The Road to The Machine-Man, Pt. 2

The transhumanist's desire to defeat death is ultimately a futile pursuit

Transhumanism is almost certainly going to become one of the most pressing ethical issues of the 21st century. What is currently a foreign concept to many, will soon force us all to think critically about what it means to be a human, what ‘being made in the image of God’ means, how much of our personhood we allow to be sacrificed to technology, and, most fundamentally, do we have the right to change and enhance what God has declared very good? What the transhumanist desires include: the merging of man and machine; the enhancement of the human body and mind; the alteration of our genetic code; the overcoming of our biological and genetic inheritance¹; and the transcendence of natural limitations. Wendell Berry is likely to be proved right in his prediction:

“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.”²

In the previous essay in this series, I looked at how the “transhumanist urge”³ seeks to remove all natural physical and mental limitations we as humans are subjected to. This is because they argue that for humanity to flourish, every limitation must be removed. They even speak of the fundamental human right that is behind this “need for morphological freedom”⁴. The tragedy that the last essay concluded is they are seeking to destroy what has been given to us for our flourishing. These limitations are for our good, it is within their bounds that we work and function at our optimum. Therefore, transhumanists, contrary to their beliefs, are actually working against human flourishing and are creating an environment where environmental destruction, injustice, and vice can proliferate⁵.

There was one limitation, though, that I did not touch on last time. It is the limitation which is the ultimate of all.

Death.

We all know that “Man is like a breath; his days are like a passing shadow.” (Psalm 144:4 ESV) and that death catches up with every one of us. For some of us, this is at the very beginning of our lives. Others of us live for “three scores and ten”. But no matter how long or brief life is - it will end. The transhumanist chafes against this fact, and deep inside they are repulsed. For them, this reality is not a truth to accept but rather a problem that urgently needs solving. And they are going to throw everything behind trying to do so.⁶

In their own words - why

The words of popular author and futurist Noah Yuval Harari epitomise transhumanist thoughts on death when he states in his bestselling book Homo Deus, that death is a “Crime against humanity and total war should be waged against it.”⁷ Harari isn’t the only voice decrying death, Max More, one of the founders of the transhumanist movement, forcefully put in his complaint in his seminal “A Letter to Mother Nature”:

“However, with all due respect, we must say that you have in many ways done a poor job with the human constitution. You have made us vulnerable to disease and damage. You compel us to age and die - just as we’re beginning to attain wisdom… What you have made us is glorious, yet deeply flawed … We have decided that it is time to amend the human constitution.”⁸

The hatred of death in these statements is stark. There is no question that death is their supreme enemy. Humans are full of ingenuity and potential, ideas and dreams, wisdom and strength. Death puts a total end to this all, depriving humanity of future discoveries, works of art, and acts of love. The transhumanist finds this absolutely intolerable. Total and unrelenting war is the only just response. They firmly believe we can only flourish as humans when we have done away with death, and more, that it is humanity’s fundamental right to remove this ultimate limitation to our flourishing. For the transhumanist, a species as wonderful and full of potential as the human does not deserve to die - and must not die.⁹

How?

Of all the transhumanist’s seemingly sci-fi desires, overcoming death is by far the most far-fetched. How exactly are the transhumanists proposing to achieve this monumental feat? With time, patience, technology, and a good dose of AI. In fact, they would say that they already have good ideas of some promising avenues of research that may defeat death in the future. These range from “mind uploading” where the body may “die”, but the mind (what they would describe as the essence of a person) continues to live on, uploaded into another vessel, to cryogenics where shortly after death, the body is frozen and stored away until technology allows this person to be brought back to life in as close as possible state as to before. Other developments concern reversing the ageing process, and advances in genetically-tailored medical care and gene alteration.

A necessary critique

Time will tell whether this ultimate vision will be reached, but a healthy dose of scepticism is still warranted. Even if the vision is achieved, central questions remain as to whether some of the proposals do indeed prevent the death of the person. For instance, if our personhood is fundamentally embodied, and thus inseparably related to our physical body, simply uploading our mind to a new vessel does not mean that our "person" lives on forever but instead a “digital doppelgänger”¹⁰ of ourselves is what continues to exist (not live).

It is from a theological standpoint though that the transhumanist vision falls the shortest. We can be assured that seeking to overcome death on this fallen earth is a futile pursuit of the highest order. For it has been decreed by the One who holds the keys of death that man shall die, for the wages of sin is death - and all have sinned (Romans 6:23). In fighting against the sentence, the transhumanist is effectively proclaiming that they do not deserve to die and are thus belittling the holiness of their Maker and are acting in extreme pride.

Despite this defiance, death remains the one certainty in life, and whether the transhumanist likes it or not, death has its ways of catching up with us, whether that be from natural disasters, human violence, technological failure, or novel diseases and threats. One fateful day this enemy will overtake them and they shall return to the dust from which they came, and the technology they merged with their body will turn to rust. The end of the transhumanist is the same as the rest of us, no matter how much energy, time, research and money they spend trying to prove otherwise. Death is inevitable and when the sovereign God calls time, the transhumanist too, despite their best efforts, will die.

However, the transhumanist does get one thing right. Their desire for death to be defeated is ultimately a good desire. Death in a sense is unnatural, as it was not part of the original Edenic plan. It is an intrusion into God’s very good creation, brought about by human sin and has been the perpetual enemy of mankind ever since. The transhumanist urge is, then, an ancient urge, harking back to a time when man could commune with God in innocence and where death was not known. It is a good urge as it feels the full weight of the tragedy of those made in the image of God being subject to the soil and processes of decay. But when mankind themselves become the agent whereby death is defeated, the urge becomes misplaced, unrealistic, and ultimately sinful.

In passing, It is worth briefly thinking about what the outcome of the transhumanist’s desires would be if they were successful. Surprisingly for them, it is a bleak future. For if mankind was to become theoretically immortal it would result in the perpetuation of sinful humanity on this fallen earth. Mankind would forever be under the curse of the Fall, and would have to deal with wars and rumours of wars, illness and disease, vice and sin for all eternity without the relief that death can bring to those whose lives are a misery (with suicide being the only escape option). Rather than progressing towards some utopia of virtue, the transhumanists would find they are eternally stuck on a planet of vice, hardship, and destruction - which sounds a lot like hell.

The final great tragedy

The greatest tragedy of them all though, when considering the transhumanist total war against death and their dreams of immortality, is how unnecessary it all is. The transhumanist is unaware that this ‘invincible’ foe has already been defeated, and the ultimate paradox now is that death is in fact the way to life everlasting. For on a cross in ancient Israel, Jesus through dying defeated death, so that now through dying in faith in Him our bodies can be raised to life again at the resurrection, to life with bodies renewed and made perfect for all eternity. For those in Christ, death truly is gain. What is more, death is actually the necessary pathway to the life that transhumanists seek. But to obtain this life, the transhumanist will have to lay down their desires for immortality in this life, along with their schemes for obtaining it, and instead take up their cross and follow Him who became sin for us and died for us, so that one day our bodies may be gloriously complete.

1. Jacob Shatzer, Transhumanism and the Image of God, IVP

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

3. This phrase appears in: Norman Wirzba, This Sacred Life, Cambridge University Press.

4. Anders Sandberg, “Morphological Freedom - Why We Not Just Want It, But Need It”, in The Transhumanist Reader, Wiley Blackwell. Morphological Freedom is “the ability to take advantage of whatever technology a person wants in order to change their body in any way they desire” - Schatzer, Transhumanism and the Image of God.

5. I argue in my previous piece: “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.” Hadden Turner, The Road To The Machine Man - part one. Over the Field.

6. Google, one of the biggest companies in the world, has a subsidiary, Calico, which is aiming to solve the problem of ageing, and possibly even death itself.

7. Yuval Noah Harari, Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow Harper Collins. (paraphrased)

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

9. It must be said, not all transhumanists are aiming to remove death.

10. The phrase ‘digital doppelgänger” comes from: Louis Rosenberg, Transhumanists want to upload their minds to a computer. They really won’t like the result, Big Think. https://bigthink.com/the-future/transhumanism-upload-mind-computer/