body by enhancing and redesigning ourselves, we are messing with God’s design — and meddling with something very good will make it less good. We have already noted the danger of physical burnout, but there is a greater danger than this in our meddling — without limitations, our capacity for vice and sin would increase exponentially and where sin abounds, chaos and destruction proliferate all the more.

For example, our greed and lust could have seemingly limitless expression and ever-increasing fulfilment in the enhanced human age. The increased efficiency and power brought about through transhumanistic enhancements may do wonders for our economic growth but would do our souls eternal harm by exacerbating our ability to appropriate the resources (and even humans¹⁷) of this world and to consume/use them with increased voracity, amplifying further our greed and sinful desires. Additionally, with greater physical strength our capacity for violence and abuse likewise becomes stronger. Our limited powers thus help to keep us as fallen humans from wreaking absolute havoc in this limited world and on our own souls. When we look at our history of abuse, this can only be a good thing.

In our history books lie the testaments to our abuse of this world. They contain examples of vast areas of degraded and deforested landscapes, the accounts of six million Jews murdered in the Holocaust, and even something as immense as our climate is documented as being changed through our influence. If we have wrought all this devastation in spite of our limitations then to be without limitations is to be in great danger, for the Enhanced Human's capacity for destruction would be almost apocalyptic. No wonder that central to the Transhumanist Declaration is the hope of colonising other planets/space as the actions of powerful post-humans could easily make this world uninhabitable.

Our God-given limitations protect us — woe to us if we forget this.

1. Posthuman is the phrase used by transhumanists to describe what they believe to be the next stage in human development, someone who is more than human, who has technological enhancements which transcend the physical limitations of current human bodies and minds.

2. Although the Declaration has since been amended and watered down, I have included the original wording of the declaration here as it shows more forcefully the original transhumanist intentions, which I believe are still in existence amongst some Transhumanists.

3. Although this priming is beyond the scope of this essay, Jacob Shatzer in his book Transhumanism and the Image of God has an excellent chapter exploring how through our current use of technology (such as our reliance on smartphones), we are being primed to accept the visions and desires of the transhumanist. These visions include technological reliance, greater knowledge capacities, the merging of the virtual with reality, and more.

4. Dorcas Cheng-Tozun, The Image Dei Meets Superhuman potential, Christianity Today, March 17, 2016.

5. One could easily envision future scenarios where the person who has merged technology with their body is at an advantage/or has the exclusive right to use certain areas of the civil society such as chip implants for paying and providing identity records, or job offers that stipulate the desirability of sensory enhancement.

6. Wendell Berry, Life is a Miracle, Counterpoint Press.

7. Norman Wirzba, This Sacred Life, Cambridge University Press

8. Max More, A Letter to Mother Earth, in the Transhumanist Reader, Wiley-Blackwell.

9. Norman Wirzba, This Sacred Life, Cambridge University Press.

10. Transhumanists use the language of fundamental rights when talking about achieving their vision. Jacob Shatzer, Transhumanism and the Image of God, IVP.

11. Matt Lillicrap, who writes a lot about limitations gets the credit for this thought.

12. Kelly M. Kapic, You’re Only Human, Brazos Press

13. Westminster Shorter Catechism.

14. Zach Eswine, Sensing Jesus, Crossway.

15. Kelly M. Kapic, You’re Only Human, Brazos Press

16. Kelly M. Kapic, You’re Only Human, Brazos Press

17. It is no secret that our economic systems use and abuse humans as workers.