| Ministry
to Rehumans |
| by Eric Stanford |
 |
Have
you noticed the “anything’s possible” mood that’s in the air
these days? It’s been coming on for a while now, but since New
Year’s, the mood has become almost palpable. The very blankness of the
present year’s number, 2000, seems to invite people to write on the
slate whatever they want. As Sting sings, “It’s a brand-new day.” |
In
the film The Matrix people walk up
walls and bend at the waist to dodge bullets. Everybody knows somebody who’s
had Lasik surgery and now sees 20/20 or better. Biologists are talking
seriously about making the Jurassic Park scenario a reality. Economists use
numbers like 36,000 and even 1 million in connection with the Dow Jones. More
American adults than not have access to the world’s new neural Net. On Super
Bowl Sunday, Christopher Reeve stood up and walked. Hello, Dolly. I tell you,
it’s like the shutters have been thrown open in people’s minds and they
are transfixed by a prospect of receding horizons they’d never imagined.
Anything’s possible . . .
This prevailing mood assumes a semiofficial form in a philosophy called
transhumanism.
Insert
rant.
I
can’t for the life of me fathom why so many Christian leaders are still
setting their armies against secular humanism, a foe that has vanished from
the field. No one is secular anymore; everyone believes in God or gods or
Spirit or spirits or “the sacred” or “the divine.” And few are content
with being merely human anymore. It’s obvious to me that it’s secular
humanism’s postmodern stepchildren, Transhumanism,
cyborgianism, and the
like, that we must now understand and contend with.
End
rant.
Transhumanism
is being promoted by individuals like Nick
Bostrom of the London School of Economics and by organizations like the World
Transhumanism Association, the Extropy
Institute, and the Foresight Institute.
Transhumanists believe that people can radically transcend what are now
considered the boundaries of humanity.
According
to Bostrom, the following are some of the changes that transhumanists are
looking for:
•
The programming of artificial intelligence
that is not only smarter but wiser and more creative than humans.
•
The development of pharmaceuticals that can
produce permanent mood enhancement and personality change.
•
The colonization of space, seeding the universe with the human race.
•
The invention of nanotechnology that will allow scientists to
manipulate matter (including living matter) at the molecular level.
•
The extreme extension of human life through gene therapy and other new
treatments.
•
The interconnection of everyone in the world through communication
media.
•
The uploading of human consciousness into virtual reality, where that
consciousness can exist forever.
•
The reanimation of cryogenically frozen
patients to heal their illnesses and give them a new start in life.
Transhumanists
are not merely predicting that these things may happen, not merely cheering
them on; they are actively working toward such achievements.
“Transhumanism
is more than just an abstract belief that we are about to transcend our
biological limitations by means of technology,” says Bostrom; “it is also
an attempt to re-evaluate the entire human predicament as traditionally
conceived. And it is a bid to take a far-sighted and constructive approach to
our new situation.”
Let me make clear that I share some of the transhumanists’
enthusiasms. If we can help people to live longer, healthier lives and be
happier and more productive, isn’t that good? But transhumanism has a darker
side. And I’m not talking about the possibility of total homo sapiens
extinction, which many transhumanists admit is another possible outcome for
the 21st century. I’m talking about the movement’s God-vying hubris.
There’s something primal and primeval, something snake-in-the-gardenish,
something Tower-of-Babelish about all this. We would be as gods. We would
ascend to heaven.
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Let’s get a reality check.
Maybe
it’s true that information is doubling every seven years and that the
Internet is evolving toward a point where it will serve up all the
world’s information to all the world’s people all the time. But
we’ll never be omniscient.
Maybe
it’s true that we can fly in supersonic jets, keep watch on distant
locations through Web cams, and interact with people on the other side
of the world virtually. But
we’ll never be omnipresent.
Maybe
it’s true that we can blow up the world many times over with fission
weaponry, and maybe we will perfect room-temperature fusion so that our
technology can take a Carl Lewis-sized leap forward with unlimited fuel.
But we’ll never be omnipotent.
We
will become “transhuman” or “posthuman” one day, in a sense, but
it will be Someone Else’s doing and it will happen in a moment, in the
twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet.
In
the words of the angel Gabriel to a soon-to-be virgin mom, “Nothing is
impossible with God.” “With God,” note. Nothing is impossible with
God.
Many
are going to sign up for the self-divinization program of transhumanism—and
get a big shock when systole and diastole cease and dark angels come to
take their soul to an unspeakable place. Others (the lucky ones) will
become disillusioned with the extremes of transhumanism before that
eventuality. These I call the rehumans. A rehuman is someone who has
discerned the limits of transhumanism and has realized that she is human
after all, always has been.
Someone
who has an economic setback and can no longer afford the greater
benefits of technology—he is going to become rehuman.
Someone
who is diagnosed with a progressive illness and is told there is nothing
medical science can do to save her life is going to become rehuman
really fast.
If
there’s a worldwide catastrophe, like a biological terrorist attack
that poisons millions, we may all rehumanize together.
One of the ancient metaphors for the church is that of
hospital, and in the postmodern age the church will find many patients
being admitted with soul wounds inflicted by failed transhumanist
aspirations. I’m writing this article so that my readers may begin
preparing to minister to such people.
Just
how this ministry should take place, I can’t tell you. I expect that
in part it will mean invoking old-fashioned doctrines like creation
(humans as a race have been declared good by God) and justification
(humans as individuals may be declared good by God). We can help people
accept that humanity is something to better but not to transcend. It’s
OK to be human and not God, because we’ve already got a God.
We can have our deepest desires satisfied if
we put our hope not in technological advances but in Jesus, the one and
only Transhuman.
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Eric Stanford, age 36, is a contributing editor for Next-Wave Web
magazine. He runs an "e-lancing" business
from his home in
Colorado Springs, mostly doing editing for book publishers and writing
for magazines. His great desire is to help the Christian publishing
industry learn to serve postmoderns more effectively. Eric studied
English at Judson College and theology at Gordon-Conwell Theological
Seminary. Write to eric@stanfordcreative.com.
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